Here is Clarice Feldman asking about Mueller’s “hunting license”:
Reuters reports:
“I don’t see what relationship this indictment has with anything the special counsel is authorized to investigate,” U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in the Eastern District of Virginia said.
At a tense hearing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, the judge said Mueller should not have “unfettered power” in his Russia probe and that the charges against Manafort did not arise from the investigation into Moscow’s alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
“It’s unlikely you’re going to persuade me the special counsel has unfettered power to do whatever he wants[.]” … “Our investigative scope does cover the activity in the indictment,” Dreeben [the Department’s deputy solicitor general] told the judge.
“Cover bank fraud in 2005 and 2007? Tell me how!” Ellis retorted. …
During the oral arguments, Ellis repeatedly chided Mueller’s $10 million budget.
He also asked whether Rosenstein, who oversees the probe and is considered an important witness into whether Trump tried to obstruct justice, is recused from the case.
And he repeatedly claimed that the indictment appeared to serve as a way for Mueller to “assert leverage” over Manafort. …
Rosenstein’s May 2017 order laying out the scope of the probe, [Dreeben] told the judge, did not reveal all the details because they involve sensitive national security and counterintelligence matters that could not be divulged publicly, but were conveyed to Mueller.
Ellis balked, saying Dreeben’s answer essentially means the Justice Department was “not really telling the truth[.]” …
Dreeben also stressed that Rosenstein wrote another memo two months later, in August 2017, explicitly granting Mueller the power to investigate Manafort’s Ukraine dealings years before the 2016 election.
[Ellis] directed Mueller’s office to take two weeks to consult with U.S. intelligence agencies to see if they will sign off so that he can personally review a sealed, unredacted version of the memo.
Read more: American Thinker
Image credit: nd.theclassifiedsplus.com.
