The Trail judge who awarded th 100 million dollar pay out has somthing to say about Mueller! Stop your dishonorable spin of a true patriot Jenifer troll.

Jenifer all your lies in the world cant change this fact about Mueller-Robert Mueller is everything Trump will never be; honorable, brave, honest, truthful, trustworthy, diligent, credible, just + upstanding! read on!

Opinion

Smearing Robert Mueller
Sean Hannity and others are blaming the special counsel for one of the F.B.I.’s worst scandals. But there is no evidence to back up their charges.

Robert Mueller was a United States attorney in 1996.CreditDennis Cook/Associated Press

By Nancy Gertner
Ms. Gertner is a retired federal judge.

April 18, 2018

1314
Was Robert Mueller, the special counsel, complicit in one of the worst scandals in the F.B.I.’s history — the decades-long wrongful imprisonment of four men for a murder they didn’t commit?

This question, which has been raised before, is being addressed again — this time by some of President Trump’s most ardent supporters on the right, especially Fox News’s Sean Hannity but also Rush Limbaugh and others. My friend Alan Dershowitz, the retired Harvard Law School professor, has also weighed in.

In an April 8 interview with John Catsimatidis on his New York radio show, Mr. Dershowitz asserted that Mr. Mueller was “the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an F.B.I. informer.” Mr. Mueller, he said, was “right at the center of it.” Mr. Bulger was a notorious crime boss in Boston, the head of the Winter Hill Gang, and also a secret source for the F.B.I.

There is no evidence that the assertion is true. I was the federal judge who presided over a successful lawsuit brought against the government by two of those men and the families of the other two, who had died in prison. Based on the voluminous evidence submitted in the trial, and having written a 105-page decision awarding them $101.8 million, I can say without equivocation that Mr. Mueller, who worked in the United States attorney’s office in Boston from 1982 to 1988, including a brief stint as the acting head of the office, had no involvement in that case. He was never even mentioned.



The case wasn’t about Whitey Bulger but another mobster the F.B.I. was also protecting, the hit man Joseph Barboza, who lied when he testified that the four men had killed Edward Deegan, a low-level mobster, in 1965. Mr. Barboza was covering for the real killers, and the F.B.I. went along because of his importance as an informant.

But the evidence — or rather, lack of it — hasn’t stopped the piling on against Mr. Mueller, particularly by Mr. Hannity. In a March 20 broadcast, he said, “Robert Mueller was the U.S. attorney in charge while these men were rotting in prison while certain agents in the F.B.I. under Mueller covered up the truth.”

[Receive the day’s most urgent debates right in your inbox by subscribing to the Opinion Today newsletter.]

He returned to this theme on April 9, noting the Catsimatidis interview with Professor Dershowitz, and said: “Four men went to jail. Mueller was involved in the case. Two of them died in jail. They were all later exonerated.”



He made the same case two days later on a show that was promoted by a tweet by President Trump — “Big show tonight on @seanhannity.” Mr. Hannity laid out his case for “Deep State crime families trying to take down the president,” including the “Mueller crime family.” Among Mr. Hannity’s accusations: “During Mueller’s time as a federal prosecutor in Boston, four — four men wrongfully imprisoned for decades framed by an F.B.I. informant and notorious gangster Whitey Bulger, all while Mueller’s office looked the other way.”

Rush Limbaugh added his own variant on April 13. “The men would have been cleared but Mueller and the prosecutors withheld evidence from the court,” he said, adding, “Thirty years in jail, four innocent people, from the man of impeccable integrity inside the establishment swamp.”

The record simply doesn’t support these assertions. As I explained in my decision, because of the gravity of the accusations made by the imprisoned men, I analyzed the evidence “with special care in order that the public, and especially the parties, could be fully confident of my conclusions.”

That said, I was unsparing in my criticism of the F.B.I. and Justice Department officials who were responsible for this wrongful imprisonment. I named names where the record supported it. I resoundingly condemned the government in an unusual court session in which I read my conclusions.

