Well, there is one person who needs to answer for his “dossier dodge” and that’s ex-Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The Wall Street Journal editorial board is wondering, and rightfully so, why Mueller decided to leave out that the Trump dossier, which is at the heart of this Russian collusion nonsense, was totally false in his testimony to Congress. Remember, the ‘it was beyond our jurisdiction’ talking point he peddled before Congress? Overall, the hearing was a success for Republicans; it finally killed the Russian collusion narrative. Yet, it seems obvious that Mueller and his team knew the dossier was garbage, but instead of making moves to bring about an end to this witch-hunt, he carried on, “tip-toeing,” as the WSJ noted around this rather important fact:
In her public order Tuesday, Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court didn’t mention Robert Mueller. But her stinging rebuke of the FBI for abusing the FISA process to obtain a warrant to spy on Carter Page invites the question: How could the special counsel have ignored the Steele dossier?
Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirms the FBI sought to verify the claims former British spy Christopher Steele made in his dossier. Yet during an appearance before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, 2017, when Mr. Comey was asked directly if the bureau was investigating them, Mr. Comey answered: “I’m not gonna comment on that.”
He had good reason to dodge. By that time, the Horowitz report makes clear, the FBI knew that most of the Steele dossier’s claims were unreliable. Yet rather than take a hard look at it, Team Mueller made a deliberate choice to tiptoe around it. In his opening statement to Congress when he testified this July, Mr. Mueller declared he would not address “matters related to the so-called Steele dossier,” which he said were out of his purview.
This makes no sense. The Steele dossier was central to obtaining the Page warrant, and the leaks about the dossier fanned two years of media theories about Russian collusion that was one reason Mr. Mueller was appointed as special counsel. Mr. Mueller owed the public an explanation of how much of the dossier could be confirmed or repudiated.
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Mr. Mueller’s dodge on the Steele dossier…vindicates our view from 2017 that Mr. Mueller was the wrong man to be special counsel. On the evidence in the Horowitz report, the special counsel team had to know the truth about the Steele dossier and false FBI claims to the FISA court, but they chose to look the other way.
I know—a lot of you already knew this, already knew that Mueller was not to be trusted. Still, it’s worth reminding. It’s worth bringing up. The dossier was a politically biased piece of opposition researchthat was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrats. And I disagree that the FBI tried to verify it. The glaring errorsin it prove otherwise. But let’s say they did. It’s still not a good situation because, like Mueller, they turned the other way if they could only confirm the title names, times, and places in the shoddy document —all of which were publicly available. Columnist Kimberley Strassel noted this when the DOJ IG report on the FBI’s FISA activity during the 2016 election was released. Remember this document was cited as credible evidence in securing a FISA spy warrant against former Trump campaign official Carter Page. I think most who see the totality of what happen would conclude that a shoddy vetting job is no vetting at all. And Mueller’s inaction on tearing down the dossier points to what The Federalist’s Sean Davis noted which is that Mueller and his team desperately tried to prove Russian collusionand couldn’t. In the meantime, these clowns left us with the bill and a lot of fake news that served as fuel for the Trump impeachment circus we’re seeing now.
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