Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
CFIF on Twitter CFIF on YouTube
More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 19, 2024 • 08:35 AM

Liberty Update

CFIFs latest news, commentary and alerts delivered to your inbox.
Mueller's Testimony: A Complete Disaster for Democrats Print
By David Harsanyi
Friday, July 26 2019
By making Mueller look like a mere figurehead unfamiliar with his own report, Republicans were able to highlight the bias and conflict of interest that plagued an investigation that was not only initiated by a Democratic administration spying on the Republican opposition during an election year, but led by prosecutors who had relationships with opposition Democrats.

If Democrats believed that Robert Mueller would provide them with additional ammunition for an impeachment inquiry, they made an extraordinary miscalculation. Not only was Mueller often flustered and unprepared to talk about his own report  we now have to wonder to what extent he was even involved in the day-to-day work of the investigation  but he was needlessly evasive. In the end, he seriously undermined the central case for impeachment of President Donald Trump.

The very first Republican to question him, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Doug Collins, forced Mueller to correct his own opening statement. In it, the former FBI director had asserted that the independent counsel "did not address collusion, which is not a legal term."

Stressing the difference between the criminal conspiracy and the colloquial "collusion" is a popular way of obscuring the fact that the central conspiracy pushed by Democrats, one that plunged the nation into two years of hysterics and fantasy, had been debunked by Mueller. Moreover, as Collins pointed out, Mueller's own report stated that "collusion" and criminal conspiracy were basically "largely synonymous."

When asked to explain this contradiction, Mueller stammered for a few minutes before saying he would "leave it with the report." Collins pointed out that, yes, the report stated that the terms "collusion" and "conspiracy" were synonymous, Mueller was forced to admit, "Yes."

It didn't get better from there. Mueller didn't know where some of the most infamous quotes in his own report had emanated. He claimed to be unfamiliar with Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, the Clinton  and DNC  funded contractors who originated and then propelled the Trump-Russian collusion theory.

Perhaps Mueller's ignorance shouldn't be surprising, since his independent counsel apparently expended zero effort into ascertaining the reliability of the evidence that helped launch the investigation.

And though there was nothing to stop him, Mueller refused to talk about a number of inconvenient aspects of his own report. He refused to talk about Joseph Mifsud, the supposed impetus for his own investigation. He refused to discuss the Steele dossier, which not only turned out to be most effective tool of Russian interference in the 2016 election, but was used in multiple FISA applications targeting at least one individual.

In the end, even Russian election interference, the ostensible purpose of the entire project, was outside Mueller's expertise. When Rep. Greg Steube asked him if there was any evidence that a single American had changed their vote because of Russian meddling (the answer, incidentally, is no), Mueller responded that it was "beyond his purview."

By making Mueller look like a mere figurehead unfamiliar with his own report, Republicans were able to highlight the bias and conflict of interest that plagued an investigation that was not only initiated by a Democratic administration spying on the Republican opposition during an election year, but led by prosecutors who had relationships with opposition Democrats.

Mueller admitted during his testimony that a one-time attorney of a Hillary Clinton aide, who had destroyed evidence by smashing the former top diplomat's Blackberry, was in charge of "day-to-day oversight" of his investigation. Others donated to her presidential campaign and even attended her election night party.

Surely, there were better people available to lead a nonpartisan criminal inquiry into the president.

Democrats, in turn, spent their time trying to force Mueller to dramatize the op-ed section of his report on potential obstruction of justice. But when Rep. John Ratcliffe asked Mueller whether his investigation been curtailed, stopped or hindered at any time, Mueller answered, "No."

Yet every liberal outlet went with the only helpful Mueller quote they could find, which was his contention that investigation did "not exonerate" Trump on obstruction. The president is, of course, wrong to claim he was fully exonerated, but it's also an absurd standard that seems to have been invented solely for Republicans. Prosecutors only have the authority to charge, not to "exonerate" their targets.

Ratcliffe, in fact, asked Mueller if he could cite a single example besides Donald Trump where the DOJ "determined that an investigated person was not exonerated because their innocence was not conclusively determined." Mueller responded: "I cannot, but this is a unique situation."

Is it? After lecturing everyone about how justice must be meted out equally to all Americans, we now hear that rules are malleable if we're talking about Donald Trump. As Ratcliffe also pointed out, Trump should not be above the law, but he should not be below it, either.

Under the Constitution, congressional Democrats are free to impeach the president for any reasons they like  and voters are free to judge the president's actions and vote for someone else. But the Mueller investigation was unable, despite its best efforts, to indict a single person for conspiracy connected to the Trump 2016 campaign, much less the president himself.

Democrats seem unable to come to terms with these inconvenient facts. And Mueller's presence didn't help their cause.


David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist and the author of the book "First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History With the Gun."
COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

Notable Quote   
 
"Americans do not trust several major U.S. institutions, including the national news media.The recently released Center Square Voters' Voice poll found that 43% of Americans say the media is trustworthy, compared with 54% who said it is not trustworthy.Younger people were more likely to trust the media, with 47% of those ages 18-34 saying they trust it and 46% saying the opposite.The numbers steadily…[more]
 
 
— Casey Harper, The Center Square
 
Liberty Poll   

Do you believe the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately reject the new Biden administration automobile emissions rule as beyond the scope of administrative agency authority?