Robert Mueller's past

Like many, we have placed a lot of hope in the Mueller investigation, but by pure chance of  a reference we read to a past scandal, we found a report on Mueller that we had compiled during the Bush years. Excerpts follow. 

It should be noted that while Mueller at the time was very much involved in protecting the establishment within the government, neither he nor some of the agencies he protected, such as the FBI, feel protective of Trump. Still, good journalism requires the facts even if they make one  a bit uncomfortable.

NOREIGA

JOEL SKOUSEN'S WORLD AFFAIRS BRIEF: [Robert Mueller] was responsible for the prosecution of Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama, who was the CIA's main money launderer for CIA operations in Panama. Even Congress knew of Noriega's CIA connections. Senator Kerry said that Noriega "had been on the payroll and an employee of the CIA for many, many, many years" Noriega was taken down by the CIA and prosecuted because he was found to be taking a much larger cut out of CIA drug profits than was agreed upon. During the trial, the presiding judge ruled that Noriega could not enter into evidence any documents proving his relationship to the CIA over the years. Mueller helped cover up this major issue by silencing Noriega . . . 

Mueller presided over the prosecution of John Gotti, the alleged Mafia head of the Gambino family group. CIA agent Richard Beneke, in response to a question of whether or not the Gotti family had ties to the CIA, testified, "Yes. As far back as 1968 and early 1969, we had begun to launder money from organized crime families in New York. At that time, Mr. Gotti was an up and coming member of one of the families. We used to wash their money out overseas and put it in Switzerland in nice, safe places for them."We do not know why the government turned on Gotti as a partner in crime. Perhaps he was also found guilty of skimming too much off the top.

ECSTASY CRACKDOWN

WASHINGTON POST, March 19,2001: The U.S. Sentencing Commission is fashioning a significant increase in penalties for people who import or sell "ecstasy," a move that would elevate the party pill used by hundreds of thousands of adolescents into the upper echelons of illegal drugs. Responding to a command from Congress, the commission is considering proposals that would make trafficking in ecstasy a more serious offense than dealing powder cocaine. Medical researchers opposed the step yesterday, testifying that ecstasy -- its purest form is known as MDMA -- is not as dangerous as cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine. "MDMA is less likely to cause violence than alcohol, less addictive than cocaine or tobacco and less deadly than heroin," said New York University psychiatrist Julie Holland, who works in Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric emergency room. "I see alcoholics and crack addicts every time I go to work. I do not see people whose lives have been ruined by MDMA." . . . Ecstasy is "quickly becoming one of the most abused drugs in the United States," Robert S. Mueller, acting deputy attorney general, testified yesterday. "The damage this drug can produce is significant and long-term," said Mueller, once the District's chief homicide prosecutor. "We have an opportunity to stop this growing problem before it becomes an epidemic, and the proposal put forth by the commission would very much help."


BCCI

Roberrt Mueller, Bush's apparent choice for head of the FBI, was involved in the shutting down of the BCCI investigation in this country. The failure to investigate the world's greatest financial scandal properly was probably the biggest dive ever taken by U.S. prosecutors and other law enforcement officials.


The story the media didn't tell you about BCCI - and Mueller's involvement - is contained in a report to the Senate foreign relations committee by Senators John Kerry and Hank Brown in December 1992. Here are some excerpts:

THE NATURE OF BCCI: BCCI's unique criminal structure -- an elaborate corporate spider-web with BCCI's founder, Agha Hasan Abedi and his assistant, Swaleh Naqvi, in the middle -- was an essential component of its spectacular growth, and a guarantee of its eventual collapse. The structure was conceived by Abedi and managed by Naqvi for the specific purpose of evading regulation or control by governments. It functioned to frustrate the full understanding of BCCI's operations by anyone. Unlike any ordinary bank, BCCI was from its earliest days made up of multiplying layers of entities, related to one another through an impenetrable series of holding companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, banks-within-banks, insider dealings and nominee relationships. By fracturing corporate structure, record keeping, regulatory review, and audits, the complex BCCI family of entities created by Abedi was able to evade ordinary legal restrictions on the movement of capital and goods as a matter of daily practice and routine. In creating BCCI as a vehicle fundamentally free of government control, Abedi developed in BCCI an ideal mechanism for facilitating illicit activity by others, including such activity by officials of many of the governments whose laws BCCI was breaking.
BCCI's criminality included fraud by BCCI and BCCI customers involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas; BCCI's bribery of officials in most of those locations; support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; management of prostitution; the commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers.

