(Courtesy photos)
A former Justice Department attorney with bi-partisan experience working for and analyzing the Justice Department told Big League Politics that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into the Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign has become dangerous to the pursuit of justice.
With all of the atrocities surrounding President Barack H. Obama, the IRS targeting of the Tea Party and conservative groups and the Fast and Furious program that sent thousands of firearms to criminal organizations and militia in Mexico–there was no special prosecutor, yet within first 100 days of the Trump administration, there is a special prosecutor, said Sidney Powell, the authoress of Licensed to Lie: Exposing corruption in the Department of Justice.
“That is strange,” she said.
“There are similarities between my book and what I know of Robert Mueller’s probe, especially where I talk about special task forces,” Powell said. Mueller is the sixth director of the FBI.
Powell said she was very concerned not just about Mueller, but also about his deputy Andrew B. Weisman.
“I see the same pattern from other cases, emerging with Mueller and his choice of Weissman for the prosecutor,” she said. “I was holding out hope on Mueller, but as soon as he picked Weismann, I knew what direction Mueller was going.”
Weisman was the federal prosecutor in charge of the Enron investigation until complaints about his practices led to his resignation from the case.
Powell said her concerns about the power of the special task force in the Enron case was highlighted in a BLP article.
Typical of Weissman’s tactics was his pre-dawn July 26 SWAT raid on the home of Paul Manafort, the former chairman of the Trump campaign.
“Mueller knows what Weissman is about and how he likes to work,” she said.
“I no longer trust Mueller,” she said. “Look at Weisman’s cases, why choose him to do anything? He should have been disbarred.”
She said we need more federal prosecutors in DOJ committed to the rule of law.
“Because the government holds all the cards, prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to disclose to the defense anything, whether it exonerates the witness or impeaches the witness, it is a Constitutional obligation they have,” she said.
The Trump administration is holding over too many career prosecutors like Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, she said. “The big mistake was Rosenstein because he has been in the government too long.” Rosenstein was appointed by President George W. Bush, in 2005, to be a Maryland U.S. attorney in Maryland, a post he continued to hold throughout the Obama administration.
“When you become a hammer for that long, everything you see is a nail, and we need to start new,” she said.
“They need to do a major clean out of the Department of Justice,” she said. “President Trump needs to get rid of everyone with ethics violations, and fill in all of the open slots with people he can trust, who will hold the government to the same standard as they want to hold us to.”
Powell said that we are a citizen government, with a Bill of Rights and a Constitution to protect us, and there are things the average Americans can do to help clean up the DOJ.
“The more people who pay attention to this, they more vocal they will get and push back on Congress,” she said.