Baseless attacks on Robert Mueller must end to protect our democracy

[Uncle Joe]

The argument du jour in partisan circles today goes like this: Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation should end because of the alleged bias of FBI agents who resented candidate Donald Trump. Some conservative lawyers have expanded this argument by claiming that the Russia investigation is the “fruit of the poisonous tree.” They are wrong on the law, wrong on the facts, and they should know better.

As former United States attorneys, we have experience prosecuting federal crimes. The Russia investigation had a proper factual and legal foundation, and recent writings are nothing more than an improper effort to wrap inapplicable legal doctrines around discredited fiction to undermine the rule of law. If we are to preserve the bedrock principles of our democracy, we must call out these partisan attacks for what they are, illegitimate and baseless, and let the special counsel conclude his work.

(snip)

All this is to say that the Mueller investigation, legally and factually, is not “fruit of the poisonous tree.” Do not just take our word for it, as the five guilty pleas speak for themselves. The defense attorneys representing these individuals, under oath in open court, disagree that critical evidence used to open the investigation was obtained illegally. Despite having access to nonpublic information, these five defendants never claimed that the FBI’s investigation was improperly predicated or the “fruit of the poisonous tree.” Those are just the guilty pleas. The special counsel has already resulted in federal grand jury charges against 23 individuals or entities with ties to Russia and the Trump campaign.

Mueller’s recent court filing demonstrates that Vladimir Putin is still meddling in our elections and underscores the high stakes for our country. The intelligence community remains confident the Russian government directed the hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman, and that the disclosures of these alleged hacked emails on sites like WikiLeaks are consistent with Russian efforts. We must get to the bottom of what happened. Curbing Russian aggression must be a priority for the United States.

(snip)

http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/396001-Baseless-attacks-on-Robert-Mueller-must-end-to-protect-our-democracy

[Nitram]

1. The sight of a president attacking his own Justice Department is surreal.

A Republican Congressional majority sitting idly by, or worse, manipulating the committee process to protect him from an investigation, is like a really bad fever dream. A novel that described all this would have been dismissed as far-fetched, absurd and foolish. I feel like we fell down the rabbit hole into an alternate reality. But I'm not giving up on Mueller. And I'm going to vote in November.