Victor Davis Hanson: In Order to Justify His Deviation from the Law, Robert Mueller Has Also Embraced Unequal Justice

Mueller probably knew there was no "collusion" from early days, but, to justify his mandate and appease the leftwing media culture which is demanding he reverse the 2016 election, he has gone after a series of process crimes, crimes that did not precede the investigation, but occurred during the investigation -- claiming Flynn "lied" to investigators, for example. (Despite the fact that the investigators Flynn "lied" to say he didn't lie at all.)

Mueller has gone after peripheral figure racking up pleas for process crimes not associated even remotely with his actual ambit, which is Russian collusion.

Well then, Victor Davis Hanson asks -- if you've gone beyond your brief to prosecute peripheral process crimes, why are you ignoring a rather large number of crimes committed by Hillary's Minions to set this all up?

Mueller has already weaponized politics, making a crime out of the tawdry business of opposition research -- but only sort of, since his interests in doing so are highly selective. And so his chief legacy will have little to do with whatever he finds on Donald Trump. He has already established the precedent that there is now no real equality under the law, at least as Americans once understood fair play and blind justice.

Once Mueller deviated from his prime directive of determining whether Donald Trump colluded -- sought help from the Russian to win the 2016 election in exchange for the promise of later benefits -- and turned to indicting political operatives for supposedly giving false testimonies about political shenanigans and engaging in illegal business practices, lobbying, and tax avoidance, he either knowingly or unknowingly established a precedent that the serial misdeeds of 2016 would be treated unequally under the law.

Yet Christopher Steele, a British subject and de facto unregistered foreign agent, is eminently indictable and extraditable. He was paid through two firewalls (Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie) by Hillary Clinton to tap Russian sources to compile a smear dossier on her opponent, with the intent of warping the U.S. election -- a classic example of foreign-agent interference in an American campaign. If we were to take away that one purchased document, then the FISA court warrants, the informants, and all the CIA, FBI, and DOJ machinations would likely have disappeared or never arisen.

Obama-administration officials Bruce Ohr (whose wife worked on the dossier) at Justice, James Comey at the FBI, and John Brennan at the CIA all in some manner colluded with Steele, either directly or indirectly, to monitor the Trump campaign and then to seed the dossier among government agencies and courts, both to ensure its leakage and to brand it with a stamp of official seriousness, warranting investigations and media sensationalism.

....

Bruce Ohr filed a false federal disclosure affidavit, in that he did not reveal, as required, that his wife was employed by Fusion GPS to work on the Steele dossier. Nor did he disclose that after the election he had been in contact with Steele, offering his help in the effort to find proof of collusion.

James Comey, along with Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, and Sally Yates, at various times submitted requests to a FISA court that deliberately never disclosed that their chief evidence for such surveillance was 1) paid for by Hillary Clinton (instead, the applications claimed vaguely that it was a product of generic opposition research, likely and by design confusing its Republican-primary origins with its maturity under Clinton auspices), 2) used as a circular source for news accounts produced in turn to establish its fides, 3) unsubstantiated and either not fact-checked or found to be impossible to verify, 4) compiled by an author already dismissed by the FBI as a unreliable asset.

Either Andrew McCabe or James Comey has likely perjured himself; or both may have. Their conflicting testimonies about leaking information to the media, and the relative importance of the Steele dossier for FISA court warrants, cannot be reconciled.

And so on.

Read the whole thing. Jonah Goldberg won't, so maybe cook up a juicy Hot Twitter Headline for him, would you?

posted by Ace of Spades at 04:00 PM

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