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Mueller: This Should Not Be The End
Mueller has concluded that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. After two years of concerted attacks by a biased press and a corrupt bureaucracy, the collusion fantasy has been laid to rest.
Now let’s talk about collusion.
In 2016, and for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting administration used the power of federal law enforcement to spy on the opposition party during a presidential election. It justified that spying by citing a fraudulent document (the Steele Dossier), paid for by its own party’s candidate, as the basis for the warrant. The spying was overseen by fiercely partisan officials in the Department of Justice openly contemptuous of the opposition candidate. Other administration officials tried hundreds of times, without explanation or plausible justification, to gain access to confidential information collected during the spying.
If the administration’s party’s candidate had won the election, it seems certain that none of this would ever have come to light, an administration and Department of Justice shot through with corruption would have welcomed its successor, and its misconduct would have been buried forever.
That didn’t happen. Now the lingering corruption of the Obama era must be exposed and removed.
Published in Politics
Unless you can make it a clean and public kill, swiftly administered, it will not be successful. If the “deep state” is as deep as is alleged, then you’ll drag it out for years in what the public will see as nothing more than hunting for revenge. As weary as they are after Mueller, further endless investigations will serve little but to tire them completely.
We often make claims that people are weary of this, that, or another thing, but most people aren’t interested enough to be weary. The worst they can get is bored.
Twenty-first century history indicates pretty strongly (see comment #19) that very little will be done by the managerial state to police itself when it screws up. That is especially true when such policing would require it relinquishing its own power.
I mean, how are these folks supposed to make a living in the Imperial City?
True, we have the outsider Trump in the White House now and he holds little affection for the “stupid” people who make up our so-called meritocracy. That permits a glimmer of hope that some retribution inside the bureaucracy may be coming, even though Lois Lerner is still enjoying her early and lucrative retirement.
But anything done to the DC boys and girls will be temporary. They did what they did because they had the power to do so, the power of our imperial surveillance state. Nobody is going to take those specific powers away from their successors, because nobody wants to give up the empire and the two things are inextricably linked. So sometime in the future, with a different cast of characters, this will all happen again, perhaps as farce, but more likely as fascism.
Are you sure that’s such a bad thing? Executive power has gotten out of bounds.
Afternoon Skipsul,
You are asking the impossible, and missing the nature of loss of trust. We have not lost trust in VA, IRS, modern media, you name the institution, because of one stark event publicly noted. One might compare it to a political campaign, where one tries to drive up the negatives. Driving up the negatives in any part of the admin state is worthwhile by itself, and to brush back the intel agencies is even more important. We might even revisit the powers we have given them to spy on us. Trump could use this to his benefit his re-election, and after that it could be used to keep the intel agencies on edge. Trump post re-election could say he was pushing on to insure that no other president was ever threatened in a similar fashion, this offers interesting political advantages. At each stage the media could be put in awkward positions in covering intel corruption, and Trump could use the media response to his advantage.
If the intel agencies get away with this do you think that that will not emboldened them?
So now they’re playing the “weary of it all” card in order to cover their tracks? No, I’m not going along with that. They weren’t weary five minutes ago.
The funny thing about the conservative response to the two-year Russiagate travesty is that nobody on this site wants to consider it. In fact, they would oppose it. Such is our paradox.
Russiagate was an inside’s game, but it was promulgated and supercharged by the media, both the press and the networks. The hysteria and refusal even today to accept collusion’s demise is attributable primarily to them. They must be corrected.
With great power, say the comic books, comes great responsibility; but today media power can be exercised irresponsibly, without fear of consequences. Stories can be fabricated, as can sources. Accusations can be leveled with a minimum regard for honesty, fairness or basic decency. Get something wrong on page 1 and — well, that’s what page 18 is for, right?
Oh, what did that chyron just say?
The press claims to speak truth to power. But when the richest man in the world owns the Washington Post and the richest man in Mexico owns the NY Times, whose power is being spoken to and whose power is being served?
