A week or so ago, in an attempt to carry water for his good friend, the president*, and for his lawyer, Michael Cohen, Sean Hannity put something up on his electric teevee screen that looked like a combination of a seventh-grade history fair project and the walls of Russell Crowe’s cabin in A Beautiful Mind. It was titled The Mueller Crime Family, and it purported to demonstrate all the Deep State connections that the special prosecutor has with various bad guys, all of which purported to disqualify Mueller from investigating the president* and the somewhat more disorganized crime over which he appears to preside. Then, I noticed something strange in the middle of the exhibit.

Holy psychopaths, I thought. That’s Whitey Fcking Bulger!

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For the benefit of those who haven’t read any of the approximately 300 books about the case, or seen any of the three movies that, fictionally or otherwise, have been made about it: Bulger was the South Boston crime lord and serial killer who was protected in his life of mayhem because he was being run as an informant by a completely corrupt FBI field office in Boston, and specifically by a crooked fed named John Connolly, who tipped Bulger that actual cops were closing in on him, so Bulger could go on the lam for sixteen years.

One of the truly awful things that happened in that period of time was that, through the unpardonable connivance of federal law enforcement, four innocent men were imprisoned for decades so that the Feds could conceal their involvement with another local hood, Joe Barboza. It was the latter’s perjured testimony that sent the four men away. Two of them died in prison. After a long legal battle, the two survivors of this horrendous miscarriage of justice, who were as innocent as the five black kids the president* wanted killed by the state over the Central Park rape case, won a $105 million verdict against the government. It was not half-enough.

As it happens, Mueller worked in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston between 1982 and 1985, during the heyday of Whitey’s career with the Feds, and while the case of the four unjustly imprisoned men was fighting its way upwind in the courts against pushback by a complicit federal law-enforcement community. Spectacularly, the president*’s primary apologists, including Hannity and the newly recruited Alan Dershowitz, as well as influential Boston columnist and talk-radio host Howie Carr, are now working overtime to pin substantial blame for the baroque corruption on Mueller. It’s all squid-ink and desperate crapola, but it seems to be finding an audience among the Deep State paranoids who are the president*’s most loyal followers.

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And now we have Nancy Gertner, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, but also the federal judge who heard the case of the four innocent men and who awarded them their $105 million, explaining in an op-ed in The New York Times that any attempt to involve Mueller in any of this is a dishonest attempt to undermine Mueller’s investigation.

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.

Gertner makes clear that Mueller had no involvement in the Barboza case, let alone in anything having to do with Whitey Bulger. One of the more awkward episodes in this latest attempt at diversion involves a Springfield mayor named Mike Albano, who has been dining out on his claim that he saw a letter from Mueller opposing parole for one of the four men. Dershowitz ran this rap on a radio show. Gertner, again:

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.”

Lovely. At this point in his career, the Dersh is reduced to quoting Donald Rumsfeld on the lack of WMDs in Iraq while pretending to be William Kunstler. Boston somehow gets involved in everything. It’s part of why we’re so damned insufferable.

Editor's Note: There were five falsely accused in the Central Park rape case, not four. We regret the error.



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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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