Appearance of Impropriety

It was an interesting conversation that took place between the Deputy Attorney General who oversees the FBI director, Rod Rosenstein, and various members of the House Judiciary Committee yesterday.  Rosenstein was in front of the committee for a happy visit, primarily to answer questions, or avoid answering them, about the investigation by Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

It's no secret why this testimony was required.  In the past week or two, it has come to light that several of the lead investigators for the FBI in both the Mueller investigation and the Hillary Clinton email "investigation", or "matter" as the Obama administration's Attorney General, Loretta Lynch ordered her team to call it, had some biases.

Specifically, we have known for a while that most of the attorneys hired by Mueller as leads on the case have been big, even maxed-out donors to Hillary, to Obama, or both, and to various Democrat campaigns and PACs.    We know that none of them were Trump campaign donors.  And there are close links to the Clinton "Foundation" and Fusion GPS, the outfit that arranged that phony dossier on candidate Trump.

Then we find out that the FBI-side investigators, including the same fellow who sat in on the abortive FBI interview of the apparently-already-cleared Hillary Clinton on her classified material-abuse investigation, were incredibly anti-Trump, virulently in fact.  That fellow, Peter Strzok, communicated his disdain in the course of about 10,000 texts back and forth with a married co-worker with whom he had an affair that may still be going on.

The texts included references to his ongoing work, and in one scary one he noted that "we can't take that risk" (of Trump getting elected); he also wrote of an "insurance policy" in case he was elected.  The timing on that was far too synchronized with the initiation of the FISA application that got the Russia thing started.

And it's starting to look like the application was based on the phony dossier on Trump that the Clinton campaign paid for through Fusion GPS, looking like the FBI in part paid for it and, worst of all, that Strzok was the one who turned the dossier into a FISA application -- right after telling his married mistress that he "couldn't take the risk" of Trump becoming president.

Rosenstein was asked several times about the "appearance of impropriety" in all that, including the brazen dominance of the DoJ attorneys roster by Democrat donors, and the potential for grave abuse by Strzok and 4-5 others with comparable conflicts based on statements, donations and actions.  He deferred, of course, and noted that those people had been reassigned and, in one egregious case, demoted.  Strzok, as we know, is now in HR, where he is in a position to affect who actually gets into the FBI.  Don't we all feel better now, right?

But nowhere in the televised part of the hearing did it come up that Strzok and the others had been with the investigation for months and months before their removal.

So what, we have to ask is the impact of that?  In other words, how much content has been processed, or even developed, during the investigation, and still part of the case file, that is immensely tainted by the work of several people with strong biases against the president and those working for him?

No one asked that, but I will.  Representative Bob, here asks this:

"What, Mr. Rosenstein, is being done right now, in the wake of the removal of biased investigators from the team, to delete any remaining evidence in the case file of their having been involved?  We know that the FBI used the totally-fake dossier to initiate the FISA application.  Has all the content in this case related to that dossier now been eliminated from the ongoing files?  Has all the work done on the case by these biased staff members been removed or does it still taint the team?"

You have to ask that.  If the prejudiced staff have been removed, but their work is still part of the case, the case itself is compromised and the $7 million or so of taxpayer dollars that Mueller has spent to date will have been wasted.

Come on, someone, ask that.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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