Department of Justice releases redacted version of the Mueller report
The Justice Department posts online a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election online; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports.
Well, there it is, for all of us to see: the full Mueller report.
The 448-page tome the left has been anxiously waiting to see for the 700 days since Special Counsel Robert Mueller was first appointed proves beyond any doubt that there was no collusion, no obstruction of justice and that Attorney General William Barr’s initial summary of the report was dead-on accurate.
Sure, the 13 crooked, angry Democrats on the Mueller team no doubt left parts of the report ambiguous to raise concerns about President Trump’s actions and motives.
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Sure, the leftist scribes in the media will breathlessly tease out a sentence here or a phrase there to claim that the report is actually being used by Attorney General Barr to cover up crimes committed by President Trump.
But the only thing the media and the Democrats will accomplish is to further prove themselves as frauds to the American people, as the Office of the Special Counsel worked directly with their colleagues at the Department of Justice to determine which redactions of the report were absolutely necessary to guard grand jury-derived information and to protect innocent Americans.
While the Democrats continue to cling to the fantasy that evidence of collusion really is lurking somewhere in the dark recesses of the Mueller report, the report itself makes it clearer than ever what any unbiased observer of the Russia story has been able to see for more than a year: Robert Mueller knew very early on in his investigation that there was no collusion.
The rest of the investigation, as far as the president and his inner circle are concerned, was spent trying to find a way to frame President Trump’s legitimate outrage over this attempt to nullify his election victory as “obstruction of justice.”
There was no obstruction of justice. Mueller himself had to know that, which is probably why he refused to charge anyone with it, entirely separate from considerations of whether the Justice Department has the authority to indict a sitting president, which it does not.
All there was, as we can now clearly see, was a rational reaction by a president who realized just how much of a mess his FBI Director and Deputy Director had made of the Clinton email investigation and saw the same people wasting taxpayer money on a politically-motivated investigation into something he knew all along was a baseless conspiracy theory.
The executive actions Trump took in firing Comey and to seek accountability in his Justice Department were widely reported in 2017. The only information the Mueller report adds to the record is legally irrelevant chatter intended to be politically damaging to the president.
That’s what Mueller’s probe really was: a taxpayer-funded anti-Trump opposition research team hiding behind a veneer of official legitimacy.
For me, the most troubling part of this entire saga is that the Democrats who undermined the legitimacy of our democracy and the public’s faith in our institutions in order to push their conspiracy theory almost got what they were really after.
This was never about achieving justice for Russian election interference or obstruction of justice. It wasn’t about uncovering a grand Trump-Russia conspiracy that I doubt most Democratic politicians ever actually believed in. It was solely about weakening the president politically by whatever means necessary.
At least one Democrat is now starting to admit just how far past the bounds of professionalism, fairness, and honesty the Mueller probe went in its efforts to smear President Trump.
Just before the report’s release, former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey spoke of the “delusion” that has taken hold of his own party. He called the process of crime convictions that arose from the Mueller probe “tainted,” asserting that the people convicted of those crimes deserve to be pardoned, and chastised Adam Schiff for politicizing the House Intelligence Committee to keep the hoax going.
This limited backlash from one of their own won’t be enough to stop the Democrats, though. The gears of the left’s spin machine are now turning, trying to exploit this windfall of ill-gotten opposition research to their utmost advantage. Already, the worst of the RussiaGate cheerleaders are out in force, suggesting there’s a cover-up happening and demanding that Barr un-redact the grand jury testimony and classified material that most likely contain the juiciest opposition research.
If we’ve learned anything over the past two and half years of RussiaGate, it’s that Democrats will not accept any result short of removing the president from office. No amount of legal exoneration will stop the political witch hunt.
That’s why we’ve got to start holding the parties behind this outrageous miscarriage of justice accountable.
Barr’s new investigations into just how we got here must now explore the numerous ways that career lawyers at the FBI and DOJ, along with a web of external actors, led us down a path designed to destroy a presidential candidate – and eventual sitting president – for the sake of their own political agenda and pursuit of power.
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The Mueller report is finally out for all to see, but the real truth must now be exposed so the American people can know that justice continues to be blind and that the rule of law in our nation remains safe from the nefarious designs of those who would subvert it.
Let the grand juries begin.
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