Mueller’s Politicized Indictment of Twelve Russian Intelligence Officers

National Review ^ | 16 July 2018 | Andrew C. McCarthy

[Meet the New Boss]

So, is Russia now presumed innocent of hacking the 2016 election?

If not, it is difficult to understand any proper purpose served by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of twelve military officers in the Kremlin’s intelligence services...

Make no mistake: This is nakedly politicized law enforcement. There is absolutely no chance any of the Russian officials charged will ever see the inside of an American courtroom. The indictment is a strictly political document by which the special counsel seeks to justify the existence of his superfluous investigation.

snip

Lacking the requisite basis to conduct a criminal investigation, the Justice Department used its counterintelligence mission as a pretext for appointing a special counsel. This was grossly improper: (1) Counterintelligence work, which is geared at thwarting the operations of hostile foreign powers, is not the prosecutor work of building criminal cases; (2) not surprisingly, then, there is no authority in the regulations to assign a special counsel to a counterintelligence investigation; and (3) because counterintelligence authorities do not afford Americans the due-process protections required in criminal investigations, the Justice Department is not permitted to use counterintelligence as a pretext for conducting what is actually an effort to build a criminal prosecution.

snip

The only point of the new indictment is to justify Rosenstein’s decision and Mueller’s existence...

To be clear, we did need an FBI counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s espionage operation against the 2016 election, and we already had a quite aggressive one before Mueller came on the scene. But we would have needed a special-counsel investigation only if there had been a concrete factual basis to believe the Trump campaign conspired in Russia’s espionage operation against the 2016 election.

There never was.

[Eleutheria5]

the media gave to us, three silenced Berkley speakers, two fake news stories...