“The Swamp” usually refers to the
vast federal bureaucratic machinery of mostly unelected top officials who
exercise influence and power without worry about the appearance of conflicts of
interest.
They are often exempt from the consequences of the laws and
regulations that affect others.
The chief characteristics of the swamp are the
interlocking friendships, business relationships, marriages and partnerships in
Washington, and their immune response against anyone who challenges them.
Robert Mueller’s investigation into
alleged collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has
proven the locus classicus of a dysfunctional and highly incestuous
Washington culture—so much so that it borders on being a caricature of a
Washington investigation.
The Origins of the Robert Mueller Appointment
How did it come about?
Mueller’s
acquaintance, former FBI Director James Comey (Mueller and Comey were lauded
dating back to the Bush Administration as “brothers in arms”), has testified
that he was so exasperated with the president that he leaked his own
confidential and likely classified memos of presidential meetings to the press via
a friend in order that it “might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.”
It certainly did that.
And mirabile dictu, the special counsel was soon
none other than Robert Mueller with whom Comey had had a professional
relationship in a variety of contexts for nearly 20 years. At some point, will
one of Mueller’s staff have to depose him to ask whether he ever discussed the
possibility of a special counsel appointment with Comey prior to Comey’s
firing?
Will Mueller need to investigate
Comey for leaking what may have been a classified memo and thus a likely
felonious act?
If the investigation touches upon the strange exemptions granted
Hillary Clinton in the Uranium One scandal, will Mueller investigate his own prior
investigation—a Mueller v. Mueller special counsel probe?
Is the U.S. legal
community so impoverished in former federal attorneys that we cannot find
special counsels without any prior relationships with those knee-deep in the
proposed investigations? Is there one former prosecutor in Washington who is
not somehow involved in these scandals?
Lisa Page and Peter Strzok
The two FBI investigators had a long-concealed amorous relationship characterized by an overriding antipathy for Donald Trump and a desire to ensure that he was not elected president or, barring that, did not prove a successful president.
Strzok interviewed
Michael Flynn, Huma Abedin, and Cheryl Mills. Both Page and Strzok communicated
concerning the “insurance” idea that might suggest efforts to stop Trump’s
election or thwart his presidency, with deputy director Andrew McCabe.
When the inspector general released
evidence of their prejudices and romantic involvement, they were dismissed.
But
Mueller apparently did not announce exactly why they were taken off his
investigation.
Their staggered departures were reported in the press as normal
reassignments and not as connected, as if to inform the public why they were
leaving would somehow not be in the Mueller investigation’s interest.
Will Page at some point be deposed
about Strzok’s behavior or vice versa? Would she or he plead paramour
privilege?
Andrew McCabe
The former deputy director of the FBI should never have been assigned to the Clinton email scandal and should have had no further assignments into anything tangential to charges of Russian-Trump collusion.
His wife was once a candidate for statewide office
in Virginia and a recipient of large amounts of money (sometimes reported as
$670,000) from a Clinton-related PAC.
Yet from the Page-Strzok archive,
McCabe was a likely anti-Trump partisan.
His presence in any investigation
involving either his wife’s patron Clinton or Clinton’s campaign rival
Trump should never have been permitted and should be seen as suspect.
Rod Rosenstein
Rosenstein never should have been allowed to appoint the special counsel Robert Mueller.
Barring that, he long
ago should have recused himself from all matters relating to the Mueller
investigation.
Rosenstein while in the Obama Department of Justice was once a supervisor
of the highly controversial Uranium One investigation headed by then FBI
Director Robert Mueller—an investigation that may be revisited by or is
currently connected with efforts to find Russian collusion with American
elected or appointed officials.
Rosenstein signed on behalf of
the Obama Justice Department at least one of the surveillance requests to a
FISA court, an application currently under a cloud for allegedly not disclosing
the unverified nature of the Steele dossier, the departure of Steele from
FBI associations, or the circular nature of news accounts concerning the
dossier.
Will Mueller at some point reexamine the nature of the FISA
applications and thus the official who appointed him?
The Team
At least four of the Mueller team worked as lawyers at the Washington law firm of WilmerHale. Robert Mueller should never have recruited so many of his former associates.
Some of them may
be investigating former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Trump’s daughter
Ivanka and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who are also supposedly
represented by WilmerHale attorneys. Of the initial 15 appointed lawyers, at
least seven are known to have contributed money to the Democratic Party or to
Hillary Clinton or both.
In such a politicized investigation,
would it have been difficult to find greater diversity, either defined by
geography, ideology, or former employment?
Will a Clinton cash supporter soon
be deposing a former Trump campaign official, or will one former WilmerHale
attorney be in court facing another former WilmerHale colleague?
Andrew Weissmann
Weissmann should never have been appointed to the Mueller team.
He is another former partner at WilmerHale where
Mueller worked, and had emailed applause to Obama DOJ holdover Sally Yates,
when as an Obama holdover acting attorney general, she tried to block her then
boss’s President Trump’s targeted immigration moratorium.
