Florida Republican Representative Ron DeSantis has introduced a bill that would place severe limits on what Special Counsel Robert Mueller and how long he could investigate at all.
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DeSantis has put forward a provision that would halt funding for Mueller’s probe six months after the amendment’s passage. It also would prohibit Mueller from investigating matters that occurred before June 2015, when Trump launched his presidential campaign.
By setting a known, and short, deadline on the investigation, DeSantis would destroy Mueller’s ability to move forward in typical fashion by bringing in low-level participants and getting them to “flip” on those at the top. Why would anyone confess, offer testimony, or cooperate in any way when they knew they had only to wait a few months for the whole investigation to go away?
The 2015 barrier would also create an artificial barrier, blocking off a huge part of Trump’s two decade relationship with Russian oligarchs and money laundering. The partnership with Felix Sater and Bayrock? The period where Donald Trump Jr. expressed that Trump was getting most of his funding from Russia and where Eric Trump stated that their golf course projects didn’t need banks because Russians were providing the cash, would be beneath that magic line. Even the events related to the “pee pee tape,” which happened in 2013, would be eliminated.
Under DeSantis’s bill, Mueller’s team would be turned into a joke, in which no one need cooperate and nothing could be followed up, and Trump need only sit and tweet his contempt until the “investigation” was starved of cash.
"Congress should use its spending power to clarify the scope and limit the duration of this investigation," [DeSantis] explained. Deputy Attorney General Rod "Rosenstein has said that the DOJ doesn't conduct fishing expeditions; the corollary to this admonition should be that Congress will not fund a fishing expedition."
In contrast to DeSantis’s bill, several Democrats have offered resolutions that would protect Mueller’s investigation, making it harder for Trump to act to dismiss Mueller or limit the access of his team. DeSantis’s amendment is currently attached to the Omnibus spending bill.