Mueller Investigator Andrew Weissman Rants Against Trump on MSNBC

Joel B. Pollak

Andrew Weissmann, who helped lead Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team of prosecutors in their pursuit of claims of “Russia collusion” and obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump, all but confirmed his anti-Trump bias in an interview with MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace on Thursday.

Weissmann was one of the most controversial of Mueller’s team of investigators, several of whom had close ties to Democrats.

He attended the Election Night party for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was Trump’s opponent in 2016. He also wrote an email to acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who defied Trump’s executive order barring travel from terror-prone countries in January 2017, praising her effusisely for doing so. (An expanded version of the executive order was later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.)

Moreover, as critics noted, Weissmann had a track record as a hyper-aggressive prosecutor: “Weissmann, as deputy and later director of the Enron Task Force, destroyed the venerable accounting firm of Arthur Andersen LLP and its 85,000 jobs worldwide — only to be reversed several years later by a unanimous Supreme Court,” attorney Sidney Powell, later hired by Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.), wrote in 2017.

On Thursday, Weissmann ripped into Trump after the president’s remarks in the White House to mark his acquittal in his Senate impeachment trial the day before.

Weissmann claimed that Trump was using Attorney General William Barr to do his political bidding, a claim he attempted to support by the fact that Trump looked at Barr during his remarks.

He went on to claim that Trump was planning to use the ongoing criminal probe by U.S. Attorney John Durham to punish those who had investigated him before. And he compared Trump to former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, saying that Trump was also a “demagogue” and “amoral.”

Weissmann also mocked Trump for not submitting himself for questioning by the Mueller probe, or under oath before Congress, even as he noted the president would have been placing himself in “legal jeopardy” by doing so.

By the end, Weissman had left little doubt that critics of the anti-Trump bias of the Mueller probe were correct.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) tweeted a clip of Weissmann and commented that it was a “travesty.”

Even with Weissmann directing the probe, it failed to find any evidence of “Russia collusion.” The Mueller report attempted to provide evidence of obstruction, but declined to recommend that Trump be prosecuted.

Attorney General Barr dropped the idea, noting there was insufficient evidence to support a prosecution, and that when Trump criticized the probe, he had “non-corrupt” motives in doing so, given the unprecedented political circumstances surrounding the sudden attacks on the new administration.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.