May 28, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
One Democratic Voice
Calls For a Halt to the Mueller Charade
Friends,
A
short column today—to pass on just one essay, and to wish each of you and your families a rewarding and meaningful Memorial Day.
The
essay is by long-time Democratic strategist/pollster and consultant to Bill
Clinton, Mark Penn. He’s been showcased on Fox News recently because of an
opinion piece he wrote for the Washington web magazine, The Hill—and it’s a commentary that has very much unsettled the
Deep State and Establishment along the Potomac: one of their own, one of their
inner circle, has broken ranks and, basically, denounced them—the Mueller
investigation and the whole “Russians Did It!” canard—as an over-the-top (and
clumsy) attempt to defeat the president, to remove him, by non-electoral and
unprecedentedly anti-democratic means…a “silent coup.”
Penn
has been attacked by all the familiar faces on the Left, from Joe Scarborough
to Rachel Maddow: another demonstration that our enemies have completely fallen
into paroxysms of sheer ideological lunacy. That one supposedly prominent
member of the Democratic Party, even a Clintonista, could make such statements,
is unacceptable and must be thwarted, discredited, and denounced.
Voices
like those of Mark Penn are becoming rare, a reminder that America is a nation
divided, and that division is growing by the day…and it is increasingly
irrevocable and unbridgeable. The earnest strategy of the Left (and some
Neoconservative supporters of amnesty) is an “ethnic replacement” goal that
will diminish to impotency the significance and power of the country’s
traditional European-descended majority, while enhancing the power and position
of Third World immigrants (illegal and legal, alike). Yet, it is more likely
that either the nation itself will break apart into regions of states and “bantustans”—some
states, like California, may break apart internally—or there will be civil war,
which could well become “hot” and more violent as time advances.
Too
bad the country doesn’t have a military like that of Chile which in 1973,
facing the prospect of a Marxist dictatorship under Salvador Allende, took
direct patriotic action and saved that nation from Communism.
Penn
may well be crying in the wilderness for a time that has long past. Sadly.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stopping Robert Mueller to protect us all
The “deep state” is in a deep state of desperation. With little
time left before the Justice Department inspector general’s report becomes
public, and with special counsel Robert Mueller having failed to bring
down Donald Trump after a year of trying, they know a reckoning is coming.
At this point, there is little doubt that the highest echelons
of the FBI and the Justice Department broke their own rules to end the Hillary Clinton “matter,” but we can expect the inspector general to document what was
done or, more pointedly, not done. It is hard to see how a yearlong
investigation of this won’t come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former
Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong in a
secret “no aides allowed” meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix
airport tarmac.
With
this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on
the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and
former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything
they can think of to save their reputations.
But it is backfiring. They started by telling the story of
Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, as having remembered a bar
conversation with George Papadopoulos, a one-time foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. But
how did the FBI know they should talk to him? That’s left out of their
narrative. Downer’s signature appears on a $25 million contribution to
the Clinton Foundation. You don’t need much imagination
to figure that he was close with Clinton Foundation operatives who relayed
information to the State Department, which then called the FBI to complete the
loop. This wasn’t intelligence. It was likely opposition research from the
start.
In no way would a fourth-hand report from a Maltese professor
justify wholesale targeting of four or five members of the Trump campaign. It
took Christopher Steele, with his funding concealed through false campaign
filings, to be incredibly successful at creating a vast echo chamber around his
unverified, fanciful dossier, bouncing it back and forth between the press and
the FBI so it appeared that there were multiple sources all coming to the same
conclusion.
Time and time again, investigators came up empty. Even several
sting operations with an FBI spy we just learned about failed to produce a
DeLorean-like video with cash on the table. But rather than close the probe,
the deep state just expanded it. All they had were a few isolated contacts with
Russians and absolutely nothing related to Trump himself, yet they pressed
forward. Egged on by Steele, they simply believed Trump and his team must be
dirty. They just needed to dig deep enough.
Perhaps the murkiest event in the timeline is Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein’s appointment of a special counsel after he personally recommended
Comey’s firing in blistering terms. With Attorney General Jeff Sessions shoved out of the way, Rosenstein
and Mueller then ignored their own conflicts and took charge anyway. Rosenstein
is a fact witness, and Mueller is a friend of Comey, disqualifying them both.
Flush with 16 prosecutors, including a former lawyer for the
Clinton Foundation, and an undisclosed budget, the Mueller investigation has
been a scorched-earth effort to investigate the entirety of the Trump campaign,
Trump business dealings, the entire administration and now, if it was not
Russia, maybe it’s some other country.
The president’s earlier legal team was naive in believing that,
when Mueller found nothing, he would just end it. Instead, the less
investigators found, the more determined and expansive they became. This
president and his team now are on a better road to put appropriate limits on
all this.
This process must now be stopped, preferably long before a vote
in the Senate. Rather than a fair, limited and impartial investigation, the
Mueller investigation became a partisan, open-ended inquisition that, by its
precedent, is a threat to all those who ever want to participate in a national
campaign or an administration again.
Its prosecutions have all been principally to pressure witnesses
with unrelated charges and threats to family, or just for a public relations
effect, like the indictment of Russian internet trolls. Unfortunately, just
like the Doomsday Machine in “Dr. Strangelove” that was supposed to save the world
but instead destroys it, the Mueller investigation comes with no “off” switch:
You can’t fire Mueller. He needs to be defeated, like Ken Starr, the
independent counsel who investigated President Clinton.
Finding the “off” switch will not be easy. Step one here is for
the Justice Department inspector general report to knock Comey out of the
witness box. Next, the full origins of the investigation and its lack of any
real intelligence needs to come out in the open. The attorney general, himself
the target of a secret investigation, needs to take back his Justice
Department. Sessions needs to act quickly, along with U.S. Attorney John Huber,
appointed to conduct an internal review of the FBI, on the Comey and McCabe
matters following the inspector general report, and then announce an expanded
probe into other abuses of power.
The president’s lawyers need to extend their new aggressiveness
from words to action, filing complaints with the Justice Department’s Office of
Professional Responsibility on the failure of Mueller and Rosenstein to recuse
themselves and going into court to question the tactics of the special counsel,
from selective prosecutions on unrelated matters, illegally seizing Government
Services Administration emails, covering up the phone texts of FBI officials
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and operating without a scope approved by the
attorney general. (The regulations call for the attorney general to recuse
himself from the investigation but appear to still leave him responsible for
the scope.)
The final stopper may be the president himself, offering two
hours of testimony, perhaps even televised live from the White House. The last
time America became obsessed with Russian influence in America was the McCarthy
hearings in the 1950s. Those ended only when Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.)
attacked an associate of the U.S. Army counsel, Joseph Welch, and Welch
famously responded: “Sir, have you no decency?” In this case, virtually every
associate and family member of the president has been subject to smears
conveniently leaked to the press.
Stopping Mueller isn’t about one president or one party. It’s
about all presidents and all parties. It’s about cleaning out and reforming the
deep state so that our intelligence operations are never used against opposing
campaigns without the firmest of evidence. It’s about letting people work for
campaigns and administrations without needing legal defense funds. It’s about
relying on our elections to decide our differences.
Mark Penn served as pollster and adviser to President
Clinton from 1995 to 2000,
including during his impeachment. He is chairman of the Harris Polland author of “Microtrends Squared.” Follow him on Twitter @Mark_Penn.
No comments:
Post a Comment