My OpenCdA posts on January 10, 2018, entitled ‘So It Never Happens Again …‘ and February 13, 2018, entitled ‘Appoint a Presidential Commission‘ urged President Trump to appoint a Presidential Commission with the same stature and authority as the 1963 Warren Commission.  The Commission I advocated first in January 2018 would examine the depth and effects of corruption by politicization of both the US Department of Justice and its subordinate agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

There were two underlying reasons for my belief that a national Presidential Commission was more appropriate than a second Special Counsel.

• The job was too big for a Special Counsel.  The scope of DoJ and FBI malfeasance, criminal abuses of authority, and other criminal conduct infected other federal agencies during the Obama presidency.  Some of those agencies, notably the CIA, the NSA, the Department of State including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Internal Revenue Service, the Executive Office of the President under and including then-President Barack Obama, and employees and members of the US Congress (e.g., Deborah Wasserman Schultz, D-FL 23rd District) had personnel with varying degrees of criminal complicity involving national security compromises and outright apparent violations of Title 18 US Code sections.

• Ordering authoritative measures to identify and correct the abuses and criminal conduct by the DoJ and FBI and to reestablish the public’s confidence in both the DoJ and the FBI is more important than prosecuting offenders except for the most egregious violations of criminal law.  Criminal prosecutions sound good, but in the end, the results are often unsatisfying.   That outcome would still leave a corrupt DoJ and FBI intact after a few low-level sacrificial stooges are convicted in skewed show trials that would likely take years to convene and conclude.

I believe those original reasons remain valid, but now there are more.

• My August 16, 2017, post entitled ‘Understanding the Subversion of the Trump Presidency‘ linked to documents explaining several levels of plans that were put in place immediately after President Trump’s election to subvert his presidency and undermine the national security.  Little did we know at the time that the ‘lawfare’ mentioned in the written plans of Brock, et al, would result in the appointment of an overzealous Special Counsel and his employment of several DoJ attorneys who had in numerous prosecutions been excoriated  by federal trial courts for withholding excuplatory evidence from defense counsels.  Several of the convictions in those prosecutions were overturned on appeal.

• On April 9, 2018, FBI special agents executed search warrants and seized documents from the permanent home, the temporary hotel residence, and the office of one of President Trump’s personal attorneys, Michael Cohen.  Since we have not seen either the affidavits prepared in support of the search warrants or the search warrant return itemizing the material seized, we don’t know for sure if the warrant service was related to the so far unproven allegations of illegal conduct by President Trump.  We do know that the warrants were sought by the Office of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York based at least in part on a referral from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and with the approval of Main Justice.  Significantly, we also know that some of the material seized contained privileged communication between President Trump and attorney Cohen.

• The seizure by FBI agents of privileged communications between President Trump and attorney Cohen should have resulted in the material being immediately turned over to a DoJ “taint team” before any of the material was examined by anyone.  The taint team comprises DoJ attorneys who are supposed to segregate privileged information from other material so that FBI agents and DoJ attorneys do not taint an investigation by the unauthorized examination and illegal use of attorney-client privileged information.   Some of the DoJ attorneys on Mueller’s Special Counsel have been chastised for Brady decision violations (For a brief discussion of Brady, see my August 27, 2014, OpenCdA post entitled From Arfee to Brady).  Their professional credibility has already been tainted in earlier times by documented misconduct.

• The FBI and the DoJ misrepresented or withheld material facts from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in securing warrants to surveil a US citizen, Carter Page.  Agencies and their agents who will lie to the Court may also be willing to fabricate evidence.   When those agencies and their agents are part of the US Intelligence Community, they have access to the resources who could fabricate false but convincing documentary evidence that would be difficult to detect forensically or linguistically, particularly if the forgers had access to contextual documents that might be found in an attorney’s files.

• The FBI and DoJ have intentionally delayed their responses to Congressional subpoenas for information about the numerous acts of alleged criminal conduct by Hillary Clinton, her campaign, her husband, and their Foundation.

• The DoJ Inspector General’s report (actually six reports), originally to have been released in March, then April, may not not be released until May or later.   AG Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III should, but likely won’t, ask the President to declassify that report and immediately release it without redactions to the public by posting it on the White House website.   A Presidential Commission’s recommendation to do exactly that could hardly be ignored by Sessions whose love for the DoJ as an institution appears to exceed his loyalty to the US Constitution or the American people.

