Collateral damage from Trump probe

Let’s call him the Trump Tracker. That’s Special Prosecutor Bob Mueller’s assignment, after all. To track down Trump.

Track him down, collar him, put him in the dock. Make him sweat and squirm. This and visions of sugarplums are dancing in the dreams of Democrats.

Who’s Special Prosecutor Mueller going to adopt as his role model? Will he be Dick Tracy? Fearless Fosdick? He has the square jaw for either,

Will he be Inspector Javert, of “Les Miserables” — the investigator who relentlessly pursued his target for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread?

Or will he be the other French character, Inspector Clouseau — the comically bumbling investigator Peter Sellers played in the Pink Panther movies?

Bob Mueller’s mission comes down to this: He’s been tapped to pull off a legalistic coup d’état. And it shouldn’t be hard to do. There are an estimated 3,000 federal laws on the books, extending over 23,000 pages under 51 titles of the United States Code. Plus, there are an estimated 300,000 criminally prosecutable regulations pursuant thereto, millions of pages long. Surely Mueller can get something on Trump.

Keep in mind, the government, citing a traffic jam, prosecuted Gov. Christie’s aides in “Bridgegate” using the civil rights laws!

Even the near-blind Mr. Magoo surely could find indictable offenses if given the limitless resources Bob Mueller has at his disposal. And if given a big bright-orange Day Glo target like Trump.

How could Trump be an easier target, considering his many years of real estate wheeling and dealing in the bottomless Democrat sleaze pit of New York, with its notoriously maloderous unions, construction firms, politicians and underworld bosses? All of which is not even to mention those ever-vulnerable tax returns, thanks to the Federal Tax Code with 75,000 pages of potential legal pitfalls of its own.

Thus my recent prediction in this space that The Donald will be out in year three.

But meanwhile, Bob Mueller — last best hope of the bat-guano crazy Maxine Waters and others of her hysterical anti-Trump ilk — seems to be spinning his wheels. Yes, true, he’s managed to secure an indictment of Paul Manafort, lobbyist and one-time Trump campaign manager. But that indictment makes not even a single vague reference to Trump. Or to Trump’s supposed “colluding” with Vladimir Putin to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.

The indictment does, though, make an intriguing reference to Hillary Clinton. It does so by citing a certain lobbying firm without identifying it by name. Manafort hired this unnamed firm to advocate in Washington for a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian faction, says the indictment. And the name of that Manafort-hired firm is reported to have been — a drum roll, please — the Podesta Group! Co-owned by none other than John Podesta, well-wired Democrat and Hillary Clinton campaign manager.

Well now. Isn’t this getting interesting?

According to the Manafort indictment, the Podesta Group was involved up to its eyebrows in Manafort’s sleazy lobbying activities. Manafort paid the Podesta Group and a second unnamed firm over $2 million. Paid it out of his illegal “offshore,” money-laundering accounts, the indictment alleges. The indictment further alleges that the Podesta Group maintained “frequent” phone and email contact with Trump’s guy, Manafort.

Meanwhile, the indictment continues, the Podesta firm, at Manafort’s behest, ”engaged in extensive lobbying” of “multiple members of Congress and their staffs” on behalf of the Kremlinfavored Ukrainian faction.

Here’s one other fascinating indictment tidbit largely overlooked in the “news”: The Podesta lobbying firm, according to the indictment, pretended to be representing a phony front group as its “nominal client” — a phantom “mouthpiece” conjured up by Manafort and given the fictional title “European Centre for a Modern Ukraine.” The Podesta Group (founded by John and brother Tony) received its paychecks from this phony front group, the indictment suggests.

So it seems that the more Bob Mueller puts the squeeze on Trump associates, the more unwanted information keeps popping up in other, unwanted places. The “Russia-Trump Collusion” hoo-ha, for example, has unearthed this key bit of unwanted information:

A dubious “dossier” allegedly linking Trump to a Moscow romp with Russian prostitutes was funded by the lawyer for — a drum roll again, please — Hillary Clinton’s campaign, i.e., the campaign run by John Podesta. The paymaster go-between here was one Marc Elias. Elias was — may we get a third drum roll, please — the lawyer for both the Clinton campaign and for the Democratic National Committee.

