Fellow Attorneys Look at Mueller’s Team With Skepticism Over History of Sketchy Tactics

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Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel in the Trump-Russia collusion probe, has employed a slew of Democrats to investigate, half of whom donated to the Hillary campaign or her Foundation. He has allowed the leaking of information periodically which also happens to harm the Trump administration. Many believe it’s a witch hunt.

Mueller’s team has most recently been criticized by fellow attorneys for questionable tactics in the past.

Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense attorney in Massachusetts, wrote an opinion piece accusing Mueller of once trying to entrap him when Mueller was acting U.S. attorney in Boston.

“I have known Mueller during key moments of his career as a federal prosecutor,” Silverglate wrote for WGBH News. “My experience has taught me to approach whatever he does in the Trump investigation with a requisite degree of skepticism or, at the very least, extreme caution.”

Mueller tried to set him up, entrap him with drug charges.

“Years later I ran into Mueller, and I told him of my disappointment in being the target of a sting where there was no reason to think that I would knowingly present perjured evidence to a court,” Silverglate wrote. “Mueller, half-apologetically, told me that he never really thought that I would suborn perjury, but that he had a duty to pursue the lead given to him.

Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor, also took aim at Andrew Weissmann, the prosecutor tapped by Mueller to help lead the investigation, in a piece this week titled, “Judging by Mueller’s staffing choices, he may not be very interested in justice.”

Powell accused Weissmann, once the director of the Enron Task Force, of “prosecutorial overreach” in past cases and said it could signal what’s to come for President Trump and his associates in the Russia probe.

“What was supposed to have been a search for Russia’s cyberspace intrusions into our electoral politics has morphed into a malevolent mission targeting friends, family and colleagues of the president,” Powell wrote in The Hill. “The Mueller investigation has become an all-out assault to find crimes to pin on them — and it won’t matter if there are no crimes to be found. This team can make some.”

Powell cited several cases where Weissmann won convictions that were later overturned.

In one case in 2012, she filed a complaint of prosecutorial misconduct for alleged witness threatening, withholding exculpatory evidence, and the use of “false and misleading summaries.” Obama’s OPR found no violations.

In her op-ed, Powell criticized Weissman for the FBI’s raid of Paul Manafort’s home, a terrifying move usually reserved for drug kingpins and mobsters.

A while back, esteemed constitutional expert, Jonathan Turley expressed his serious concerns about one of Mueller’s team members.

One of the team members, Michael Dreeban, has already argued for a ridiculously broad interpretation of obstruction of justice, one of the issues Trump is being investigated for after Mueller’s friend Jim Comey said he thought there might be a case. Esteemed liberal Professor of law Jonathan Turley writes:

Dreeben’s background also contains an interesting item that bears directly on the potential case against President Donald Trump.  Dreeben argued in an unsuccessful appeal of the prosecution of Arthur Anderson where the Justice Department advanced a sweeping interpretation of obstruction of justice — an interpretation that I criticized as wildly overbroad.

The interpretation resulted in a unanimous rejection of the Supreme Court.  Given the call for a charge of obstruction against Trump (and the view of some of us that there remains considerable statutory barriers to such a charge), Dreeben’s addition should be a concern to the Trump defense team.

After Dreeben and his team relentlessly and unconstitutionally pursued Arthur Anderson, one of the biggest accounting firms in the nation at the time, the case was overturned by the Supreme Court, but by then the company was ruined.

Mueller’s possible predisposition to hide evidence

Mueller might also be too favorably disposed towards the Clintons. While he was head of the FBI, the agency hid evidence it collected on a Russian bribery and extortion scheme aimed at growing their atomic energy business inside the United States.

According to Tuesday’a report from John Solomon writing for The Hill, the FBI started gathering evidence in 2009 of Russian officials engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion, and money laundering. That was before the two Clinton deals went through giving the Kremlin control over 20% of the U.S. Uranium and a more flexible deal in sales.

While we reported this on Tuesday, we did not discuss the role of Robert Mueller. A witness to the corruption was kept from notifying Congress by the Mueller FBI. The witness was gagged and is still gagged by Jeff Sessions.

Mueller’s role in IRS targeting

It was Mueller’s FBI that found no fault with the IRS targeting Conservatives and which did in fact collaborate with them to find grounds for criminal culpability so they could put Conservatives supporting candidates in jail. At the time, the FBI even received millions of pages of IRS information they were not allowed to have. They only returned them when Judicial Watch found them out.

There is no congressional oversight of Mueller in his current investigation of Russia and Trump. He can do anything he wants and he blocks FOIAs. When Republican lawmaker Devin Nunes demanded documents about a former British spy’s Russia dossier, the FBI refused, according to Reuters. Mueller took full control of the Russia dossier put together mostly on the word of spies in the Kremlin by the writer of the dossier, British ex-spy Christopher Steele who was paid to do it as part of opposition research.


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