‘Clinton fan club’: More links between ‘Russiagate’ probe team & Hillary surface
Serious questions have been raised over the independence of Robert Mueller’s investigation into allegations of Russian meddling in last year’s US presidential election. This follows fresh reports of strong links between members of the investigating team and Hillary Clinton and her aides.
Investigator Aaron Zebley – often referred to as Mueller’s “right-hand man” after having served as the former FBI director’s chief of staff – acted as an attorney for Justin Cooper, the IT staffer who installed Clinton’s private email server at her home, and who destroyed her old Blackberry phones with a hammer, a Fox News report states.
Documents obtained by the news outlet reportedly reveal that, Zebley, who was also a senior counselor in the National Security Division at the Department of Justice, “stonewalled” senate investigators following requests to interview him during their probe into Clinton.
"We are troubled by [Zebley’s] complete refusal to engage the committee in a discussion about how to further assuage your concerns,” congressional investigators complained in a letter to Cooper.
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Mueller investigator Andrew Weissmann, a former partner at the global law firm WilmerHale, attended the Democratic presidential candidate’s election party in November 2016.
Jeannie Rhee, another former WilmerHale partner, represented Ben Rhodes, an ex-Obama National Security Adviser in a 2015 racketeering case, and Clinton herself in a lawsuit seeking disclosure of her private emails, Fox reported.
Weissmann donated $2,300 to the Obama campaign in 2008, and at least $2,000 to the DNC in 2006. Rhee donated $5,400 to Clinton in 2015 and 2016 and $4,800 to former President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2011.
The latest revelations come after a report last weekend found that another “Russiagate” investigator, Peter Strzok was removed from Mueller’s team over anti-Trump texts he exchanged with a former investigator, Lisa Page.
Strzok, a former FBI counterintelligence agent, has been involved in a number of significant developments in both the Clinton and Russia probes. He was present during the FBI’s 2016 interview with Clinton at the end of the email investigation. He also oversaw the FBI interviews with Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
“You’ve got Donald Trump being persecuted by Hillary Clinton’s fan club, that’s inequitable,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News Friday.
“Many of the members of Mueller’s team donated to the Clinton campaign. We have a lot of highly qualified federal prosecutors in the Justice Department and we could have found a bunch of them who didn’t donate to either candidate. But that didn’t occur, and that’s troubling.”
