On this weekend’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” former George W. Bush U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe was launched “initially in a flawed way.”
Mukasey said, “I think what we heard on Friday is the fruit of — the rather bitter fruit of the fact that this investigation was launched initially, in a flawed way. ”
He continued, “The regulations require that in order to have a special counsel, it has to be a finding that there is a criminal case to be investigated, criminal case that’s got to be, and that there is a conflict, some good reason a conflict or other good reason why the Justice Department can’t do it. And under those circumstances, what the attorney general or whoever is acting for him in this case, the deputy, is obligated to do, is to tell the special counsel what the crime is and to put forth a specific set of facts.”
He added, “The memo that was originally drafted appointing Robert Mueller says that you are to follow-up the questions of Russian involvement in the election as testified to by James Comey on a particular date before the House Intelligence Subcommittee. What he testified to was not a criminal investigation. It was a counterintelligence investigation so right from the get-go to say that you’re authorized to pursue that investigation is flawed. Apparently, Rod Rosenstein realized that at some point later in the game and changed the memo, put in an additional memo supposedly specifying what was being investigated and what the crime was, but we haven’t been allowed to see that.”
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