In his May 29 televised statement, special counsel Robert Mueller told us that everything he had to say was contained in his written report, and that it contained everything that Congress and the public needed to know about his investigation. This, however, is incorrect in several material respects, and the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees should insist that he appear before them to answer extremely urgent questions.
The Mueller report is completely silent on the results of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation that was opened up shortly after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on May 9, 2017. The next day, Trump then confided to Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S. the following day in the Oval Office that — referring to the FBI’s Russia investigation — the firing of “nut job” Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him. Trump then followed this confirmation by admitting to NBC’s Lester Holt in a televised interview at the White House that he had decided to fire Comey because of the “Russia thing.”
Alarmed FBI and Justice Department officials promptly opened up a counterintelligence investigation into whether the current occupant of the White House was so compromised by Russia that, for all intents and purposes, he was an active agent of a hostile foreign power. After all, Trump had sounded like a Russia apologist for many months. There was no reasonable basis for his apparent love of all things Russian and his inability to criticize the country or President Vladimir Putin, its autocratic leader, in any way. Firing the FBI director, in an evident attempt to derail the bureau’s investigation into the massive and coordinated attack by Russia on the U.S. electoral system, left no question that there was something seriously wrong in the White House and that there was an urgent need to mount an investigation as quickly as possible. For the first time in American history, there was a rational and actionable basis for believing that a sitting president of the United States was betraying his own country.
View the complete June 2 article by Kenneth F. McCallion from Salon on the AlterNet website here.