Three House Republicans try to oust Mueller over laughable uranium deal conspiracy theory

On the very week that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe started producing evidence of problematic Russian contacts by the Trump campaign, three House Republicans suddenly want to kneecap Mueller. Who could have guessed it? The Washington Post writes:

Three conservative House Republicans are expected to file a resolution Friday calling on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to recuse himself from his probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, accusing him of conflicts of interest.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who wrote the resolution, accuses Mueller of having a conflict of interest because he was serving as FBI chief when the Obama administration approved a deal allowing a Russian company to purchase a Canada-based mining group with uranium operations in the United States, according to a draft obtained by The Washington Post.

Now keep this in mind: While there is zero evidence that Hillary Clinton was involved in any improper dealings on the Uranium One sale referenced above, there’s less than zero evidence that Mueller had anything at all do with it because his agency wasn’t even on the multi-agency governing committee that approved the sale.

President Trump has often brought up the Uranium One deal in 2010 as a way to accuse Hillary Clinton of potential corruption and foreign collusion, despite scant evidence she was directly involved in the decision to allow it to proceed. Nine government agencies make up the government committee that reviews such deals, along with five other observer agencies; the FBI is not one of them.

That didn’t stop Gaetz from introducing the resolution anyway.

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In that release, Gaetz makes some claim about an informant being muzzled by the FBI, which kept Congress “in the dark” about corruption related to the deal. Interestingly, that’s not the reasoning Gaetz gave to the Washington Post for his calls for Mueller to step down.

“Someone who was involved in a deal cannot reasonably be trusted to scrutinize that probe,” Gaetz said in an interview.

Gaetz added that he does not trust Mueller because of his “close personal relationship” with former FBI director James B. Comey.

Wonder how long it took Gaetz’s staff to find another peg for him to hang his hat on. In the end, he only convinced two other House members to sign on and one of them is Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas. ‘Nuff said.

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