AFTER TARGETING INNOCENT CITIZENS WHILE FBI DIRECTOR
by Sharon Rondeau
Mueller served as director of the FBI, a division of the U.S. Justice Department, from September 4, 2001 to September 4, 2014, after James B. Comey was confirmed to succeed him. Having been nominated by President George W. Bush, Mueller’s ten-year term was extended by two years by Congress after Bush’s successor, Barack Hussein Obama, requested it in May 2011.
At the time CBS News reported, “Well regarded by Republicans and Democrats, Mueller is known for transforming a crime-fighting agency into the front line of defense against terrorism.”
Some in the media have opined that Mueller is conflicted and should not have been brought in to act as Special Counsel, while others have called for an end to the “witch hunt” against President Donald Trump and his campaign aides seeking evidence of “collusion” with Russia leading up to the 2016 presidential election.
Trump and his aides have denied that any “collusion” took place between the campaign and anyone in the Russian government.
In mid-December, an article at The Hill reported that “a majority of polled voters say special counsel Robert Mueller has a conflict of interest because of his past ties to former FBI Director James Comey, according to the latest Harvard CAPS-Harris survey. ”
In 2007, as then-FBI director, Mueller worked under Comey, who was Acting Attorney General while AG John Ashcroft was hospitalized. Political commentator, strategist, author and Trump supporter Roger Stone has reported that Mueller and Comey’s acquaintance dates back to the 1990s.
A video at The Hill of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who chose Mueller to be Special Counsel, testifying in December to the House Judiciary Committee about the investigations and other concerns depicts him saying that Mueller’s credentials made him an “ideal” choice to serve in that capacity.
An article published Saturday at The American Thinker reminds readers that in 2015, the government-watchdog Judicial Watch obtained, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, “an official ‘DOJ Recap’ report detailing an October 2010 meeting between Lois Lerner, DOJ officials and the FBI to plan for the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity.”
In its press release, JW further wrote:
The newly obtained records also reveal that the Obama DOJ wanted IRS employees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over documents to the DOJ before giving them to Congress. Records also detail how the Obama IRS gave the FBI 21 computer disks, containing 1.25 million pages of confidential IRS returns from 113,000 nonprofit social 501(c)(4) welfare groups – or nearly every 501(c)(4) in the United States – as part of its prosecution effort. According to a letter from then-House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, “This revelation likely means that the IRS – including possibly Lois Lerner – violated federal tax law by transmitting this information to the Justice Department.”
No one, including Lerner, was prosecuted for the “targeting” of “conservative” and other non-profit-status applicants to which Lerner admitted in 2013 by responding to a “planted” question. After the scandal became fully public, Obama insisted that there was “not even a smidgeon of corruption” at the IRS.
At the time of JW’s 2015 press release, Comey was FBI director. During testimony in June 2014, Comey told members of the House Judiciary Committee that in regard to the subject database given to the FBI by the IRS, “only its table of contents was examined” before it was returned to the IRS.
An article in cleveland.com reported that Comey told the committee that “people should believe his testimony” “because I’m saying it and because of what they know about the FBI.”
President Trump fired Comey last May to an uproar on the part of major media and congressional Democrats, even though many of the same congressmen had called for Comey’s termination after he informed Congress in late October 2016 that the FBI had reopened its investigation into then-Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was Obama’s secretary of state.
An article dated January 29, 2018 details multiple lapses in the FBI’s performance under Mueller’s direction dating to the 9-11 attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people. The author claims that Mueller’s FBI employed “deceit” which fostered the passage of the U.S. Patriot Act the following month and that “Mueller’s agency routinely violated federal law and the Bill of Rights.”
Also found fraudulent was Obama’s Selective Service registration form, which also was never investigated by any federal law-enforcement entity.
On July 18, 2012, this writer spoke with an FBI media representative, who admitted to having viewed the entirety of a press conference given the day before by birth certificate investigator Mike Zullo under the authority of then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio. At the presser, the second of its kind on the subject, Zullo revealed that the standard of probable cause in the forgery of the birth certificate had been surpassed.
For his part, Arpaio implored Congress and the FBI to investigate given the “national security” implications of the forgery of the documentation of the nation’s sitting chief executive.
When this writer asked the FBI spokesman whether or not the agency planned to take any action on Zullo’s findings, he responded that citizens should contact their respective congressmen if they believed “a crime has been committed.”
Mueller was FBI director when emails sent to a U.S.-born Islamic terrorist in Yemen by then-U.S. Army Major and psychiatrist Nidal Hasan were not reviewed. On November 5, 2009, Hasan killed 13 and injured 32 of his fellow Ft. Hood soldiers during a rampage in which he was heard to shout, “Allahu Akbar!”
