If Trump team had done wrong, it would have leaked long ago

A little over a week ago, Trump’s attorney Rudy Guiliani said that the basis of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was illegitimate and he was absolutely correct.

Instead of discussing presidential pardons or subpoenas, President Trump and his legal team would do well to focus on the legitimacy of the entire investigation because it is truly a house of cards built on a foundation of air.

{mosads}The Mueller investigation began on a series of rumors, innuendoes, an unproven dossier funded by political opposition, apparent Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuses, illegally leaked memos by a self-aggrandizing former FBI director, and the firing of said director based on a memo written by the person who then appointed the special counsel and still oversees him.

Only in a town like Washington, well-insulated from common sense and the real world, would any of this seem fine.

The investigation was spun up with the firing of James Comey. President Trump had the legal authority to fire Comey for any reason, whether it was his gross mishandling of the Clinton email investigation or just for being too tall. We know from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s letter that Comey’s firing was justified beyond the simple fact that every member of the executive branch serves at the pleasure of the head of the executive branch.

Comey’s flat refusal to acknowledge publicly — until he was testifying under oath — that the president was not under investigation for any potential Russia collusion meant the rumor mill was allowed to swirl and detract from the administration’s positive work. This allowed Comey’s his minions to leak to the media false information that Trump was under investigation for more than six months.

Setting aside Comey’s monumental failures during the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s tens of thousands of deleted emails and unsecured server, Comey’s defiance in the face of the president’s request to clear his name was enough reason to fire the FBI director.

Not only did Comey fail in his duties in the Clinton investigation, his errors in judgment with the “Steele dossier” showed a clear disdain for President Trump and tainted the entire Russia investigation.

As I and many others have outlined before, the dossier was created by a former spy turned detective-for-hire who was being paid by political-research firm Fusion GPS; Fusion GPS was being paid by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to scrape up any material, no matter how dubious, to sully then-candidate Trump.

In this, they were successful. Steele’s dossier was first spread across the Obama administration, then in Congress, and then shopped to various news outlets. 

Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the media that fell for this dossier; it was the highest levels of the FBI, which means they were either deeply incompetent or politically motivated to use any damaging materials against Trump.

The “salacious and unverified” dossier served, for example, as a foundational piece to the FISA warrants authorizing the surveillance of Carter Page while he served as an adviser to the Trump campaign. Yet, Comey failed to fully brief the president on this piece of political muckraking, focusing exclusively on the most sensational portions of it while not explaining the source of the material to the president. 

Adding to the bizarre nature of all of this is why Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein remains involved in this investigation. He wrote the memo laying out why Comey should be fired; Trump fired Comey using that memo as the basis — and, in response, Rosenstein appointed Comey’s former colleague, Robert Mueller, then refused to recuse himself from the investigation. He masqueraded as the one providing oversight for Mueller while clearly giving Mueller carte blanche to investigate anything, from the fairytale of collusion to the mysteries of how life began.

Further add to this that no crime was committed for which to launch an investigation. 

Have we lost our minds as a country, that we’ve just settled on a Stalinist approach to our political differences? It is now apparent that if there are political and policy differences in this country, we’ve decided not to settle them at the ballot box like normal human beings. Let’s just criminalize political differences like any good banana republic: Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.

This is all a political witch hunt, an investigation in pursuit of a crime. 

Allow me to ask a few common-sense questions: If Trump and his campaign have been under some form of surveillance since 2015, by intel agencies in the U.S. and England, and there still is zero proof of collusion, what is the point of all of this?

If multiple national security agencies investigated Trump and his team, and those entities were run by people who loathed and hated Trump, wouldn’t any real evidence of collusion have been leaked months ago to a compliant press?

Of course it would have. Collusion and obstruction of justice allegations are neat little hooks on which to hang their hats, but neither is the point of all of this: This is nothing but a political attempt to nullify the 2016 elections. Only in Washington, a city so far detached from the day-to-day realities of life in America, could this investigation continue. 

Every day that Mueller’s illegitimate investigation continues, and the mainstream media plays its role of mouthpieces for the “deep state,” Russia’s Vladimir Putin wins. He’s winning every day this drags on, and those who continue to push the fairy tale and the witch hunt for purely political reasons — from Congress to the deep state to the mainstream media — are, in effect, helping to destabilize our democracy.

Ned Ryun is a former presidential writer for President George W. Bush and the founder and CEO of American Majority, which trains conservative political candidates and activists.