Jim Jordan To Mueller: Why Wasn’t Joseph Mifsud Charged With Obstruction?https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2019/07/24/jordan-mueller-wasnt-joseph-mifsud-charged-obstruction/The Robert Mueller hearings continue to grind on, and perhaps especially on Mueller himself. At times, Mueller acts as nothing more than a one-word validation for Democrats reading verbatim from his report. At other times, he appears lost and unfamiliar with it — especially in this tough cross-examination from Republican Jim Jordan. Jordan highlights the curious case of
Joseph Mifsud in the Russia-collusion saga, whose name comes up 87 times in Mueller’s report, included repeated references to his lying to investigators.
And yet, when Jordan asks why the FBI didn’t charge Mifsud for lying as he did with Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, and Paul Manafort, Mueller can’t immediately recall Mifsud or his role. When his memory gets refreshed, Mueller can’t offer any explanation for their decision not to press charges either.
Mifsud’s not just a footnote in Mueller’s narrative. He first gets introduced on page 5 of Volume I as the man — as Jordan accurately notes — tells George Papadopoulos that “the Russian government had ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of e-mails.†Papadopoulos’ indictment and conviction for obstruction by Mueller’s office directly relates to his interactions with Mifsud (pages 9 and 81 fn). On page 193, Mueller’s report outlines a number of false statements that Mifsud subsequently made to investigators.
Why wasn’t Mifsud charged with the same crime as Papadopoulos? After all, they later got Papadopoulos to admit he’d lied and to cooperate with investigators. That would have cured the defects listed in this summary and allowed prosecutors to dig deeper into Mifsud, but it appears that they just let the matter drop. Mueller had no answer for this, and tried to claim that he couldn’t discuss declination and charging decisions. “It’s obvious, I think,†Mueller told Jordan, “that we can’t get into charging decisions.â€
Excuse me? His report exists because the statute
requires Mueller to explain his charging and declination decisions. Jordan suggests that the reason for Mueller’s refusal to answer is that Mifsud is an intelligence operative, but even if that were the case, Mueller had no trouble indicting “thirteen Russians no one ever heard of,†as Jordan put it.
