Fox’s Kilmeade Blasts Mueller Probe Over New DOJ Memo: Launched on a ‘Phony Premise’ With ‘No Foundation’

Fox & Friends took a break from around the clock coronavirus coverage on Thursday to slam Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation of President Donald Trump’s campaign and ties to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The morning show covered a new, mostly-unredacted memo the Justice Department released Wednesday night on what Mueller was authorized to investigate with his probe. Trump and his allies have been calling for the memo’s release for some time, expecting that it will prove Mueller and his team went beyond the intended scope of their investigation as they looked for criminal activity from the president’s campaign.

Brian Kilmeade lamented that the release took so long before making a slew of claims about what the memo reveals.

We are going to see that when Adam Schiff came out and says ‘we have indisputable evidence that Donald Trump colluded with Russia,’ there was nothing. He was flat out not telling the truth. My fear is that this is getting so deep that the average personal caught up in the pandemic won’t realize how big a story this, but it’s only going to get bigger as the attorney general digs deeper and deeper and John Durham gets closer and closer to unearthing what really took place… The probe shouldn’t have been launched, money shouldn’t have been wasted, the legal fees through the roof. People in jail. Michael Flynn among others. Roger Stone, all because of a phony premise launched from an investigation with no foundation.

Ainsley Earhardt agreed, saying it “just proves what the president has been saying,” that “we never would have known about this if Hillary Clinton were elected. Think about all the lives ruined because of this.”

Law&Crime, Mediaite’s sister website, picked up on the memo, “The Scope of Investigation and Definition of Authority,” which former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein sent to Mueller back in 2017. The memo was redacted when it was previously released to the public in the middle of Mueller’s investigation, but the new, less-redacted version shows Rosenstein approving investigations into Carter Page, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Michael Flynn.

Mueller was allowed to pursue allegations that Page committed a crime by colluding with Russian government officials in their election interference. Page was not indicted as part of the Russia probe, and last year, DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz called out “serious performance failures” from the FBI in his report on how they conducted their investigation. However, Horowitz also shot down a frequent pro-Trump talking point by saying there was no evidence of political bias in opening the Russia probe, and that there was sufficient predicate for it.

On Manafort, Mueller was asked to look into the collusion allegations, but he was also allowed to look into the former Trump campaign manager’s shady financial dealings and the payments he received from the Ukrainian government. He was been sentenced to just under 4 years in prison after being convicted for bank fraud, tax fraud and other financial crimes that came up in the midst of Mueller’s investigation.

On Papadopoulos, Mueller was tasked with seeing if the foreign policy adviser was involved in collusion or if he committed a crime “by acting as an unregistered agent of the government of Israel.” In 2017, he plead guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts.

On Flynn, Mueller was asked to look into the former national security adviser’s “conversations with Russian government officials during the period of the Trump transition,” and also whether Flynn lied to the FBI about his Russian contacts and failed to report them. Flynn previously pleaded guilty to giving the FBI false statements about his conversations with the Russia’s former ambassador to the U.S., but he has been attempting to retracted his plea, and newly released documents have sparked a debate on whether the FBI attempted to entrap him while interviewing him.

Watch above, via Fox News.