We now know when to expect the Mueller report --- sometime on Thursday --- and the anticipation is making leftists go from being merely crazy to being totally screaming bonkers. The memo must have gone out to tell Democrats to try to discredit Attorney General William Barr in any way possible, even if it means criticizing him for releasing the report so close to Easter weekend (not kidding; that’s one of the things they’re complaining about). They know they may have trouble slamming Barr for redacting the report willy-nilly, as it reportedly has just a small, reasonable amount of redacting. And we all know that classified information and grand jury testimony must by law remain redacted. But...Easter!
Yesterday, I showed how the media are already working to shape the narrative, and there are far too many examples of this to even scratch the surface. Mostly, they want to do three things: 1) justify the appointment of a special counsel in the first place (absent any crime; that makes it hard) and Mueller’s many months of conducting anal exams, 2) gloss over the fact that no case could be made for conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, which is what this was supposed to be about, and 3) stress that Congress still has the power to impeach whether they have clear evidence of wrongdoing or not. So impeachment is what many Democrats in Congress will still push for, regardless of what the report says.
Hey, who needs a report at all? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez already knows “so many” reasons why Trump needs to be impeached, “so many,” in fact, that it boggles her mind, which, it must be said, is very tiny and easily boggled. Here’s the LAUGH OF THE DAY, courtesy of the Yahoo News “Skullduggery” podcast:
After interviewing about 500 people and going through zillions of pages of documents, the very highly motivated, reliably anti-Trump special counsel team “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated [as in, ‘colluded’] with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” You’d think every American would be relieved and delighted to hear this, but, curiously, that is not how it’s playing out. I’ll bet the investigators on Mueller’s team are the least delighted of all, because they surely did everything in their power to make that case for Trump being an agent of Vladimir Putin.
Recall that Peter Strzok, in one of his texts to Lisa Page, expressed hesitance to join the special counsel because of the concern that there was no “there there.” Gosh, he turned out to be right! In fact, why did they have to appoint a special counsel at all to find that out? They could’ve just asked Strzok, and he could have told them, “Hey, we’ve been investigating for months, and let me tell you, you’re not gonna find anything, because there’s no ‘there’ there.” It could have saved upwards of $35 million.
The FBI looked into this before turning it over to Mueller and didn’t find anything –- well, besides the ginned-up “dossier” that was based on nothing, some fake stories leaked to the media by the FBI itself, and some fraudulently-obtained wiretaps that they could use for perjury traps. The House Intelligence Committee under Devin Nunes didn’t find anything. The Senate didn’t find anything. And now the special counsel has zilch-zero-bupkis.
The Democrats will just keep looking for something on Trump. (And you know the old saying, “It’s always in the last place you look.”) Mueller’s report hasn’t even come out, and they’re already moving on, subpoenaing banks. This is just the beginning; the House Financial Services Committee (chaired by Maxine Waters) and the House Intelligence Committee (chaired by Adam Schiff) are authorizing the flood of subpoenas.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/15/democrats-subpoena-deutsche-bank-1277199
As for obstruction, it seems to me that the Mueller team passed along their “no exoneration” phrasing as a gift to Trump’s political enemies. After coming up with nothing, it was like throwing them a bone, to tear into like starving wolves. Of course, we’ve seen that when it comes to Trump, the left has a really elastic way of defining “obstruction.” In his case, it can be something as small as a tweet. But all the President ever did was vent, as is his right –- he never did one thing to put limits on Mueller or interfere with the investigation in any way. He made it absolutely clear that Mueller should complete his investigation unimpeded. The left only DREAMED that he would fire Mueller or otherwise interfere with him; it never happened, much as Trump might have wanted to send him packing.
He did fire FBI Director James Comey, but for tremendously good reason, and doing so was well within his authority as President. (Even Comey had to admit that.) As Alan Dershowitz has made clear, it’s not obstruction for the President to exercise his constitutional authority. But that doesn’t mean they won’t go after him on it.
So, did the special counsel decide not to accuse Trump of wrongdoing because they knew a sitting President couldn’t be indicted? Absolutely not. Barr’s conclusion states, “Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.” So there.
If the Democrats were capable of embarrassment, one would think they’re about to get really red-faced over this whole thing. But it seems nothing embarrasses them. They just press on, moving the goal posts and revising their accusations. Byron York has a good piece in the WASHINGTON EXAMINER that puts the report into perspective.
If Democrats aren’t embarrassed about the anticlimactic special counsel report, I wonder if they might still want to hide when more comes out about the FBI investigation that predated and laid the groundwork for the Mueller probe. William Barr will be taking a broad look at it all. Of course, there’s the matter of FISA abuse and the criminal referrals from Devin Nunes, and according to John Solomon at THE HILL, IG Michael Horowitz is also taking a close look at former FBI Director Comey’s handling of classified information in the leaking of his personal notes of a conversation with President Trump, with the goal of getting them into The New York Times and triggering a special counsel investigation.
Those notes were government property, not his to divulge, and by definition they were classified. Comey has tried to split a legal hair, maintaining that by divulging the “content” over the phone instead of passing along the physical notes, he wasn’t improperly sharing government property or leaking classified information. We’ll see about that. He thinks he’s a crafty lawyer in addition to being a paragon of morality, but the more he talks, the less crafty he seems, and he’s considered moral only on Planet Comey.
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