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.CreditCreditDennis Cook/Associated Press
By Nancy Gertner
Ms. Gertner is a retired federal judge.
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.
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.”
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
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.CreditCreditDennis Cook/Associated Press
By Nancy Gertner
Ms. Gertner is a retired federal judge.
- April 18, 2018
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.
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.”
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
