In 2016, it was revealed that Hillary Clinton and her former State Department Chief-of-Staff Cheryl Mills had hard-drives scrubbed with “BleachBit” and phones beaten with hammers rather than turn over tens of thousands of e-communications Clinton had improperly moved through her home-based private server. And guess what?
Over the last few days, America has discovered that many of Clinton’s allies who were working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s bogus “investigation” of nonexistent “Russian State Meddling” into the 2016 election have followed in her awkward, pigeon-toed footsteps. Instead of turning over electronic devices that could contain information material to a federal investigation of their “Russian Meddling” charade, former members of the “Mueller Team” are claiming that their phones have been wiped clean.
And only a handful of reporters are talking about it with any sense of import.
The Washington Examiner’s Daniel Chaitin is one of them, as are Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, and TownHall’s Bronson Stocking, and, thanks to them California Congressman Devin Nunes (R), and President Trump, we have a pretty good handle on how this “accidental” data-wipe by the Mueller team could lead to federal felony “obstruction” charges.
Writes Stocking:
On Saturday, President Trump reacted to news that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team wiped their phones clean before turning the devices over to investigators. Recently released documents suggest the Mueller team engaged in massive evidence destruction while under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General.
And the actions were taken by many individuals, lending credence to the idea that this was intentional and systematic.
At least 15 phones used by Mueller's team of investigators were 'accidentally' wiped clean, the new documents reveal. A key tactic used by the Mueller team to destroy the evidence was to place the phones on airplane mode, lock them, and then claim not to remember the password.
The Examiner’s Chaitin notes that during his Sunday morning conversation with Bartiromo, Congressman Nunes provided the important time period in which the Mueller team carried out its “accidental” elimination of potentially important communications.
’This looks like it occurred at a very interesting time,’ Nunes said during an interview on Fox News's Sunday Morning Futures. ‘This is when the lovebirds' text messages were discovered. So, clearly, after that, everybody on the Mueller team went and wiped their phone.’
And Chaitin translates:
The congressman was referring to the anti-Trump text messages between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page that became fuel for President Trump and his allies to dub the Russia investigation a ‘witch hunt.’
There was a lot more fuel than that, much of it falling under the legal term “fruit of the poisonous tree” and stemming from unjustified FISA warrants based on at least 12 instances of bogus, seemingly deep-state/DNC backed “misrepresentations” that the Trump 2016 campaign and the Russian government colluded to swing the election.
Writes Chaitin:
The newly revealed records show that data on the official phones of several members of Mueller's team, including former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, got deleted ‘accidentally’ before (Inspector General Michael) Horowitz could review the devices.
And said Nunes to Bartiromo:
The question here is: Was there an investigation? Because if there was, that could be obstruction of justice… But I think, regardless of that, this is destruction of federal records. We cannot have a justice system, whether it's at the federal level or the state level or local level, where records are being destroyed, Maria, because that's how we have a fair and equal justice system here that, if there's misconduct of any kind, that you can go back and look at what the prosecutors were doing.
For her part, Maria Bartiromo was one of the few television news reporters who seemed to grasp the severity of the problem.
“Isn’t this obstruction of justice? Is that a federal crime, punishable with up to 20 years?”
That’s the key question, and, as Nunes observed, if those phones were material parts of an investigation, this stunt on the part of the Mueller gang very well could come back to haunt them.
As TownHall’s Stocking points out, one member of that gang has already pled guilty to wrongdoing:
U.S. Attorney John Durham's criminal investigation into the origins of the Obama administration's phony Russia investigation recently netted its first guilty plea. Mueller lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pled guilty to felony charges related to fabricated evidence that was used to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on former Trump campaign official Carter Page.
We’ll see how big this gets. But one would be hard-pressed not to notice the ever-rising tide of improper activity conducted by tax-funded, politically-connected officials in the U.S.
It certainly seems reasonable to say Mueller and his “ream-team” didn’t care one whit for the so-called rules of the U.S. government as laid out in the U.S. Constitution, and none of their lame excuses can hide that fact.