By Laura Ainsworth, Staff Writer
January 30, 2019
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We’ve had almost a week now to try to digest the FBI’s raid on the home of Roger Stone, and it’s sitting even heavier on the stomach than it did right after the initial shock of it. You know how it is when you feel a little sick, and just have to sit quietly and take shallow breaths? It’s that kind of feeling. Unsettling.
Thanks to CNN --- and I sincerely mean that; it’s important that we have a record of this --- we got a good look at what our government has become in 2019, and future generations will see it, too. If the purpose of having cameras there was to intimidate possible targets and witnesses, it appears to have backfired and succeeded in turning a lot of people into concerned civil libertarians. Not enough of them, though.
The bad news is, there are also a lot of Americans applauding this: the ones seething with Trump-rage, the people who hate him so much that they don’t even care what has to happen to take him down. That’s really the scariest part, because their approval is providing the necessary political cover for an out-of control special counsel, DOJ and FBI. Joy Behar spoke for them all when she said they were just desperate to get rid of Trump. These people (media included) need to try using their tragically inadequate little pea-brains for just a moment and consider what else they might be getting rid of in this gasoline fire they’ve started, such as the possibility of civil discourse and, especially, the integrity of our institutions of law and justice. They’re burning it all down. Maybe they’ll get rid of Trump and maybe they won’t, but we have to ask what will be left when they’re through.
Patricia McCarthy has an excellent piece in AMERICAN THINKER called “Roger Stone’s SWAT team arrest: Are we even America any more?” It sure doesn’t look like it to me.
I find it ironic that at a time when people are screaming about “Russia, Russia, Russia,” we’re seeing the kind of behavior from our own government that we’ve always associated with...Russia. We’re seeing Lady Justice with her blindfold off and her thumb on the scales of justice, giving special people a pass while squashing others like bugs. When we were kids, wasn’t this the impression we had of what it was like to live in a totalitarian nation, one that operated without a constitution that would have limited the government and offered equality under the law? Sometimes adults would warn, “It could happen here,” but we didn’t think too seriously about that, because we lived in AMERICA.
But now, it IS happening here. America in 2019 has empowered its government way too much, especially its unelected judges and bureaucrats. Didn’t we imagine Russia as a place where the State police would arrive in force in the pre-dawn hours to rouse you from your bed, shine lights in your bleary eyes, march you outside in your bare feet, search your house and all your belongings and lock you away in solitary confinement until you “cooperated”?
Well, that’s essentially what happened to Roger Stone –- not the solitary confinement part, though that did happen to Paul Manafort –- in the wee small hours of the morning last Friday. It was absurd: 19 official vehicles showed up, lights blazing, with 29 heavily-armed FBI agents in body armor. They escorted Stone out of his house, took him away and then spent hours searching his home. The man doesn’t own a gun or even an up-to-date passport, he says, and he’s already been under investigation for two years.
When Mueller was appointed to look into Trump’s possible “collusion” with Russia, the FBI already knew that the whole thing was made up, based on a work of fiction by Christopher Steele called the “Trump dossier.” We now know that Justice Department official Bruce Ohr had told the top people at the FBI and DOJ that it was just political “oppo research” that Steele couldn’t even vouch for, yet they used it fraudulently to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.
Of course, in Russia, they wouldn’t need a warrant to spy –- they’d just do it. But if our government can fake evidence to get a warrant to spy, and THEN just do it, our protection from its intrusion is illusory.
The most curious --- and damning --- thing to me about the special counsel probe is Mueller’s steadfast refusal to look at any of the “Russia” connections of Hillary and her campaign. (He must have never intended to, either, or he wouldn’t have put an attorney who had worked for the Clinton Foundation on his team.) The “dossier” itself was information that supposedly came from Steele’s Russian contacts. Calling Robert Mueller!
It also appears that the Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr. was likely set up by Fusion GPS through their Russian connections. Fusion GPS was paid by Hillary’s campaign through the law firm Perkins Coie. I’ve just scratched the surface of what stinks like three-week-old sushi. But has the special counsel looked at any of it? No; he's as skilled at looking the other way as Hillary has been throughout her marriage to Bill.
Patricia McCarthy goes as far as to say that the Mueller investigation was set up to “to conceal and obliterate the volumes of evidence of crimes committed by Hillary Clinton; her campaign; and a group of higher-ups in the FBI, DOJ and CIA, all of whom were involved in a scheme to keep Trump from getting elected. All of them have lied under oath and before Congress, yet walk free. Mueller himself was involved in the Clinton scheme to sell 20 percent of U.S. uranium to Russia.”
It should also be said that the mainstream media have done as good a job of ignoring Hillary’s “Russia” connections as Mueller has. That’s something else we increasingly share with totalitarian states: the media serve as a propaganda arm, in our case for the left, and willingly. When dissenters from the right speak up, social media do their best to censor them and are getting better all the time at controlling the flow of information.
Speaking of information, there’s one thing I want to know: who had authority to order the raid on Stone’s house? It seems to me that either Robert Mueller did, or FBI Director Christopher Wray was the one to sign off. Such heavy-handed tactics do fit Mueller’s style –- or at least Andrew Weissmann’s –- but if he and Weissmann get to do this unilaterally, they have WAY too much power and have got to be reined in. Acting AG Matt Whittaker, recently brought in by Trump, is supposed to be supervising Mueller; is he?? And if Wray signed off on this, something is very wrong at the highest level of the FBI.
What good is the Constitution if it’s just going to be ignored? These days it’s easy to imagine it as nothing more than an old parchment in a glass case, to be stared at by tourists and school kids as a relic of our early history. And in short order, if we keep going the way we are, that’s all it will be.
McCarthy’s piece is pretty dark and pessimistic, but, sadly, there’s not one word I disagree with. The big question now is, what are we going to do about it?
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