Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report is finally in, and I only have one question — was the witch hunt worth it?
As many of us suspected all along, the FBI’s $30 million investigation revealed nothing that even remotely ties President Trump’s 2016 election campaign to the Russian government. In the famous words of CNN’s Van Jones, the Russia thing was “just a big nothingburger” from the very start.
“The special counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts,” Attorney General Bill Barr stated unequivocally in his letter to Congress summarizing the principal findings of the Mueller probe.
Of course, while the probe found none of the damaging evidence of collusion with Russia that Democrats had been counting on, this useless partisan game has done plenty of damage to our criminal justice system.
Make no mistake, the FBI is an important institution. Day in and day out, the bureau investigates real crimes and real criminals who prey on innocent people, and goes after real gangs that infest our communities.
Sadly, however, the decisions of some bad actors to let the FBI be used as a political pawn of the Democratic Party have fundamentally tainted the bureau’s reputation and all but destroyed its credibility. To enact justice in society, law enforcement requires public trust in its legitimacy.
Even before the conclusion of Mueller’s investigation, numerous legal experts slammed the Office of Special Counsel for its aggressive tactics, including a federal judge who recently sentenced Paul Manafort to 47 months in prison.
“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud,” Judge T.S. Ellis told Mueller’s lawyers during a hearing last year. “What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”
“This vernacular is to ‘sing,’ is what prosecutors use,” the judge continued. “What you got to be careful of is, they may not only sing, they may compose.”
As I explained at length in a previous opinion piece, Ellis (no relation to me) rightly condemned the FBI for prosecuting Trump’s associates for unrelated “process” crimes, an irresponsible strategy that created an incentive for witnesses to fabricate or exaggerate information about Trump in hopes of receiving a softer sentence.
How is the public supposed to trust an institution that deliberately used intimidation tactics as part of a politically motivated effort to undermine a sitting president? How can voters believe in the fairness of our criminal justice system when it has clearly been compromised by bias and partisan politics?
In an op-ed published Sunday, former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova wrote that the entire Russian collusion conspiracy theory and subsequent special investigation “was a hoax perpetrated against the American people.” The American people agree.
Ever before Mueller’s anticipated “bombshell” turned out to be a dud, a recent poll found that 50 percent of Americans believed Mueller’s probe was a politically motivated “witch hunt” against Trump — a statistic that spoke volumes about the FBI’s tattered credibility. Now that the public have been served their gourmet nothingburger, repairing the damage to the justice system will take a lot of time and effort.
Even after torching multiple witnesses, getting Michael Cohen to repeatedly lie about President Trump, and wasting millions of taxpayer dollars, Robert Mueller and his team still couldn’t extort enough desperate confessions to find “evidence” of collusion that never existed to begin with. Regrettably, the FBI sacrificed its own credibility and damaged the integrity of our criminal justice system in the process.
So I ask again: Was the witch hunt really worth it?
Jenna Ellis (@realJennaEllis) is a member of the Trump 2020 Advisory Board. She is a constitutional law attorney, radio host, and the author of The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.
