As a White House Advisor to President Clinton during his entire impeachment proceedings, I’m experiencing 1998 déjà vu.

That’s as prosecutors once again work overtime to turn extramarital affairs and the efforts to keep them secret into impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors.

Except it’s worse.  Unable to get the witnesses to compose the stories they want, today’s prosecutors are discovering they can simply compose the crimes by manipulating the pleas of men desperate to protect their families. That never happened in 1998.

The Michael Cohen Sentencing Memo of November 30 took aim directly at both Cohen and President Donald Trump. It was used, unethically, to cast the president as directing a criminal conspiracy to make “secret and illegal” payments.  Then again, when has Mueller and his gang done something ethically?

Yesterday (12/10), I received an email from the Motion Picture Academy informing me that if I didn't pay my dues, I wouldn't be able to vote in the Oscar nominations in a couple of weeks.

I debated for a few minutes.  Dues have inflated since I joined in the eighties and are now a hefty $450 per annum.  Nevertheless, spendthrift that I am, I bit the proverbial bullet and went for it. Call it the inability to break a bad habit. Or an addiction to the non-stop influx of screeners that arrive at my door every December, not that I watch many of them. (I suspect I'm not alone in that.)

But it wasn't just the money that had made me hesitate.  On one level, I wouldn't have re-upped up for $4.50, let alone $450.  I mean -- what was the point of this? Does anybody care who wins the Oscar anymore?  I certainly don't -- and I'm a voter.

Here’s why this year the Oscars will continue on their downward spiral toward life support.

Robert Mueller’s legal team may write a damning report on Trump’s ethics, based mostly on flipping minor former business associates of Trump’s and transient campaign officials by threatening them with long prison sentences.

So far, we know that the U.S. government decided to intervene in a political campaign to help one candidate and to smear the other — under the pretext of Russian “collusion.” That would be Obama’s government helping Hillary to smear The Donald.

And so it hired or made use of spies and informants including Hank Greenberg, Stefan Halper, Felix Sater, and others to contact Trump campaign officials to catch them in supposed collusion traps.

It enlisted the help of foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the British and Australians.

It misled FISA courts into granting warrants to spy on Americans and, post factum, threatened long prisons sentences with those surveilled and interviewed.

Why has Robert Mueller investigated absolutely none of this?

The pattern and purpose of Mueller’s investigation and the endgame is becoming clear, and yes, it’s clearly get the president at all costs.

The team Mueller hired really foretold the story — Andrew Weissmann as the stop-at-nothing pit bull and a group of Democrat lawyers, including some who have represented the Clintons, had the obstruction of justice charge ready to go on day one.

The investigation, I believe, has come up truly empty on its central charge related to the president — collusion with the Russian government. They are now trying to find someone, anyone who had any contact with Julian Assange with the aim of calling that collusion-lite.

But mostly what Mueller’s team is doing is bludgeoning witnesses on unrelated charges to piece together a case against the president. They are shaping that case through the indictments -- and threats of indictments -- that are being used to get guilty pleas to make the president seem like an obstructor or co-conspirator. They are literally creating the crimes.

Let’s review what Mueller and his team are doing:

He came, he saw, he took yet another step towards Making America Great Again.

President Trump scored major successes at the G-20 summit that concluded over last weekend in Argentina (12/01-02).

Specifically, the community of nations agreed in their official communique to “necessary reform” of the World Trade Organization, a top White House priority, recognized the decision of the U.S. to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, and to still utilize “all energy sources and technologies, while protecting the environment.”

In addition, the Chinese promised to up their purchases of U.S.- made goods and to discuss other demands in exchange for postponing an expected hike in tariffs; President Xi also committed to designating the deadly drug Fentanyl as a controlled substance in China, and vowed to help with de-nuclearizing North Korea.

It was an all-round win-win for the president, who needed one.