Conservative dupes in the Russia-gate probe

By Cliff Kincaid

Rush Limbaugh has interviewed former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy about how Robert S. Mueller's Russia-gate investigation has turned out so badly for President Trump and his associates. That's funny. Back in May, McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote an article for National Review under the headline "Robert Mueller: A Solid Choice for Trump-Russia Investigation 'Special Counsel.'"

Here's what McCarthy, described as one of the nation's most prominent voices on legal and national security issues, said: "Bob Mueller is a widely respected former prosecutor, U.S. attorney, high-ranking Justice Department official, and FBI director. He is highly regarded by both parties.... He is a straight shooter, by the book, and studiously devoid of flash." Using "Bob" seemed to imply they are friends or associates.

Limbaugh himself said that Mueller "has perhaps the best and the cleanest reputation in all of official Washington. He is Mr. Integrity. He is Mr. Cultured. He is Mr. Mannered. He is Mr. Sophisticated. There isn't a soul in Washington who dares utter nary a negative word about Mueller."

Seven million dollars later, there has been a lot of flash, leaks, a few pleas, some indictments, and Trump's presidency is on the line. McCarthy, a buddy of Limbaugh who also appears on his radio program, now thinks Mueller is building a case for impeachment. They didn't recognize Mueller as the hatchet man for the Deep State that he really was.

Clearly, McCarthy was fooled bigly. So were many others. This is an indictment of the "conservative media" that failed to do their digging into Mueller's real record.

Forgive me for tooting my own horn, but I said from the beginning that Mueller was going to take down Trump. How did I know? Did I have insider information? No. But I did have access to the objective facts about Mueller's disastrous tenure as FBI director. All that a journalist had to do was review history and consult knowledgeable sources. These facts included implicating the wrong people in the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, working with the Muslim Brotherhood to purge FBI materials of the truth about radical Islam, and failing to reform the FBI's internal security system after Russian spy and FBI agent Robert Hanssen was caught.

Mueller is the ultimate symbol of what has gone wrong with our system of government. In an honest world, he should have been forced into retirement in disgrace. Instead, he is running a Star Chamber proceeding targeting our elected president.

McCarthy's May 17 column declared, "Democrats are so Trump-deranged that I suspect, despite Mueller's solid reputation, they will claim the fix is in if impeachment does not appear to be on the horizon in short order. But most people will give Mueller a chance. And he deserves that."

This is how conservatives, led by National Review, rolled over and let things get out of control.

I knew where it was heading. My June 9 column was titled, "Trump Should Say 'You're Fired' to Special Counsel." I wrote, "Since Mueller can't indict Trump, his investigation could produce impeachment charges against Trump, which would be filed by the House if the Republican majority disappears in the 2018 elections."

This has been the plan all along. Charges of impeachment, based on obstruction of justice and even sexual harassment allegations against Trump, will be lodged. For now, the process continues. "House Overwhelmingly Rejects Trump Impeachment Vote," said the Daily Caller on Wednesday. The vote was 364-58.

Mueller and his Deep State allies understand that the impeachment process is at an early stage and that clueless conservatives can be counted on to keep saying (to themselves) that there is really nothing to worry about.

By the middle of June, McCarthy seemed to be having second thoughts about the work of honest "Bob" Mueller, the "straight shooter." He wrote an article under the headline "Mend, Don't End, Mueller's Investigation." McCarthy was now saying, "The alarm bells that led to Mueller's erroneous appointment cannot be un-rung. But legal surgery needs to be done, lest Mueller's amorphous mandate lead to Scooter Libby 2.0, or worse, another Iran-Contra epic – a fiasco that seemed to have a longer run than Phantom of the Opera."

It looks like Mueller had a case of Trump-derangement syndrome. Perhaps that stemmed from Trump's open disgust with the U.S. intelligence community, also known as the Deep State. It appears that Trump understood that the U.S. was losing in the world because our CIA, FBI, NSA, and other agencies were seemingly unable or unwilling to defend America and its interests. America's enemies had been winning and growing more powerful under former President Barack Hussein Obama. Why? This is the area that cried out for an inquiry.

Now, in December, however, McCarthy has concluded that something has gone wrong in the investigation and that the "straight arrow" Mueller is now targeting Trump personally for charges of obstruction of justice and is making a case for impeachment.

