Source: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Watch out, folks! The Federalist’s Sean Davis is dragging the beaten hypothetical corpse of Robert Mueller through. He just took the man to the woodshed in his latest piece and rightfully so. The Russia investigation is over. Special Counsel Mueller is done. He’s done talking about it. He directed us to read the report that was compiled after two years of digging and to leave him alone. Oh, and Democrats, go ahead with impeachment wink* wink*. He twisted the words of his investigation’s findings on Russian collusion; none was found. But Mueller phrased it in a way that left it open for interpretation. And if we know anything about that, impeachment-obsessed Democrats will take it, run with it, and totally go off the rails—and they have. The Mueller report exonerated the Trump White House of Russian collusion. That’s a fact. Done. This circus is over. I wish it were over, but Mueller had to rehash and pour gasoline over the obstruction allegations, which the DOJ determined didn’t have enough to bring forward formal charges.
Again, it’s over. But the Left, promising their base a fight, are going to impeach Donald Trump. It’s only a matter of time. They need to; it’s a key 2018 campaign promise. House Democrats wouldn’t be running the show in the lower chamber if they hadn’t pushed for of heavily insinuated that this would be an agenda action item.
Mueller decided to fan those flames again, and now we have a brushfire over a presser that really didn’t unveil anything new. If anything, it was what Attorney General William Barr outlined prior to the redacted report being released to the public. It’s that outline that apparently reeks of a cover-up, an allegiance to Trump, and possible perjury. Even after the case has been closed, the nothing burgers keep being served. Only Democrat whose brain function has been depressed by over consuming this myth for the past two years would believe this were a rational take. Everyone else knows it's not. Mueller is now patient zero, spreading impeachment Ebola that has spread like a brush fire among congressional Democrats.
Maybe this was his aim all along. Davis noted that the media glossed over key portions of the Mueller report that showed the political motivations of the investigation. The hard-core group of Democratic lawyers really, really wanted to prove Russian collusion, but couldn’t find anything, which adds more credibility to the report’s conclusions on that front. It also could explain why after this Trump-Russia collusion horse was discovered to be a myth—the investigation limped on and on for 18 months at the cost of millions of dollars. As a result, the liberal pundits, Democrats, and their minions in the media kept hanging onto hope that something would be found. And then the report was done, nothing was found, and an entire industry got a haymaker so brutal, so violent, that the lower part of its jaw was dislodged. They can’t let it go. They won’t let it go. Like penicillin-resistant syphilis, it will linger trying to slowly take down this White House for merely beating an inauthentic, lying, untrustworthy woman whose favorable numbers depreciated the longer she remained in the spotlight. Hillary sucked. Sorry, lefties, your gal just couldn’t win. And if she couldn’t do it in 2016, she was never going to win.
This feeling was amplified with the conclusion of this investigation and no definitive smoking gun that could torpedo this administration. As a result, Davis goes into a very lengthy piece about how the exiting presser by Mueller yesterday proved that this was a political hit job that perverted the rule of law. And he also makes a note that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree between Mueller and his successor at the FBI, James Comey, concerning the apparent overreach in the investigations that have defined their legacies:
If there were any doubts about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s political intentions, his unprecedented press conference on Wednesday should put them all to rest. As he made abundantly clear during his doddering reading of a prepared statement that repeatedly contradicted itself, Mueller had no interest in the equal application of the rule of law. He gave the game, and his nakedly political intentions, away repeatedly throughout his statement.
“It is important that the office’s written work speak for itself,” Mueller said, referring to his office’s 448-page report. Mueller’s report was released to the public by Attorney General William Barr nearly six weeks ago. The entire report, minus limited redactions required by law, has been publicly available, pored through, and dissected. Its contents have been discussed ad nauseum in print and on television. The report has been speaking for itself since April 18, when it was released.
If it’s important for the work to speak for itself, then why did Mueller schedule a press conference in which he would speak for it weeks after it was released? The statement, given the venue in which it was provided, is self-refuting.
Let’s start with the Mueller team’s unique take on the nature of a prosecutor’s job. The standard American view of justice, affirmed and enforced by the U.S. Constitution, is that all are presumed innocent absent conviction by a jury of a specific charge of criminal wrongdoing. That is, the natural legal state of an individual in this country is innocence. It is not a state or a nature bestowed by cops or attorneys. Innocence is not granted by unelected bureaucrats or federal prosecutors.
“Every defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.”
Had he stopped there, he would have been correct. But then he crafted a brand new standard.
“The order appointing the special counsel authorized us to investigate actions that could obstruct the investigation. We conducted that investigation and kept the office of the acting attorney general apprised of our work,” Mueller said. “After that investigation, if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
According to Mueller and his team, charged Russians are presumed innocent. An American president, however, is presumed guilty unless and until Mueller’s team determines he is innocent.
[…]
“It would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge,” Mueller said, after all but stating that Trump committed a crime for which Mueller never charged him. Just as Mueller’s own words and actions at the Wednesday press conference prove that he didn’t want his team’s report to speak for itself, the report itself proves that Mueller and his team don’t believe it’s unfair to accuse somebody of something a court cannot resolve.
If they actually believed that, then the 240-page volume II of their report on their obstruction investigation of the president would never have been authored. After all, according to Mueller’s own statement, such an operation would be patently unfair.
[…]
Mueller revealed himself as little more than a clone of James Comey—the smarmy, scheming politician who replaced Mueller as the head of the FBI. Recall that it was Comey who assumed for himself powers that did not belong to him by law when he declared at a 2016 press conference no “reasonable prosecutor” would charge Hillary Clinton with criminal wrongdoing in her mishandling of classified information and unsanctioned use of a secret, private email server to evade public records laws. Just as Mueller did in his report and Wednesday press conference, Comey followed up his declaration that Hillary would not be charged with statement after statement after statement of all the awful things Hillary Clinton did.
“There is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information,” Comey said of Clinton. He excoriated her for repeatedly sending and receiving top secret information on her unsecured server which had never been authorized to process classified information. He even said it was possible, due to her “extreme” carelessness, that hostile foreign actors had penetrated her system and obtained highly classified information about U.S. national security programs.
[…]
There’s no longer any doubt about who Robert Mueller is or why he conducted himself the way he did. As abominable as his press conference was, we should in many ways be thankful that Mueller so willingly displayed for all to see his disdain for basic rules of prosecutorial conduct, his total lack of self-awareness, and his naked desire to stick it to Trump.
The spying on the Trump campaign, the deep state—all of this was initially received as psychobabble by the liberal media. They’ve both been confirmed. These are deep state antics. The DOJ is looking into the origins of the Russia investigation, which AG Barr has said the answers he’s received to his questions just “don’t hang together.” Barr is also looking into whether the Trump dossier, which was reportedly used to secure a FISA spy warrant against Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, which was known to be biased political opposition research by the State Department at the time. The man who compiled it, ex-MI6 spy Christopher Steele, all but admitted that this information had a shelf life. In other words, it needed to get out to impact the 2016 race. The effort was funded by the Clinton campaign, the FBI used it to secure a FISA spy warrant, and it seems that they didn’t even bother to verify it. I mean, if you miss these glaring errors, the only other conclusion is gross incompetence. Either way, it’s not good. The spygate fiasco is the one that drops next. The DOJ’s inspector general, an Obama-appointee, is going to drop his final report on that this summer. And I think there are a lot of Democrats who are nervous.