Of the discovery of the neglected Hasan emails, CBS News reported:
Much was already known about the series of oversights and missteps the government made leading to the terror attack at the Fort Hood Army post. Soon after the attack, it was revealed that members of two FBI anti-terrorism task forces saw emails between the Army psychiatrist and al-Awlaki beginning in December 2008. Those task forces reviewed the communications and decided they were in keeping with Hasan’s research at the time, and as a result, no formal investigation of Hasan was opened. Hasan was writing a research paper about the effects of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A related article is titled, “Fort Hood review will call for FBI policy changes.” An earlier article dated January 7, 2010 connects the FBI’s failure to flag Hasan’s communications with Awlaki to the near-disaster of the 2009 Christmas Day attempted bomber on Northwest Airlines Flight 253.
Thwarted by a passenger after attempting to detonate explosive devices hidden in his underclothing on December 25, 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should not have been allowed entry into the United States, according to CBS News. On November 19, 2009, Abdulmutallab’s father reported to the CIA that he believed his son had become radicalized and planned to conduct a “suicide mission” in Yemen, but he was not subsequently placed on the “Do Not Fly” list to the U.S.
After the details of the foiled plot became known, Obama said that “the intelligence community had information that could have and should have been pieced together,” according to ABC News.
On Friday, Rosenstein held a quickly-arranged press conference in which he announced that a grand jury in Washington, DC under Mueller’s purview issued an indictment against 13 Russian citizens and three Russian-owned companies for allegedly attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election through social media and rallies which were both anti-Trump and pro-Trump in nature.
No Americans were indicted or said to have taken part in criminal activity. It is unclear whether or not the Russians can be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial.
Some mainstream articles reported that Mueller indicted the Russians rather than the grand jury. Constitutionally, neither Mueller nor any investigator has the power to issue an indictment.
At roughly the same time that Rosenstein offered his remarks, a statement from the FBI under its new director, Christopher Wray, admitted to having failed to follow up on a specific threat from someone “close” to the alleged Parkland, FL high school shooter, Nikolas Cruz, who is accused of murdering 17 people and injuring 14 others last Wednesday.
A threat reported to the FBI’s Public Access Line (PAL) last September was also not transmitted to the Miami field office as it should have been, Wray said, apologizing for “the additional pain this causes all those affected by this horrific tragedy.”
On May 29, 2002, CNN reported that Mueller admitted that “Counterterrorism officials may have missed additional warning signs that Middle Eastern men were trying to acquire aviation skills prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks.”
More recent missed opportunities to thwart terrorist attacks include the admittance to the U.S. of 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who the Russian government had “warned the FBI in 2011” was “associated with militant Islamists,” and “Pulse” nightclub shooter, Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people on June 12, 2016.
In regard to Mateen, The Los Angeles Times later reported:
The veteran FBI agent and a local sheriff’s deputy took no chances when they got a credible tip about a potential terrorist.
In a joint operation, they ran his name through a maze of federal criminal and terrorism databases and scrutinized his telephone records for suspicious contacts.
Without a warrant, they couldn’t read his emails or listen to his calls. But they watched him from unmarked vehicles to track his daily routine and to see whom he met.
They deployed two confidential informants more than a dozen times to secretly record his conversations. They interviewed him twice and convinced him to provide a written statement — in which he admitted he previously had lied to agents.
In the end, after a counter-terrorism investigation that stretched from May 2013 to March 2014, the agent and his supervisor concluded that Omar Mateen was not a threat and closed the case.
On June 13, 2016, Comey said in retrospect that he “didn’t think” that there was anything “our agents should have done differently,” adding that “we’ll look at it in an open and honest way and be transparent about it.”
“Transparency” was the hallmark adjective of the Obama regime despite the reported forgery of his only publicly-proffered identification documents.
The “weaponization” of the FBI under Mueller provided the basis of the American Thinker article, which went on to describe the “persecution” of Texas citizen Catherine Engelbrecht. In 2009, Engelbrecht founded two groups, TruetheVote and King Street Patriots, for which she applied for tax-exempt status. Both organizations received multiple FBI visits and government inquiries between 2010 and 2013 in what Engelbrecht termed “interagency coordination.”
During testimony in early 2014, Engelbrecht told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that she was not alone in having been “targeted” by hostile government agencies driven by a political agenda.
The FBI participated in an Obama-era endeavor dubbed “Operation Vigilant Eagle” which “targeted” military veterans, including those recently returning from war duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, for signs of having morphed into “potential domestic terrorists.”
The case of one veteran, former Marine Brandon Raub, received much media attention after he was seized from his Chesterfield, VA home with the participation of Mueller’s FBI on August 16, 2012 and forced into the psychiatric wing of a VA hospital. Days later, a judge ordered him released because of a lack of probable cause that he had committed a crime.
In contrast, the FBI’s 2010 case against Navy veteran Darren Wesley Huff placed him behind bars for three and one-half years based on a crime he allegedly had planned but not carried out.
