Congressional Democrats will finally get an opportunity to put on a public show starring former Special Counsel Robert Mueller when he appears before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
Mueller was last seen at his May 29 press statement, in which he attacked President Trump by promoting a tenuous theory of obstruction of justice as grounds for impeachment. Mueller, despite the “no collusion, no obstruction” conclusion of his dubious report, smeared the president by presuming him guilty anyway, claiming he was not exonerated and signaled House Democrats to begin impeachment proceedings.
This hearing will give Mueller and the Democrats an opportunity to once again push the “destroy Trump” narrative and jump-start the impeachment process. Mueller’s testimony will be geared to that end. Democratic questions will seek to fill in the blanks to preserve Mueller’s manufactured reputation for probity. And the mainstream media will be primed — and probably pre-briefed — to drive the point home. (RELATED: Roger Stone Raid Raises Questions About Wray Among FBI’s Rank And File)
However, unlike at his press statement where he allowed no questions, Mueller will now have to face hard scrutiny from Republicans and honest Democrats about the origins of his investigation, misconduct during the process, and his questionable, sometimes completely erroneous conclusions.
For example, why did Mueller sit on the fact that his team had early-on discovered that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, which was the central question of the entire Russiagate hoax? Were the midterm elections a factor in his delay for exonerating President Trump of Russia collusion?
Why did Mueller continue as special counsel after learning that former FBI Director James Comey broke the law to get him appointed by leaking information from President Trump’s FBI files to the New York Times, using a Columbia professor friend of his as a cut-out? (RELATED: Former FBI Agent: Comey Isn’t Treasonous, But That Doesn’t Make Him Competent)
Why did Mueller populate his investigative team almost exclusively with people with obvious political bias against President Trump? What was the role of chief prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who hired many of the conflicted members of the team and who had been spotted at Hillary Clinton’s election night party?
Why did Mueller hide from the American people for four months Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s outrageous conduct and flagrant anti-Trump bias, which necessitated they be fired from the investigation? And why did his office quietly delete all the text messages they passed while on his team, going so far as to reformat their government-issued phones?
Did Mueller’s office have any contacts with the media, such as leaking information regarding the massive pre-dawn raid on Roger Stone’s home, or the inexplicable guns-drawn action at the home of Paul Manafort?
Why didn’t Mueller investigate the Steele dossier that was the basis for the Russian collusion hoax? Why didn’t Mueller examine contacts between Steele, Fusion GPS employees like Nellie Ohr, and/or members of the Clinton campaign with the sketchy Russian sources who fed the rumors that were the basis of the dossier
These are important questions since this was the only demonstrable Russian collusion in 2016, as the dossier was the prime vehicle for Russian interference in the election.
Critical questions can also be asked about Mueller’s report to the attorney general, 400 pages of rumor, innuendo and noise that boiled down to “no collusion, no obstruction.” Why did Mueller withhold information from the report that would have tended to make President Trump look good, such as the fact that Carter Page, far from being a Russian colluder, was in fact an FBI informant against Russia?
What does Mueller make of the fact that United States District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich issued an opinion on July 1 that Mueller did not in fact establish a Kremlin connection to the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization Mueller claimed ran Moscow’s ‘active measures’ social media campaign in 2016?
Democrats, of course, won’t want to ask these hard questions because they are implicated in the scandal. Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff has a history of lying about President Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia and has serious ethics problems over mishandling of classified info and irregular communications with anti-Trump witnesses. (RELATED: I’m A Senior Trump Official, And I Hope A Long Shutdown Smokes Out The Resistance)
But regardless of what Mueller says or doesn’t say, it is critical to remember that this entire enterprise was illegitimate from the start. We arrived here largely because of one person — Hillary Clinton. The Clinton campaign paid for a smear operation against Donald Trump using Russian rumors filtered through Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS, and a dossier laundered through the Obama Justice Department and FBI to create a bogus psy-operation that ultimately led to the special counsel. Without Hillary Clinton, and the need to minimize the damage from her email scandal, there would have been no dossier, no FISA spy warrants, no collusion hoax, no special counsel, no coup cabal, no threats of impeachment, and no continued partisan harassment from Congress.
This is rooted in a Clinton campaign operation seeking to create a false narrative that the Russians were conspiring with Donald Trump to rig the 2016 election. But she was the one subverting the American electoral process, with the unprecedented and illicit cooperation of corrupt swamp dwellers in the upper reaches of the Obama administration. And it is important that the sedition be exposed, and Hillary Clinton and the rest be held accountable.
To this end the president should start releasing all the key documents that detail the depth and breadth of the scandal, who was involved in it, and how it unfolded. Attorney General William Barr needs to investigate how the Mueller investigation came about and, in particular, the matter of the manufactured predicate for the unprecedented and troubling mobilization of government resources to spy on the Trump presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, Judicial Watch has over 50 lawsuits to uncover more information, of which over a dozen relate to Mueller himself. The Democrat circus hearing may boomerang as the “investigation of the investigators” accelerates.
Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) is president of Judicial Watch, the nonprofit watchdog group in Washington, D.C.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
