Thursday, July 25, 2019
By Gary Bauer
The Mueller/Media Meltdown
During yesterday's hearings, the fake news commentators had to observe in real time what everyone else was seeing with our own eyes. Robert Mueller was melting down and so too were the left's impeachment delusions.
As the hearings progressed we began to hear the Trump-haters lamenting Mueller's performance. Here are some examples:
- Left-wing law professor Laurence Tribe tweeted, "This morning's hearing was a disaster. . . the tired Robert Mueller sucked the life out of [his report]."
- Michael Moore declared Mueller to be "A frail old man, unable to remember things, stumbling, refusing to answer basic questions."
- NBC's Chuck Todd said, "On optics, this was a disaster."
- ABC's Terry Moran declared, "Impeachment's over."
- Even Rep. Al Green (D-TX), who forced a vote on impeachment last week, conceded, "Some persons were hoping for a . . . 'wow' moment. It didn't happen."
But if you were like most Americans who didn't watch the hearings and only turned on the evening news or opened your morning newspaper today, here's the "news" you likely heard or read: "Mueller did not exonerate Trump."
That's the best possible spin the left could come up with, but it is totally absurd.
In our system of justice, prosecutors or special counsels do not announce they have or have not exonerated someone. You are either guilty or not guilty, and juries make that determination.
That was the key point Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX), a former federal prosecutor, drove home during yesterday's hearing.
Ratcliffe asked Mueller, "Which Department of Justice policy sets forth a legal standard that an investigated person is not exonerated if their innocence is not conclusively determined?"
When Mueller couldn't answer the question, Ratcliffe answered it for him, saying, "You can't find it because . . . it doesn't exist."
Prosecutors and special counsels either find there is enough evidence to issue an indictment or that there is not enough evidence to issue an indictment. Mueller found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. That should have been the end of it.
The Real News
If we actually had a functioning media with real journalists dedicated to reporting facts, then every American would know what yesterday's big news was. And it was this: Robert Mueller was clearly unfamiliar with the Mueller Report.
There are now serious questions about whether Mueller was used as a prop while a team of Clinton loyalists attempted to do what Hillary Clinton could not -- get Donald Trump out of the White House.
It would take a small book to outline all the episodes that occurred yesterday raising questions about who really ran this investigation, but here are just a few.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) asked Mueller, "Who wrote the nine-minute comments that you read at your May 29th press conference?" Mueller refused to answer, leading Gohmert to reply, "So that's what I thought. You didn't write it."
It should have been an easy question to answer unless Mueller didn't want to answer it, and he clearly did not.
Here's something else: Millions of Americans know that Fusion GPS is the opposition research firm hired by the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. Fusion GPS worked with foreign spies and Russians to produce the unverified Steele dossier, which the FBI used to spy on the Trump campaign.
As Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) noted:
"There is collusion in plain sight. . . The Democrats colluded with Russian sources to develop the Steele dossier and Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya colluded with the dossier's key architect, Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson."
Yet, when Mueller was asked about Fusion GPS, he was clueless even though Fusion GPS was included in his report and was a central player in this scandal.
And that leads us to this big news.
Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel because a dossier full of lies was circulated throughout Washington. It was paid for by the Clinton campaign and sourced by Russians, yet Mueller claimed it was not within his purview to examine the dossier.
The origin of evidence is a fundamental issue in our justice system. Evidence makes or breaks a case.
Yet in this case it seems the special counsel wasn't interested in looking at all of the evidence involving Russian interference in our elections. Maybe that's because Andrew Weissmann and Aaron Zebley were still working for Hillary Clinton.
Attorney General William Barr has a lot on his plate. But he really should look into who ran the Mueller investigation. The man we saw yesterday was not capable of controlling dozens of partisan lawyers and producing an unbiased report.
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