• The efforts of the DoJ, the FBI, and the Special Counsel seem now to be a concerted effort to intentionally obstruct the performance of the duties of the President and Congress.   By design, our “free press” heartily endorses and furthers that objective.   The skews media are protected by the First Amendment, however as those same media are quick to point out when it serves their purposes, there can be reasonable restrictions on the freedoms guaranteed by our Bill of Rights.  There needs to be a reasonable discussion about an appropriate and reasonable reaction when the supposedly untouchable skews media become co-conspirators with agencies and agents of the US Government to intentionally obstruct the lawful operation of a duly elected government.  A Presidential Commission, not an overzealous Special Counsel hell-bent on taking down the President of the United States, is the proper venue for that discussion.

US Senators Charles Grassley (Chairman, Senate Committee on the Judiciary), Lindsey Graham (Chairman, Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism), John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis  sent this letter today to the US Attorney General (AG) Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.  The attachment letter sent to DOJIG Michael Horowitz earlier is attached to today’s letter and included with the link to it.

The letter demands that AG Sessions appoint a second Special Counsel to work with the DoJ Inspector General (DOJIG) to  investigate a range of issues concerning FBI improprieties in the application and renewal of FISA warrants, the FBI’s apparent unauthorized release of classified [national security] informationi to the press, and the FBI and DoJ’s investigations of General Michael Flynn.

The letter, supported by attachments, explains that the Special Counsel’s authority includes the ability to obtain testimony from persons not currently employed by the DoJ as well as having access to special tools available to prosecutors that are not available to the DOJIG.

Significantly, the Senators’ letter concludes with this rather blunt wording:  “If you are unwilling to take this step, please send us a detailed reply explaining why not.”  It seems the Senators are getting tired of Rosenstein’s nonresponsiveness to their inquiries and requests.

Within hours of the mass murders on February 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Florida’s knee-jerk Republican Governor Rick Scott and half-cocked Republican US Senator Marco Rubio have demanded that FBI Director Christopher Wray resign.

The FBI has already acknowledged that it failed to properly categorize and forward a good citizen’s potentially critical report called in on January 5 to the FBI about alleged shooter Nikolas Cruz.

Properly, both Director Wray and AG Sessions have ordered an investigation to determine exactly what happened that led to the FBI’s mishandling critical information.  Until that investigation is completed, any adverse actions against any FBI employee including Director Wray are premature.

Wray was installed as the FBI Director on September 28, 2017, exactly 140 days before the Parkland murders.

For two opportunistic political hacks, Florida’s Governor Rick Scott and Senator Marco Rubio, to call for Wray’s resignation over the breakdown of a program put in place long before be became Director is not only unfair but monumentally stupid.  Firing Wray for not having first found and then fixed every FBI problem in his first 140 days on the job is not the way to rehabilitate the FBI.

The damage done to the FBI and DoJ by eight years of Obama and Biden, Holder and Lynch, and Mueller and Comey appears to have originated at the top and flowed downhill.  Their politicizing damage needs to be  assessed by a Presidential Commission, not aggravated by firing Christopher Wray.

Right now, the FBI needs a strong Director.  It may have one in Christopher Wray.  Fire him for political expedience rather than just cause, and the next qualified and competent Director will almost certainly be much harder to find.

The Fox News Network is running an online news story today by Fred Lucas.  The story is headlined Democratic AGs swarm Trump administration with lawsuits.

The story is accompanied by a pull quote which reads, “This is not about the rule of law or holding the line to stop the feds from preempting state laws; this is about power.”  The quote is attributed to Scott Will, executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association.

It has a name, Mr. Will.   It’s called “Lawfare.”  Think of it as weaponizing the rule of law with the sole purpose of  paralyzing and neutralizing a superior opponent.  If you and your cronies in the Republican Attorney General Association  (RAGA) are just figuring out that “The Resistance” to the Trump election and inauguration is using it, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.  I suggest you read a couple of books.

The first book is Lawfare:  Law as a Weapon of War. It was published in 2016.

The second is Lawfare: The War Against Free Speech: A First Amendment Guide for Reporting in an Age of Islamist Lawfare.  It was published in 2011.

If the RAGA members doubt that its DAGA counterparts like Washington State’s Robert “Sideshow Bob” Ferguson are intentionally using lawfare to bring the Trump administration to a grinding halt, they should find and read David Brock’s online publication “Democracy Matters – Strategic Plan for Action.”  (See OpenCdA post dated August 16, 2017, entitled Understanding the Subversion of the Trump Presidency.)  Lawfare is one of the techniques Brock and his fellow travelers discuss in the Strategic Plan for Action.