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Special Counsel Mueller Adds Another Obama Ally To His Team

• http://www.zerohedge.com

With each passing day, it's looking increasingly like the only people qualified to serve on Special Counsel Mueller's investigative team are lawyers who have either directly worked for and/or contributed to the campaigns of Barack Obama and/or Hillary Clinton.  As Reuters points out today, Mueller's latest hire is Greg Andres, a former DOJ attorney who was appointed during the Obama administartion and served under Attorney General Eric Holder.

A former U.S. Justice Department official has become the latest lawyer to join special counsel Robert Mueller's team investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election, a spokesman for the team confirmed.

Greg Andres started on Tuesday, becoming the 16th lawyer on the team, said Josh Stueve, a spokesman for the special counsel.

Most recently a white-collar criminal defense lawyer with New York law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, Andres, 50, served at the Justice Department from 2010 to 2012. He was deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division, where he oversaw the fraud unit and managed the program that targeted illegal foreign bribery.

Here's more on Adres' background:

Among the cases Andres oversaw at the Justice Department was the prosecution of Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford, who was convicted in 2012 for operating an $8 billion Ponzi scheme.

Before that, Andres was a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn for over a decade, eventually serving as chief of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney's office there. He prosecuted several members of the Bonanno organized crime family, one of whom was accused of plotting to have Andres killed.

A graduate of Notre Dame and University of Chicago Law School, Andres was a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin from 1989 to 1992.

He is married to Ronnie Abrams, a U.S. district judge in Manhattan nominated to the bench in 2011 by Democratic President Barack Obama.

As we've pointed out before, several of Mueller's early, notable hires were all been contributors to Hillary's and/or Obama's previous campaigns and Jeannie Rhee actually represented the Clinton Foundation.

Michael Dreeben, who serves as the Justice Department's deputy solicitor general, is working on a part-time basis for Mueller, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Dreeben donated $1,000 dollars to Hillary Clinton's Senate political action committee (PAC), Friends of Hillary, while she ran for public office in New York. Dreeben did so while he served as the deputy solicitor general at the Justice Department.

Jeannie Rhee, another member of Mueller's team, donated $5,400 to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign PAC Hillary for America.

Andrew Weissmann, who serves in a top post within the Justice Department's fraud practice, is the most senior lawyer on the special counsel team, Bloomberg reported. He served as the FBI's general counsel and the assistant director to Mueller when the special counsel was FBI director.

Before he worked at the FBI or Justice Department, Weissman worked at the law firm Jenner & Block LLP, during which he donated six times to political action committees for Obama in 2008 for a total of $4,700.


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