by WorldTribune Staff, September 2, 2018
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s “greatest problem was his original mandate” allowing an open-ended investigation of President Donald Trump, Hoover Institution Fellow Victor Davis Hanson wrote.
So where are we after 15 months of indictments of an elected president’s associates, but on charges having nothing to do with Russian collusion to tilt the election in his favor?
“We are left with the impression that Mueller cannot find much to do with his original mandate of unearthing Russian collusion, but he still thinks Trump is guilty of something,” Hanson wrote in a syndicated column.
“In other words, Mueller has reversed the proper order of jurisprudence” in which a citizen is innocent until proven guilty.
Mueller started his investigation, which he stacked with a “dream team” of Democratic Party loyalists, “with the assumption that the reckless raconteur Trump surely must be guilty of some lawbreaking. Thus, it is Mueller’s job to hunt for past crimes to prove it,” Hanson wrote.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, “is not facing legal trouble for destroying subpoenaed emails, for using an unlawful email server, or for the expenditure of campaign money on the Steele dossier.”
Now Mueller “with the effort to go back years, if not decades, into Trump’s business and personal life” is entering “uncharted territory,” Hanson wrote.
“The argument is not that Trump committed crimes while president – indeed, his record at home and abroad is winning praise. The allegations are instead about what he may have done as a private citizen, and whether it could have reversed the 2016 election.”
Hanson said that Trump should “immediately declassify all documents – without redactions – relating to the Mueller investigation, the FISA court warrants, the Clinton email investigation, and CIA and FBI involvement with the dossier and the use of informants.”
A second special counsel should also be appointed to “investigate wrongdoing on the part of senior officials in these now nearly discredited agencies,” Hanson wrote. “The mandate should be to discover whether there was serial conflict of interest, chronic lying to federal officials, obstruction of justice, improper unmasking and leaking, misleading of federal courts, and violation of campaign-finance laws.”
Hanson concluded: “It is past time to stop the stonewalling, the redacting, the suppression, the leaking to the press, and the media hysteria. The government must turn over all relevant documents to two special counsels and free each to discover who did what in 2016. Americans need the whole truth to ensure equality under the law and to thereby set us free from this nearly two-year nightmare.”
Subscribe to Geostrategy-Direct __________ Support Free Press Foundation