“The Mountain in Labour” is one of the fables credited to the Greek storyteller Aesop in the 6th Century BCE.

“The Mountain in Labour” was described later in a four-line Latin poem by Phaedrus, a first-century Roman fabulist. Phaedrus wrote “a mountain had gone into labour and was groaning terribly. Such rumours excited great expectations all over the country. In the end, however, the mountain gave birth to a mouse.”

The great 19th-century political cartoonist and caricaturist, Thomas Nast, the scourge of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, produced a famous cartoon satirizing Horace Greeley and his supporters in the 1872 presidential election. It depicted Greeley as a mouse emerging from a mountainous pile of mud labeled “Liberal Mountain.”

Last Friday, Mount Robert Mueller gave birth to a mouse named George.

U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss sentenced George Papadopoulos to 14 days in prison for lying to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s FBI investigators when asked if he had met with the mysterious London-based university professor Joseph Misfud.

In a recent interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Papadopoulos said he never knew about the claim that Russia had Hillary Clinton’s emails until told by Misfud in London in a meeting arranged by FBI-paid informant, Cambridge University professor Stephen Halper.

In other words, Papadopoulos was set up by the FBI. When the FISA warrants are declassified and made public, they will show that Carter Page was also set up by the FBI and Department of Justice. And, according to stories last Sunday in British newspapers The Mirror and The Sun, Misfud has disappeared.

Another mouse is former Skadden Arps attorney and Dutch national Alex van der Zwaan, who admitted to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Paul Manafort partner Rick Gates. Van der Zwann was sentenced in April to 30 days in prison.

Retired General Mike Flynn pleaded guilty in December  2017 to lying to FBI investigators about his discussions with Russian diplomats after President Donald Trump was elected but before his inauguration. Flynn, who has yet to be sentenced, has attempted to withdraw his guilty plea in light of the post-plea exculpatory admission that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn found the General to be truthful. Mueller’s alleged conflicts of interest and alleged irregularities in the appointment of Mueller by the U.S. Department of Justice First Assistant Rod Rosenstein have also been raised by Flynn’s lawyers as grounds for withdrawing the plea.

In addition to these three mice (Papadopoulos, Van der Zwann and Flynn) pleading guilty to the “process” crimes of lying to federal investigators, in August Mueller’s prosecutors convicted Paul Manafort of evading taxes from 2010 through 2014. Manafort was named Trump Campaign Chairman on May 19, 2016, and resigned on Aug. 19, 2016, two years after the tax evasion in question.

Manafort is a Mueller mouse as well. The tax evasion convictions and the criminal allegations Manafort will face in his second trial have nothing to do with President Trump’s campaign.

Through May 31 of this year, even the left-leaning Politifact conceded that the direct and indirect cost of the Mueller probe through May 31 was at least $17.9 million. Add to that the costs of the three-week Manafort trial in August and the ongoing direct and indirect costs of the investigation, the price tag must be approaching $30 million by mid-September.

General Flynn had to sell his house in Alexandria, Va. to pay his legal bills. Papadopoulos and van der Zwann have had their careers and finances irreparably damaged by Mueller’s strong-arm tactics.

Mount Mueller and the mainstream media, eager to vilify anyone remotely connected to the Trump campaign, have sensationalized Russian collusion and obstruction allegations, creating great expectations in their believers.

Maybe they should take a lesson from another of Aesop’s fables, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

Michael Henry writes in Oxford and can be reached at mhenryauthor@gmail.com.