(By Saint John Hunt) Something had to be done. Somebody had to take a stand and do something to stop the egregious overreach of “Special Counsel” Robert Mueller. Barely three days into 2018, in what will hopefully prove to be the first of many corrective actions pushing back against Mueller’s unaccountable legal fishing expedition, someone finally did.
Paul Manafort, the third (and briefest) of four campaign managers for the 2016 Trump Campaign, filed suit against Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and the Department of Justice.
All I can say is: it’s about damn time! Manafort is a hero for fighting back against this out-of-control ex-FBI Director and his sordid band of Clinton-connected lawyers, unethically masquerading as legitimate prosecutor-investigators.
Mueller’s roving “investigation” into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election is supposed to be looking into whether President Trump or anyone on his staff had colluded with the Russians. But Mueller indicted Manafort on charges having nothing whatsoever to do with Trump, the Trump Campaign or any Russians. The accusations against Manafort are based on events that go back years before Manafort’s very brief but high-profile work for the Trump Campaign.
Mueller put Manafort under surveillance, eventually ordering an armed FBI hit squad to conduct a pre-dawn raid on Manafort’s residence. With Manafort and his wife held at gunpoint, Mueller’s bully boys proceeded to ransack their home and snatch ALL of the pajama-clad Manafort’s files and data. Manafort was eventually put under house arrest with a $10 million bond!
Mueller’s excessive actions have caused Manafort economic injury, harm to his reputation, invasion of his privacy and mounting legal costs that will certainly be enormous by the time he is done defending himself.
All of this demands answers to the question: what has this got to do with probing supposed Russian collusion?
The answer, which you will never hear from the great Mueller, for obvious reasons, is: not a damn thing! Zero, zilch, nada!
Paul Manafort was charged with the following violations of law:
Failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts for calendar years 2011-2014 (four counts total);
Being an unregistered agent of a foreign principal between 2008 and 2014 (one count);
Making a false and misleading Foreign Agents Registration Act statement in 2016 and 2017 in a document furnished to the Attorney General (one count); and
Making a false statement in 2016 and 2017 (one count).
There are also two charges of conspiracy which are based on these alleged law violations, ALL of which center on an alleged scheme that began in 2006. In an unforgiving irony, most of these allegations had been widely known since 2007! The bulk of money transactions cited in the indictment, said to be $12 million in personal purchases by Manafort or Gates, occurred between 2008 and 2011, with the most recent in August 2014, nearly 2 years before Manafort had anything to do with the Trump Campaign!
Manafort is justified in suing the daylights out of Mueller et al. His lawsuit contends that Mueller exceeded the proper limits of his investigation and roamed far afield of the boundaries of jurisdiction granted to the Special Counsel. The suit alleges that Deputy AG Rosenstein, who is supposedly overseeing the activities of Mueller’s ad hoc inquisition, exceeded the authority provided under 28 C.F.R. 600.4
28 C.F.R. 600.4 states the jurisdiction of a Special Counsel shall be established by the Attorney General. The Special Counsel will be provided with a specific factual statement of the matter to be investigated. The Special Counsel also has authority to investigate and prosecute federal crimes committed in the course of, and with intent to interfere with, the Special Counsel’s investigation.
As Special Counsel, if Mueller concluded that an expansion of his jurisdiction was necessary, beyond his original mandate, to fully investigate and resolve the Russian election interference, or to investigate new matters that come to light in his investigation, Mueller was obliged to consult with the Attorney General, who determines whether the additional matters should be added to the Special Counsel’s jurisdiction, or assigned elsewhere.
Keep in mind, Mueller is a SPECIAL Counsel, appointed on the premise that the matters he is investigating implicate conflicts of interest within the Department of Justice such that the subject matter can not be investigated nor prosecutions conducted by DOJ attorneys. Mueller is not supposed to be taking on criminal investigations that could or should be conducted in routine fashion by any junior Assistant U.S. Attorney.
We, the public, are not paying Mueller and his minions millions of dollars to conduct a dragnet for any sorts of criminal charges they can cook up against anyone having any connection to the Trump Campaign for anything they ever did, regardless of whether it has anything to do with the 2016 election, Russian interference, or even with delusional claims of Russian collusion with Donald Trump. Let’s get to the heart of Mueller’s investigation of all things Trump related.
DONALD TRUMP HAS VIOLATED NO LAW
Despite all the hub-bub about supposed collusion, the president has violated no law. Even if his campaign had actually received some sort of Russia-based assistance, no evidence of which has been produced after nearly 18 months of public and media investigations (including an endless stream of reckless baseless allegations), this would still not amount to any sort of crime.
