Federal Judge Rebukes Hannity, Limbaugh For Using Whitey Bulger Scandal to Smear Mueller

Despite what Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative commentators would have us believe, special counsel Robert Mueller was not involved in the protection of notorious mobster Whitey Bulger – in fact, he wasn’t even mentioned in the case.

Says who? Nancy Gertner, the federal judge who presided over a case against the FBI brought by the men who were wrongfully convicted (and their families in the case of two men, who died in prison).

Gertner wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times Wednesday that because she wrote a 105-page decision which awarded $101.8 million to the damaged parties, she can state “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.”

She wrote further:

I was unsparing in my criticism of the F.B.I. and Justice Department officials who were responsible for this wrongful imprisonment. I named names where the record supported it. I resoundingly condemned the government in an unusual court session in which I read my conclusions.

Mr. Mueller is mentioned nowhere in my opinion; nor in the submissions of the plaintiffs’ lead trial counsel, Juliane Balliro; nor in “Black Mass,” the book about Mr. Bulger and the F.B.I. written by former reporters for The Boston Globe.

The case Mueller may – and it’s an incredibly tenuous “may” – have had some involvement with would have been that against Joseph Barboza, which was a similar case in which the FBI protected a mobster who perjured himself and knowingly incarcerated the wrong people. But there’s no evidence of that, either, says Gertner.

A man named Michael Albano, who was the former mayor of Springfield, MA and served on the Massachusetts Parole Board in the 1980s asserted that he saw a letter from Mueller opposing the release of one of the men who was wrongly convicted, but no copy of the letter has ever been produced.

“An accusation of such gravity demands more,” Gertner wrote. “When Mr. Hannity and others say Mr. Mueller was responsible for the continued imprisonment of those four men, they are simply wrong — unless they have information that I, Ms. Balliro, the House investigators and the “Black Mass” authors did not and do not have.”

“If they do, they should produce it. If they don’t, they should stop this campaign to discredit Mr. Mueller,” she concluded.

[image via screengrab]