Jerome Corsi has accused Robert Mueller of prosecutorial misconduct.
The conservative commentator told Breitbart’s Amanda House on Thursday that the special counsel pressured him into pleading guilty, threatened to put him in jail for the rest of his life, and treated him “like a criminal” despite his cooperation with Mueller’s probe.
“They said, ‘If you don’t accept this plea deal, and plea to this one count, and say you’re guilty of it…then you’ll get no prison time, but if you don’t do this, we’re going to indict you with multiple counts, obstruction of justice, in Washington, D.C., where the jury will hate you, and we’ll put you away for 25 years,” Corsi said.
Corsi: Mueller threatened me
Mueller investigated Corsi on the suspicion that he acted as a middleman between WikiLeaks and Trump campaign operative Roger Stone, who was charged in January with lying about his communications with the organization, which is headed by Julian Assange. Corsi, who was not charged, said that Mueller’s team threatened him into taking a plea bargain to prove that Trump colluded with Russia.
“The prosecutors were convinced that I had introduced Roger Stone to Julian Assange, and I was the linchpin, I was key to the prosecutors establishing collusion argument, and if I had I lied or broken down and was willing to tell the prosecutors what they wanted, to stay out of prison, his report would have said collusion, because they believed I could give them the link they were looking for,” he said.
Corsi said that Mueller’s team was dangling a life sentence over his head given his age, and that his refusal to take a plea bargain made Mueller’s team “furious.” This aligns with an accusation Trump made in November that Mueller’s team was “screaming and shouting” at witnesses to threaten them into providing incriminating testimony.
“Well, I’m 72 years old, that would have been a life sentence. But as I point out in [my book] Silent No More, my wife woke up one morning and she said, ‘I’d rather visit you in prison for the rest of your life than have you not be the man I married,'” Corsi said. “I decided I was going to tell them I was not going to take their plea deal, and they were furious.”
Reckless prosecution
Corsi’s account of being prosecuted by Mueller corroborates what many critics had said of the special counsel probe long before it concluded: that Mueller recklessly targeted witnesses with “perjury traps,” a method in which witnesses are entrapped in lies, or simply misstatements, and then pressured to cooperate.
Mueller subpoenaed Corsi’s laptop and emails, and with that evidence in hand, subjected him to aggressive questioning that lasted 40 hours over 2 months, Corsi said. He went on:
They bring you into this unmarked FBI building in southeast Washington. You come in through the garage, you have to go in and give them in this safe room your laptops, all your electronic devices, your computer, everything, and they bring you up to this internal conference room, with no windows, no clock, and it’s me and my attorney David Gray at this point, to sit across from three of the prosecutors on Mueller’s team, and six to nine FBI, and they start grilling you for hour after hour, and if you forget some emails, or if you state something different from something they have from a phone call three years ago which you didn’t remember, all the prosecutors stand up, the FBI, they stomp out of the room, they call your attorney into the next room, they say they’re going to put you in prison for the rest of your life.
Like Stone, Corsi has attracted sympathy from those who see in Mueller’s prosecution methods a pattern of intimidation and abuse of power that reached a dramatic point in the armed, pre-dawn raid on Stone’s Florida home over process charges in January.
Corsi’s treatment was even the feature of a monologue by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who said that the 72-year-old was facing life in prison for the “crime of forgetting” about an email he forwarded more than two years before his questioning by Mueller’s investigators — an experience Corsi described in his book as a nightmare.
“I got subpoenaed on August 28. I provided my computers, my laptops, my backup devices, everything, I voluntarily gave to the Special Counsel and to his prosecutors, and from the beginning, they treated me like a criminal,” Corsi explained. “I would wake up at 4:30 in the morning, and look out to see if the FBI’s outside. It was — it’s been a nightmare.”
Restoring justice?
The conclusion of Mueller’s investigation with no collusion last month prompted calls for pardons for Mueller’s targets, including Stone and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Meanwhile, President Trump and his allies have stepped up calls for accountability for Russiagate’s perpetrators.
With Mueller’s probe now over, Corsi — who filed a $350 million lawsuit against Mueller, the DOJ, and the CIA — said he is hopeful that Attorney General William Barr will “turn the tables” and clean house at the FBI and DOJ. Barr said this month that he will begin reviewing misconduct by senior intelligence officials who spied on Trump’s campaign and played a role in the origins of the Russia investigation.
“As I point out in Silent No More, these prosecutors — we have a weaponized system of justice right now that’s very heavily politicized, and this was under Obama,” Corsi said. “Barr’s job is to restore justice, the American people’s faith in justice.”
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