Four years and eight months was the length of the Whitewater investigation against the Clintons. Robert Fiske was appointed as special prosecutor in January of 1994. Fiske would be replaced by Kenneth Starr, who effectively ended the investigation with his report released in September of 1998. Patrick Fitzgerald was made special counsel in December of 2003 due to the leaking of a federal agent’s identity. It was a year and 10 months until the investigation produced an indictment. The Special Congressional Investigation into the Benghazi attacks lasted two years and six months, spanning from May of 2014 until December of 2016.
We have not yet reached the anniversary of Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel, though in that short time the Special Counsel’s investigation has produced guilty pleas from Trump’s Deputy Campaign Manager Richard Gates, Trump Cabinet member Michael Flynn, and Trump Campaign Foreign Policy Advisor George Papadopoulos. Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort is currently being charged with a variety of crimes, including ‘conspiracy against the United States.’ Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in regards to Manafort and Gates’ contact with suspected Russian intelligence operative, Konstantin Kilimnik. Common cybercriminal Richard Pinedo has been swept up by the investigation, pleading guilty to selling bank accounts made with stolen identities to Russian agents. The Mueller team has also indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies on counts related to cyber-espionage.
Calls to “shut down” the Special Counsel are completely unfounded. Complaints that it has gone on too long ignore history. Claims of “no collusion” ignore the mountain of public evidence, including communications from the Trump campaign showing interest in, and the opportunity for, coordination with the Russian government and non-governmental agents interfering in the 2016 election such as WikiLeaks. Those who accuse the special counsel of bias ignore the fact that it is overseen by a life-long Republican appointed by Trump himself, and headed by Robert Mueller, another life-long Republican who was appointed FBI director by George W. Bush. There have even been claims of a vast “deep-state” conspiracy reaching across the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, various District Courts, FISA Courts, State U.S. Attorney offices, and even Trump’s own Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, being the root of all this legal trouble.
The Trump team’s defensive arguments have become a convoluted web of contradictory statements that evolve every time the public is exposed to new information. Just this weekend Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s newest attorney, gave several inconsistent interviews. It was interesting to hear Mr. Giuliani’s claim that our President might invoke his Fifth Amendment rights should he be deposed by the Special Counsel. But perhaps most telling, has been the use of the term “perjury trap” by the President and his legal counsel to describe testifying before Mueller’s team. The simplest translation might read that Trump will be choosing between perjury and self-incrimination.
Appreciate the words of Senator Trey Gowdy (R-SC), a man considered a villain by many on the left, “if you look at the jurisdiction for Robert Mueller, first and foremost, what did Russia do to this country in 2016? That is supremely important, and it has nothing to do with collusion. So, to suggest that Mueller should shut down and all that he is looking at is collusion, if you have an innocent client,… act like it.”
Nolan Crenshaw