What should the American public look for in the Mueller report?
Former U.S. Solicitor General Ken Starr weighs in on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly near the end of his investigation. Judging by the spin already coming from the Democrats, liberals are growing increasingly nervous that Mueller’s report won’t actually reveal any evidence of collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russia.
“If the report comes out and exonerates Donald Trump, we move on," Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu told CNN last month, referring to several other Democrat-led investigations currently picking up steam.
The need to find an alternative angle of attack became particularly pressing in the wake of Michael Cohen’s much-ballyhooed testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, during which he threw cold water on the entire collusion fantasy.
THE BRAZEN PLOT AGAINST TRUMP BY THE OBAMA-ERA FBI AND DOJ CONTINUES, ENABLED BY A COMPLICIT MEDIA
Indeed, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler is already laying the groundwork for this abuse of power, demanding documents from more than 80 individuals and organizations in hopes that they might provide him with ammunition to use against President Trump.
In other words, this will never end. Democrats will keep trying to hamstring this administration with endless public investigations that are really about political retribution – and they’ll do so, as Lieu put it, “regardless of what Robert Mueller’s report shows.”
They’ll find it difficult to justify that approach after Mueller’s report inevitably fails to live up to their “#resistance” fantasies, so they’ll most likely try to pretend that Mueller’s 22-month long investigation was somehow too narrow in scope and that there are still lots of stones left to be turned over.
That argument is, of course, patently false. Mueller’s investigators have interviewed hundreds of people, including dozens within the Trump White House, about a wide variety of topics. His prosecutors have charged a half-dozen Americans with crimes that have no obvious connection to the original ambit of the investigation, which was to find “links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”
Beyond that, a federal judge has already categorically rejected the notion of a narrow, specific, limited scope to Mueller’s investigation – much to the delight of liberals at the time. Paul Manafort’s lawyers tried to argue that one of his indictments was invalid because it was outside the scope of Mueller’s inquiry, but while Judge T.S. Ellis III expressed skepticism of the Special Counsel statute, he rejected Manafort’s petition.
Additionally, both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and then-acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker have testified under oath before Congress about the Mueller investigation, giving lawmakers ample opportunity to press them for details about the probe. Moreover, even with an administration famously plagued by leaks, never once has any evidence emerged that the Department of Justice limited the scope of Robert Mueller’s probe in any way.
All of this shows that Mueller and his investigators have been given an extraordinarily wide berth to investigate President Trump, his 2016 campaign, and Russian election interference. Indeed, they’ve been given an effectively unlimited scope to investigate anything they saw fit – Rosenstein’s letter appointing Mueller as Special Counsel authorizes Mueller to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”
And yet, Democrats in and out of Congress are now acting as though Mueller’s investigation was always intended as little more than a starting point. Neal Katyal – who, during the Clinton administration, wrote the special counsel regulations under which Mueller was appointed – is now claiming that the Mueller Report may merely be a “roadmap” for further, and potentially endless, investigations, for instance.
The congressional Democrats who would lead those investigations, such as Nadler and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, certainly seem to agree. They and others have called for that “roadmap” to be made public, even though disclosing information about someone who doesn’t face criminal charges would directly contradict DOJ policy, and possibly even the very regulations governing Mueller’s probe, which give the attorney general discretion to decide how much of the report to release.
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The partisan motives behind the Democrats’ strategy are obvious. Democrats know that Mueller’s team won’t find evidence of collusion that never took place, so they’re preparing to bog the Trump administration down with endless government-funded investigations based on the premise that the Special Counsel investigation was somehow inadequate.
Even if Mueller completely exonerates the president’s campaign, Democrats will never give up on their quest to overturn the American people’s choice in the 2016 presidential election. That’s been the whole point of the Russia-collusion witch hunt from the very beginning.