How is it related to Robert Mueller? This is another case in which FBI Director Robert Mueller oversaw a political witch hunt against enemies of the Obama administration. Then the enemy was off-shore drilling industry, a prominent segment of the oil and gas industry. But the tactics that Mueller’s subordinates used to attack the industry was surprisingly similar to what the Mueller & Angry Democrats have been using against Trump lately.
Engineer Kurt Mix helped to stop the oil flow from the Deep Horizon disaster, which Obama administration later used to choke off oil and gas drilling of the US shores. Kurt Mix had the same role that Roger Stone played in the Trump election, in the Mueller’s mind. Mueller’s subordinates zeroed on Kurt Mix. Kurt Mix, a veteran oil engineer, was suspected of what can be called a derivative of a speech crime. British Petroleum was accused of telling the government wrong oil flow rate (a speech crime, especially when the flow rate could be only estimated), and Kurt was accused of deleting his text messages regarding that speech crime. Nevertheless,
April 24, 2012: FBI agents, with their guns drawn, storm Kurt’s home to arrest him and interrogate his wife; agents take Kurt on a “perp walk”.
May 2, 2012: Task Force prosecutors indict Kurt on two felony counts of obstruction of justice for text message string deletions that occurred in October 2010 and August 2011.
These were the same gestapo tactics and obstruction charges in the absence of a predicate crime that Mueller used later against Trump supporters. Robert Mueller was the FBI Director in the period when the FBI handled the case. The pressure to refer Kurt to prosecution came from DC, although I don’t know how hands on Mueller was. Even if he wasn’t hands on, he created the atmosphere of lawlessness, in which neither truth nor guilt or innocence matter; only what suits the Democratic agenda.
Speaking of the deleted text messages: they contained no secret or confidential data; Kurt Mix provided full access to them to everybody authorized to collect evidence; he deleted them only when he knew that the FBI had copies of them; he hired forensic experts to restore them on his phone, rather than “bleached” or destroyed it with a hammer.
Originally published on August 18, 2016:
After the tragic explosion on the Deep Horizon oil platform in 2010, who was the first person prosecuted by Obama administration? The answer will surprise even the regular readers of this site.
That person was BP engineer Kurt Mix, who led the efforts to stop the oil spill, and had no involvement with the well prior to the blowout. But the Department of Justice, headed by Eric Holder, indicted him anyway. Kurt was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice (carrying penalty up to 20 years in prison) for deleting text messages from his personal cell phone.
Of course, nobody expected DOJ to prosecute the government “regulators”, on whose watch the disaster happened. But prosecuting an engineer, who was not involved in any conduct that led to the explosion, but was sent in and literally tried to “save the planet”? (Well, the spill was tiny compared to the ocean size, but still, Kurt Mix probably contributed more to ocean protection than all environmentalist organizations over the last 20 years.) That was gross even for the Obama administration.
Obama administration diverted billions dollars from the settlement with BP to its friends among environmentalist and climate alarmist groups. There is strong evidence that it sabotaged efforts to mitigate consequences of the Deep Horizon disaster in order to promote its Climatist agenda. Crazed prosecution of the man who tried to stop the oil spill adds more weight to this conclusion.