If you’re following the money trail, the money went from the Clinton campaign/DNC, to lawyer Elias, to a dirt-digging firm named Fusion GPS, to one-time British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, with perhaps finally a little something going to Kremlin insiders.

The Steele dossier claimed to be based on revelations the exBrit spy gleaned from his Moscow sources. But if Putin was determined to see Trump elected over Hillary Clinton — as the official Democratic Party narrative now insists — why were supposed Kremlin sources dishing dirt on Trump — dishing it to Democrats? It doesn’t quite add up, does it? Bob?

It seems unavoidable that the more rocks Bob Mueller turns over in pursuit of Trump, the more unwelcomed questions are going to come scurrying out into daylight. Questions regarding Hillary Clinton’s activities. And not just questions regarding her activities but the actions of the agency Bob Mueller once headed himself, the FBI. Questions such as:

• If vigilance regarding the Kremlin is so all-fired important (as the Democratic narrative now has it) how could Hillary Clinton’s recklessly unsecured State Department email system — vulnerable to Russian hacking and in violation of department rules circulated under her own signature — have been sloughed off with a mere wag of the finger, as it was by then-FBI Chief Big Jim Comey?

• When the email probe commenced, why didn’t the Obama Justice Department take the routine legal precaution of seeking an evidence-protection order for the 30,000 supposedly “private” emails Clinton subsequently took extraordinary steps to destroy (using data-erasing BleachBit)? Even Inspector Clouseau surely would find such gross neglect of professionalism deeply embarrassing. Wouldn’t you say so, Bob?

• In its investigation of suspected Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the FBI never even examined the DNC’s computer servers itself. It relied instead on a DNC cyber-security contractor, a firm called CrowdStrike, for such information as it received. Again, Inspector Clouseau surely would be deeply embarrassed by the FBI’s apparent amateurish fumbling here. Big Jim Comey says the DNC ignored “multiple requests” to let his FBI agents examine the servers. But the DNC says the FBI never asked — not even once! Hmmm. Somebody’s lying. Wonder who? Any ideas, Bob? By the way — taking Big Jim Comey at his word — since when does the FBI make “multiple requests” for information and then does nothing when its requests are ignored? Any thoughts on that, Bob?

• Keeping in mind that uranium is the key precursor ingredient for nuclear weapons, we come now to the Great Uranium Sale Caper. Ask yourself if there’s any Trump-Putin collusion that could remotely equal this caper.

In the Great Uranium Caper, the U.S. government sold off 20 percent of America’s very limited uranium mine assets to a Russian state corporation, Rosatom. Rosatom’s the Moscow-based outfit that oversees Russia’s nuclear arsenal. This mind-boggling transaction was approved behind closed doors by an Obama administration multi-agency panel, the “Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.”

Wait, there’s more.

Even as this sale was percolating through the Obama bureaucracy, it now turns out that the FBI was investigating various corruption allegations involving parties to the unfolding deal. (In 2015, three defendants were convicted of money-laundering, wire fraud and other charges.)

Did the FBI ever bother to inform the Obama uranium-sale committee about that ongoing corruption probe while the panel was deliberating approval of the momentous transaction? If the panel was never informed, why wasn’t it? If the panel was indeed informed, then it proceeded to okay the sale anyway, despite the corruption probe relating to the sale — right?

Bob? Bob? Hello? Special Prosecutor Bob ought to be able to find the answer to the uranium questions without much trouble. He was, after all, FBI chief during that uranium sale corruption probe.

Well, in any event, the uranium deal went forward, with some eyebrow-raising developments in its wake.

In Moscow, Bill Clinton pocketed a $500,000 “fee” for a single speech, pocketed the half-million from a Russian investment bank linked to one of the principal Russian parties in the uranium sale deal. And the Clinton Foundation later banked millions of dollars in donations from certain parties who had an interest in the approval of the uranium sale — this according to revelations in Peter Schweizer’s book, “Clinton Cash,” as confirmed by New York

Times reporting.

In response to which Hillary Clinton says: “Pffft.” That’s all been “debunked,” she poohpoohs, rolling her eyes and waving her hand.

It has? How so? By whom? When?

Bob? Bob? Hello? Anybody home?