Yet another key member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe appears to have deep ties to the Democratic Party.
Aaron Zebley served previously as Mueller’s chief of staff at the FBI and as a senior counselor in the National Security Division at the Department of Justice. He also served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the National Security and Terrorism Unit in Alexandria, Virginia.
He is often referred to in the media as Mueller’s “right-hand man.”
Also, in 2015 when he was a lawyer, he represented Justin Cooper, the IT staffer who personally set up Hillary Clinton’s unsecure server in her Chappaqua home, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson revealed on his show Thursday.
Cooper, it so happens, is also the aide who destroyed Clinton’s old BlackBerries with a hammer.
Documents obtained by Fox News show that Senate investigators grew frustrated with Zebley after being repeatedly stonewalled when they were trying to set up a meeting with Cooper.
“Mr. Zebley telephoned Homeland Security [Committee] staff to inform them that Cooper had chosen to cancel the interview,” the documents said.
In a letter to Cooper, congressional investigators complained: “We are troubled by your attorney’s [referring to Zebley] complete refusal to engage the committee in a discussion about how to further assuage your concerns.”
Let this sink in. The same attorney who played a defensive role for Hillary Clinton was tapped by Mueller in June to play an offensive role against Clinton opponent Trump.
But Zebley isn’t the only questionable hire. Out of a team of fifteen lawyers, nine of them have donated to Democratic candidates. None of them seem to have Republican leanings.
Jeannie Rhee, who was hired by Mueller last summer to work on the probe, was the personal attorney of Ben Rhodes and also represented the Clinton Foundation, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham reported on Wednesday.
Two other members of the team have been revealed as blatantly partisan in recent days as well — Peter Strzok, an anti-Trumper who helped exonerate Hillary Clinton, and Andrew Weissmann, an unscrupulous prosecutor who told outgoing acting Attorney General Sally Yates in an email that he was “proud” of her for defying President Trump’s travel ban.
“Why would Mueller hire an obvious Democratic partisan for a politically sensitive job like this?” Tucker Carson asked Rep Steve King, (R-IA) on his show Thursday night.
“This whole thing screams of conflict of interest,” King replied. He told Carlson that a congressmen asked FBI Director Christopher Wray during the judiciary committee hearing Thursday whether being pro-Clinton was a prerequisite for getting on his team. “It looks like every single one of them’s a Clinton partisan,” he said.
“What’s so grotesque and ironic about it is the whole point of the independent counsel statute is to reassure the public that the investigation is above politics. That’s why it’s taken out of the hands of the DOJ leadership!” Tucker exclaimed. “So you’d think Mueller would go out of his way to make certain that no one on his team could be accused of partisanship, and yet almost all of them seem to have ties to the Democrat Party,” he lamented.
On top of all this, Fox News’ James Rosen reported on Thursday that a senior Justice Department official was demoted this week amid an investigation into his contacts with the shady opposition research firm Fusion GPS.
It will probably take years for President Trump to drain this cesspool.
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