Rachel Maddow noted on Tuesday that Robert Mueller’s team scored a major victory in court just ahead of his scheduled public testimony before two House committees on Wednesday.
As Politico reported on, “A federal jury on Tuesday convicted Bijan Rafiekian, a former business partner of Michael Flynn, on a pair of foreign-agent felony charges stemming from work the two men did for Turkish interests during the final months of the Trump presidential campaign in 2016.”
The report continued, “The verdicts, returned by jurors in Alexandria, Va., after a weeklong trial and only about four hours of deliberation, amount to a belated courtroom victory for special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated the $600,000 lobbying and public relations contract at the heart of the case and then handed the matter off to other federal prosecutors after Flynn’s guilty plea to a false-statement charge in 2017.”
Maddow said Mueller’s victory is the latest evidence that the special counsel’s work is on more solid ground than ever heading into his testimony on Wednesday, despite the nonsense being spewed by the right-wing media.
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“It’s weird,” the MSNBC host said. “It’s like the whole anti-Robert Mueller t-shirt arguments don’t work as well outside of Fox News.”
Video:
Robert Mueller scored a big court victory ahead of his testimony before the House. #ctl #p2 #maddow pic.twitter.com/pb8mztLe0a
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) July 24, 2019
Maddow said:
Perhaps when you have an anti-Robert Mueller crusading TV lawyer representing you, that seems like a surefire strategy to grease your own skids and get yourself off the hook. You know, blow up Mueller’s prosecution of this other guy. That will make Mueller look bad and then the whole deep state charade of the Mueller investigation will come crashing down and all the charges will be dropped against Mike Flynn, or at least he’ll get a light sentence and, you know, everybody will get a Fox News contributor contract and we’ll all laugh all the way to the bank. I guess that’s how they thought it was going to go. Today that strategy took a little bit of a hit when prosecutors actually won their case against Kian and got a conviction of him on all counts, even without Mike Flynn as a witness. And now in the wake of that, in the wake of that unanimous jury verdict, that he is guilty on all counts. Now Mike Flynn, President Trump’s national security adviser, is in the unenviable position of having his business partner convicted for something Flynn already admitted to prosecutors that he, himself, did. And in a failed effort to prevent that conviction from happening, Flynn has just blown up his own position as a cooperating witness for prosecutors, which was his best bet for avoiding a prison sentence for himself? And now his business partner is looking at a potential 15 years in prison. And Flynn still has his own sentencing in his own case ahead of him. Which, again, will hinge on just how valuable he has been to prosecutors all this time. The same prosecutors he just double-crossed and changed his story on and tried to kill their case against his business partner and he failed in that effort. Oops. Good luck at your sentencing. I mean, it’s weird. It’s like the whole anti-Robert Mueller t-shirt arguments don’t work as well outside of Fox News.
Robert Mueller is on solid ground heading into his testimony
For more than two years, Donald Trump and his allies in Congress and Fox News have worked tirelessly to undermine the credibility of Robert Mueller and his team of investigators.
The president and his protectors saw the investigation as a legal and political threat, and they thought the best way to disarm that threat was to smear a well-respect Republican in Mueller.
Even at this hour, the efforts to muzzle Mueller continue as Bill Barr’s Justice Department tries to limit what he says during his testimony on Wednesday.
But as Maddow pointed out on Tuesday, even though the special counsel investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia has ended, Mueller’s team continues to go about its business in court – and they continue to win.
So while Trump and his friends at Fox News paint Mueller as a man without credibility, he continues to notch legal victories against former Trump officials.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
