The Mueller team has become a disgrace to the pursuit of justice

Mark Penn:

Either Robert Mueller has the case of the century, tons of incriminating email and is now close to unveiling the collusion with the Russians that has been so widely repeated, or the investigation has come up empty-handed and he is now trying to bludgeon some peripheral figures into plea deals to give the appearance of collusion. It sure has created a lot of public confusion.

While we have to leave the door open to the first theory, recent actions of the special counsel sure look like a last-minute overreach to draw in fringe characters who did little more than make inquiries or tried to seem in the know about the purloined Clinton campaign emails.

To add to these mixed messages, a bombshell came out in the Guardian, that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort allegedly met repeatedly in person with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Such activity would definitely have changed the whole complexion of the case. But with both Assange and Manafort’s denials and a full denial from Manafort’s attorneys, it is more likely the Guardian was “had” with fake Ecuadorian embassy notes. There would be cameras filming everyone going into the embassy, where Assange took asylum in 2012, and holding three in-person meetings would have generated lots of collateral emails and calls — you don’t just show up at an embassy out of the blue and knock on the door. Once examined, the story is, frankly, preposterous.

Mueller then raised collusion hopes with the accusation that Manafort has been lying, but now we learn that his “lies” have been about his business dealings and not about his interactions with President Trump. With news of the cooperation deal leaking, it looks like more retaliatory behavior on the part of the prosecutors, who have so far had a very warm reception from Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who never hesitated to throw Manafort in jail without bail. Her actions, I believe, will eventually be sanctioned: Manafort was never a serious flight risk.
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It’s after all this activity, and after the Assange interviews, that, beginning on July 25, 2016, Stone and author/political commentator Jerome Corsi had a flurry of exchanges about potential future releases of emails. The cat, so to speak, already was out of the bag, and WikiLeaks showed it had troves of emails. If Stone or Corsi had been an active part of this operation, there would have been emails before the July 22 drop of hacked emails.

Just to be clear, we are talking about the Jerome Corsi who regularly is labeled a conspiracy theorist and who falsely spread the “birther” sham against President Barack Obama. He is banned from much of social media for spreading speculative, often unsubstantiated material. How on earth is the special counsel going to paint him as a shrewd operative who was actually in the know and behind Russia collusion? It is beyond ridiculous that the special counsel is tarring and threatening Stone and Corsi.
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During the Mueller probe, his technique appears to be to indict on unrelated matters in hopes of extorting testimony to fit the collusion narrative.  This is despite the complete lack of evidence to support that narrative beyond the discredited dossier Hillary Clinton paid for as opposition research.  Mueller should admit he has found nothing and resign.  That is really the only honorable course left to him.

The Mueller team is made up some people with a history of prosecutorial; abuses.