Keeping the sequence of events in order in the Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation can be very tricky.
If you have been trying to follow the Trump-Russia collusion investigation sequence of events from day to day — well, good luck with that one.
To try and help you put some of the collusion confusion into order, here are links to three timelines.
Washington Post’s Trump-Russia Timeline
Committee to Investigate Russia’s Trump-Russia Timeline
Sharyl Attkisson’s Collusion Against Trump Timeline
Today’s Washington Times online is running an article headlined Top Democrat deems claims Trump campaign was spied on ‘nonsense’.
Sadly, even with mounting evidence to the contrary, there are people who refuse to believe that employees of the FBI and DoJ, acting under color of law, would spy illegally on political organizations. History proves their disbelief to be misplaced.
Even the FBI’s own website acknowledges that COINTELPRO “…was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.”
The aphorism in the title of my post is most often attributed to George Santayana.
When I read The Sulzberger Slimes online article headlined Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation on Wednesday, my first reaction to this 3800+ word piece was: Somebody at Main Justice got a preview of the Department of Justice Inspector General’s long-overdue report regarding the FBI and DOJ’s investigation and handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe, called up their favorite Slimes stenographer, and planted a pre-emptive fluff story out ahead of an expected ‘Bad Moon Rising’.
Later in the same day I learned that the Department of Justice Inspector General had finished his long-awaited report of the FBI and DOJ’s investigation and handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe. The draft report has not yet been released publicly, but it has been (or will be by COB Friday) made available to multiple subjects of the report for their review.
Judging from the nervous tics suddenly afflicting the Fantasyland-on-the-Potomac swamp rats in the respective Mahogany Rows at Main Justice and the FBI, John Fogerty* may have been foretelling some more career ending moves when he wrote:
Hope you got your things together
Hope you are quite prepared to die
Looks like we’re in for nasty weather
One eye is taken for an eye
Two other writers have prepared read-worthy articles for their respective online publications. These two articles are decent counterpoints to the Slimes’ effort to soften the blows expected to be inflicted by the DoJ IG’s report.
Mollie Hemingway has written 10 Key Takeaways from The New York Times’ Error-Ridden Defense of FBI Spying on Trump Campaign. It was published online in The Federalist on May 17, 2018.
Andrew McCarthy has written Spinning a Crossfire Hurricane: The Times on the FBI’s Trump Investigation. His article was published online in National Review on May 17, 2018. (more…)
If you haven’t yet read Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel’s column posted on May 10, 2018, please take the time to read it. It was entitled About That FBI ‘Source’.
Strassel asserts that Rosenstein and the US Department of Justice are stonewalling the House Intelligence Committee’s most recent subpoena because, “… the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.”
Strassel’s column implies that the FBI inserted a highly-placed human intelligence source or recruited one already inside the Trump campaign before the 2016 election. She also says, “… we know Mr. Nunes’s request deals with a ‘top secret intelligence source’ of the FBI and CIA, who is a U.S. citizen and who was involved in the Russia collusion probe.” [emphasis mine] In other words, she suggests the FBI was running an intelligence collection operation inside the Trump campaign.
Assuming Strassel and her competitors at the Washington Post have the straight scoop, it raises a few questions.
The actions of Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein to resist the HPSCI’s subpoenas only adds to the plausibility of the Washington Post’s and Wall Street Journal’s articles. President Trump can if he chooses declassify everything DoJ and the CIA have on this matter. Whether he should or not must be based on legitimate national security considerations, not political expedience or advantage.
Government agencies are supposed to use investigations to obtain verifiable facts, not bludgeon citizens into making false statements so the “G” can notch another conviction.
Apparently Special Counsel Robert Mueller never got that memo.
Finally an honest and unintimidated Senior Federal District Court Judge, Thomas Selby Ellis III, has declared in open court what most people have recognized for months: Special Counsel Robert Mueller has insufficient or, more likely, no evidence showing Russians worked cooperatively with the Trump campaign to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Now having spent several million dollars of public money with little to show for it, Mueller appears willing to use the bludgeon of criminal prosecution to convince witnesses (e.g., Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort) to “sing” against President Trump. Or maybe Mueller will settle for an imaginative composition in lieu of admissible evidence.
In the hearing on Friday, May 4, 2018, in the Eastern District of Virginia, Judge Ellis said, “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment or whatever. …”
There was a succinct summary of the Judge’s comments in The Daily Caller News Foundation article dated May 6, 2018, entitled Federal Judge Could Be A Nightmare For Special Counsel Mueller.
I really like the phraseology law professor Alan Dershowitz used in the May 7, 2018, The Hill article entitled Federal judge rightly rebukes Mueller attorney for questionable tactics. Judge Ellis said, “This vernacular is to ‘sing,’ is what prosecutors use. What you got to be careful of is, they may not only sing, they may compose.”
