Writing for National Review, Andrew McCarthy accused Mr. Mueller of overstepping his authority in bringing charges against Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, and Rick Gates, Mr. Manafort’s deputy. He called the indictments “shaky and overcharged” and an example of “an abusive prosecutorial tactic that flouts congressional intent.”
Much of this news coverage in the last several days has focused on two reports that Mr. Trump’s defenders say point to evidence that Mrs. Clinton and her campaign benefited from cultivating ties to Russians.
The first stems from a New York Times article in 2015 that said that while Mrs. Clinton was serving as secretary of state, the Obama administration approved the sale of a controlling interest in Uranium One, a company based in Canada that had uranium holdings in the United States, to a Russian atomic energy agency. The deal, the article said, benefited not just Russia but the men who helped build the company, major donors to the Clinton Foundation.
Some of the connections between Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation were unearthed by Peter Schweizer, a former fellow at the right-leaning Hoover Institution, who provided some of his reporting to The Times, which scrutinized the information and built upon it with its own reporting.
But the coverage received renewed attention this month after an article in The Hill said that the F.B.I. had been looking into evidence around that time — when Mr. Mueller was at the F.B.I. — that Russians were engaged in bribery so they could expand their energy interests in the United States. Mr. Trump called it “Watergate, modern age.”
