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How Confident Is Robert Mueller in the Case He Is Building?

How Confident Is Robert Mueller in the Case He Is Building?

Last updated on: December 3, 2018 at 12:03 pm by Susan Wright

How Confident Is Robert Mueller in the Case He Is Building? 2018-12-03T12:03:53-05:00 Susan Wright

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So how confident is special counsel Robert Mueller in the work he’s been doing since May 2017?

Mueller was assigned as special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein because of two events.

The first was the recusal of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions from the ongoing Russia probe. Sessions had been implicated in the probe, after it was determined that he’d had his own communications with Russian officials, during the course of the 2016 election, while he was campaigning for Donald Trump.

Sessions, out of a sense of propriety and ethical concern, recused himself, having no idea what sort of Hell he’d unleashed and how he would become a target of a petulant, increasingly agitated and unhinged President Trump.

Secondly, Donald Trump shot himself in the foot by firing FBI Director James Comey the way he did.

Did he have a right to fire Comey?

Certainly. As president, he didn’t even need a reason, but after initially having his people say he had fired Comey because of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, he cut the legs out from under them.

Appearing with NBC News’ Lester Holt, Trump proclaimed that he would have fired Comey anyway, and said it was because of the “Russia thing.”

This coincided perfectly with what Comey had already said about the new president asking him to pledge loyalty to him. He also said Trump had asked him to let his first and former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, off the hook.

Flynn was forced to step down from his position with Trump’s administration, after only three weeks, after it was determined that he failed to register as a foreign lobbyist for Turkey, nor did he disclose payments he’d received from three separate Russian firms (with one being RT, the Russian propaganda network) for a speech in Moscow.

Because of all these things, Rosenstein obviously felt the case would be best handled by a competent, well-regarded legal mind, and both sides of the political aisle seemed quite satisfied when Robert Mueller, who served 13 years as director of the FBI, under both the Bush administration, and the Obama administration.

When it became clear that Mueller was taking his assignment seriously, digging in, and overturning every suspicious rock conceivable, Trump and his loyalists with the GOP suddenly balked.

Mueller has been thorough and no matter what Sean Hannity and the other barking mad MAGAdooks claim, he has yielded results.

Axios reporter, Garett Graff, has done an analysis of the work done by Mueller’s team, to date, and in his estimation, special counsel has been dropping little indicators of connection between Trump’s campaign and the actions of Russian intelligence.

The biggest example of this, he says, is an “oddly specific” reference to Russian hackers targeting “email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by [Hillary] Clinton’s personal office” for the first time in 2016 within hours of Trump publicly encouraging Russia to release Clinton’s hacked emails.

He also notes that Mueller linked former Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen’s decision to call off the Trump Tower Moscow project in June 2016 with news that broke around the same time of Russians hacking the Democratic National Committee.

Additionally, Mueller conspicuously left one Russian national who traveled to Atlanta in 2014 unindicted earlier this year — despite the fact that “Mueller makes clear in the indictment that he knows the precise IRA official to whom this unnamed male traveler filed his Atlanta expenses after the trip.”

Graff goes on to point out that the moves Mueller makes, the order of his court filings and those he has already indicted is “increasing” the burden of proof on himself.

Mueller has a long and distinguished career in the legal field. He certainly knows this is what is happening.

If he’s going to these lengths, then he must feel that he has a solid case. He’s showing an extreme amount of confidence.

Another thought Graff seems to have grasped is that by dropping these little nuggets, Mueller is making it more difficult for some rogue Trump loyalist in the Justice Department to step in and shut down his work.

Meanwhile, President Trump continues to engage in Twitter rages. Earlier Monday, he attacked his former attorney, Michael Cohen, calling for him to serve a long prison sentence, while also praising his old pal, Roger Stone, for his “guts” at not rolling over on him.

There have been some, such as Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George Conway, who have openly accused Trump’s Twitter attacks and thinly veiled suggestions of potential pardons as akin to witness tampering.

File under “18 U.S.C. §§ 1503, 1512” https://t.co/e4ZGVn1kJi

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) December 3, 2018

He may have a point.

What do you think?

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