Calling for Mueller to resign

Investors Business Daily's editorial board added its voice to those calling for Robert Mueller to resign.

Russian Scandal: Special Counsel Robert Mueller has a tough job. After all, how can you prove allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials to influence our 2016 presidential election when, from all evidence after a year and a half of investigation, it didn't happen?

Naming Mueller to head the investigation was a huge error. His investigation should be shut down and Mueller sent home.

This week's stunning revelation that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee funded the fake Trump/Putin dossier, filled with outright lies, exaggerations and misleading information, is the final straw.

For it shows that not only were Hillary Clinton, the DNC and her lawyer, Marc Elias, lying when they denied any involvement in the phony dossier, it showed that they — not Trump — were deeply, perhaps criminally, compromised by collusion with Russian officials.

In Hillary's case, in 2009 she promised the Russians a "reset," and then over the next two years proceeded to help them build their own mini-Silicon Valley with U.S. funding and expertise, and approved the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian company that controls 20% of U.S.-based uranium supplies, to Russia's state-owned nuclear monopoly, Rosatom.

If that isn't dizzying enough, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her husband former President Bill Clinton, and their Clinton Foundation charity took in millions of dollars from Russian entities and the grateful executives of Uranium One, who were taken over by the deep-pocketed Russians. It was a classic example of illegal pay-for-play, and yet neither President Obama's Justice Department nor his FBI found anything wrong with it.

Fast forward to 2016, and Hillary and the DNC retained Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. Fusion then hired former British spook Christopher Steele, a man who, as former head of the Moscow desk for Britain's MI6 intelligence agency, has deep espionage ties in Russia, to do "research" on Trump. What they got instead was innuendo, half-truths, distortions, exaggerations and just plain gossip — much of it from Russian "sources."

And yet, this phantasmagorical bit of research became the basis for a full-blown investigation of the Trump campaign's supposed ties to Russian officials and their interference in the 2016 presidential election.

With each new revelation in recent weeks, it has become ever clearer that the collusion that took place wasn't on the part of Trump, but Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, who have been playing a double-game with the Russians since at least Obama's first term. That's the real collusion here. Typical of how the progressive left works, they have accused their opponent of the very thing they are guilty of: colluding with a possible enemy.

This is where Robert Mueller comes in. Mueller himself was head of the FBI from 2001 to 2013. But from 2009 to 2013, all sorts of alarms were going off over the apparent influence peddling by Hillary Clinton while serving as secretary of state. The Justice Department, headed by die-hard leftist lawyer and Obama loyalist Eric Holder, did nothing. Nor did Mueller.

Fast forward to 2016. Mueller's successor at the FBI, James Comey, did do something: He paid Fusion GPS, which received funding from Russian sources, for its bogus "research" on Trump. That research also became the basis for the equally bogus investigation headed by Mueller.

Yet, as we said earlier in the week, it's now clear that the real Russian collusion was among Hillary and Bill Clinton, their Clinton Foundation, the DNC, Democratic operatives and bagmen John and Tony Podesta, Fusion GPS and James Comey. Not Trump and his campaign confederates.

When a legal mistake of this magnitude is made, it must be undone. That's just what Congress is doing right now.

In recent days, both houses of Congress have unveiled investigations into the Uranium One deal and possible pay-for-play deals at Hillary Clinton's State Department and her family Clinton Foundation.

Just Thursday, Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican, called for naming a special counsel for the Uranium One deal and the related financial shenanigans. He's on solid ground here: In a new Rasmussen poll, 51% of likely voters said they believe "it's likely that Bill and Hillary Clinton or their close political associates broke the law in their dealings with Russia."

In the meantime, however, the purely political investigation of Trump led by Mueller since the start of this year has gone nowhere. It should be ended immediately, and not just because they've found nothing or that the original basis for the investigation has been tainted by being funded by the Democrats, FBI and Russians.

We have nothing personal against Mueller, who led the FBI's shift toward counterterrorism in the immediate years after 9/11. But as special counsel, Mueller has conflicts all over the place, including his personal ties to Comey (who was Mueller's favorite to succeed him at the FBI in 2013) and by the fact that he headed the FBI during the time that Hillary was engaged in soliciting donations, selling access to the office of the secretary of state, and officially approving the highly questionable Uranium One deal.

In addition, the very premise of the Russian investigation has been proven faulty, based almost entirely (at least initially) on a politically motivated opposition-research operation run by the Democrats against Trump, and later picked up by the FBI's Comey. Based on this, it's time to let special counsel Robert Mueller go, and dismantle the Russian investigation he leads.