By Mike Huckabee
January 28, 2019
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“We have just witnessed the unprecedented politicization and weaponization of every federal agency under President Obama, and the worst ever of the Department of Justice and the FBI.”
So says Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor who worked at the DOJ for ten years, in three federal districts under nine U.S. attorneys who were appointed by Presidents of both parties. She’s been lead counsel in over 500 federal appeals. Along with her impressive resume, she’s the author of “LICENSED TO LIE: Exposing Corruption In The Department Of Justice.”
I recommend her book highly, but if you don’t have the time or inclination to get into that level of detail, at least watch her interview with Mark Levin from Sunday’s LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN. In fact, I’d say it’s a must-see for important background on the special counsel investigation of President Trump.
The focus here isn’t so much on Robert Mueller as it is on the history of his longtime right-hand man, notorious “pit bull” Andrew Weissmann. Powell calls him “the poster boy for prosecutorial misconduct,” and for good reason. She’s intimately familiar with what was going on back in the days of the Enron task force, when then-FBI Director Mueller recruited then-deputy Director Weissmann to be the lead prosecutor on the Enron case. Weissmann went after accounting firm Arthur Andersen, the auditors and financial advisers to Enron, and indicted them for “destroying evidence.” Powell says that in order to do this, they had to essentially create a crime by combining two separate statutes. Since an auditing firm under indictment can’t work for publicly traded companies, they were through, and 85,000 people lost their jobs.
According to Powell, Mueller was perfectly aware of all this, because Weissmann reported to him.
When the case finally got to the Supreme Court, Justice William Rehnquist wrote the opinion for the 9-0 decision to overturn the conviction, saying (as paraphrased by Powell) that it was shocking how little criminal culpability the jury instructions had required and that Arthur Andersen had not committed a crime. But by then, it was all over for Arthur Andersen.
Nothing happened to Weissmann, who went on to become the director of the Enron task force. Before that, he had already turned his sights on Merrill Lynch. (Powell defended one of the four executives targeted in that case whose lives, she says, were ruined, even though almost all of the counts against them were eventually reversed.) She says Weissmann made an example of Arthur Andersen to send a message to other companies that they’d better cooperate or else.
The point of bringing these things up is to give an idea of just what President Trump is dealing with now. The four Merrill Lynch executives were treated similarly to the way Paul Manafort (currently in solitary) is being treated now. To cite just one example, Weissmann had the youngest of them (who later was completely exonerated) sent to a maximum security federal transfer facility, with the worst violent offenders, apparently to break him. He was separated from his two young children and family for eight months.
Powell says her own client in the case was convicted on two counts, perjury and obstruction of justice, for testifying about “his personal understanding” of a telephone call he wasn’t even on. Weissmann had instructed him to share his understanding with the grand jury “whether it was accurate or not.” How can any prosecutor determine that someone is lying about his own understanding of something? Yet this is what was done, and Weissmann, of course, decided he was lying.
And this is why President Trump cannot meet with the special counsel, no way, no how.
Mueller’s choice for second-in-command on the special counsel was Weissmann, but then, he’s brought Weissmann along with him wherever he went for the past two decades. Since he has to have known the kind of activities Weissmann is famous for, what does this tell us about Mueller?
We know now that the whole investigation of Trump was built on a false premise and that the FBI, and later the special counsel, knew this but continued letting a false narrative cloud his Presidency anyway. In fact, Andrew McCarthy has a great column explaining why the Roger Stone indictment inadvertently tells us this.
The ultimate purpose of the special counsel, Powell says, is to write a report designed to destroy Trump. She’s seen the tactics they use, which shouldn’t be part of the American system of justice. Weissmann and his pals are obviously well practiced in destroying people and enjoy their work immensely. We truly are in banana republic territory here.
https://www.foxnews.com/shows/life-liberty-levin
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