Special Counsel Robert Mueller has submitted his report. The two-year long investigation is over. Over 2,000 subpoenas were issued, 500 witnesses interviewed, and after all that, there is no evidence President Trump, his campaign staff, or the Kremlin colluded to tilt the 2016 election. Half the country knew that, while the other half chose to remain drooling vegetables on this issue. There was no collusion. On obstruction of justice, another moronic Democratic obsession, Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein didn’t see enough evidence to suggest this took place. Maybe…that’s because if this did happen—and I think it didn’t—then Trump did a bad job. He allowed over 2,000 subpoenas and hundreds of witnesses be interviewed by partisan Democratic staffers on Mueller’s staff. Yet, this gives even more weight and credibility to the report, which is why I never liked the bashing of the Mueller probe based on that point. If you were confident that the Russian collusion hysterics were a wild goose chase, then you would want the most anti-Trump people on Mueller’s staff because when that report drops confirming what you had a hunch on, then there’s no ‘well, he or she used to work for Republicans’ talking point bubbling up.
I never thought I’d see the day where Democrats are visibly upset that the President of The United States DIDN’T collude with the Russians.
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) March 25, 2019
Yet, while we all pop champagne over this tremendous political win for the Trump White House and the country, Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel noted that what’s being glossed over with the no collusion reports from the news media is how the Mueller report totally trashes the FBI
“If you are going to investigate a presidential campaign, and on a charge as grave as collusion, and with the heavy-handed tactics the FBI employed--you'd better have a highly convincing reason to act,” tweeted Strassel. “The Mueller report is a judgment that never was any real evidence.”
1) On the #NoCollusion findings of Mueller's report. It's worth recognizing that this is more than an exoneration. It's a searing indictment of the FBI.
— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) March 24, 2019
2) If you are going to investigate a presidential campaign, and on a charge as grave as collusion, and with the heavy-handed tactics the FBI employed--you'd better have a highly convincing reason to act. The Mueller report is a judgment that never was any real evidence.
— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) March 24, 2019
3) The Papadopoulos conversation was always thin gruel. And the Mueller findings now prove the dossier was a fabrication. The country now deserves a full accounting of how the FBI blew this so badly--so that it doesn't happen again.
— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) March 24, 2019
4) If Mueller has done his job, he will address some of this. But the real accounting needs to come from a full declassification of FBI/DOJ probe docs. Mueller report is only half the story. Time to go back to the beginning, to how we got a special counsel in first place.
— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) March 24, 2019
I never thought I’d see the day where Democrats are visibly upset that the President of The United States DIDN’T collude with the Russians.
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) March 25, 2019
Given this proves the dossier was a fabrication, how did the FBI not violate the Woods Procedures by presenting unverified material to the FISA court? What are the consequences of that? How many prior FISA warrants have been based upon “research” such as the garbage in dossier? https://t.co/sTw2lf0Kvs
— Nick Short (@PoliticalShort) March 25, 2019
I’m glad Mueller made it official that Trump didn’t do all the stuff Clinton actually did.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 25, 2019
The report showed that the so-called Trump Dossier, which was compiled by a former MI6 spook, Christopher Steele, and funded by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, is a total work of fiction. There was no collusion. There was no blackmail or any of that innuendo. If anything, this operation executed on behalf of Democrats shows collusion between Russia, Steele, DNC, and the Clintons, but that’s for another time. Strassel elaborated further in her column today:
The wreckage is everywhere. The nation has been engulfed in conspiracy theories for years. A presidency was hemmed in by the threat of a special counsel. Citizens have gone to jail not for conspiracy, but for after-the-fact interactions with Mr. Mueller’s team. Dozens more have spent enormous amounts of money and time defending their reputations.
None of this should ever have happened absent highly compelling evidence—from the start—of wrongdoing. Yet from what we know, the FBI operated on the basis of an overheard conversation of third-tier campaign aide George Papadopoulos, as well as a wild “dossier” financed by the rival presidential campaign. Mr. Mueller’s no-collusion finding amounts to a judgment that there never was any evidence. The Papadopoulos claim was thin, the dossier a fabrication.
Which is all the more reason Americans now deserve a full accounting of the missteps of former FBI Director James Comey and his team—in part so that this never happens again. That includes the following: What “evidence” did the FBI have in totality? What efforts did the bureau take to verify it? Did it corroborate anything before launching its probe? What role did political players play? How aware was the FBI that it was being gulled into a dirty-trick operation, and if so, how did it justify proceeding? How intrusive were the FBI methods? And who was harmed?
If Mr. Mueller has done his job properly, his report will address some of this. His team would have had to look into the sources of the allegations as part of determining the documents’ (lack of) veracity. A Mueller report that doesn’t mention the dossier and its political provenance, or questionable news stories used to justify surveillance warrants, for instance, is a report that is playing politics.
The Trump dossier was a Democrat-funded opposition research operation that the FBI reportedly used as the key piece of evidence to secure a FISA spy warrant against former campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Even then, there were serious questions about its validity. The vast majority of it was unverified. And disgraced fired FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was a top counterintelligence agent who signed off on the investigation that was eventually taken over by Special Counsel Mueller upon James Comey’s firing from the FBI in May of 2017, might have suggested in texts to former bureau lawyer Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair, that this dossier might be the so-called insurance policy against a Trump presidency. The two shared tens of thousands of anti-Trump texts throughout the 2016 election; Strzok was also a key player in the Hillary Clinton email probe. So, with these antics and the DOJ pretty much discussing a coup concerning the 25thAmendment—you can see that a lot of cleanups has to be done at the DOJ/FBI. We should revisit this part in the future though.
Another question: who was involved in the reported kill order concerning nixing bringing charges against Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information that was sent through her unsecured and unauthorized server when she was secretary of state? Who at Obama DOJ was involved in that decision-making process, whose orders were then transmitted to the FBI?
There will be criticisms of this Mueller report for sure...on both sides. For now, we should all take a victory lap, as it has torched the liberal media's world and that of Democratic Party America, setting up for a deluge of progressive tears.