When an investigation generates crimes, it’s a crime.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

Petraeus, Obama’s CIA Director, lied to FBI agents about passing classified materials to his mistress. Despite being caught in the lie on a recording, he was never charged for it, as Flynn was. Instead he only pleaded guilty to mishandling classified information and received a slap on the wrist.

While Justice Department personnel had wanted to hold Petraeus accountable, the final decision was made by Attorney General Holder and FBI Director Comey. Lawyers for Petraeus insisted that he couldn’t be charged with lying to the FBI because DOJ guidelines recommend not charging “in situations in which a suspect, during an investigation, merely denies guilt in response to questioning by the government.” Petraeus admitted making false statements, but was never charged over them.

That’s what makes Flynn’s case so striking.

General Petraeus lied about committing a crime. His mishandling of classified information was a serious issue. And yet he was never charged for it.

General Flynn lied about something that was not a crime. His conversations were authorized by officials in the incoming Trump administration. And even by the outgoing Obama administration.

A week before Trump’s inauguration, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that there was nothing “necessarily inappropriate about contact between members of the incoming administration and foreign officials” because Flynn was “part of the transition team.”

The question had been about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador.

Obama’s own people had been carrying on talks with Iran and Syria before he entered the White House. The Iranian contacts eventually climaxed in an illegal agreement in which the Obama regime shipped billions in foreign currency to the terror regime on unmarked cargo planes. Those billions have helped finance Iran’s current war in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Israel, Lebanon and around the region.

Flynn was doing his job.

Team Mueller, with its string of Obama and Hillary backers, hasn’t actually found a crime that he committed. The only crime it could find was created wholly out of its own investigation.

When a crime wouldn’t exist without an investigation, then the investigation created the crime.

And it’s the investigation that is the crime.

The secondary crime here was created by entrapping Flynn as part of an investigation that was supposedly pursuing a primary crime that it, once again, failed to prove.

And Team Mueller has yet to find hide or hair of this crime. After all its grandstanding, it has yet to charge a single person for the crime it was supposed to be investigating. But it has managed to charge two people, George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn, for lying to investigators. It has not charged them with doing a single illegal thing that predated the Mueller investigation.

The same establishment that wouldn’t charge Petraeus with lying about a serious crime because it isn’t policy has nothing to charge Flynn with except lying about a wholly legal act against its own policy.

Team Mueller has likewise yet to establish that George Papadopoulos committed a preexisting crime.

When an investigation generates crimes, instead of exposing them, it’s a witch hunt. And the Clinton and Obama judges as well as investigators make it abundantly clear that this is a partisan witch hunt.

While Flynn didn’t violate the law, he interfered with Obama’s foreign policy agenda. And Obama officials did consider that a crime. While Petraeus’ lie was established by a recording made by his mistress, Flynn was eavesdropped on for the benefit of members of the Obama administration.

And they were determined to punish him and President Trump for obstructing their political agenda.

That’s why the Mueller investigation isn’t about what Flynn did during the election, the supposed purpose of the entire investigation, but what he did during the transition. The claims of election tampering are a front. The election collusion stuff is nowhere in sight.

Team Mueller’s fishing expedition has found and created a number of crimes. But none of those crimes involve collusion. None of them have anything to do with election tampering or rigging.

The endgame, as Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, has made clear is to take down President Trump, not by establishing a crime, but by destabilizing his administration.

Mueller has produced no collusion, but what he offers is theater. The performance destroys lives. But its real goal is to undermine Trump domestically and internationally. The fake ABC News report that caused tremors in the stock market shows how the campaign can undermine Trump’s economic accomplishments by raising the specter of impeachment. And why should North Korea, Iran or the Palestinian Authority take Trump seriously when they get the impression that he might be gone soon?

The Mueller investigation is the latest act in the total war waged by Obama against Trump. The same rigged system that gave Hillary a pass is now being utilized to generate crimes by Trump officials.

Peter Strzok, the lead investigator in the Clinton email scandal, was sending pro-Clinton and anti-Trump messages during his extramarital affair with a woman working for FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. McCabe’s wife had received a sizable amount of money from a Clinton ally. Strzok was on Mueller’s team until he had to be removed because of his shenanigans. Instead of coming clean about his removal, the FBI stonewalled Congress about what really happened. It’s gotten so bad that Rep. Nunes and other House Republicans are preparing to charge the FBI head with Contempt of Congress.

Strzok’s investigation of Trump relied on the Steele dossier that was paid for by Hillary and handfed by at least one current Russian intelligence operative. That was the same dossier that figures in the FBI chose to fund despite its utter lack of credibility and its partisan origins in the Clinton campaign.

We’re now in Act 3 of a leftist conspiracy to invent a conspiracy to justify its own conspiracy.

In Act 1, the Clintons created the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory and used a British former intelligence agent with connections to Russia and the FBI to inject the dossier into the FBI. In Act 2, Obama officials used the dossier to justify their eavesdropping on Trump officials In Act 3, Team Mueller is using that illegal eavesdropping to entrap and generate crimes against assorted Trump officials.

After all this time, the conspiracy theory remains as unproven as ever.

And the conspiracy theory is that the past election was illegitimate, that Trump doesn’t belong in the White House and Hillary does, and that radical measures must be taken against the First Amendment, the Electoral College and our entire political system to prevent such a “mistake” from occurring again.

That’s not just a conspiracy theory. It’s a radical leftist conspiracy against America.

Mueller had every opportunity to make his case. He could have run a fair and transparent investigation. Instead he’s become the public face of a partisan witch hunt in which a confederacy of Hillary supporters and judges dispense with everything from attorney-client privilege to the U.S. Attorneys’ manual so that they can offer fresh heads to the baying D.C. mob reading the Washington Post.

Enough.

Mueller must go. This circus must end. And a real investigation must be conducted of the Obama administration’s eavesdropping on Trump officials and members of Congress. Both the DOJ and the FBI require urgent housecleaning. That is the only meaningful result of the Muller investigation.

Either you drain the swamp. Or the swamp drowns you.