‘They acted like crybabies who were offended that someone dared to criticize them…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) One of President Donald Trump’s former lead attorneys on Tuesday shed new light as to why special counsel Robert Mueller chose not to pursue obstruction of justice charges in his Russia collusion probe: because Mueller knew it was a set-up.
John Dowd said Mueller’s attempted perjury trap of the president closely mirrored the one that recently declassified FBI notes revealed was used against former national security adviser Michael Flynn in a January 2017 interrogation.
“It was a monstrous lie and scheme to defraud,” Dowd said of the special counsel’s attempt to lure Trump into a phony deposition.
Dowd told Fox News contributor Gregg Jarrett that, in both cases, the corrupt interrogators had little pretext for conducting the requested interviews.
They hoped, instead, to entrap their victims into committing crimes by saying something that might then be construed as a lie.
“Mueller’s scheme was the same one captured in the FBI set-up notes pertaining to Flynn,” Dowd said. “They knew they had nothing, but using their official power they created and perpetuated the facade of an investigation.”
Also like the Flynn case—in which FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka attempted to catch Flynn off-guard by deploying a false sense of collegiality toward their unwitting victim—Dowd said that Mueller was not always what he seemed.
“As I look back, we had the most perfect trusting relationship with Mueller based on his word and handshake, which held throughout,” Dowd said. “No paper. Word was solid.”
However, the former FBI director, whose impartiality and fairness were widely heralded at the time, knew exactly what his objectives were.
Mueller, the immediate predecessor and close personal friend of disgraced former FBI Director James Comey, brazenly proceeded with the plot against the president, despite every overture that the Trump White House made to cooperate with the probe.
“They received everything they asked for without a hitch or page missing, including the most intimate notes of conversations with and by POTUS,” Dowd said.
“Every witness they requested testified truthfully,” he continued. “No lying. No grand jury testimony. Mueller affirmed all of this in our March 5 [2018] meeting. How could there be a whisper of obstruction under these circumstances?”
In Trump’s case, though, the very fact that the president refused to play ball by granting an in-person interview—having learned a lesson from Flynn’s framing—became yet another basis for the obstruction charge against him.
That charge originally had been liked to Trump’s May 2017 firing of Comey, even though it was a legitimate exercise of the president’s constitutional authority.
But the indignation of being publicly rebuffed by the president only fueled Mueller’s team of biased prosecutors to stack the deck even more.
“They acted like crybabies who were offended that someone dared to criticize them, so they instinctively labeled it obstruction,” Dowd told Jarrett in an interview last year. “It was insane.”
The revelations since, indicating that Comey likely spearheaded the potentially criminal and seditious plot against Trump and his advisors, have only validated further the reasoning for his removal.
The Justice Department is currently conducting a criminal probe into the actions of the Obama intelligence community, led by special prosecutor John Durham, and some have speculated that Comey may face indictment when the probe concludes this summer.
Dowd told Jarrett that documents from the Mueller probe also raise questions as to whether Trump may have been justified in firing and replacing the special counsel.
Mueller likely knew from early in his probe that there was no evidence to substantiate the collusion claims, but he continued to milk the hollow investigation for two years, at a cost of more than $30 million in tax dollars.
Democrats used the false narrative heavily in their fundraising and campaigning for the 2018 midterm election, which helped them to retake the majority in the House of Representatives.
A day after Mueller’s July 2019 House testimony made clear that the prospects of Russian collusion were dim, the Democrats immediately proceeded to entrap Trump in a new scheme, claiming he abused his power during a phone call with the Ukrainian president.
That ultimately enabled them to fulfill their campaign promise of impeachment, although Trump was acquitted by the Senate.
The distractions of the Democrats’ largely partisan impeachment trial in January and February of this year cost precious time and created a climate of divisiveness on Capitol Hill that hindered the government’s ability to prepare for and respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
Yet, despite the Mueller report showing no underlying Russian collusion to predicate the investigation—and with indisputable evidence that Obama officials were, in fact, responsible for orchestrating the hoax—House Democrats have continued to pursue the baseless obstruction claim as a potential avenue for an impeachment do-over.
House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, recently pressed for unredacted transcripts of witness’s grand-jury testimony from the Mueller probe until a Supreme Court decision last week shot him down.