Mr. Mueller is mentioned nowhere in my opinion; nor in the submissions of the plaintiffs’ lead trial counsel, Juliane Balliro; nor in “Black Mass,” the book about Mr. Bulger and the F.B.I. written by former reporters for The Boston Globe.

Mr. Barboza, like Mr. Bulger and one of Mr. Deegan’s killers, Vincent Flemmi, was in the Top Echelon Criminal Informant Program started in 1961 by J. Edgar Hoover. The program, as I noted in my opinion, “was strictly confidential, which not only meant that its existence would be kept secret from the general public and other divisions within the federal government, but also from state law enforcement agencies.” Mr. Barboza’s F.B.I. handlers, Dennis Condon and H. Paul Rico, and their superiors, knew that Mr. Barboza had perjured himself and that he was protecting Mr. Flemmi, but they withheld that information from state prosecutors because of his importance as an informant and to protect the informant program.

They continued to withhold the truth during commutation hearings for the men; each time the F.B.I. could have disclosed Mr. Barboza’s lie, it did not. In fact, the agency lobbied against clemency.

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Much has been made about an assertion made by Michael Albano, the former mayor of Springfield, Mass., who served on the Massachusetts Parole Board in the 1980s. He has said repeatedly that he saw a letter from Mr. Mueller, written during the period while he was in the United States attorney’s office in Boston, opposing the release of one of the four men.

But no copy of that letter has ever been produced, and Mr. Dershowitz now says in a statement that several days after making his remarks on the Catsimatidis show, The Boston Globe “revealed for the first time to my knowledge that no such letter has been found. I never repeated the allegation after that.” Still, he said, “further investigation seems warranted, since absence of evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence, especially in government files.”

Perhaps. But an accusation of such gravity demands more. I found no such letter from Mr. Mueller in the commutation files in the court record. Neither did the lead trial lawyer for the plaintiffs, Ms. Balliro, who has a complete copy of the parole board files of all four men, which were produced in response to a subpoena before the trial. Other letters from federal prosecutors are in those files. But there was nothing from Mr. Mueller.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that another federal judge, Mark Wolf, held hearings that revealed the F.B.I.’s refusal to inform the United States attorney in Boston that Mr. Bulger and his confederate Stephen Flemmi, brother of Vincent, were informants. In a report by the House Committee on Government Reform, which looked into the F.B.I.’s use of secret informants, the only reference to Mr. Mueller was a favorable one. He offered, as F.B.I. director, to work with the committee to reform the agency’s informant practices.

When Mr. Hannity and others say Mr. Mueller was responsible for the continued imprisonment of those four men, they are simply wrong — unless they have information that I, Ms. Balliro, the House investigators and the “Black Mass” authors did not and do not have. If they do, they should produce it. If they don’t, they should stop this campaign to discredit Mr. Mueller.

Nancy Gertner, a judge on the Federal District Court in Massachusetts from 1994 to 2011, is a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.S



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2018 01:09AM by riverhousebill.

Let's not sugarcoat this: Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and the others are not "simply wrong,"- they are lying in order to wreck the Mueller investigation and protect Donald Trump. Period.

There is a wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker this week showing a cameraman giving the countdown to the beginning of a tv broadcast featuring a Hannity- like figure at a desk and saying “Lights, Camera, Fiction.” Perfect!

So, let me get this straight....our odious excuse for a president, who once paid for full page ads DEMANDING the execution of five innocent black men, is now accusing an evidently innocent person of falsely imprisoning four men? Can we say, "projection"?

I'm reminded of the Frog, the Scorpion and the river. This is what Hannity, Limbaugh and their ilk do. I will go into work this morning, and an otherwise very intelligent colleague will have Limbaugh's show on, and sometime later will spew the latest bile from Limbaugh's show up on us. Freedom of speech is one thing, but to be allowed to outright lie to the public has got to stop.

