The Mueller probe was: two years, 19 lawyers (all Democrat donors and partisans), 40 FBI agents, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 500 witnesses, and countless lives thrown into turmoil by harassing people about the aforementioned. All 2,800 people subpoenaed likely had to hire an attorney for at least $50,000 each to protect themselves from being railroaded for some minor misstatement, as Gen. Michael Flynn was.
It cost $40 million, but the government does not know for sure because it does not care what things cost taxpayers. The big witness was Robert Mueller who, when asked his name, asked what page that was on. Mueller was supposed to be the Democrats' Zeus, raining down thunder and lightning on Donald Trump. Yet all he did was create fog. He looked like an old man at his country club arguing with the manager about when happy hour ended.
Avoid the inclination to feel sorry for Mueller; he callously ruined many lives. If he were a real hero, he would have realized a month in that Trump did not collude with Russia and shut this investigation down. He cleared Trump but in a weaselly Washington way told Jerrold ("Lil Nads") Nadler and Adam ("Shifty") Schiff, "That is all I can do with no evidence; now it is up to you to impeach on no evidence."
Ron HartDemocrats made us endure an embarrassing $40 million witch hunt for their own political theater. That $40 million could have been better spent on getting about 100 of Hollywood liberals' jake-legged kids into USC.
Here are the silly process crimes this scorched earth debacle got us:
» Babyface George Papadopoulos entrapped for mis-recalling an irrelevant date on which something immaterial happened. He spent a few days in jail, and the streets were so much safer then.
» 13 Russian college kids for essentially practicing English online at a St. Petersburg troll farm for $4 per hour, and 12 Russian intelligence operatives who might as well have been picked from the GRU phonebook, none of whom will show up. He might as well have indicted Kim Jung Un's barber - at least that guy has committed crimes.
» Paul Manafort for standard Washington lobbyist/tax evasion crimes committed long before he met Trump, crimes the IRS should have gotten him for 10 years ago. Mueller had more armed federal agents at the pre-dawn raids of almost-octogenarians Manafort and later Roger Stone than we had at the bin Laden raid.
» Rick Gates for helping Manafort shake down the Ukrainian government and other sleazy Washington swamp rats.
» Michael Cohen for evading taxes and running Trump's bimbo silencing operation, also things the IRS should have gotten him for years ago.
» Michael Flynn for doing his job talking to his Russian counterpart and confusing the confusable Mike Pence on what he did and didn't say about Obama's idiotic 11-hour Russian sanctions. Comey laughed about entrapping Flynn by sending FBI agents over to interview him like it was a friendly visit.
» Sam Patten, a Manafort operative who forgot to register correctly as a foreign agent - another paperwork "crime" Mueller busted.
View other columns by Ron Hart
» Richard Pinedo, a grifter who never met Trump and got caught selling forged bank accounts online to Russians for a few bucks each.
That's all she wrote, and it's about as sad as it gets. At $40 million, that works out to about $5.7 million per indictment. Joe McCarthy would be proud.
The real crimes were committed by Obama officials like Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Strzok and others who knowingly used the DNC/Hillary bought-and-paid-for "opposition research" (the Steele Dossier) to attempt this coup.
Under oath, Mueller said "Yes," that if he could he would have indicted a sitting president. He had testified before and wrote in letters that he would not have. Had Mueller really cared about prosecuting someone for lying under oath about something meaningful, at that moment he had his man.
Contact Ron Hart, a syndicated op-ed humorist and TV/radio commentator, at Ron@RonaldHart.com or Twitter @RonaldHart.