Robert Mueller’s infamous “pit bull” has joined the NBC news team, making his debut as a “legal analyst” on Wednesday for the first public impeachment hearing.
NBC described the Mueller team leader as a “legendary prosecutor”—which he is actually, but not in a good way.
Andrew Weissmann is a former Justice Department official who is known for engaging in ruthless and unethical behavior in several high-profile cases. Gen. Michael Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell, in fact, made him the lead villain in her book “Licensed to Lie” and has labeled him “the poster boy for prosecutorial misconduct.”
Weissmann will be offering advice to House Democrats for their impeachment inquisition against President Trump in his new position at NBC/MSNBC, further confirming the hyper-partisan nature of the Mueller probe.
On MSNBC Wednesday, he stressed that Democrat lawmakers need to present a case to the American people, arguing that Trump needs to be impeached right away, rather than waiting for the election to decide the president’s fate.
“The key thing that the Democrats have to think about is, where are you going to be at the end? What is it that you’re going to be asking people to really care about? And you need to find out — and make the case for — why should there be impeachment where people vote to convict as opposed to acquit now, and not sort of let it go to the election?” Weissmann said.
Once reason why Weissmann may like to see Trump removed from office ASAP is because he was allegedly involved in the DOJ’s alleged 2016 election malfeasance.
In testimony last year before a House task force investigating the Trump-Russia affair, DOJ official Bruce Ohr testified that in July of 2016, he met with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the discredited anti-Trump dossier for the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. By that time, Steele had completed a few installments of the dossier, including the salacious and never-verified sex allegations about Trump and prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.
Ohr testified that he relayed the information to Andrew McCabe, who was at the time the number-two man at the FBI, then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and top FBI agent Peter Strzok. And he testified that he told three people at the DOJ, including Andrew Weissmann who was already “working on some of these matters.”
Years before Mueller tapped his longtime comrade to join his team investigating President Trump and his associates, Weissmann led task forces on the Enron, Arthur Andersen, and Merrill Lynch cases, where he engaged in an unethical, scorched-earth prosecutorial style that upended countless lives.
Margot Cleveland of The Federalist detailed Weissmann’s misconduct during the Enron case after getting court documents unsealed.
The now unsealed records expose efforts by Weissmann, and the Enron Task Force he led, to intimidate witnesses and to interfere in the attorney-client relationship of a cooperating witness. Several affidavits unsealed last week catalogued veiled threats made to witnesses the Enron defendants sought to interview. However, because many of the attorneys would speak only off the record to Enron’s attorneys, the courts refused to consider the affidavits sufficient to prove prosecutorial misconduct.
According to Powell, a former federal prosecutor, “Weissmann quietly resigned from the Enron Task Force just as the judge in the Enron Broadband prosecution began excoriating Weissmann’s team and the press began catching on to Weissmann’s modus operandi.”
Weissmann is also responsible for completely destroying Arthur Andersen, a former accounting firm that had 85,000 employees worldwide.
Convicted at trial, a fatally damaged Andersen appealed. The Supreme Court eventually took the case. In 2005, the nation’s highest court overturned the conviction in a 9-0 opinion.
And in the Merrill Lynch case, Weissmann’s “reckless win-until-reversed modus operandi” sent four Merrill Lynch executives to prison until a federal appellate court overturned their convictions and freed the men.
Summing up, Powell wrote at the Hill that “Weissmann creatively criminalized a business transaction between Merrill Lynch and Enron.”
Four Merrill executives went to prison for as long as a year. Weissmann’s team made sure they did not even get bail pending their appeals, even though the charges Weissmann concocted, like those against Andersen, were literally unprecedented.
Weissmann’s prosecution devastated the lives and families of the Merrill executives, causing enormous defense costs, unimaginable stress and torturous prison time. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the mass of the case.
By getting hired as an analyst for a cable news network, Weissman fellows in the footsteps of fellow coup-plotters, former CIA director John Brennan (NBC), former DNI James Clapper (CNN) and fired FBI acting director Andrew McCabe (CNN).