Two other federal district court judges are looking at the Michael Flynn guilty plea and the demand of the 13 indicted Russian boiler room operators for a speedy trial.
In Flynn’s case, recently released unredacted FBI reports indicate that during their interview with Flynn, the FBI agents detected no evidence of Flynn’s making false statements to them in violation of federal law. Yet he pled guilty to making false statements to them. Why? Apparently the Justice Department suggested that unless Flynn admitted making false statements, his son would be prosecuted, too.
Special Counsel Mueller’s highly publicized indictments of the 13 Russians is beginning to look like another Justice Department clown car act, too. Expecting the Russians to remain in Russia with which the US of A has no extradition treaty, Mueller’s thugs asked for a continuance of their arraignment. Oddly enough, the Russians’ US of A legal counsel objected, saying in fact that the Russians would plead not guilty and demand a speedy trial. More importantly, the Russians’ legal counsel made a detailed demand for discovery. Their counsel wants to see everything Uncle Sugar has on the 13 Russians. Ruh-roh!
Given the US DoJ’s extremely bad habit of not fully disclosing exculpatory evidence and its not expecting the Russians to actually want to go to trial, we may soon see a motion for dismissal from the Special Counsel.
As I’ve suggested in preceding OpenCdA posts, the US Department of Justice and its subordinate element, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, need a mercilessly critical examination by a Presidential Commission akin to the 1963 Warren Commission. There are clearly some corrupt lawyers and agents in both. And for the sake of the Constitution, fire Mueller and his thugs before they can bludgeon again!
Today’s Seattle Times online is running an article headlined ‘Gina Haspel, nominee to head CIA, sought to withdraw over questions about her role in agency interrogation program‘.
According to the article, “Haspel told the White House she was interested in stepping aside if it avoided the spectacle of a brutal confirmation hearing on Wednesday and potential damage to the CIA’s reputation and her own, the officials said.”
Don’t withdraw. Don’t even think about it. Please don’t.
For the last 33 years you’ve done more for your country than most of the Fools on the Hill. While they were getting rich, getting drunk or high, and getting laid, you were defending our country with more loyalty, integrity, courage, and smarts than they will ever have. Unfortunately, they are stupid enough to reject your nomination and put the country at risk to score some points for their own political enrichment. They are moral hypocrites.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has just publicly released its final report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Here is a link to the redacted report entitled Report on Russian Active Measures.
ADDENDUM: 04-28-2018 – Here is a link to the 96-page Minority Views commentary about the HPSCI final report linked above.
|
|
|
Here is a link to the cover letter and the 39-page report of the Office of Inspector General, US Department of Justice, released April13, 2018.
Senate Majority Leader Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr. and Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Davis Ryan Jr. are among several Fools on the Hill urging President Trump to just let Special Counsel Robert Mueller finish his investigation. Just let him finish the job he started, they’re saying.
That certainly sounds like a reasonable suggestion. Except it’s not.
How will McConnell, Ryan, and the other Fools on the Hill know when the investigation is finished?
What are the clearly enumerated defined investigative criteria being used to judge the sufficiency of the Mueller Hit Squad’s investigation?
Who has been designated and empowered to be the person to say that the investigation has reached its conclusion?
The answers to those questions should have been clearly enumerated and included in the authorization for the Special Counsel, but they weren’t.
Why not?
The answer to that last question may be in what was not included in Order 3915-2017 signed by Acting Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein on 5/17/17. That was the order which appointed the Special Counsel to investigate Russian interference with the 2016 Presidential election and related matters. Paragraph (b) of that Order gives Mueller almost unlimited authority to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump“. [emphasis mine]
Notice, however, the Order does not authorize as well the investigation of “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and inviduals associated with the campaign of nominee Hillary Clinton.” Had the Clinton campaign been mentioned specifically with the Trump campaign in the Order, it would have forced Rosenstein to include the kind of specificity I suggested. It would have made it difficult for Mueller to ignore the Clinton campaign’s and the DNC’s now-proven financial relationship with the Russian government to create the fictional Steele dossier. It would have made it difficult for Mueller to focus his entire inquisition on Trump.
By specifically excluding the Clinton campaign from the Order, Rosenstein gave Mueller complete authority to ignore Clinton campaign complicity with the Russians and also to ignore other crimes committed by the Clinton campaign and others.
For an exceedingly clear explanation of just how corrupt the US Department of Justice has become, read ‘Talk to Mueller? No, Trump Should Use His Bully Pulpit to Expose Mueller’s Corruption‘. It was written by Kurt Schlichter and was posted April 12, 2017, on townhall.com.
Powered by WordPress
Copyright © 2024 by OpenCDA LLC, All Rights Reserved