The events of April 20, 2010 involving the FBI, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), seven East Tennessee county sheriffs’ departments, and Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) based on false tips of a “courthouse takeover” having been made to then-Madisonville, TN Mayor Allan Watson resulted in “The Madisonville Hoax,” a non-event which the FBI later bragged had removed would-be terrorists from the streets. No arrests were made that day, although Huff was arrested ten days later based on the false statements contained in the FBI affidavit.
Virtually all references to “Operation Vigilant Eagle” now consist of a single column written by The Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead, with no government documentation on the program appearing in a lengthy search.
On February 8, LCDR Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III (Ret) described how he had brought documentation of corruption within Mueller’s FBI to his congressman’s staffer, Maxine Gernert, the day before, with her reaction having been an attempt to hand back the documents in the presence of a witness.
Fitzpatrick said that once Gernert decided not to retain the documents, she exited her office, beckoning to Fitzpatrick to follow her to the mayor’s office. Fitzpatrick said he declined to follow her. “I walked away and exited at the far side of the building,” Fitzpatrick said.
“Here is the punchline: I am blockaded by the United States Congress,” Fitzpatrick told us. “Maxine told me that when I was there that day. The phone call she was on when I got there was from Washington, DC. She received the phone call because somebody from their IT staff had seen the email I sent her at 12:22 that day and called her. That was the phone call she was on when I came in at about 1:45.”
Fitzpatrick continued:
“They’re blocking you,” she told me outright. “And don’t send me any more emails. The word is out, Walt; your name is out there.”
So any emails I was sending to members of Congress are being blocked. I have information that implicates Mueller in a criminal event, and it’s inarguable. The congressman attempted to refuse acceptance of hard evidence that there was criminal activity on the part of Mueller’s FBI. Mueller’s investigating the Trump campaign and other tangents — Paul Manafort, Gen. [Michael T.] Flynn (Ret), Rick Gates, — Mueller can be stopped dead in his tracks once it is recognized and appreciated that Mueller did the same thing to Darren Huff and Naval Academy graduate Fitzpatrick that Comey and Rosenstein and Yates did to Carter Page.
They did exactly the same thing.
I have sent this information to hundreds of people — Grassley, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz — and the only response I got from Rep. Mark Meadows’s office was, “How did you get my name?”
Here’s the big picture: Everything I have seen and reported on which you have seen and reported on is true. There is absolutely no question, and the Congress is now involved on the Republican side. There hasn’t been a single representative or senator who has taken the information to a law-enforcement agency to demand the arrest of Robert Mueller as Grassley did in his memo requesting a criminal investigation into Christopher Steele.
In all of this, I haven’t seen anybody call for the arrest of Peter Strzok or Lisa Page, who are still employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Bruce Ohr and his wife; [former FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe is looking at retirement next month — I don’t see anybody within the federal government being approached by a law-enforcement officer with a badge and gun saying, “Here, come with me.”
[Editor’s Note: For previous installments of our recent interview with Fitzpatrick, please see here, here, and here.}
May 2, 2019
Hi Sharon,
I was doing a search on the Mueller Report, when I saw your article.
It was an unusual take on Mueller who has been portrayed as a straight shooter, while Comey is a bit of a scallywag – a show-horse – rushing to Ashcroft’s beside in a prior episode during the Bush 2 presidency. The Clinton email pronouncement, and now the current Trump inquiry possible started by small group rogue agents.
However, your article casts a different light on Mueller, and the fact that while he was the head of the FBI, we had the 9-11 attack, where field agents in MN and AZ warnings of Saudi men getting trained to fly, but not land planes were ignored at FBI HQ. I am also peeved, that he left the “OBSTRUCTION” question open on The Trump Report. It will get Congress stuck for another 2 years of Impeachment talk, while Rome (USA) burns!
From the article:
“Mueller served as director of the FBI, a division of the U.S. Justice Department, from September 4, 2001 to September 4, 2014, after James B. Comey was confirmed to succeed him. Having been nominated by President George W. Bush, Mueller’s ten-year term was extended by two years by Congress after Bush’s successor, Barack Hussein Obama, requested it in May 2011.”
September 4, 2001, appointment!? Hmmm. Arrived on the scene a week in advance of the massive terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Coincidence Mr. Bush II? Obviously on the radar of the author of this article.
I believe Comey leaked his meetings with Trump to get his buddy, Mueller, selected as Special Council. Both Comey and Mueller were FBI Directors during massive spying on millions of American citizens. Dennis Montgomery provided 47 hard drives of evidence of this spying to Comey’s FBI more than two years ago and they did nothing except, perhaps, destroy the evidence. The plan by Comey was to get Mueller as Special Council to get rid of Trump, and to protect both Mueller and himself by preventing this huge scandal from being revealed and acted on.