Like other Mueller
team members, Weissmann was a donor to Democratic causes and a Hillary Clinton
partisan. The idea that he can investigate Trump, after donating and
patronizing his political opponent and applauding renegade efforts to block his
executive orders, is not credible.
Sally Yates reportedly cosigned one of
the FISA court requests to monitor Trump campaign associates; if the duplicity
surrounding those applications becomes an issue, will Weissmann then
recalibrate his former high-five for Yates as he investigates her?
Associate Deputy Attorney General
Bruce G. Ohr
He may be the most conflicted of all government attorneys associated with past and present investigations.
Ohr
had met with the architects of the fusion GPS dossier and likely did not
disclose that meeting to his superiors.
His wife, a Russian expert, was
hired by Fusion/GPS to help find damaging information about Donald Trump—a fact
Ohr deliberately and likely unlawfully hid on a federal disclosure form.
Whom did Bruce Ohr talk to about Fusion/GPS and to what degree did he interact
with Rosenstein, Comey, or the authors of the FISA court requests?
Almost any
interaction with Ohr that pertains to Fusion GPS and the Mueller investigation
is now the fruit of a poisoned tree. At some point would Ohr have been
consulted about Ohr co-produced research?
Aaron Zebley
He was Mueller’s chief of staff while Mueller was FBI director, and yet another former partner at WilmerHale.
In the past, Zebley had represented Justin Cooper, who has testified that he
set up Hillary Clinton private server and then destroyed with a hammer some of
Clinton’s mobile devices, when there was already investigatory interest in
their contents. Indeed, the Clintons’ email server in question—the domain clintonemail.com—used
by Hillary Clinton was in fact registered to Cooper himself, not to Bill or
Hillary Clinton, while she was secretary of state.
To reiterate: Mueller selected a
lawyer to help investigate Trump who had recently defended a former Clinton
aide in the midst of the Hillary Clinton scandal.
Was the idea that Zebley
could always plead attorney-client relationship if his own investigation butted
up to matters of the Clinton email scandals? Would Zebley at some point have
deposed his former client?
Jeannie Rhee
It might be one thing to have one member of a team investigating Trump who had represented an employee or foundation of the Clintons, but quite another with two incidents.
Yet
Rhee—another WilmerHale alumna, and another sizable contributor to the Clinton
campaign—was yet another attorney who had represented someone deeply involved
in a recent Clinton scandal.
She had recently been hired not only
by the Clinton Foundation but also by Obama Deputy National Security Adviser
Ben Rhodes during the investigation of the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack and
its relationship to the Clinton tenure as secretary of state.
If the Mueller
investigation turns to the areas involving the misuse of FISA court-approved
surveillance and improper unmasking and leaking of the names of American
citizens, will Rhee depose her former client Rhodes?
Will she advise Mueller
about the nature of the Clinton Foundation she defended if the matter of his
own past investigations of Uranium One-associated donations to the foundations
arises.
Mueller Keeps Feeding the Beast
A special counsel investigation is by nature an object of singular scrutiny. Fairly and not, it is constantly subject to charges of partisanship, and government pressure.
It was the duty of
Robert Mueller to appoint attorneys who were not just immune from charges of
conflict of interest but exempt from the very thought of charges of conflict of
interest—as well as recusing himself and his attorneys from any past
associations that might have conflicted with his own investigations.
He knew
from his original directive that he had latitude to pursue any illegality that
arose from his collusion investigations; he has just done that in the
tangential matters of alleged tax and lobbying crimes.
He may likely have to
again when he collides with defective FISA court requests, illegal unmasking
and leaking of surveilled citizens, past Russian collusion in the Uranium One
and Fusion/GPS Steele dossier, and obstruction of justice concerning the
Clinton emails.
Instead of preempting these
conflicts of interests, he has managed to feed a veritable beltway octopus
whose tentacles are so deeply wrapped around the players and financing of the
2016 campaign, the dubious FISA court applications, a Washington blue-chip
legal firm on both sides of the current collusion allegations, and the assorted
past scandals of Hillary Clinton from Uranium One to the email debacle, that if
it had not earned legitimate criticism, it would have had to be invented.
It is the Washington habit to praise
Mueller for his unquestionably sober and judicious legal career and long and
admirable public service.
The giddy media has nonstop fed the public the
stunning resumes and often past patriotic sacrifices of his legal team. All
that is a fine and noble thing.
But local attorneys in Boise, prosecutors in
Memphis, and FBI investigators in San Jose know how to avoid the appearance of
conflicts of interest.
The Mueller team either does not or
believes in its case it simply doesn’t matter.
About
the Author: Victor Davis
Hanson
Victor
Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics
professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at
California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie
Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He
has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was
awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush.
Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma,
California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism.
He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars – How the First
Global Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic Books).
