The process is the punishment - Corsi rejected the deal and was never indicted.

Well this slipped under my radar screen. From 'Scorched Earth': Mueller's Targets Speak Out by Paul Sperry.

Veteran journalist Art Moore was editing a story on the Trump-Russia probe last October when he heard a knock at the door. He saw a couple of men in suits on the front porch of his suburban Seattle home and thought they were Jehovah’s Witnesses making the rounds. But they weren’t missionaries there to convert him; they were FBI agents there to interrogate him, sent by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The G-men wanted to talk about WikiLeaks, specifically whether the Trump campaign had any connection to the hacktivist group’s release of thousands of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 election.

The two FBI agents – cyber-crimes experts Jared Brown and Aleks Kobzanets, the latter of whom had a Russian accent – grilled Moore, an editor for the news site WND.com, for about 90 minutes. Among other things, they asked about former WND correspondent Jerome Corsi and whether he had any advance knowledge of WikiLeaks' dumps of Clinton campaign emails. Corsi, who is friendly with the president, had used Trump confidante Roger Stone as a source during the campaign.

“They were clearly on a fishing expedition,” Moore said, recounting the incident to RealClearInvestigations publicly for the first time.

“They seemed desperate to find something to hang onto the narrative” of Russian collusion, he said.

A former Associated Press and Christianity Today reporter who co-authored a best-selling book on homeland security, Moore said he believed the special counsel secretly looked through not just his personal emails and text messages, but also his phone records, even though the agents assured him he was not a target of investigation.

The first few paragraphs, I am thinking, "This is weak tea." You never want to tangle with the legal system. The government is Leviathan and you are krill. Of course it is stress inducing, even if you are innocent. Perhaps, especially if you are innocent.

But as his reporting continues, the Mueller investigation actions seem more and more intrusive and abusive. It is hard to separate the fact that the FBI agents were tasked with an investigation which perforce requires investigation with the appearance that they were actually intentionally making the process so punishing that they could coerce the outcomes they were seekking.

One of their target treated especially intensely was Jerome Corsi.

Corsi and his wife, Monica, were spending a quiet August afternoon in 2018 at their Denville, N.J., home when they heard the doorbell ring. The best-selling conservative author and Harvard Ph.D. opened the door to find two of Mueller's agents delivering a subpoena to appear 10 days later before a federal grand jury in Washington.

Corsi's appearance before “angry” anti-Trump D.C. jurors was stressful, he said, but nothing compared with what he called Mueller's “mental torture.” Over the next two months, the 72-year-old Corsi said he was interrogated six times by a battery of the special counsel's lawyers and investigators inside a windowless conference room in an unmarked FBI building in southeast Washington. Some of the sessions stretched up to eight hours. He said he was often left alone in the sparse room for long periods with no cellphone, laptop or even a book to read, while investigators observed him from another room. He was not allowed to leave to go the bathroom without being accompanied by an armed agent.

One of his interrogators was Jeannie Rhee, a former top Obama appointee and Clinton donor and supporter who previously defended the Clinton Foundation in a fraud case. She was one of at least 13 registered Democrats on Mueller’s team of 18 prosecutors. “Are you protecting Donald Trump?” Corsi said Rhee barked at him. She and the other prosecutors “were out to prove that I was the link between [Wikileaks founder Julian] Assange and [Trump confidante Roger] Stone — the key link to Assange that the prosecutors had to establish to advance their Russian collusion narrative.”

But Corsi had no advance knowledge of Assange’s release of Clinton campaign emails. And neither, Corsi believed, did his pal Stone. They also had no source connecting them to Assange, though they gave the impression they did on Twitter. “Jerry and Roger blow a lot of smoke,” Moore said. “Both guys like to boast about having inside information.”

“I didn’t know Assange and was never in touch with him and had no way to contact him,” Corsi said. “That’s what they couldn’t believe.”

He said the three prosecutors assigned to his case tried to force him to admit he and Stone did know Assange; and when he wouldn’t, they threatened him with prison. “They began yelling at me,” he said, "reminding me I could be sent to prison for giving the FBI false information."

Then he said they threatened to charge him for inconsistencies in his testimony, which they wanted to use to indict Stone, whom Mueller later arrested for lying to Congress in lieu of Russian conspiracy charges (Corsi is listed as a material witness — “Person 1” — in the indictment). His recollection fuzzy, Corsi asked to have access to his emails and his Verizon call records from 2016, which prosecutors had obtained. But he said they “refused" to provide the information to aid his memory. On the other side of the table, his interrogators checked his story for holes by referring to an eight-inch-thick binder of records.

