Be sure and listen to Dan Bongino’s podcast today. He has an interesting take about why HRC was working with the Russians. Starts about the 40 minute mark. Tom Cotton asks Wray about Deropaska on tape. Does Steele work for Deropaska? Wray does not answer. Says he can say more in a classified setting. Bongino thinks President Trump was set up to take the fall for HRC working with the Russians. Was Steele being paid by the Clintons and Deropaska at the same time. Was Deroposka a source for the dossier.
In 2009, when Mueller ran the FBI, the bureau asked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to spend millions of his own dollars funding an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent, Robert Levinson, captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007.
Melanie Sloan, a former Clinton Justice Department lawyer and longtime ethics watchdog, told me a “far more significant issue” is whether the earlier FBI operation was even legal: “It’s possible the bureau’s arrangement with Mr. Deripaska violated the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the government from accepting voluntary services.”
George Washington University constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley agreed: “If the operation with Deripaska contravened federal law, this figure could be viewed as a potential embarrassment for Mueller. The question is whether he could implicate Mueller in an impropriety.”
Now that sources have unmasked the Deripaska story, time will tell whether the courts, Justice, Congress or a defendant formally questions if Mueller is conflicted.