Robert Mueller Flouting Justice Department Standards

Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review recently wrote an editorial for the National Review entitled, Mueller’s Investigation Flouts Justice Department Standards. Though not a lawyer it wasn’t hard to see how Mueller apparent it has become that he has no respect for settled law.

When Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself and passed the baton to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to set the parameters for Robert’s Mueller’s “witch hunt,” he didn’t do Trump or America any favors.

Federal regulations give the power to set limits on a special counsel’s investigation which Rosenstein interpreted as meaning almost none. His duty was to “identify the crimes that warrant investigation and prosecution.” But what crimes might those be? McCarthy explains they are “crimes that the Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate in the normal course; crimes that become the parameters of the special counsel’s jurisdiction.”

Rather than define what crimes the special counsel could prosecute, Rostein left it to Mueller to set his own rules.

Rosenstein, instead, put the cart before the horse: Mueller was invited to conduct a fishing expedition, a boundless quest to hunt for undiscovered crimes, rather than an investigation and prosecution of known crimes. ~ Andrew C. McCarthy

From there things get confusing. In short, Mueller has pursued whatever seems to interest him. The collusion he supposedly originally set out to find has faded from sight to be replaced by indictments that have nothing to do with President Trump, collusion, or sometimes even Russia.

According to McCarthy, Mueller is:

Shredding Justice Department charging policy by alleging earth-shattering crimes, then cutting a sweetheart deal that shields the defendant from liability for those crimes and from the penalties prescribed by Congress. The special counsel, moreover, has become a legislature unto himself, promulgating the new, grandiose crime of “conspiracy against the United States” by distorting the concept of “fraud.”

Consider this example. According to Mueller, Paul Manafort and Robert Gates are guilty of conspiracy to defraud banks of more than $25 million. In all, the indictment charged the two with nine bank-fraud counts, each carrying a penalty of up to 30 years in prison. A staggering 270 years combined.

Those indictments caused a media splash portraying Gates and Manafort as federal felons of the worst sort. The indictments for bank fraud and tax fraud are relatively straightforward to prosecute and those the language of the indictments promised evidence to be overwhelmingly well documented. In spite of this apparent solid evidence, Muller permitted Gates to enter a guilty plea to something quite different.

The very next day … Mueller permitted Gates to plead guilty to two minor charges — a vaporous “conspiracy against the United States” and the process crime of misleading investigators, each carrying a sentence of zero to five years in jail. This flouted Justice Department policies designed to ensure that federal law is enforced evenhandedly across the nation. ~ Andrew C. McCarthy

Had these indictments been presented according to normal Justice Department procedure Gates would have been indicted for “the most serious readily provable charge consistent with the nature and extent of his/her conduct.” That would have been an indictment for over $100 million in fraud and potentially decades of imprisonment. Instead, Gates plead guilty to what amounts to a “wrist slap” and little or no incarceration.

Everything about these indictments flies in the face of Justice Department guidelines. The accepted course of action would have been to only allow a plea deal if Gates had pled guilty to the most provable and worst crime. Normally, part of the plea deal would be to promise seeking leniency from the court with the probability of a greatly reduced sentence. Instead, Mueller dropped the heaviest charges and allowed Gates to plead to far lesser offenses. As McCarthy notes:

Mueller’s pleading shenanigans are an affront to the Constitution’s separation of powers. To begin with, he undermines Congress’s clear intent to punish grave conspiracy offenses with severe penalties.

McCarthy concludes from a legal standpoint what common sense has led many others to. Mueller’s proceedings have nothing to do with what he was appointed to investigate – “collusion with Russia.”

The question now is – When will this witch hunt come to an end?

~ American Liberty Report


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