Mueller #2

Both the pro-Trump and anti-trump suspicions, like Caesar's wife, have implications not because they are true but because they might be believed. So we debate proving negatives. (Angels are invisible; nobody has ever seen an angel; therefore, angels exist.) But innuendo can be very powerful.

From Hanson's article filled with "apparents,' "likelys," "probablys," and "seems:"

"The Mueller team’s modus operandi starts with the assumption that President Donald J. Trump is responsible for Russian collusion. Or he must at least be found guilty of something or other from his past decades as a wheeler-dealer, high-profile Manhattan provocateur.

Given that starting point, the special counsel then tries to prove his particular charge by rounding up those who have worked for Trump, examining in detail their personal history, discovering that they were imperfect, and threatening to ruin them (or their family members) with long prison sentences or crippling legal bills unless they aid what are becoming his Captain Ahab–like obsessions.

Far worse, Mueller has overlooked dozens of likely tangential felonies related to his investigations — they are not deemed useful to his zealous pursuit of Donald Trump.

Deputy Director Andrew McCabe probably lied to federal investigators. He faces no charges.

James Comey, the former FBI director, probably misled a FISA court and likely lied under oath to a congressional committee by claiming 245 times that he did not know or did not remember various important facts. It’s also likely that Comey broke the law by deliberately leaking secret and confidential FBI memos to friends and the press for his own particular agendas. Comey’s FBI team knew as early as July 31, 2016, that the Steele dossier was an unverified, biased product of Hillary Clinton’s opposition research, and yet he helped to send it to the FISA court as the primary evidence used to justify surveillance of Carter Page — in order to look for something on Trump.

Comey earlier had warped the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server and emails by his own admission that he assumed she was going to be president and therefore deserved special treatment rather than a process that followed the letter of the law. He apparently faces no criminal liability on any of these issues.

Comey — and later, after his firing, his lieutenants — apparently conducted a counterintelligence investigation of President Trump. The likely illegal move was based on the ridiculous notion that Trump had colluded with Russia, either as a dupe and fool or as a canny and treasonous Russian operative. These fantasies were the pretext for using Clinton opposition research to prompt their investigations.

Worse still, the FBI later was apparently terrified that a President Trump would eventually demand the release of documents disproving the FBI canard that it was generically investigating “collusion” rather than Trump himself. Recall that Comey, according to his sworn testimony, assured Trump three times that he was not the object of a FBI official investigation.

Yet just such an investigation of the president of the United States was under way. It occurred in a landscape in which Comey himself, later Mueller team members Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and recently journalists as diverse as Michael Isikoff and Jonathan Karl have admitted either that there is likely to be no proof of collusion, or that the Mueller team will not find any evidence of collusion, or that the Steele dossier was mostly inaccurate and made up — or all that and more.

Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s blue-chip prosecutor, was briefed in August 2016 by Bruce Ohr, the fourth-ranking official in the Obama Department of Justice, that the Steele dossier was unverified, that it was a campaign opposition hit piece paid for by Hillary Clinton, and that Ohr’s own wife worked with Steele on it.

Those facts about the prior role of Weissmann seemed of no interest to Mueller. Nor did Mueller seem bothered by the fact that the DOJ and the FBI went to a FISA court on four occasions to use that very dossier to obtain surveillance on Carter Page, who was to become a subject of Mueller’s own investigation."