Quote (IceMage @ Dec 1 2017 01:35pm)
I'm not sure how you can say this. Mueller has the authority(given to him by Trump's deputy AG) to look into these other issues outside of strictly campaign officials colluding with Russia. He's using whatever facts he can find to flip people, in order to get to the truth of what happened during the campaign.
Do you actually expect Mueller's endgame to be charging Trump officials with violating the Logan Act?
If Mueller wanted to know the truth of what happened in the diplomacy
after the election he could have asked any 2-bit foreign policy analyst in washington
Exactly what good does it do to get leverage to expose Flynn/Kushner/Pence/Trump lying or misleading about the the back channel diplomacy after the fact?
If his end-game is to cause Trump enough political trouble to throw his presidency into jeopardy, that's a great way to accomplish it. If his goal was to find evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia during the campaign, that's a poor place to look.
What's the best case scenario, that he could crowbar his way into sensitive diplomatic channels just to figure out whether there's a whiff of any pre-existing arrangements?
Is he going to look at the lengths Flynn had to go through to set up a channel to Russia (and still get spied on) and use this as evidence to
exonerate Trump, since it demonstrates the opposite?
He was tasked with looking into whether Trump colluded with Russia to cheat the election. If he's using all his powers to go after complete tangents, process violations and now dig into politically explosive diplomatic squabbles, that's painting a partisan picture.