President Donald Trump came under criticism after a report alleged he tried to remove special counsel Robert Mueller in June 2017. But according to former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, the president has every right to fire Mueller if he so desires.
Starr, who investigated former President Bill Clinton during the 1990s, indicated during a Monday appearance on Fox News that under the U.S. Constitution, Trump has control over executive branch personnel decisions.
Since Mueller — the man in charge of investigating alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election — technically works for the Department of Justice, which is part of the executive branch, Trump has the power to fire him.
“The president has very broad powers. Article II of the Constitution of the United States vests the executive power in the president,” Starr said, as reported by The Daily Caller. “We’ve elected the president, and he has all this power.”
Trump is “at liberty” to decide he wants Mueller out, Starr added, even if he thinks Mueller is simply “not doing a good job” or if his investigation is “interfering” with the “conduct” of Trump’s presidency. – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [divider][/divider]Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) joined SiriusXM hosts Matthew Boyle and Amanda House and launched a scathing attack on former FBI head and now Special Counsel Robert Mueller on this week’s edition of Breitbart News Sunday.
“I’ve been complaining since the day he was appointed, he did so much damage to the FBI,” Gohmert said of Mueller, offering up multiple criticisms of his long FBI career, from his alleged mishandling of the Boston bombing in 2013 to the now-infamous anthrax investigations over a decade earlier.
“This guy has done so much damage to our country, to the greatest law enforcement force for good in history, the FBI … he did a lot of damage. It’s time to stop the damage that he’s doing right now,” added Gohmert.
He also faulted Mueller for his handling of the 2001 anthrax investigation.
“This guy’s done so much damage, he should never have been appointed, and if he had had any decency about him at all, he would have immediately declined because he couldn’t investigate anything Comey is involved in,” he said, suggesting Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey are basically “joined at the hip.” – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [divider][/divider]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
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