Mueller using an attorney who has been accused of prosecutorial misconduct

Fox News:

When a report surfaced that federal agents picked the lock on Paul Manafort’s front door for a surprise raid over the summer while the former Trump campaign chairman was in bed, it was also a wake-up call for prominent Houston attorney Tom Kirkendall.

“Here is a United States citizen where the FBI is coming in, picking his lock, and raiding his home in the early morning, over what? It doesn’t matter which side you’re on. It’s just crazy. We’re not the Soviet Union. It’s appalling,” said Kirkendall, who has worked on cases involving one of the special counsel’s key investigators, Andrew Weissmann.

The intensity of the focus on Manafort is widely seen as a potential effort by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team to pressure him into providing information on others, possibly President Trump himself, in the Russia probe.

But the “brass-knuckle” tactics have raised eyebrows in the legal community.

The Manafort investigation has been the subject of numerous leaks, including new details about the so-called FISA warrant reportedly used to eavesdrop on his calls last year. Warrants issued by a FISA court, which stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are supposed to be highly secret.

“It is not at all common” to reveal a FISA warrant publicly, former attorney general Michael Mukasey told Fox News. “FISA warrants are obtained for the purpose of gathering intelligence, a purpose that obviously would be defeated by revealing a warrant publicly.”

The leaks could be coming from any number of sources due to the multiple ongoing investigations on Capitol Hill as well as the special counsel probe – in addition to the dissemination of sensitive information by Obama administration figures in its final days.

But former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said he “wouldn’t be the least bit surprised” if some of the leaks were coming from the special counsel.
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While Mueller has assembled a large team, one of its most prominent investigators is former U.S. attorney Weissmann, who had overseen a series of controversial prosecutions that ultimately resulted in dismissed convictions and formal allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

For example, when Weissmann was leading the Enron Task Force, he sent former Merrill Lynch executive William Fuhs to a maximum-security prison in Oklahoma, 700 miles from his wife and two small children in Denver.

Fuhs spent the next year behind bars before being released on bail. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals later ruled that there was no evidence upon which a reasonable jury could find that he violated the law, and his conviction was vacated.
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Weissmann also helped prosecute Anderson Consulting, which led to a conviction of the firm, its eventual closure and the loss of 28,000 thousand employees. In a highly unusual unanimous decision, the Supreme Court later overturned and dismissed that conviction as well.

“That was a tremendous example of horrifying prosecutorial misconduct,” Kirkendall said. Weissmann, at the time, denied there had been any intimidation of witnesses. ''There is no factual basis'' to the allegation, he said in 2002. ''It is just not true.''

Former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell was so outraged after a case involving Weissmann that, in 2012, she filed a formal complaint of prosecutorial misconduct with the Texas bar and the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The complaint alleged witness threatening, withholding exculpatory evidence, and the use of “false and misleading summaries.” After reviewing the complaint, the Obama administration’s OPR found no ethical violations
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It gives the appearance of a prosecution team seeking to extort information out of a subject of an investigation that they can use against their real target.  It is ironic that an investigation that is supposed to be about Russian influence in an election is resorting to tactics used by Russian despots.  It looks like an investigation in search of a crime.