RUTHFULLY YOURS

As President Trump deliberates on whether to be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a look at Mueller’s record of indicting ham sandwiches ought to give him pause.

Mueller, as The Federalist points out, botches high-profile cases and can drag them out for a decade. Reporter Daniel Ashman found this case with Mueller’s name on it, the anthrax attacks case dating back to 2001. That was when some maniac or terrorist, some beast, sent anthrax powder in the mail to news agencies, injuring people who opened the packages. I worked at Forbes magazine in New York at the time and remember how the mail was quarantined, depriving us of that communication line, and I remember how terrified people were at this nasty coda to the horrific 9/11 terror attacks.

The Federalist reports:

The anthrax letters began just a week after the 9/11 attack. While planning the airplane hijackings, Al-Qaeda had been weaponizing anthrax, setting up a lab in Afghanistan manned by Yazid Sufaat, the same man who housed two of the 9/11 hijackers. Two hijackers later sought medical help due to conditions consistent with infection via anthrax: Al Haznawi went to the emergency room for a skin lesion which he claimed was from “bumping into a suitcase,” and ringleader Mohamed Atta needed medicine for “skin irritation.” A team of bioterrorism experts from Johns Hopkins confirmed that anthrax was the most likely cause of the lesion. Meanwhile, the 9/11 hijackers were also trying to obtain crop-dusting airplanes.

So how did Mueller’s investigative team handle the case?

Mueller issued a statement in October of 2001, while anthrax victims were still dying: the FBI had found “no direct link to organized terrorism.” The John Hopkins team of experts was mistaken, the FBI continued, Al Haznawi never had an anthrax infection. The crop-dusting airplanes they needed was possibly for a separate and unrelated anthrax attack.

So even though the likeliest blame pointed to al Qaida’s 9/11 attackers, not just from the acts observed, but because terrorists just love dancing around a second time in the wake of a new attack, following the buzz they got from their initial attacks, Robert Mueller pursued other, more politically correct targets, such as white men in government agencies.

Instead of slamming terrorists with the indictment, Mueller went after insiders, people who worked at health agencies, with one case against a U.S. worker dismissed with a large payout, and another case against a U.S. worker ending in suicide, quite possibly in despair at being accused.

The terrorists got little attention, despite being the likeliest culprits.

Any questions as to why it took so long? When you are barking up the wrong tree, it can take forever to find anything to pin on someone.

It’s said a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich. Most don’t, of course, because they have better things to do. Not Robert Mueller, however. He actually likes to indict ham sandwiches, even when the culprit is sitting right there in plain sight. Was it political correctness that kept Mueller from going after the bad guys? Quite possibly. I remember how quickly political correctness showed up in the memorial displays of 9/11, when the smoke hadn’t even stopped billowing from the World Trade Center’s smoldering ruin down-road from Union Square. So it’s pretty obvious that not blaming Muslims, even particular Muslims, for the attacks was in the air from the beginning, and Robert Mueller chose to go with those political winds.

Which rather precisely has the look of what is going on now with Mueller’s investigation of President Trump and his supposed collusion with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. Without any evidence of collusion and no big gotcha, Mueller can drag a case out for ten years, maybe driving a few people to suicide, all because he cannot allow himself to admit that maybe there wasn’t any collusion. He keeps going, like the dog that can’t stop sniffing.

President Trump should consider this pattern before consenting to talk to Mueller.