Solomon: How Mueller Deputy Andrew Weissmann’s Offer to an Oligarch Could Boomerang on DOJ

John Solomon writes in The Hill that, following Robert Mueller’s appointment as Special Counsel, his chief deputy offered legal protections to a Ukranian oligarch in exchange for dirt on Donald Trump:

The ink was still drying on special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment papers when his chief deputy, the famously aggressive and occasionally controversial prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, made a bold but secret overture in early June 2017.

Weissmann quietly reached out to the American lawyers for Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash with a tempting offer: Give us some dirt on Donald Trump in the Russia case, and Team Mueller might make his 2014 U.S. criminal charges go away.

. . .

At the time, pressure was building inside the DOJ and the FBI to find smoking-gun evidence against Trump in the Russia case because the Steele dossier — upon which the early surveillance warrants were based — was turning out to be an uncorroborated mess. (“There’s no big there there,” lead FBI agent Pete Strzok texted a few days before Weissmann’s overture.)

Read the rest of the article here.