Weissmann has a disgraceful history of weaponizing the law for political purposes. He is at it again.
Andrew Weissmann, who ran special counsel Robert Mueller’s misbegotten Russian collusion investigation, is desperate to derail U.S. Attorney John Durham’s criminal inquiry into suspected corruption and abuse of power by officials at the FBI and others in the Obama administration.
Weissmann, who has never bothered to conceal his hatred of President Trump, penned a recent op-ed in the New York Times urging Department of Justice officials to resist the Durham probe. This smacks of an effort by Weissmann to obstruct justice. In essence, he is encouraging prosecutors at the DOJ to interfere with or undermine a legitimate criminal investigation. He appears to be doing it for a corrupt purpose.
It is outrageous that any lawyer would advocate such action. But the unconscionable move is classic Weissmann. He has no scruples. His respect for the law is non-existent. Truth is meaningless, which makes him a perfect fit for his current job as a paid commentator at MSNBC.
What is especially insidious is that Weissmann was himself involved in the phony anti-Trump dossier in the summer of 2016 just as the Russia hoax was launched.
As I detailed in my book, Witch Hunt, Christopher Steele fed the dossier that he had composed to Bruce Ohr during a morning meeting at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. on July 30th. This was one day before the FBI secretly opened its investigation of Trump and his campaign without a shred of credible or verified evidence.
Ohr later testified before Congress that he immediately arranged a meeting with Weissmann to tell him all about the improbable accusations in the dossier, the severe bias of its author, and how the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democrats had funded it so as to damage Trump during the presidential campaign.
Hence, Weissmann knew at the outset that the case against Trump was riven with prejudice and driven by a defective document. Instead of investigating Clinton and her confederates for conspiring with foreigners to defraud the U.S. government, the dossier was exploited to target Trump despite a dearth of evidence that it was authentic.
All of this made Weissmann complicit in the misuse of the dossier and the ensuing witch-hunt that consumed the next three years of the Trump presidency. Did Weissmann take any action to question the legal validity of the FBI’s probe or shut it down? Apparently not. In fact, he did the opposite. Months later, Weissmann joined the Mueller investigation of Trump without fully disclosing his disqualifying conflict of interest. He failed to recuse himself as federal regulations required.
U.S. Attorney Durham should haul Weissmann before a grand jury and question him about his involvement in the dossier and his direct role in pursuing Trump based on knowingly fictive evidence. I suspect Weissmann fears this, which is why he is now doing what he can to obstruct the Durham probe.
Weissmann is the kind of guy who gives lawyers a bad name. In his career he has left a trail of wreckage, destroying lives and livelihoods.
He drove the Arthur Anderson accounting firm out of business, leaving tens of thousands without jobs, only to have his prosecution overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court. You have to really screw up to get overturned by every justice on the highest court.
But Weissmann didn’t stop there. Undeterred, he went after Merrill Lynch executives putting them behind bars and ruining their lives, only to have that case also reversed.
Weissmann’s shameless record proves that he is a one-man train wreck with a ledger of complaints filed against him. He is infamous for his abusive tactics and wrongful prosecutions that have earned him reversals and rebukes. He has been accused of suppressing evidence and threatening witnesses.
At one point, Weissmann’s reputation was so sullied that he was largely banished from the DOJ, only to have Bob Mueller rescue him. As special counsel, Mueller gave him complete authority to pick the team of partisans that went after Trump with a vengeance. There was never any evidence of a collusion conspiracy and Weissmann knew it from the beginning.
Weissmann has a disgraceful history of weaponizing the law for political purposes. He is at it again.