Imagine how hard these conspiracy theorists and professional propagandists are searching for dirt on Mueller - a public servant who is doing his job. And this is what they come up with. It’s as close to de facto proof that Mueller is above reproach as you will get.

It's a sad day when a federal judge who presided over a lengthy trial and heard extensive evidence on FBI crimes has to write an opinion piece in the New York Times to refute the repeated lies of Hannity, Limbaugh, Jenifers and their ilk.

It is as though the world has turned on its head, where truth has to fight for itself daily against a sea of lies. This insane period of US history, made possible by a dishonest and fraudulent President, has to end before lasting damage is done.

Its Mueller Time and it time to Impeach this bone spur coward.
VD porn star of a president.

Many things I dont like about this socialist govt of Vietnam,
But one law I like here is a law on the books against Speculation.
Here in Vietnam you start a rumor with out facts to back it up you can go to jail.
You are free to speculate but you better have something more than say a Sean Hanity or Jenifer.

Remind you Ms Gertner Retired Federal Judge is same judge who awarded the 101 million dollar judgment
said Mueller had nothing to dowith 4 wrongfuly imprisoned.



Quote Jenifer Honest judge!
honest judges, U.S. taxpayers footed a $100 million court award to the four men framed for murders committed by (the FBI operated) Bulger gang. (

jenifer just like Trump no respect for truth or US military heros true patriots


Jenifer you have a spin problem DISGUSTING!

It's a sad day when a federal judge who presided over a lengthy trial and heard extensive evidence on FBI crimes has to write an opinion piece in the New York Times to refute the repeated lies of Hannity, Limbaugh, Jenifer and their ilk.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2018 02:31AM by riverhousebill.

Quote
riverhousebill
It is as though the world has turned on its head, where truth has to fight for itself daily against a sea of lies. This insane period of US history, made possible by a dishonest and fraudulent President, has to end before lasting damage is done.

Its Mueller Time and it time to Impeach this bone spur coward.
VD porn star of a president.

Many things I dont like about this socialist govt of Vietnam,
But one law I like here is a law on the books against Speculation.
Here in Vietnam you start a rumor with out facts to back it up you can go to jail.
You are free to speculate but you better have something more than say a Sean Hanity or Jenifer.

Wow, you have that law in Vietnam and you think that law is great! That explains a lot...

I'm sorry you're so upset that a war hero turned out to be dishonorable, dishonest, untruthful, untrustworthy, uncredible, unjust, unscrupulous, unprincipled, unethical, underhanded, crooked, shady and sleazy.

I like Alan Dershowitz. I'll have to look up that he said Mueller was never involved because I read many articles that said he was involved in the Whitey Bulger case.

So let's take out the Whitey Bulger case. There are still plenty of underhanded, unethical, unjust, unscrupulous, dishonest deeds that Mueller did in his past.

There was a lot of 911 dirt on Mueller besides the fact that he put 1000 immigrants in jail who were innocent just to make Bush look good like he was on top of the phony 911/War on Terror/Iraq situation.

Many other scandals, too. Read my thread again.

[www.rawfoodsupport.com]

I was going to post the next attrocity/outrage - about how he bungled the Anthrax cases - but it's kind of late now, so I'll do it tomorrow.

Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just writing what I read and stating my sources. So you're accusing the Huffington Post of lying, accusing Sara Carter of lying and other reputable news sources, news people of lying.

I feel sorry for that guy you work with who listens to Rush Limbaugh and then spouts off about it - lol

It's a sad day when a federal judge who presided over a lengthy trial and heard extensive evidence on FBI crimes has to write an opinion piece in the New York Times to refute the repeated lies of Hannity, Limbaugh, Jenifer and their ilk.

WTF with the double speak?

Jenifer presents as evidence Mueller corrupt example 4 men sent to prison,
govt awards over 100 million in damages wrongful imprisonment.

