Collusion? Now Mueller linked to Russian contacts

Robert Mueller

Democrats have been charging for the last year that Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016 was colluding with Russia to defeat their candidate, the twice-failed Hillary Clinton.

No evidence has been presented yet, however.

But the investigation has revealed that the so-called Steele "dossier" of unverified claims against Trump from unnamed Russian sources, a trigger for the investigation of Trump, was funded by Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Now, Special Counsel Robert Mueller also has been revealed to have had Russian contacts.

It was the Hill that reported even Mueller's "comrades" believe the relationships might be a conflict of interest.

"In 2009, when Mueller ran the FBI, the bureau asked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to spend millions of his own dollars funding an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent, Robert Levinson, captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007," the report said.

"Yes, that's the same Deripaska who has surfaced in Mueller's current investigation and who was recently sanctioned by the Trump administration."

The Levinson mission was confirmed by "more than a dozen participants inside and outside the FBI, including Deripaska, his lawyer, the Levinson family and a retired agent who supervised the case," the Hill said.

Levinson had disappeared several years earlier, and the U.S. was anxious to get him back.

However, American agents thought that politically it would be better for the U.S. work through a third party.

"One agent who helped court Deripaska was Andrew McCabe, the recently fired FBI deputy director who played a seminal role starting the Trump-Russia case, multiple sources confirm," the Hill said.

The project eventually fell apart and Levinson remains is still missing, the report said.

The report said the FBI had three reasons for choosing Deripaska for a mission worthy of a spy novel.

"First, his aluminum empire had business in Iran. Second, the FBI wanted a foreigner to fund the operation because spending money in Iran might violate U.S. sanctions and other laws. Third, agents knew Deripaska had been banished since 2006 from the United States by State over reports he had ties to organized crime and other nefarious activities. He denies the allegations, and nothing was ever proven in court."

The report said Deripaska was rewarded by being allowed back into the U.S., over and over.

Article author John Solomon noted Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz "told me he believes Mueller has a conflict of interest because his FBI previously accepted financial help from a Russian that is, at the very least, a witness in the current probe."

Dershowitz said: "The real question becomes whether it was proper to leave him (Deripaska) out of the Manafort indictment, and whether that omission was to avoid the kind of transparency that is really required by the law."

Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, meanwhile, said Monday that the entire Russia investigation issue is all a setup.

"Practically every element of this investigation results from a setup. And I guess at the root of this. … Now, you may think this is a rhetorical question or a question that answers itself, but stop and think of the effort that has gone into denying Donald Trump the presidency — and then after he wins it, doing everything.

"I mean, these people have thrown the kitchen sink. They have taken every trick in their arsenal and they have deployed it against Donald Trump for the express purpose of getting rid of him, forcing him to resign, lowering his public approval numbers to the point that he'd lost all support. This is what they were trying to do. Now, stop just for a moment. We know who these people are. They are the Washington establishment. These are the people who consider themselves elites," he said.

The goal, he said, is to "force him to resign."

"They thought they could do it in six months. Destroy him. Ruin his reputation. Destroy public support; get it down to the twenties. The next thing they want to get is an interview. If they can get Trump lying to them, they’ll call a process crime: Lying to the FBI. But in terms of impeachment? Ain’t no way, Jose. It isn’t gonna happen. There’s no way the Senate is gonna two-thirds vote to get rid of Trump, not in the midst of all of these successes. It just isn’t gonna happen, and that’s why panic is setting in."