Among BCCI's principal mechanisms for committing crimes were its use of shell corporations and bank confidentiality and secrecy havens; layering of its corporate structure; its use of front-men and nominees, guarantees and buy-back arrangements; back-to-back financial documentation among BCCI controlled entities, kick-backs and bribes, the intimidation of witnesses, and the retention of well-placed insiders to discourage governmental action.

BCCI systematically relied on relationships with, and as necessary, payments to, prominent political figures in most of the 73 countries in which BCCI operated . . . These relationships were systematically turned to BCCI's use to generate cash needed to prop up its books. BCCI would obtain an important figure's agreement to give BCCI deposits from a country's Central Bank, exclusive handling of a country's use of U.S. commodity credits, preferential treatment on the processing of money coming in and out of the country where monetary controls were in place, the right to own a bank, secretly if necessary, in countries where foreign banks were not legal, or other questionable means of securing assets or profits. In return, BCCI would pay bribes to the figure, or otherwise give him other things he wanted in a simple quid-pro-quo. The result was that BCCI had relationships that ranged from the questionable, to the improper, to the fully corrupt with officials from countries all over the world,...

BCCI IN THE U.S.: In 1977, BCCI developed a plan to infiltrate the U.S. market through secretly purchasing U.S. banks while opening branch offices of BCCI throughout the U.S., and eventually merging the institutions. BCCI had significant difficulties implementing this strategy due to regulatory barriers in the United States designed to insure accountability. Despite these barriers, which delayed BCCI's entry, BCCI was ultimately successful in acquiring four banks, operating in seven states and the District of Colombia, with no jurisdiction successfully preventing BCCI from infiltrating it. The techniques used by BCCI in the United States had been previously perfected by BCCI, and were used in BCCI's acquisitions of banks in a number of Third World countries and in Europe. These included purchasing banks through nominees, and arranging to have its activities shielded by prestigious lawyers, accountants, and public relations firms on the one hand, and politically-well connected agents on the other. These techniques were essential to BCCI's success in the United States, because without them, BCCI would have been stopped by regulators from gaining an interest in any U.S. bank. As it was, regulatory suspicion towards BCCI required the bank to deceive regulators in collusion with nominees including the heads of state of several foreign emirates, key political and intelligence figures from the Middle East, and entities controlled by the most important bank and banker in the Middle East.

Equally important to BCCI's successful secret acquisitions of U.S. banks in the face of regulatory suspicion was its aggressive use of a series of prominent Americans, beginning with Bert Lance, and continuing with former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, former U.S. Senator Stuart Symington, well-connected former federal bank regulators, and former and current local, state and federal legislators. Wittingly or not, these individuals provided essential assistance to BCCI through lending their names and their reputations to BCCI at critical moments. Thus, it was not merely BCCI's deceptions that permitted it to infiltrate the United States and its banking system. Also essential were BCCI's use of political influence peddling and the revolving door in Washington.