Places blame on Mueller as corrupt, Hum! read what federal Judge Gertner said again jenie my troll.

So now what? The judge you said is honest is lying saying Mueller had nothning to do with sending those mobsters up creek?

Your so full of it and this proves you are desperate to spin a false picture,
makes me realy wonder who you are with such disgusting propaganda lies from all the right wing Koch brother ect corrupt think tanks and Hanity Insanitys you copy and paste from

WHAT PART FEDERAL JUDGE GERTNERS QUOTE CANT YOU COMPREHEND? ____


Qoute Judge Gertner

-There is no evidence that the assertion is true. I was the federal judge who presided over a successful lawsuit brought against the government by two of those men and the families of the other two, who had died in prison. Based on the voluminous evidence submitted in the trial, and having written a 105-page decision awarding them $101.8 million, I can say without equivocation that Mr. Mueller, who worked in the United States attorney’s office in Boston from 1982 to 1988, including a brief stint as the acting head of the office, had no involvement in that case. He was never even mentioned.

Slime is bone spur cowards who screw porn stars while wife home prenant.
Slime is a man a baby man who says I like the ones who dont get caught.
Slime is a baby man who trashes every living and POW.
Slime is a baby man who says My Vietnam was avoiding stds in the bath houses of NYC.
Slime is Trump and his disgusting bone spur crowd who trash a true patriot war hero.

Quote
riverhousebill

The Trail judge who awarded th 100 million dollar pay out has somthing to say about Mueller! Stop your dishonorable spin of a true patriot Jenifer troll.

Jenifer all your lies in the world cant change this fact about Mueller-Robert Mueller is everything Trump will never be; honorable, brave, honest, truthful, trustworthy, diligent, credible, just + upstanding! read on!

Opinion

Smearing Robert Mueller
Sean Hannity and others are blaming the special counsel for one of the F.B.I.’s worst scandals. But there is no evidence to back up their charges.

Robert Mueller was a United States attorney in 1996.CreditDennis Cook/Associated Press

By Nancy Gertner
Ms. Gertner is a retired federal judge.

April 18, 2018

1314
Was Robert Mueller, the special counsel, complicit in one of the worst scandals in the F.B.I.’s history — the decades-long wrongful imprisonment of four men for a murder they didn’t commit?

This question, which has been raised before, is being addressed again — this time by some of President Trump’s most ardent supporters on the right, especially Fox News’s Sean Hannity but also Rush Limbaugh and others. My friend Alan Dershowitz, the retired Harvard Law School professor, has also weighed in.

In an April 8 interview with John Catsimatidis on his New York radio show, Mr. Dershowitz asserted that Mr. Mueller was “the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an F.B.I. informer.” Mr. Mueller, he said, was “right at the center of it.” Mr. Bulger was a notorious crime boss in Boston, the head of the Winter Hill Gang, and also a secret source for the F.B.I.

There is no evidence that the assertion is true. I was the federal judge who presided over a successful lawsuit brought against the government by two of those men and the families of the other two, who had died in prison. Based on the voluminous evidence submitted in the trial, and having written a 105-page decision awarding them $101.8 million, I can say without equivocation that Mr. Mueller, who worked in the United States attorney’s office in Boston from 1982 to 1988, including a brief stint as the acting head of the office, had no involvement in that case. He was never even mentioned.



The case wasn’t about Whitey Bulger but another mobster the F.B.I. was also protecting, the hit man Joseph Barboza, who lied when he testified that the four men had killed Edward Deegan, a low-level mobster, in 1965. Mr. Barboza was covering for the real killers, and the F.B.I. went along because of his importance as an informant.

But the evidence — or rather, lack of it — hasn’t stopped the piling on against Mr. Mueller, particularly by Mr. Hannity. In a March 20 broadcast, he said, “Robert Mueller was the U.S. attorney in charge while these men were rotting in prison while certain agents in the F.B.I. under Mueller covered up the truth.”

