Indefensible

Why is it that the supposed newspapers of record, the NYT and WaPo, along with all of the major main stream media outlets are so, so incurious about what historians will undoubtedly call the greatest political scandal in U.S. history? For those progressives who have been willfully ignorant of the scandal or who dismiss it as politics as usual, Kim Strassel provides a quick introduction:

In hindsight, the FBI’s Russia-collusion scandal always had two parts: the bureau’s indefensible probe of the Trump campaign and the coverup—the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.

That the latter probe was a coverup came into sharp relief this week with the Justice Department’s belated withdrawal of its case against former national security adviser Mike Flynn and the release of former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s “scope” memo. Both demonstrate that Mr. Mueller was named not to get to the bottom of Russia-related crimes but to legitimize the illegitimate decisions the FBI and Justice had made to that point, to squeeze “something” out of its disastrous escapade.

Mr. Rosenstein initially didn’t limit Mr. Mueller’s investigation to real crimes. His original May 2017 appointment letter gave the special counsel carte blanche to look into “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” When he detailed the “scope” of Mr. Mueller’s duties in an Aug. 2, 2017, memo, the government guarded the document like Fort Knox—refusing to let even Congress view it. We now know why. The memo authorized the Mueller team to investigate a series of already debunked theories and noncrimes.

Take the section that allows Mr. Mueller to investigate former Trump campaign members Carter Page and Paul Manafort for “a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials.” Every “collusion” allegation the FBI had about these two men came directly from the Steele dossier, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. By August 2017, the FBI knew that dossier was bunk.

According to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, the FBI knew by January 2017 that the dossier’s primary Russian source had disavowed the allegations and the FBI had failed to validate a single claim. Colleagues of author Christopher Steele had warned the FBI of his poor judgment. As was revealed only last month, the FBI had also been warned several times that the dossier might itself be Russian disinformation.

Of course, none of that mattered to the partisans within the FBI (and the intelligence agencies). Their objective was a soft coup and their target was the duly-elected President of the United States, Donald Trump. 

In what has to be one the most comprehensive discussions of the FBI's soft coup attempt on Donald Trump (written earlier this year), Eli Lake presents the case against the FBI in voluminous detail. Read the whole thing!

Lake begins his paper in this way:

Donald Trump published the most consequential tweet of his presidency on March 4, 2017. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process,” the chief executive pondered. “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

The response from Trump’s opposition was outrage. The Washington Post fact checker gave it four Pinocchios. The director of the FBI, James Comey, rebuked Trump and said such a thing had never happened. James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, assured NBC’s Meet the Press that no warrants had been issued in 2016 to surveil members of the Trump campaign.

Following the dictum that the best liars lace their lies with elements of the truth, the deep state and media operatives who condemned Trump for alleging surveillance by Obama were technically correct. Trump's personal phones were not tapped and (at least to date) there is no evidence that Barack Obama gave a direct order to surveil Trump himself. But those statements mask a far deeper truth—the FBI did surveil the Trump campaign, using a opposition research dossier that was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC. Worse, the media protected the Democrats from blowback by refusing to investigate the story, labeling it a "conspiracy theory." Like all the other fake news that has emanated from the media over the past 3.5 years, we now know that the allegations against the FBI and its leadership are accurate.

Any thinking person who takes the time to read Lake's detailed account of this scandal can only conclude that a coup attempt occurred, encouraged by Democrats who wanted Trump to be gone, cheering on by a media that hated Trump because he called them out for their incompetence and bias, and effected by deep state operatives in the intelligence community.

Many of us have written extensively on the scandal over the past few years, while Democrats worked overtime to (1) hide evidence, (2) bury the story with the help of their trained hamsters in the media, and (3) suggest that anyone who believed it was a "conspiracy theorist." There was only one problem for the Dems, facts and clear, irrefutable evidence indicate that the conspiracy was real.

