Hypocrisy on Steroids

It's hardly surprising that Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media suggest that Roger Cohen's guilty plea for making hush payments to two porn stars for decade-old consensual affairs between Donald Trump and those women is somehow "an impeachable offense." After all, special counsel Robert Mueller tells us that the hush payments were made "for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” Mueller is sending people to jail in his effort to somehow, someway bring down an elected president. One can only wonder whether the same would have been done had Hillary Clinton been elected.

Huh ... what?

First, the big picture: If an alleged campaign finance violation is good enough to bring down a president, one can only wonder how the Clinton email scandal would have played had it been adequately and fully investigated by an FBI controlled by James Comey.

But wait! cry Clinton partisans, the FBI investigation did Clinton in!

Uhhh. No.

In fact, the FBI "investigation was woefully incomplete, disregarded pivotal evidence, and was designed to exonerate Clinton, not find fault in her actions. James Comey lied when he claimed it was thorough and lied when he claimed that all relevant evidence had been examined. Paul Sperry explains:

RealClearInvestigations pieced together the FBI's handling of the massive new email discovery from the “Weiner laptop.” This months-long investigation included a review of federal court records and affidavits, cellphone text messages, and emails sent by key FBI personnel, along with internal bureau memos, reviews and meeting notes documented in government reports. Information also was gleaned through interviews with FBI agents and supervisors, prosecutors and other law enforcement officials, as well as congressional investigators and public-interest lawyers.

If the FBI “soft-pedaled” the original investigation* of Clinton’s emails, as some critics have said, it out-and-out suppressed the follow-up probe related to the laptop, sources for this article said.

“There was no real investigation and no real search,” said Michael Biasello, a 27-year veteran of the FBI. "It was all just show — eyewash — to make it look like there was an investigation before the election.”

Although the FBI’s New York office first pointed headquarters to the large new volume of evidence on Sept. 28, 2016, supervising agent Peter Strzok, who was fired on Aug. 10 for sending anti-Trump texts and other misconduct, did not try to obtain a warrant to search the huge cache of emails until Oct. 30, 2016. Violating department policy, he edited the warrant affidavit on his home email account, bypassing the FBI system for recording such government business. He also began drafting a second exoneration statement before conducting the search.

The search warrant was so limited in scope that it excluded more than half the emails New York agents considered relevant to the case. The cache of Clinton-Abedin communications dated back to 2007. But the warrant to search the laptop excluded any messages exchanged before or after Clinton’s 2009-2013 tenure as secretary of state, key early periods when Clinton initially set up her unauthorized private server and later periods when she deleted thousands of emails sought by investigators.

Far from investigating and clearing [Clinton confident and aide, Huma] Abedin and [disgraced Democrat Congressman, Anthony] Weiner, the FBI did not interview them, according to other FBI sources who say Comey closed the case prematurely. The machine was not authorized for classified material, and Weiner did not have classified security clearance to receive such information, which he did on at least two occasions through his Yahoo! email account – which he also used to email snapshots of his penis.

Many Clinton supporters believe Comey’s 11th hour reopening of a case that had shadowed her campaign was a form of sabotage that cost her the election. But the evidence shows Comey and his inner circle acted only after worried agents and prosecutors in New York forced their hand. At the prodding of Attorney General Lynch, they then worked to reduce and rush through, rather than carefully examine, potentially damaging new evidence.

Comey later admitted in his memoir “A Higher Loyalty,” that political calculations shaped his decisions during this period.

Ya think?

The thing that concerns those of us who object to the "witch hunt" currently being conducted to unseat a duly-elected president is the clear evidence that the investigative powers of the government (and a Department of Justice that controls those powers and acts on the findings) are not being applied in an even-handed manner. Clinton was clearly guilty of significant wrong doing, but because she was from the right party under the right president, she essentially was allowed to skate "for the principal purpose of influencing the election” in her favor. That ... not a hush payment to a couple of porn stars ... is the big story of 2016 and yet, the media has no interest and the democrats? Well, what can one expect?

All politics is about hypocrisy, and what we see in the Mueller investigation is hypocrisy on steroids. If Robert Mueller can drift so far afield that he's looking at payments to porn stars (where's the Russian connection?), you'd think he might consider looking into the possibility that the Russians hacked Hillary's private server (and used their findings to target their trolling and hacking during the 2016 election). You'd also think that Mueller might have a modicum of interest in the Russians, Fusion GPS, and Hillary's opposition research intended, I might add, "for the principal purpose of influencing the election."

Nah, nothing to see there ... move along.

FOOTNOTE:
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* Sperry provides some quantitative details:

[Comey] told Congress that “thanks to the wizardry of our technology,” the FBI was able to eliminate the vast majority of messages as “duplicates” of emails they’d previously seen. Tireless agents, he claimed, then worked “night after night after night” to scrutinize the remaining material.

But virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.

In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.

“Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the evidence” of what was reviewed in the original year-long case that Comey closed in July 2016, said a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation.

UPDATE:
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I am not alone in my growing concern about the manner in which "justice" is being applied as the Mueller probe continues. Kim Strassel, one of the few journalists who has been dogged in her investigations of the scandal that was and is the investigation into "Russian collusion" by the FBI pre- and post election and the Mueller probe after, writes:

U.S. Attorney Robert Khuzami took a few moments in his Tuesday statement about Michael Cohen’s plea deal to sing neutrality’s praise: “His day of reckoning serves as a reminder that we are a nation of laws, with one set of rules that applies equally to everyone.”

Noble words, and they used to mean something. But a disparity of justice is at the heart of our current crisis of faith in institutions. Americans aren’t outraged that the Federal Bureau of Investigation felt obliged to investigate allegations leveled at campaigns, or that a special counsel is looking at Russian electoral interference. They are instead furious that Lady Justice seems to have it in for only one side.

The country has watched the FBI treat one presidential campaign with kid gloves, the other with informants, warrants and eavesdropping. They’ve seen the Justice Department resist all efforts at accountability, even as it fails to hold its own accountable. And don’t get them started on the one-sided media.

And they are now witnessing unequal treatment in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. Yes, the former FBI director deserves credit for smoking out the Russian trolls who interfered in 2016. And one can argue he is obliged to pursue any evidence of criminal acts, even those unrelated to Russia. But what cannot be justified is the one-sided nature of his probe.

Those of us who follow these events understand the blatant bias that pervades this investigation, but low information voters may not be so well informed. What they see and hear is the constant drumbeat of indictments and guilty pleas having nothing to do with the underlying investigative objective.

Already, the trained hamsters in the media are doing battlefield prep, readying the public for "impeachment" (the word has been used hundreds of times in the past few days) once the Dems take power in the House. Understandably, many voters think that something is rotten and the the GOP should be punished, because ... Trump is guilty (of what? who knows? but guilty, nonetheless). They may very well vote accordingly in November.

It's a brilliant strategy hatched by the Democrats and their deep state and media allies, and may very well work.