[Receive the day’s most urgent debates right in your inbox by subscribing to the Opinion Today newsletter.]

He returned to this theme on April 9, noting the Catsimatidis interview with Professor Dershowitz, and said: “Four men went to jail. Mueller was involved in the case. Two of them died in jail. They were all later exonerated.”



He made the same case two days later on a show that was promoted by a tweet by President Trump — “Big show tonight on @seanhannity.” Mr. Hannity laid out his case for “Deep State crime families trying to take down the president,” including the “Mueller crime family.” Among Mr. Hannity’s accusations: “During Mueller’s time as a federal prosecutor in Boston, four — four men wrongfully imprisoned for decades framed by an F.B.I. informant and notorious gangster Whitey Bulger, all while Mueller’s office looked the other way.”

Rush Limbaugh added his own variant on April 13. “The men would have been cleared but Mueller and the prosecutors withheld evidence from the court,” he said, adding, “Thirty years in jail, four innocent people, from the man of impeccable integrity inside the establishment swamp.”

The record simply doesn’t support these assertions. As I explained in my decision, because of the gravity of the accusations made by the imprisoned men, I analyzed the evidence “with special care in order that the public, and especially the parties, could be fully confident of my conclusions.”

That said, I was unsparing in my criticism of the F.B.I. and Justice Department officials who were responsible for this wrongful imprisonment. I named names where the record supported it. I resoundingly condemned the government in an unusual court session in which I read my conclusions.

Mr. Mueller is mentioned nowhere in my opinion; nor in the submissions of the plaintiffs’ lead trial counsel, Juliane Balliro; nor in “Black Mass,” the book about Mr. Bulger and the F.B.I. written by former reporters for The Boston Globe.

Mr. Barboza, like Mr. Bulger and one of Mr. Deegan’s killers, Vincent Flemmi, was in the Top Echelon Criminal Informant Program started in 1961 by J. Edgar Hoover. The program, as I noted in my opinion, “was strictly confidential, which not only meant that its existence would be kept secret from the general public and other divisions within the federal government, but also from state law enforcement agencies.” Mr. Barboza’s F.B.I. handlers, Dennis Condon and H. Paul Rico, and their superiors, knew that Mr. Barboza had perjured himself and that he was protecting Mr. Flemmi, but they withheld that information from state prosecutors because of his importance as an informant and to protect the informant program.

They continued to withhold the truth during commutation hearings for the men; each time the F.B.I. could have disclosed Mr. Barboza’s lie, it did not. In fact, the agency lobbied against clemency.

ADVERTISEMENT


Much has been made about an assertion made by Michael Albano, the former mayor of Springfield, Mass., who served on the Massachusetts Parole Board in the 1980s. He has said repeatedly that he saw a letter from Mr. Mueller, written during the period while he was in the United States attorney’s office in Boston, opposing the release of one of the four men.

But no copy of that letter has ever been produced, and Mr. Dershowitz now says in a statement that several days after making his remarks on the Catsimatidis show, The Boston Globe “revealed for the first time to my knowledge that no such letter has been found. I never repeated the allegation after that.” Still, he said, “further investigation seems warranted, since absence of evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence, especially in government files.”

Perhaps. But an accusation of such gravity demands more. I found no such letter from Mr. Mueller in the commutation files in the court record. Neither did the lead trial lawyer for the plaintiffs, Ms. Balliro, who has a complete copy of the parole board files of all four men, which were produced in response to a subpoena before the trial. Other letters from federal prosecutors are in those files. But there was nothing from Mr. Mueller.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that another federal judge, Mark Wolf, held hearings that revealed the F.B.I.’s refusal to inform the United States attorney in Boston that Mr. Bulger and his confederate Stephen Flemmi, brother of Vincent, were informants. In a report by the House Committee on Government Reform, which looked into the F.B.I.’s use of secret informants, the only reference to Mr. Mueller was a favorable one. He offered, as F.B.I. director, to work with the committee to reform the agency’s informant practices.