As the truth comes out, it appears that the Mueller probe was a partisan witch hunt, as Trump alleged. That people like General Michael Flynn were entrapped and railroaded in an effort to unseat or weaken Trump. That political scum (and I use that word with purposeful intent) like Adam Schiff are at best dishonest and duplicitous and at worse, a seditious piece of Schiff. That the media failed the American people as it always does. That the Democrats care little for the rule of law and are more than willing to weaponize powerful government agencies against citizens and the political opposition.

I'm now hopeful that some of the key perpetrators of the coup will be indicted. I'm also convinced that the Dems will never recognize the seriousness of this episode and will continue to work to obfuscate the facts and allow the guilty to walk free. They do not deserve to lead.

UPDATE:

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The house organ of the Democratic Left, the New York Times, expresses "outrage" over the DoJ's totally justified decision to exonerate Gen. Michael Flynn and drop all charges against him. Here's their take:

Criminal law specialists and members of the law enforcement community are tough to really shock. But the Justice Department’s announcement that it would drop criminal charges against Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, has provoked, in addition to outrage, a sense of utter demoralization among them. They’ve never seen such a thing before. After all, Mr. Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. 

But it’s important to understand why all Americans should be not just shocked but outraged. It’s not just because Mr. Flynn won’t go to jail or offer any service toward justice. 

It’s because this move embeds into official U.S. policy an extremist view of law enforcement as the enemy of the American people. It’s a deception that Americans must see through — and that the federal judge overseeing Mr. Flynn’s case, Emmet Sullivan, can reject by examining the Justice Department’s rationale in open court and by allowing a future Justice Department to reconsider charges. 

According to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, the FBI knew by January 2017 that the dossier’s primary Russian source had disavowed the allegations and the FBI had failed to validate a single claim. Colleagues of author Christopher Steele had warned the FBI of his poor judgment. As was revealed only last month, the FBI had also been warned several times that the dossier might itself be Russian disinformation.

Like most supposedly reasoned arguments coming out of the Left, the NYT's suggestion that Flynns exoneration is "extremist view of law enforcement" is abject nonsense. The only "extreme" issue is the fact that an out-of-control, hyper-partisan cadre of FBI executives worked overtime to railroad Flynn. But that doesn't seem to bother the NYT or its op-ed contributors. 

One of the Left's talking points is that Flynn "pleaded guilty twice." He did that because the same extremist element within the FBI and a group of Obama holdovers at the DoJ threatened to jail his son on trumped up charges. That's banana republic stuff, but I suppose the Left is fine with it, given they're working hard to turn the US into a banana republic—coups, weaponization of the government against the opposition, jailing opposition leaders—sound a lot like Venezuela.

Alan Dershowitz rebuts the NYT's nonsense:

More than a year ago I wrote that it was clear General Michael Flynn should never have pleaded guilty because he did not commit a crime. Even if he lied to the FBI, his lie was not "material." For a lie to be a crime under federal law, it must be material to the investigation – meaning that the lies pertain to the issues being legitimately investigated. The role of the FBI is to investigate past crimes, not to create new ones. Because the FBI investigators already knew the answer to the question they asked him—whether he had spoken to the Russian Ambassador—their purpose was not to elicit new information relevant to their investigation, but rather to spring a perjury trap on him. When they asked Flynn the question, they had a recording of his conversation with the Russian, of which he was presumably unaware. So his answer was not material to the investigation because they already had the information about which they were inquiring.

From a legal and policy point of view, encouraging the FBI to misuse its legitimate authority to investigate past crimes, solely to create future crimes is both immoral and illegal. That is why Congress added the word material to its statute.

Because Flynn's answers were not material to what the FBI said it was investigating –- a violation of a never-used law, the Logan Act, that prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments -- they did not constitute a crime.

Democrats hyperventilate when some backroom analyst is fired because he disagreed with administration policy, but they're sanguine about a general with 35 years of service being railroaded into a guilty plea, bankrupted with legal fees, and otherwise disgraced—all because thse same Democrats lost an election. I'll say it many times between now and November—if you observe their actions in matters large and small, the Democrats do NOT deserve to lead.