When Robert Mueller was appointed last May as Special Counsel to investigate Trump, Politico Magazine gushed that “Mueller might just be America’s straightest arrow — a respected, nonpartisan and fiercely apolitical public servant whose only lifetime motivation has been the search for justice.” Most of the subsequent press coverage has shown nary a doubt about Mueller’s purity. But, during his 11 years as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mueller’s agency routinely violated federal law and the Bill of Rights.
Mueller took over the FBI one week before the 9/11 attacks and he was worse than clueless after 9/11. On Sept. 14, 2011, Mueller declared, “The fact that there were a number of individuals that happened to have received training at flight schools here is news, quite obviously. If we had understood that to be the case, we would have — perhaps one could have averted this.” Three days later, Mueller announced: “There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country.” His protestations helped the Bush administration railroad the Patriot Act through Congress, vastly expanding the FBI’s prerogatives to vacuum up Americans’ personal information.
Deceit helped capture those intrusive new prerogatives. The Bush administration suppressed until the following May the news that FBI agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis had warned FBI headquarters of suspicious Arabs in flight training programs prior to 9/11. A House-Senate Joint Intelligence Committee analysis concluded that FBI incompetence and negligence “contributed to the United States becoming, in effect, a sanctuary for radical terrorists.” FBI blundering spurred the Wall Street Journal to call for Mueller’s resignation, while a New York Times headline warned: “Lawmakers Say Misstatements Cloud F.B.I. Chief’s Credibility.”
But the FBI was off and running. Thanks to the Patriot act, the FBI increased by a hundredfold — up to 50,000 a year — the number of National Security Letters (NSLs) it issued to citizens, business, and nonprofit organizations, and recipients were prohibited from disclosing that their data had been raided. NSLs entitle the FBI to seize records that reveal “where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work,” the Washington Post noted. The FBI can lasso thousands of people’s records with a single NSL — regardless of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable warrantless searches. – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [divider][/divider]Was the New York Times’ story about President Donald Trump’s desire to fire special counsel Robert Mueller used to distract the public from the doubt building around Mueller’s investigation?
A reporter for the Washington Free Beacon sure thinks so.
“Isn’t it curious that just as the Mueller probe and the entire premise of his investigation is coming under scrutiny…that we have a deliberate leak to change the narrative,” Free Beacon reporter Elizabeth Harrington said on Fox News Friday. “Now the media is in a frenzy, they’re talking about obstruction.”
“Trump didn’t fire anybody. Not firing someone doesn’t sound like obstruction to me,” she added, noting that Strzok’s text messages more closely define obstruction.
Harrington also said she believed the Times’ story was “intentionally leaked by the Mueller team as a distraction.” – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [divider][/divider]President Donald Trump was bombarded with questions about testifying before special counsel Robert Mueller before he left for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
CNN host Wolf Blitzer said their reporter, Pamela Brown, had an exchange with Trump over whether he would testify under oath about Russian collusion and obstruction of justice:
Brown: Would you do it under oath, Mr. President?
Trump: You mean like Hillary did it under — who said that?
Brown: I have no idea [unintelligible].
Trump: Wait, wait, wait. Do you not have an idea? You really not have an idea? I’ll give you an idea. She didn’t do it under oath. – READ MORE