According to constitutional scholar and Harvard University law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, “It is not a violation of any federal law for a campaign to have collaborated with a foreign government to help elect their candidate”.
Certainly one can argue that it should be, but as it stands now, there is no law that Trump or anyone on his campaign broke. Which means Robert Mueller has been tasked to investigate and somehow prosecute conduct that DOES NOT constitute any criminal offense under the laws of the United States.
Mueller and his hit squad have been tasked with rooting out “crimes” that do not actually exist in the law. The Special Counsel is charged with investigating crimes. Mueller’s ad hoc powers do not include conducting some sort of unbounded inquiry into “the whole Russian matter”, regardless of Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein’s false claims otherwise. Such an investigation would be properly conducted by Congress or any other appropriate agency, but NOT one tasked with finding and prosecuting CRIMES.
This is exactly why we have laws to constrain prosecutors exceeding their proper legal authority. Federal prosecutors are not granted broad general power to go casting about for anything they happen to catch, whatever that might be.
They are bound by strict, specific statutes limiting their intrusive, often-disruptive activities to the investigation of crimes, and then only specific crimes. Fishing around everywhere they can look to find other “possibly-related offenses” is beyond their legitimate jurisdiction and proper legal authority, and even if such an illegal generalized targeting of an individual or individuals should produce some sort of law violation, it cannot be made public.
In Mueller’s case, if he happened to find evidence of some unrelated crime, his only legal and proper action would be to refer it to the law enforcement agency having normal jurisdiction over such a matter. Mueller does not have lawful authority to act as some sort of Spanish Inquisition or Salem witch hunter, pursuing anything whatsoever he can dig up on his targets.
We have all heard bandied about these fabricated, exaggerated claims of “obstruction of justice!!! There are plenty of cheap deceitful partisan lawyers and talking heads misleading the public into believing that there can be “obstruction of justice” even if there are no actual crimes involved in the activities being probed by government agents. They are lying to themselves and to the American people.
It is NOT possible to obstruct the investigation of a ‘crime’ if no such crime exists under any federal statute, and the investigated conduct is therefore not a crime. Yes, it may sound strange, but it is the truth….it is a FACT.
Mueller’s lawless abuse of power to hound and pursue Paul Manafort is clearly an abusive tactic to pressure Manafort to go along with their scheme to take down the president. It should be crystal clear to anyone, whether lawyer or layperson like myself, that Manafort was charged for conduct completely unrelated to alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
There is absolutely no connection between the 2016 Trump campaign and these administrative reporting “crimes” dating back to 2007 that Mueller has alleged against someone who spent a grand total of two months as campaign manager, out of a nearly 2-year campaign.
Month after month after month of intrusive, excessive probing, costing millions upon millions of our tax dollars, and Mueller has NOTHING to report in the way of Trump collusion. Mueller has all these lawyers, a huge staff, goaded on by a ceaseless Democrat and media cacophony of threats, false charges, groundless allegations and a fake news smear campaign that has become a cult-like chant for Mueller to do something….ANYTHING to slake their cynical cries for presidential blood!
Mueller singled out Manafort because he found out there were allegations against Manafort from 2007 and, conveniently for the revival of Mueller’s fast-evaporating quest to find Russian boogeymen under Trump’s bonnet, Manafort had also worked briefly as Trump’s campaign manager.
As has been predicted by many with this, and every previous multi-million dollar “special” counsel investigation, Mueller would end up doing anything to justify his existence and spare himself the humiliation of being not just a failure, but a dupe, once faced with the hard truth that the whole affair into which he invested his professional reputation was nothing but an incredibly-cynical partisan hoax perpetrated on the public and the justice system by the enemies of those he was tasked to go after.
Mueller has knowingly and willfully attacked Paul Manafort, unlawfully prosecuting Manafort for alleged crimes which on their face have nothing to do with any Russian collusion and now Mueller and his hench lawyers want to personally interrogate the president? I cannot speak for the president, but I for one would not for an instant give validation to this ex-FBI bully Mueller and his thugs by granting him so much as a public tour pass to the Executive Mansion.
If there was any real justice, Mueller would have already been fired and charged with criminal offenses for his reckless, lawless abuse of his duties and powers as Special Counsel.
And while we are on the topic of real justice, Mueller’s bromantic buddy Jimmy Comey should be imprisoned just the same, for colluding with Mueller in a seditious conspiracy (yes I said it) to injure our government by purposefully attempting to illegally undermine the President of the United States.
In 2016 there was a righteous cry for justice that caught on across America. IT was very simple: “LOCK HER UP!” Let me be the first to amend it to reflect the doubled-down corruption that has gone on since that watershed election year. Let me be the first to say: “LOCK THEM UP!”