BCCI AND LAW ENFORCEMENT: While the Justice Department's handling of BCCI has received substantial criticism, the office of Robert Morgenthau, District Attorney of New York, has generally received credit for breaking open the BCCI investigation. It did so not on the basis of having any witnesses or information available to it which were not available to other investigators, including the Justice Department, and the Federal Reserve. Rather, District Attorney Morgenthau broke the case because he recognized BCCI's importance and significance as a case of global international organized crime, and devoted sufficient attention and resources to force out the truth . . . [J]ust as illegal drugs are smuggled into this country, illegal profits must be smuggled out. The sums involved are truly staggering . . . the simple truth is that the wire transfer and the bank book are as much the tools of the drug trade as the scale and the gun. . . the nexus between drugs and money means that if we are to succeed in the war against drugs, we must be as vigorous in our prosecution of corrupt bankers as we are of street dealers.

In going after BCCI, Morgenthau's office quickly found that in addition to fighting off the bank, it would receive resistance from almost every other institution or entity connected to BCCI, including at various times, BCCI's multitude of prominent and politically well-connected lawyers, BCCI's accountants, BCCI's shareholders, the Bank of England, the British Serious Fraud Office, and the U.S. Department of Justice. Each, while professing to cooperate with the District Attorney, in fact withheld information from the District Attorney and in some cases, impede, delay, or obstruct his inquiry for months. Ultimately, Morgenthau proved BCCI's criminality, not because of information or cooperation provided by other government agencies -- with the key exception of the Federal Reserve, there was almost none -- but because BCCI had left a trail of evidence of wrongdoing there for anyone with the tenacity to pursue it.

Morgenthau's attempts to obtain documents concerning BCCI's money laundering and other crimes from Panama met similar resistance. Finally, when the District Attorney of New York turned to the Justice Department for assistance, it too refused to cooperate. As Morgenthau testified on May 23, 1991: "We've had a number of meetings with senior people in the fraud section of the Justice Department, and I think their position has been that they'd rather go it alone." 

In fact, at the time the Justice Department had ~ refused to provide the New York District Attorney with access to its documents and certain witnesses under its control in connection with BCCI, and in one case, a prosecutor in Tampa actually lied to the Morgenthau office . . 
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The Justice Department, along with the U.S. Customs Service and Treasury Departments, failed to provide adequate support and assistance to investigators and prosecutors working on the case against BCCI in 1988 and 1989, contributing to conditions that ultimately caused the chief undercover agent who handled the sting against BCCI to quit Customs entirely . . .


Justice Department personnel in Washington, Miami, and Tampa actively obstructed and impeded Congressional attempts to investigate BCCI in 1990, and this practice continued to some extent until William P. Barr became Attorney General in late October, 1991 . . .

Over the past two years, the Justice Department's handling of BCCI has been criticized in numerous editorials in major newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times . . . Typical editorials criticized Justice's prosecution of BCCI as "sluggish," "conspicuously slow," "inattentive," and "lethargic." Several editorials noted that there had been "poor cooperation" by Justice with other agencies. One stated that "the Justice Department seems to have been holding up information that should have been passed on" to regulators and others. Another that "the Justice Department's secretive conduct in dealing with BCCI requires a better explanation than any so far offered."

EARLY WARNINGS: Assistant Attorney General Mueller told the Subcommittee that while the CIA may have known about BCCI's criminality and illegal ownership of First American dating as far back as 1985, "regrettably, the Justice Department was not on the CIA's dissemination list until 1990 and therefore the Department never received this 1986 report at the time it was disseminated." 

Mueller is correct that no component of DOJ ever received the 1986 report, but the May 1989 report, which contained many of the same facts, including BCCI's ownership of First American -- in some cases with more detail provided -- was provided to both the DEA and the FBI . . .

The Justice Department, along with the U.S. Customs Service and Treasury Departments, failed to provide adequate support and assistance to investigators and prosecutors working on the case against BCCI in 1988 and 1989, contributing to conditions that ultimately caused the chief undercover agent who handled the sting against BCCI to quit Customs entirely.

Justice Department personnel in Washington lobbied state regulators to keep BCCI open after the January 1990 plea agreement, following lobbying of them by former Justice Department personnel now representing BCCI . . .

Some public statements by the Justice Department concerning its handling of matters pertaining to BCCI were more cleverly crafted than true . . .