Eyebrows were raised last week when it was discovered that Special Counsel Jack Smith had added attorney Michael Dreeben to his legal team.
“An interesting detail: Michael Dreeben somehow snuck into Jack Smith’s office. He was Mueller’s appellate guy,” enthused Marcy Wheeler, a proponent of the debunked conspiracy theory that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia.
Fellow Russia-collusion hoaxer Rachel Maddow of MSNBC ran an entire segment to announce the exciting news that Dreeben is “helming this part of the case,” meaning Smith’s request to the Supreme Court to look at whether American presidents may be prosecuted for actions taken while they are president. Left-wing legal activist (and, yes, another bitter clinger Russia-collusion hoaxer) Joyce Vance said her “friend” Dreeben had “framed this petition” before the Supreme Court.
Mueller, of course, is Robert Mueller, the ostensible head of the Mueller probe that treated the Russia conspiracy scam as credible and leaked information to the propaganda press to ensure it had maximum effect. After 18 months, the investigation concluded with not a single American, much less a single Trump official, being found to have colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. On the way to that conclusion, it wreaked havoc on Republicans across the country, and a strong majority of Democrats still believe the “big lie” that Russians stole the 2016 election for Donald Trump.
The Real Leaders of the Mueller Probe
As anyone who saw the visibly struggling Mueller testify in July 2019 knows, he wasn’t in a mental position to lead the operation. That was left to key operatives, including more than a dozen Democrats. For example, Mueller selected partisan Andrew Weissmann for a key role. In addition to his ethically flawed prosecutions of Enron executives, he was at Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 Victory Night Party. The inspector general report showed him as a full participant in the Russia-collusion hoax. After the Mueller probe, Weissmann went on to raise money for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. Weissmann was also part of the team at left-wing legal group Just Security that unofficially wrote Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump over classified documents.
As partisan as Weissmann was, and continues to be in his role at left-wing propaganda outlet MSNBC, he wasn’t even the actual leader of the Mueller lawfare strategy. That was the much more subtle, much more careful, and much less sloppy Michael Dreeben.
Dreeben was “leading the special counsel’s defense each step of the way,” Politico wrote in 2018 when it put him in the top 10 of its “power list.” He is widely seen as being in charge of Mueller’s “overall legal strategy.” When Mueller picked Dreeben, former Chuck Schumer staffer and anti-Trump “resistance” hero Preet Bharara praised the pick.
That was important because even though the Mueller team knew from the outset that the Russia-collusion theory it perpetuated was false, it pursued a novel legal strategy of trying to build an impeachment case that Trump “obstructed justice” when he protested the Democrat-designed and Democrat-funded Russia-collusion lie. It is also worth noting that the Mueller probe, for fairly obvious reasons, never investigated how the Russia-collusion theory was designed and funded by Democrats, developed with the help of Russian operatives, and integrated into the federal government’s unconstitutional resistance of a duly elected president. Covering up those facts was, in fact, the purpose of the Mueller probe.
Not Dreeben’s First Democrat Operation
Now Dreeben has joined the Biden administration’s effort to try to convict Trump on Jan. 6-related charges before the 2024 election. This is not the first Democrat effort Dreeben joined. He was also brought on to help Democrat Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance’s successful effort at the Supreme Court in 2020 to get Trump’s taxes and related financial records.
New York Magazine reported that Dreeben was part of a key group of former Mueller prosecutors brought in by Vance to figure out ways to politically prosecute Trump. They weren’t the only lawyers brought into the Democrat operation. Vance secured legal help from a Biden-connected law firm in New York City to design the “get Trump” operation. The powerhouse law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison lent Michael Pomerantz, Elyssa Abuhoff, and Caroline Williamson to Vance. The law firm had held a $2,800-per-plate fundraiser for Biden during his presidential campaign.
By the spring of 2023, Dreeben was publicly noting his affiliation with Just Security, “the legal beachhead of the Trump resistance.” The group helped launder Mueller probe legal theories into the general public and helped transition the Russia-collusion impeachment theory to the Ukraine issue once it became apparent that the Russia hoax was only believed by Democrats in echo chambers. Dreeben left the federal government in June 2019 after the Mueller probe ended, and he was viewed by Republican congressional staffers as being involved in Democrats’ impeachment efforts later that year along with Norm Eisen. Eisen, a frequent author at Just Security, was the House Democrats’ counsel for the 2019 impeachment.
Dreeben is one of the most experienced advocates before the Supreme Court, having argued 105 cases during his time in the solicitor general’s office. That the elite attorney is helping Democrats with their 2024 campaign strategy of lawfare is significant and showcases how much coordination between key Democrat operatives is behind this Soviet-style attempt to imprison President Joe Biden’s political opponents.
Democrat prosecutors began indicting Donald Trump and other Republican political opponents earlier this year. Democrat Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Vance’s successor, indicted Trump in March in a widely panned case involving payments to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. After the shocking raid on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump in Florida in a classified documents case in June 2023. Democrat activist Fani Willis indicted Trump and more than a dozen other Republicans in August for contesting the poorly run 2020 election in Georgia. Smith also indicted Trump in Washington, D.C., in August on charges related to the Jan. 6 protest of the controversial 2020 election.
This is all happening while the Democrat New York Attorney General Letitia James, who ran on an explicit campaign of using lawfare to harm Trump, is attempting to seize the Trump family business as punishment for his political views.
The focus on Smith’s second indictment in Washington, D.C., is occurring along with the realization that the other cases might not secure the quick and easy convictions in front of biased juries that are the hallmark of other show trials.