Once again, because of his prestige, background, and credentials, he made news. "Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy is also saying this is now an obstruction of justice investigation and the ultimate goal is to impeach President Trump," said Sean Hannity on his Fox News show. Yes, but McCarthy and other legal experts and scholars had assured us that Mueller was honest and a straight shooter.

Patting myself on the back, I wrote last May that Mueller had fooled a lot of people and that his appointment was good news for the Swamp but bad news for Trump. I noted the evidence that Mueller had badly mishandled the anthrax investigation after the September 11, 2001, attacks, and that he was being criticized for a cover-up in the case and sued. That same month, May 2017, I wrote a column under the headline "Special Counsel Mueller Will Get His Man," explaining more of the corruption surrounding Mueller's tenure as FBI director. I cited evidence that Mueller purged government materials of information that identified the nature of the Islamic terrorist enemy. I said Mueller was determined to get Trump and would pursue the president.

Here's what I wrote: "Those who say there is no evidence of a crime in Russia-gate miss the whole point. Mueller will produce evidence of a crime out of nothing if he has to." I predicted a flimsy "obstruction of justice" charge against Trump, based on Mueller's probe of Michael T. Flynn. This is exactly what we are seeing come to pass.

My column explained, "Mueller's job is to damage and destroy a President elected by the people. His job is to protect his friend, former FBI director Comey, who used a spurious document, the 'Trump Dossier,' to conduct an inquiry that has turned up nothing." This was apparent from the beginning.

Another motive is to divert attention away from the other problems in the FBI that we have seen on display in such incidents as the Las Vegas massacre (where the FBI seems to have no clue on motive), left-winger James Hodgkinson's planned massacre of Congressional Republicans (the FBI blamed it on "anger management" problems), and FBI involvement in the attempted assassination of Pamela Geller in Garland, Texas (an FBI undercover agent was among the Jihadists).

Finally, there's Mueller's handling of the case of Robert Hannsen, the most damaging spy in FBI history. He had spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for 22 years, from 1979 to 2001, and was caught before Mueller took over as FBI director. But Mueller was responsible for making sure something like this never happened again. He was supposed to carry out reforms to catch infiltrators and spies. The Inspector General said that Hanssen had escaped detection "because of longstanding systemic problems in the FBI's counterintelligence program and a deeply flawed internal security program" and recommended a central repository for the receipt, collection, storage, and analysis of derogatory information concerning FBI employees "with access to sensitive information." By 2007, the Inspector General said that the FBI had "not yet established" such a repository, which could help identify security risks and spies.

This failure may help explain why and how we had an FBI agent with an anti-Trump bias named Peter Strzok reportedly running investigations of Trump and Hillary and having an affair on the side with another FBI employee. He was a security risk on the Mueller Special Counsel payroll. He hasn't been fired, just reassigned.

Although various conservative outlets carried my columns about FBI corruption and Mueller's game plan in Russia-gate, I was never invited on the conservative talk shows or quoted in Breitbart about Mueller's desire to take down Trump. I was virtually alone in warning about what was to come. People like McCarthy and Limbaugh, with their claims about Mueller's honesty, made what is happening today possible. They were dupes, now with egg on their faces.

The stakes are enormous. The fate of an elected president hangs in the balance. From the FBI point of view, a corrupt agency and corrupt agents are at risk of being exposed and punished. What I fear is that the same Russian operatives who wrote the "Trump Dossier" are pulling the strings in the FBI itself. Hence, Russia-gate is a diversion from corruption and moles within the FBI. It's a big mess, as Trump might say.

At this point, it doesn't look like Trump is willing to fire Mueller and issue pardons for Mueller's victims. Convinced that Mueller was an "honest" man and a "straight arrow," Trump may have waited too long. Firing Mueller at this point might make him look desperate and accelerate demands for his impeachment.

In the meantime, conservative defenders of Mueller should explain in detail how and why they went so badly wrong. It would be appropriate for this mea culpa to begin on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. It turns out that he flunked out of his own fictitious Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. His claim about being right 99.9 percent of the time has taken a huge hit. But he won't lose his job. Trump will.

© Cliff Kincaid