Lawyer: Robert Mueller Helped Frame an Innocent Man For Murdering His Family
Patrick Howley
|
Boston criminal defense attorney Harvey Silverglate spoke with Big League Politics about Mueller, pointing us to a series of essays that he wrote for WGBH about his years of interactions with the special counsel in the President Donald Trump “Russia” case.
Mueller fought to cover up astonishing revelations of new evidence in the famous case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Fort Bragg army doctor convicted for the murder of his wife and children in 1970. MacDonald was convicted in 1979 but many people still believe he didn’t do it — and he maintains his innocence himself.
Astute insiders — including those who were at Fort Bragg at the time of the murder — point to the massive Vietnam War-era drug commotion that was present within the Army, particularly by soldiers returning home for war, and believe that MacDonald was either caught up in it or simply knew too much.
MacDonald himself claims that the drug culture led to his family’s murder, and that he merely crossed the wrong people at the wrong time.
Regardless of one’s personal opinions on the MacDonald case, the allegations that Silverglate makes against Mueller are astonishing, indicating perfidy by Mueller and throwing into question another Mueller says or does as a law enforcement officer.
Here is what Harvey Silverglate had to say:
“When he led the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, I arranged in December 1990 to meet with him in Washington. I was then lead defense counsel for Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, who had been convicted in federal court in North Carolina in 1979 of murdering his wife and two young children while stationed at Fort Bragg,” Silverglate explains.
“Years after the trial, MacDonald (also at Princeton when Mueller and I were there) hired me and my colleagues to represent him and obtain a new trial based on shocking newly discovered evidence that demonstrated MacDonald had been framed in part by the connivance of military investigators and FBI agents. Over the years, MacDonald and his various lawyers and investigators had collected a large trove of such evidence.”
“The day of the meeting, I walked into the DOJ conference room, where around the table sat a phalanx of FBI agents. My three colleagues joined me. Mueller walked into the room, went to the head of the table, and opened the meeting with this admonition, reconstructed from my vivid and chilling memory: “Gentlemen: Criticism of the Bureau is a non-starter.” (Another lawyer attendee of the meeting remembered Mueller’s words slightly differently: “Prosecutorial misconduct is a non-starter.” Either version makes clear Mueller’s intent – he did not want to hear evidence that either the prosecutors or the FBI agents on the case misbehaved and framed an innocent man.),” Silverglate said.
“Special counsel Mueller’s background indicates zealousness that we might expect in the Grand Inquisitor, not the choirboy,” Silverglate opines.
Silverglate’s passage ends
Refusing to even consider the possibility of FBI or prosecutorial corruption on such a high-profile case, especially one that occurred during the chilling and demonic years of America’s painful Vietnam War, is something that Mueller will have to answer for with God.
Here is an explainer on the MacDonald case, with Larry King interviewing MacDonald in 2012:
Here is part of a very interesting essay written by Jeffrey MacDonald, which was published on a blog dedicated to his case, which goes into great detail about the extent of the drug problems that were going on — with Army officer complicity — at Fort Bragg and throughout the United States military as of 1970, when MacDonald’s family was murdered.
MacDonald writes (READ THE WHOLE THING HERE):
“…one of my specific duties was to counsel all drug abusers in our unit. January, 1970 was the first (!) halfway house, also the first unit-wide lectures & films on drug use & abuse, & just the beginnings of what later became a floodtide of discharges due to drug abuse. Stories were flooding the U.S., including Bragg. of widespread drug abuse in Vietnam, & we were reeling from the horror stories of units ambushed & slaughtered by V.C. because our sentries were “loaded” on drugs. Hepatitis was suddenly a major problem among our troops, especially southeast Asia returnees, a large part of it from drug use. Marijuana was being looked upon as generally okay, except among really elite units, like U.S. Army Special Forces – Green Berets – where any drug use was considered a weakness, and potentially deadly in the field. The spectre of heroin was suddenly emerging, first led by inner-city blacks in the service, but by 1969-70, it was a hot ticket even among whites, and it was considered very, very deadly among “real soldiers” (i.e., my type of unit)…
And everything happening in civilian America was also happening , maybe even more so, in the army. The spectre of Vietnam, death, the loss of your buddy, being away from home – it added more fuel to the fire within the military. AWOL’s were up; education & discipline among the huge new pools of draftees were down. Violence & drug problems plagued Ft. Bragg. One only has to look at the Fayetteville Observer front page on 17 February 1970! The lead story is the slaughter of my family. The second story, also front page, was a huge spread on a massive drug raid netting 12 suspects…
It is impossible to understand events, actions & reactions, in those days without recalling how tumultuous & scary, if you will, everyday life had become. There is no other time, excepting the Civil War period, when our country was in such an uproar. Certainly, at no time since approximately 1975 can you recall anything approaching the upheavals of 1969-70. I believe very strongly part of the moronic C.I.D. response to 17 Feb. 1970 is easily understood if you realize they had to have an answer; they simply had to have a suspect, & quickly, so as to keep the fear & paranoia over the slaughter of my family to a minimum. One of their overriding concerns certainly had to be to come up with an understandable scenario. At least 4 “hippie” intruders, breaking into a captain’s house on Ft. Bragg & killing his blonde wife & 2 children, simply wasn’t acceptable. However, a domestic dispute, now that is something every newspaper reader could easily understand. I believe it was this reasoning which created part of the C.I.D. response…”
Share: