The former assistant director of the FBI wonders who investigates the investigators in the wake of former Trump administration national security advisor Michael Flynn pleading guilty to lying to the FBI and agreeing to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

“Bob Mueller should have never been offered nor accepted the job as special counsel as he has a huge conflict of interest,” Jim Kallstrom tells Breitbart News. “He should have recused himself.”

Not only do observers describe Mueller and the man he recommended to replace him as FBI director, James Comey, as close or even best friends, but the special counsel pursues an investigation heavily involving the bureau he once led. How one maintains detachment in leading a team that includes numerous anti-Trump partisans in a probe involving one’s close friend and the former bureau for which Mueller served as director goes unexplained.

Other problems Kallstrom sees include the means by which investigators obtained information and what constituted probable cause to obtain it.

“The Obama administration apparently, had the advantage of using electronic surveillance, collecting information on the Trump campaign,” Kallstrom explains. “That collection, in my view, may be found to be unlawful.”

At the very least, one administration conducting surveillance on the opposition party looking to replace it strikes as unusual if not unprecedented. In 1972, for instance, President Richard Nixon’s political team relied on former agents of the FBI and CIA to gather intelligence on the Democratic Party.

If the surveillance and investigatory methods prove unlawful, Kallstrom notes that this puts Mueller in an awkward position of looking into his close friend and perhaps the bureau that both men once led.

“If they used the phony dossier as the predicate for the FISA order they obtained, that could be a huge problem,” Kallstrom tells Breitbart News. “If they knew the information was phony, that is a felony. If they did not know it was phony, they were incompetent.”

The “dossier,” which Americans belatedly discovered as an opposition research investigation funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and other partisan sources, served as a justification in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to obtain a wiretap on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled the opposition research dubbed an intelligence dossier in the media, admits that he neither traveled to Russia nor spoke to many of the sources for the anti-Trump document that the Clinton campaign funded and the FBI used in its investigation.

“This whole matter with the dossier and the investigations that ensued, including FISA surveillance and the unmasking of hundreds of names, in my view, will prove to be violations of the rules set down by the Congress for unmasking, or worse, will be found to be violations of federal law,” Kallstrom concludes. “The Justice Department should find out if the FBI paid for this phony dossier and should inspect the affidavit that was given to the FISA court to determine the accuracy of their probable cause.”