Mueller’s office took his iPhone and two Apple computers — along with all his passwords — and mapped out every email, text message and tweet he had sent in 2016. Corsi said they even traced the Google searches he conducted as part of research for his news articles.

He said Mueller’s investigators engaged in “Gestapo tactics,” including harassing his friends and family — as well as his sources. “They got abusive when they didn’t get what they wanted,” he said, "and they got nasty.”

Expanding its search for incriminating evidence, Mueller’s office sent additional FBI agents to question several of Corsi’s news sources. One team of investigators showed up at the doorstep of JoAnne and James Moriarty, who were sources for a completely unrelated story of his. Nevertheless, they grilled the couple, separately, for about three hours to see if they knew if Corsi had any connections to WikiLeaks.

“They just keep thinking they could find something,” Corsi said.

At the beginning of Corsi's account it easy to think "The agents were doing their job. Just because he is a professional, why would they treat him differently than if they were interviewing a more obvious criminal?"

But the treatment gets more and more aggressive. More obviously simply wrong.

He said the stress caused him to have "a nervous breakdown.” He suffered insomnia, as did his wife, who was worried about him and crying a lot. He said Mueller’s office had leaked information from the grand jury hearing to CNN, which dispatched a news crew to camp outside their home in a black SUV. Feeling chest pains and shortness of breath one day, Corsi made an appointment with his cardiologist, who warned that the "tension from Mueller" could trigger a heart attack or stroke.

Anxious to end the siege, Corsi last November scheduled three in-studio TV interviews, including with NBC News and ABC News, to go public with his plight. But he had to cancel them all at the last minute. In the middle of his planned media campaign, his lawyer got an urgent call from Rhee and other prosecutors. His lawyer conveyed that they were “desperate” to stop him from doing more media (the prior day he had given an interview to One America News Network). They offered a plea deal: cop to one count of perjury for no jail time. He had one week to accept the offer.

Corsi rejected the deal and was never indicted. The Mueller report indicates he is no longer under active investigation.

So the FBI ruthlessly interrogates an elderly journalist to the point of a heart attack (another journalist had a stroke), leaks information to the press, and threatens Corsi to the limit by offering a plea deal. And all along they had nothing. He was innocent. Sure begins to sound like an abusive process.

In the end, Corsi was drilled by Mueller’s team for more than 40 hours, and in the process, racked up more than $100,000 in legal bills.

“I still haven’t recovered physically or financially,” he told RCI, though he has received donations from a legal defense fund. “We’re just now putting our lives back together."

He maintained that his “Kafkaesque” nightmare at the hands of Mueller was “nothing more than punishment for the crime of being a vocal supporter of Donald Trump.”

“It was a completely fraudulent way to conduct an investigation,” he said. “Usually you start with a crime and find the criminals. But in this case, they started with the ‘criminal’ and looked for the crime.”

Yes, that is what it looks like.

I wonder if new of this reporting might be why Mueller so oddly declined to answer questions at his final press conference.

Page after page of this sort of thing by Sperry. Case after case where innocent civilians are threatened, harassed to the point of illness, and near-bankrupted. If there were reasonable grounds to suspect them of crimes, some of this might seem within reason. Instead, most of these interviewees seem to simply have been fishing expeditions to find something to support a predetermined assumption. It does seem like “they started with the ‘criminal’ and looked for the crime.”

Its a fine line between an aggressive investigation and an abusive one. I was formerly inclined to the first assessment. This reporting tilts me towards the latter. But with a low degree of confidence.

This might end up being a double irony.

It is now clear that the original accusation of Russian collusion was a manufactured political event and never a real crime. The only crime was the making of the false accusation and then the usurpation of government power for partisan ends.

Similarly, it begins to look like the only crime in the Special Investigation was the conduct of the investigation itself.

A final thought. This sure seems like scorched earth strategies by the old Mandarin Class. You almost have to wonder if this goes beyond partisan competition. I wonder if it is something more existential.

You think about the hundreds of millions gleaned from special deals arising from their "public service" by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and their families from some of the shadiest characters in Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East. Is the old guard simply defending their gravy train? And of course their legions of enablers would need to defend the status quo because they are the ones most likely to be convicted.

Which raises the separate issue. I prize rule of law, equality before the law, and the smooth transition of power between administrations. If we are to root out the corruption implied by the line of thinking above, something has to give. Rule of law and equality before the law will be in tension with the smooth transition of power. Just as old administrations should not be subverting new administrations (the Steele dossier episode and all the consequences which from it), new administrations should not be perceived as maliciously punishing past political opponents.

The only way out of this dilemma which I see is to prosecute the mid-level enablers and shame the leaders by making it clear they broke the law but not sending them to jail. That sticks in my craw and perhaps there is some other approach. But I am not currently seeing one.