More, more, and more on Mueller
It appears that the elusive Christopher Steele will be testifying:
Former British spy Christopher Steele has agreed to meet in London with U.S. officials regarding the dossier, The Times of London is reporting.
A source close to Steele told the newspaper he plans to meet with American authorities within the next several weeks, but only about his interactions with the FBI and only with the approval of the British government.
Of course, this is only a report from “a source close to Steele.” Who knows who that is, and whether the source is reliable?
More here:
We don’t yet know which investigators will be interviewing Steele in the coming weeks, but it’s a pretty safe bet that they’ve offered him some form of immunity in exchange for his candor. That should terrify the Democrats who enlisted him in their attempts to execute a Deep State coup against Trump.
If Steele spills the beans on his former handlers, the resulting prosecutions of former high-level federal officials would make Watergate seem trivial by comparison.
I’m not as optimistic as the author of that quote, Joe diGenova.
In addition, this latest from John Solomon was a big story yesterday:
In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence.
But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
Why Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny.
Turns out there were a lot of things omitted from Mueller’s report.
And if you want a review of Mueller’s past prosecutorial history, here’s your opportunity.
Yesterday I discussed this article about what Mueller’s team did to his targets in the Russiagate probe. Today I want to add a few more quotes.
Jerome Corsi’s story:
.[Corsi] said Mueller’s investigators engaged in “Gestapo tactics,” including harassing his friends and family — as well as his sources. “They got abusive when they didn’t get what they wanted,” he said, “and they got nasty.”
…“They just keep thinking they could find something,” Corsi said.
He said the stress caused him to have “a nervous breakdown.”…
In the end, Corsi was drilled by Mueller’s team for more than 40 hours, and in the process, racked up more than $100,000 in legal bills.
“I still haven’t recovered physically or financially,” he told RCI, though he has received donations from a legal defense fund. “We’re just now putting our lives back together.”
He maintained that his “Kafkaesque” nightmare at the hands of Mueller was “nothing more than punishment for the crime of being a vocal supporter of Donald Trump.”
“It was a completely fraudulent way to conduct an investigation,” he said. “Usually you start with a crime and find the criminals. But in this case, they started with the ‘criminal’ and looked for the crime.”
In a $300 million lawsuit filed earlier this year against Mueller and the Justice Department, which oversaw Mueller’s office, Corsi alleged that Mueller’s team subjected him to warrantless surveillance, illegally leaked details about grand jury and other secret proceedings to reporters, and threatened to sabotage his “business and contractual relationships” unless he perjured himself in the Russia “collusion” probe.
“Mueller had been doing everything in his power to try to threaten and coerce Corsi into testifying falsely, through both illegal surveillance and defamation, in order to take down President Trump and have him removed from office,” the complaint states…
Corsi was never indicted and is no longer under investigation.
Many of Mueller’s targets have incurred enormous legal fees. This is one of the tools of an independent counsel, working for a government with very deep pockets and arrayed against witnesses whose pockets are considerably more shallow. One of the most upsetting things is that the government has inexhaustible resources and private people they target have to pay their own legal fees, not to mention the stress involved, which acts as pressure to lie to get the whole thing over with.
You might also want to refresh your memory on Roger Stone:
Like Corsi, Stone slammed Mueller’s “gestapo” tactics. Some former agents agree the raid was excessive.
“The charges are lying and obstruction, so they dress out like this was a Waco assault? C’mon,” retired FBI special agent Michael Biasello said, adding that Mueller clearly was trying to intimidate Stone.
Stone says Mueller’s agents have also probed into his emails, text messages, phone calls and bank records. He claims they sifted through his garbage cans and went so far as to interview his maid to ask if he was meeting with Russians at his home.
“For months, Mueller’s Russian investigation has tried to implicate me by saying I had direct knowledge of plans by WikiLeaks to release information damaging to Clinton’s campaign,” Stone said. “There is no evidence whatsoever to support this claim, even after at least 12 of my current and former associates have been browbeaten by the FBI and at least six of them were dragged before Mueller’s grand jury.”
He says he’s racked up more than $1 million in legal bills, and he fears his defense could wind up costing him double that sum and force him into bankruptcy.
There’s that money thing again. It’s a very powerful and effective form of political intimidation.
Papadopoulos:
At one point, Papadopoulos said Mueller’s team even “threatened me with a Logan Act violation for helping Trump meet [foreign] leaders.”
Only two people have been charged with violating the Logan Act since it was passed in 1799. Both cases occurred before the Civil War; both defendants were acquitted.
“Even thinking about charging someone with a Logan Act violation is obscene and in my view profoundly corrupt,” former independent counsel Wisenberg said.
Papadopoulos said the piling on of charges convinced him to take a plea deal in which he copped to lying to investigators in exchange for minimal jail time. “I pled guilty when they came after me with FARA violations,” he told RCI.
But that didn’t stop the threats and intimidation. Led by Clinton supporter Rhee and Obama donor Andrew Goldstein, Papadopoulos said, Mueller’s prosecutors threatened to rip up the plea agreement to get him to confess that he shared what the so-called Russian agent allegedly told him in London about Clinton’s emails with higher-ups in the Trump campaign. Only, he never told anyone on the campaign about the yarn — and emails, texts and other evidence backed him up.
Still, during one interview at the FBI’s Chicago office, Mueller’s lawyers grilled him for seven hours on the subject, relentlessly asking, name by name, if he told various officials on the campaign. Without this critical piece of information, Mueller had no conspiracy. “I got the sense that I was the linchpin of their conspiracy case,” Papadopoulos said.
“Unfortunately, the truth was not what they wanted to hear,” he said. “No matter how much Mueller and his team wished I had told campaign members, I hadn’t.”