When Mr. Hannity and others say Mr. Mueller was responsible for the continued imprisonment of those four men, they are simply wrong — unless they have information that I, Ms. Balliro, the House investigators and the “Black Mass” authors did not and do not have. If they do, they should produce it. If they don’t, they should stop this campaign to discredit Mr. Mueller.

Nancy Gertner, a judge on the Federal District Court in Massachusetts from 1994 to 2011, is a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.S

I must insist that you provide links - as I do l- to articles/sources that you copy and paste. I find it much easier to read and understand when I read an article on a website than the little writing as it appears here.

Here is the link that I had to search out to where that Partisan Judge refutes the assertions of many others - both Lib and Republicans - that Mueller was involved in the Whitey Bulger case -

Opinion

Smearing Robert Mueller

Sean Hannity and others are blaming the special counsel for one of the F.B.I.’s worst scandals. But there is no evidence to back up their charges.

[www.nytimes.com]

************

I had misunderstood Alan Dershowitz' stance in the issue - he believes Mueller was complicit in the Whitey Bulger case. I like Alan Dershowitz. He's a Lib who is a lawyer/constitutionalist first rather than partisan/on a mission to "Get Trump."

Here is the link to the interview of Alan Dershowitz' which was mentioned in the opinion article of the NYT where he asserts that Mueller was involved -

[omny.fm]

[www.nytimes.com]

Now, the above New York Times opinion piece by Judge Nancy Gertner (that riverhousebill posted) - in which she asserts Robert Mueller's innocence in the Whitey Bulger case and disputes Alan Dershowitz claim that Mueller was involved - was written on April 18th of this year.

On April 23rd, Alan Dershowitz wrote the following opinion piece in response to Ms. Gertner's maintaining Mueller's innocence -

OPINION
Alan Dershowitz: Maybe Mueller should be investigated
by Alan Dershowitz
| April 23, 2018


[www.washingtonexaminer.com]

Just as the first casualty of war is truth, so, too, the first casualty of hyperpartisan politics is civil liberties.

Many traditional civil libertarians have allowed their strong anti-Trump sentiments to erase their long-standing commitment to neutral civil liberties. They are now so desperate to get President Trump that they are prepared to compromise the most basic due process rights. They forget the lesson of history that such compromises made against one’s enemy are often used as precedents against one’s friends.

But today’s fair weather civil libertarians are unwilling to give Trump — who they regard as the devil — the “benefit of law” and civil liberties.

Consider the issue of criticizing Robert Mueller, the special counsel. Any criticism or even skepticism regarding Mueller’s history is seen as motivated by a desire to help Trump. Mueller was an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston, the head of its criminal division, the head of the criminal division in Main Justice, and the director of the FBI during the most scandalous miscarriage of justice in the modern history of the FBI. Four innocent people were framed by the FBI to protect mass murdering gangsters who were working as FBI informers while they were killing innocent people. An FBI agent, who is now in prison, was tipping off Whitey Bulger as to who might testify against him so that these individuals could be killed. He also tipped off Bulger, allowing him to escape and remain on the lam for 16 years.

What responsibility, if any, did Mueller, who was in key positions of authority and capable of preventing these horrible miscarriages, have in this sordid incident? A former member of the parole board — a liberal Democrat who also served as mayor of Springfield, Mass. — swears he saw a letter from Mueller urging the denial of release for at least one of these wrongfully convicted defendants. When he went back to retrieve the letter, it was not in the file. This should surprise no one since Judge Mark Wolf (himself a former prosecutor), who conducted extensive hearings about this entire mess, made the following findings:

