The Patriot Post® · 'Witch Hunt'

By Gary Bauer ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/55278-witch-hunt-2018-04-11

There is still a lot we don’t know about Monday’s raid on the office and residence of Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. The president received the shocking news during a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to determine our response to Assad’s latest use of poison gas.


When the media were brought into the Cabinet room, the president took the opportunity to show his extreme anger at what he, and I believe correctly, referred to as a “witch hunt.” Here’s some of what he said:


So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys… It’s a disgraceful situation. It’s a total witch hunt… We’ve given, I believe, over a million pages’ worth of documents to the Special Counsel…

And here we are talking about Syria and we’re talking about a lot of serious things… And I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now… It’s an attack on our country… It’s an attack on what we all stand for…

This is the most biased group of people. These people have the biggest conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen… They’re not looking at the other side; they’re not looking at the Hillary Clinton — the horrible things that she did and all of the crimes that were committed. They’re not looking at all of the things that happened that everybody is very angry about…  They only keep looking at us.

The president is right on every count.

Robert Mueller’s charge was to investigate Russian collusion in the election. He did that. He indicted more than a dozen Russians and a handful of Russian entities. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said the Russian effort wasn’t about electing a particular candidate but simply sowing chaos. That should have been the end of it.

But, thanks to Mueller’s ongoing witch hunt, Putin’s strategy of creating chaos has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Mueller seems to have declared war on the Trump presidency. He seems intent on invalidating the results of the last election.

I heard speculation that Mueller may actually want Trump to fire him. This kind of fishing expedition, which has metastasized into an investigation of anything and everything Trump and anyone around him has ever done in their entire lives, could be the breaking point.

This process, if used against the rest of Washington, DC, would likely result in 9/10ths of the city going to jail.


There are reports that material seized from Cohen’s office relates to “Stormy Daniels.” There are reports that Mueller is investigating a $150,000 payment from a Ukrainian billionaire to Trump’s foundation arranged by Michael Cohen. The same billionaire gave $13 million to the Clinton Foundation, but who cares about that?


The Double Standard

Given what we still don’t know at this time, let me make a few comments about what I do know is burning in the hearts of the 63 million people who voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

When news broke that Hillary Clinton had been putting classified information on a private, unsecured server and on other devices, making the information vulnerable to foreign capture, the country was shocked.

It quickly became apparent that Hillary Clinton and the people around her were engaged in the destruction of evidence. For example:

  • As time went on, we were told that a laptop full of Clinton’s emails was “lost in the mail.”

  • Other devices were destroyed with hammers.

  • Hillary’s attorneys were allowed to decide which emails were “personal” and which ones would be turned over.

  • Her remaining emails were not just deleted. Her server was wiped with “BleachBit” in violation of a congressional subpoena.

But wait… There’s more!


All during this shell game, not once did the FBI raid any residence owned by the Clintons or their attorneys. If they had done so, I guarantee you there would have been a huge outcry from civil libertarians and their media allies.

Not only did the Justice Department and the FBI guarantee that they did not violate the sacrosanct legal principle of attorney-client privilege, they allowed Clinton to get away with designating two of her top aides, subjects of the investigation, as her attorneys. As a result, they could not be questioned about their knowledge of Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.

We know that while all this was going on there was a cadre of agents at the FBI who believed Clinton would be the next president, and they did their best to ensure that she — and their careers — were protected.

We know fired FBI Director James Comey wrote his exoneration memo before Clinton was interviewed.


We know her interview was a complete joke, given that it was not recorded nor was it conducted under oath.

We know the attorney general violated ethical standards when she met on a private airport tarmac with the spouse of the investigation’s target.
 
 During all of this, the FBI never went to court to get a wiretap on Hillary Clinton or her associates to see if they were engaged in obstruction of justice.


Mueller’s original charge was to investigate Russia’s meddling in our elections. So far, he has found no evidence involving Donald Trump and collusion with the Russians. There is more circumstantial evidence that the Clinton campaign colluded with the Russians. Yet it is clear that Mueller is not looking into anything involving Hillary Clinton.


I am sure there are more than a few Trump supporters who are also thinking about this:

The FBI got two warnings about the Parkland school shooter and did nothing. It didn’t break down the door of his house to seize his guns. When the FBI got a report on the Pulse night club shooter, it didn’t break down the door of his house. In fact, his father was an FBI informant at the time.

In both cases, the suspects were cleared and dozens of people died as a result. But the FBI has time to delve in to an alleged dalliance in 2006?


I think it is time for Mueller and the country to “move on."