A frustrated Rhee (one of the lawyers on Mueller’s team) threatened to charge Papadopoulos with obstruction and throw him in prison for 25 years. She cited the fact he deleted his Facebook account, something his lawyer said he could do…
Looking back on his ordeal, Papadopoulos said he was railroaded. “Of course, they knew there was no collusion crime, especially in my case,” he said, adding that investigators just wanted “to use me for their war against Trump.”
There’s plenty more. Oh, just read the whole thing.
It’s almost impossible to adequately cover or even keep track of the revelations that are coming out now; there’s just so much. As I’ve said many times in the past, every single American should be deeply deeply disturbed by these activities. But plenty are not, or even applaud what they did in their Ahab-like effort to get at the root of all evil, Moby Trump.
The Logan Act threat against Papadopoulos is even more risible now that Obama’s henchmen are openly collaborating with Iran. Would love to have Trump point this out the next time Pelosi rants about “impeachment” or “prison” for Trump.
I think Barr is a straight shooter and will unravel this spider web of deception, corruption, and treason.
Going through all of this, as someone who still holds idealistic standards about truth and the rule of law, is extremely depressing.
Michael Towns:
Agreed.
I hope we never get used to it, and I hope my growing cynicism does not prove correct.
Congressman Gohmert obviously doesn’t like Mueller.
https://hannity.com/media-room/gohmert-mueller-unmasked/
Falling (sadly) into a less and less and less Mueller category, a Jordan Schachtel thread on just released FOIAED FBI docs (quoting): *** “FBI concludes Hillary Clinton was in “violation of basic server security” w/ home-brew server.
-Discusses possibility that *all* of her emails were stolen.
-Review found HRC stripped classification of highest possible level.” ***
Link: https://mobile.twitter.com/JordanSchachtel/status/1137090107033493504
Stomach turning stuff, all taken in all.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/robert-mueller-russia-investigation-special-counsel-dershowitz
No one has ever been convicted of a Logan Act violation, but that didn’t stop Mueller et. al.
Remember what Comey said about mishandling classified material in Hillary’s case. The statute doesn’t require intent, but only two convictions had been delivered under those circumstances. Because two is somehow not enough, Hillary must go free.
______
I agree very much with Neo’s sentiment that “we never get used to it.”
But I think the thing that unnerves me the most about the Mueller investigation, was that he/they didn’t even attempt to appear fair and unbiased. I mean the composition of the team primarily. I had to look up “Rhee.” That’s Jeannie Rhee, Hillary’s personal attorney, a so-called expert in cyber security. (Ha!) Who would think it was OK to put her on the Mueller team?
It’s not that I’m surprised that Mueller would be that corrupt. It’s that he didn’t think there would be any consequences to putting together a team that blatantly questionable.
The Kilimnik reveal probably indicates that Kilimnik was just another lure sent at the Trump Campaign by someone in the Obama Administration.
” One of the most upsetting things is that the government has inexhaustible resources and private people they target have to pay their own legal fees, not to mention the stress involved, which acts as pressure to lie to get the whole thing over with.” – Neo
The even more depressing part is that, as taxpayers, we not only pay to have our government harass our fellow citizens — if the FBI is taken to court, we pay their defense fees and, if they lose, any settlements to the plaintiffs.
This will continue until government LEOs have to pay their own way for charges of bias and misconduct.
I mean, by reimbursing the government it they lose, otherwise they face the same problems as their alleged victims during the investgation and trial, but NOT having an unlimited purse to draw from, otherwise few legitimate complaints will prosper.
However, I know personally of two cases where the FBI was smacked down by judges for over-reach that was nearly on par with what we’ve been seeing.
“It’s not that I’m surprised that Mueller would be that corrupt. It’s that he didn’t think there would be any consequences to putting together a team that blatantly questionable.” – TommyJay
It looked horrible on the face of it at the beginning, because it was (see Dershowitz’s comments above), but the silver lining did finally show up (as predicted by some): if there had been any scintilla of evidence of Trump or close associates actually conspiring with real Russian operatives (rather than FBI bait), they would have found it.
Should anyone be sure that Herr Müller uses Gestapo tactics?
He not only looks the aryan ideal and is of pure SS eligible Teutonic Preußen stock, he also is right out of central casting to be an Einsatzgruppen officer.
He was the inspiration for Col. Landa. His professional history is just icing on the cake.
And while it won’t tell you anything you didn’t already know if you have been following this story about the Steele Dossier like I have, Andy McCarthy literally fillets the document in exacting detail in an essay yesterday from NR.
McCarthy didn’t tell us anything I didn’t know (although he collected and analyzed it very well), but Jeff Carlson did:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/5-discrepancies-call-the-accuracy-of-muellers-report-into-question_2951924.html
That’s actually only 4; he didn’t mention there that “Rosenstein & Sessions Discussed Need to Remove Comey” well before he was fired by Trump.
The information about Nadler was, as the NYT says, a real bombshell.
(h/t from https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/more_evidence_mueller_report_was_a_dishonest_hit_job_omitting_key_facts_to_distort_conclusions.html)
The Gossip Factory cuts both ways.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/doj-official-bruce-ohr-conduit-for-dossier-author-got-28000-bonus-during-russian-probe_2955292.html
Fitton is just making allegations, of course, but if he “had confidence that the former associate deputy attorney general clearly did not commit a crime, he would have said so.”
Maybe the DOJ can appoint a special counsel to investigate.
More, More, More on Ohr, Ohr, Ohr.
Sundance reminds us what was happening when Bruce got that nice bonus.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/06/07/foia-docs-twice-demoted-doj-official-bruce-ohr-received-28000-bonus-during-work-on-sketchy-dossier/