The files relating to the Wheeler murder, and the FBI's handling of them, exemplify recurring irregularities with regard to the preparation, maintenance, and production in this case of documents damaging to Flemmi and Bulger. First, there appears to be a pattern of false statements placed in Flemmi's informant file to divert attention from his possible crimes and/or FBI misconduct….
Second, contrary to the FBI's usual policy and practice, all but one of the reports containing Halloran's allegations against Bulger and Flemmi were not indexed and placed in an investigative file referencing their names. Thus, those documents were not discoverable by a standard search of the FBI's indices. Similar irregularities in indexing and, therefore, access occurred with regard to information that the FBI received concerning an extortion by Bulger of Hobart Willis and from Joseph Murray concerning the murder of Brian Halloran, among other things.
Third, when documents damaging to the FBI were found by the Bureau, they were in some instances not produced to the defendants or the court at the time required by the court's Orders.

Wolf also made a finding that directly references Mueller’s state of knowledge regarding the “history”:

“The source also claimed to have information that Bulger and Pat Nee had murdered Halloran and Bucky Barrett. The source subsequently said that there was an eyewitness to the Halloran shooting who might come forward, and elaborated that: 'there is a person named John, who claims he talked to Whitey and Nee as they sat in the car waiting for Halloran on Northern Avenue. He sits in a bar and talks about it. He saw the whole operation.” The source added that the person providing the information to the source “will be willing to talk to you (authorities) soon.” On Feb. 3, 1988, Weld directed Keeney to have the information that he had received sent to the United States Attorney in Boston, Frank McNamara, and to the strike force chief, O'Sullivan. Weld added that: “Both O'Sullivan and [Assistant United States Attorney] Bob Mueller are well aware of the history, and the information sounds good.”

It is not beyond the realm of possibility therefore that Mueller wrote this letter, even if it is no longer in the files. If in fact Mueller wrote such a letter, without thoroughly investigating the circumstances, he surely bears some responsibility. Moreover, it is widely believed among Boston law enforcement observers the FBI was not really looking for Bulger during the years Mueller was its director. It is believed the FBI was fearful about what Bulger would disclose about his relationship with agents over the years. It took a member of the U.S. Marshall’s office to find Bulger, who was hiding in plain view in Santa Monica, Calif.

Recently, a former federal judge, who used to be a civil libertarian, rushed to Mueller’s defense, declaring “without equivocation” Mueller “had no involvement” in the massive miscarriage of justice. Her evidence is the lack of evidence in the files. But no civil libertarian should place such great trust in government files, especially in light of Wolf’s findings. They should join my call for an objective investigation by the inspector general of the Justice Department before they assure the public “without equivocation” Mueller had absolutely “no involvement.”

But these “Get Trump At Any Cost” partisans have rejected my call for an investigation, out of fear that it may turn up information that might tarnish the image of the special counsel who is investigating Trump. Instead they criticize those of us who point out Mueller was “at the center” of the Justice Department and FBI while this miscarriage of justice occurred. All civil libertarians should want the truth about this sordid episode, and Mueller’s possible role in it, regardless of its impact, if any, on the Trump investigation. Mueller should welcome an objective investigation, which might eliminate any doubt about his role in this travesty. But too many former civil libertarians are prepared to sacrifice civil liberties and the quest for truth on the altar of “Get Trump.”

This is all too typical of the about-face many civil libertarians have taken since Trump became president. I have previously written about the ACLU’s abdication of its traditional role in challenging governmental overreach. For the new ACLU, getting Trump trumps civil liberties.

It is ironic to see many right-wingers being the ones to criticize overreach by law enforcement, while many left-wingers now defend such overreaching. Hypocrisy and selective outrage abounds, as neutral principles take a back seat. Conservatives used to say “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.” I would respond that “a liberal is a conservative who is being audited or whose kid was busted for pot.” Today, a civil libertarian is a conservative whose candidate is being investigated, while a law-and-order type is a liberal who wants to see Trump charged or impeached.

I am a liberal who voted against Trump, but who insists that his civil liberties must be respected for all of our sake.

Alan Dershowitz (@AlanDersh) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School and author of Trumped up! How Criminalizing Politics is Dangerous to Democracy.