What do we do about a problem like Mueller?

Former Clinton pollster Mark Penn‘s Hill article “Comey, Mueller and the poisonous tree” posits some solutions.

The more we learn about how these massive investigations were started, the more they look so corrupted that this entire investigation now could now qualify as the fruits of a poisonous tree, a doctrine first adopted by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter as the only way to prevent government agents from abusing the rights of citizens and benefitting [sic] from those actions. The government can’t violate people’s rights with impunity and then just say “oops.”

The investigation was polluted from the beginning. Former British spy Christopher Steele was a government contractor when he illegally leaked the dossier and lied about it. Mueller team members and FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok operated with such open hatred for Trump that they were removed from the investigation after managing key parts of it. The heads of the FBI and CIA participated in spreading and vouching for a Trump dossier they never verified and yet used to spy on Americans.

. . . . Perhaps most puzzlingly, Rosenstein wrote a critical memo supporting the Comey firing and then appointed a special counsel after the firing. By doing this, combined with the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Rosenstein set up a government within the government, with a super broad charter and practical immunity from being removed. The Mueller investigation then operated without any independent supervision from outside the agency, review by any elected officials or contemporaneous judicial review.

With this kind of freedom, it’s no surprise the treatment of their early targets involved guns-drawn searches, threats to prosecute family members and plea bargains for dubious process crimes even for those who did no actual underlying wrongdoing. Only one of the early targets, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, is even in a position to challenge the special counsel, and he has been all but denied bail, had his assets frozen and even placed under a highly unusual gag order

. . . . The best way to end all this is not to fire Mueller and Rosenstein or wait for them to wrap it up but to challenge this entire process in court as irretrievably tainted. If Mueller does not agree to end the investigation in exchange for presidential interrogatories, then it may be time to try to block the whole thing in court, with full discovery into whether its foundation was so corrupted — and the stonewalling actions so blatant — that the doctrine of the fruits of a poisonous tree can be invoked to stop this national distraction.