The Columbus Dispatch

Declassify all documents, add special counsel to get at truth

- Victor Davis Hanson is a historian at the Hoover Institutio­n, Stanford University. author@victorhans­on.com

routine reassignme­nts.

But Mueller’s greatest problem was his original mandate to discover whether Trump colluded with the Russians in 2016 to tilt the election in his favor.

After 15 months, Mueller has indicted a number of Trump associates, but on charges having nothing to do with Russian collusion. They faced inordinate­ly long prison sentences unless they “flipped” and testified against Trump.

We are left with the impression that Mueller cannot find much to do with his original mandate of unearthing Russian collusion, but he still thinks Trump is guilty of something.

In other words, Mueller has reversed the proper order of jurisprude­nce.

Instead of presuming Trump innocent unless he finds evidence of Russian collusion, Mueller started with the assumption that the reckless raconteur Trump surely must be guilty of some lawbreakin­g. Thus, it is Mueller’s job to hunt for past crimes to prove it.

While Mueller so far has not found Trump involved in collusion with foreign citizens to warp a campaign, there is evidence that others most surely were colluding — but are not of interest to Mueller.

It is likely that during the 2016 campaign, officials at the Department of Justice, FBI, CIA and National Security Agency broke laws to ensure that the outsider Trump lost to Hillary Clinton. FBI and DOJ officials misled the Foreign Intelligen­ce Surveillan­ce Court in order to obtain warrants to surveil Trump associates. National security officials unmasked the names of those being monitored and likely leaked them to the press with the intent to spread unverified rumors detrimenta­l to the Trump campaign.

A spy on the federal payroll was implanted into the Trump campaign. Hillary Clinton’s campaign team paid for research done by a former British intelligen­ce officer working with Russian sources to compile a dossier on Trump. Clinton hid her investment in Christophe­r Steele’s dossier by using intermedia­ries to wipe away her fingerprin­ts.

As a result of wrongful conduct, more than a dozen officials at the FBI and DOJ have resigned or retired, or were fired or reassigned. Yet so far none of these miscreants has been indicted or has faced the same legal scrutiny that Mueller applies to Trump associates.

Hillary Clinton is not facing legal trouble for destroying subpoenaed emails, for using an unlawful email server or for the expenditur­e of campaign money on the Steele dossier.

No president has ever faced impeachmen­t for supposed wrongdoing alleged to have taken place before he took office — not Andrew Johnson, not Richard Nixon and not even Bill Clinton, who lied about his liaisons with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.

The argument is not that Trump committed crimes while president — indeed, his record at home and abroad is winning praise. The allegation­s are instead about what he may have done as a private citizen and whether it could have reversed the 2016 election.

The only way to clear up this messy saga is for Trump to immediatel­y declassify all documents — without redactions — relating to the Mueller investigat­ion, the FISA court warrants, the Clinton email investigat­ion, and CIA and FBI involvemen­t with the dossier and the use of informants.

Second, there needs to be another special counsel to investigat­e wrongdoing on the part of senior officials in these now nearly discredite­d agencies.

It is past time to stop the stonewalli­ng, the redacting, the suppressio­n, the leaking to the press and the media hysteria. The government must turn over all relevant documents to two special counsels and free each to discover who did what in 2016.

Americans need the whole truth to ensure equality under the law and to thereby set us free from this nearly two-year nightmare.

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