Our Founders established a First Amendment protection for a free press. It is one of the principles we proclaim. But like other principles — free trade, separation of church and state, the right to bear arms — time and practice eventually force us to move from our principled ideal and adjust it to flesh-and-blood reality. We deal with what it has become, not what it was, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
Our politics has been defiled by the license of a consequence-free media. Like a family where permissiveness is an all-encompassing ideology, our home has been fouled by children who feel free to eliminate wherever and whenever they want. They refuse to clean it up. And we, the supposedly responsible ones, are so paralyzed by abstraction and fear of the future that we are becoming inured to the midden heaps and simply pray that somehow, someway, things will change.
But the media is not going to reform itself. No one who has watched, read and listened to the MSM in the last two days can have any doubts about that at all.
We need to push for loosening of the libel laws, perhaps using our mother country England as an example. The current standard for defamation must change; newspapers and networks must be more vulnerable to lawsuits from the people they slander. Only the threat of bankruptcy and ruin can halt the reckless behavior which has become the media’s norm in this century.
This is the conservative approach to what we face. When conditions within a polity become intolerable, you either make a peaceful adjustment to the oppressive situation or you prepare for much worse later. Doing nothing, claiming incapacity, is an unworthy response for the inheritors of our Anglo-American traditions to take.
But I can already feel the violent perturbations of holes being poked in the air by angry fingers…
Nicely written comment, Freesmith, but I don’t think stricter libel laws would have prevented the endless Russia collusion speculation, nor seriously undermined the narrative. You can’t sue people for expressing a suspicion that turns out to be incorrect. And you can’t sue the media for piling on.
I will be generally satisfied if the people lose a bit more of their faith in the mainstream media, and if the worst offenders are ejected from government. I think that’s happening.
Except how does it develop a tool to control the administrative state? Specifically, how would it control the administrative state better than policy which puts limiting the state to its proper role ahead of trying to figure out which agents of the state are Boy Scouts and which are thugs in suits?
Much evil can be done by those with good intentions, and if we just kicked out the corrupt ones, we might be unpleasantly surprised by the number of bureaucrats left, and the damage they still could do to us.
@amyschley often recommends the comedy Yes Minister for its revealing satire of administrative dysfunction. The civil servants making the mischief are usually quite different from thugs in suits. They’re mostly well-behaved. Their vices tend toward the picayune and touchingly human — a bit of moral vanity, a touch too much world-weary cynicism, the cowardice of people-pleasing — that sort of thing. It’s simply not necessary to be a thug in order to be a cog in the machinery crushing human freedom.
Given that resources for reform are always limited, perhaps it is better to focus on reforming policy, as @skipsul suggested, than on trying to prove the mens rea of bureaucrats whose mens rea may not in fact be provable.
But loosening of the libel laws would permit say, Michael Cohen to sue for defamation when the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and the other usual MSM suspects report that “in 2016 Michael Cohen was in Prague meeting with Russian agents.” If the standard is even as strict as “reckless disregard for the truth,” Michael Cohen wins in a walk, especially after he shows his passport that proves he’s never visited Prague.
I think that a press that so routinely publishes falsehoods does not deserve the carte blanche protection that the First Amendment provides, especially not to the extent is has been extended by the Supreme Court’s opinion in NYTimes v. Sullivan.
A press that routinely publishes false information can reasonably and correctly be called the enemy of the people. I would support a movement to amend the Constitution to place a requirement of truthfulness on the press in order to exercise its freedom.
It is cruel irony indeed that the Republican Party’s 2008 Presidential nominee authored a bill that further unbridled the power of the press while severely restricting the free speech rights of We the People.
I understand your point, but disagree. I don’t think too much press freedom is the problem. It’s always possible to distort the truth, and greater restrictions will be used by the other side when they are in power.
I’m content with existing law, so far as mainstream media are concerned.
It is if any future executive is completely afraid to act on anything at all. We need only look at the W. Bush years where the Dems went on fishing expedition after fishing expedition looking for any confirmation of “Bush lied”. Now you can argue the wisdom of the 2nd Gulf War all you like, and the lack of wisdom in Congress surrendering its declaration of war powers, but regardless of that the implication is clear – any Prez who orders military action will now be subject to ex post facto trials for that action should the domestic political winds shift. Congress should instead actually reassert its political duties up front as that would restore a proper balance of power, rather than merely threatening to embarrass any Prez after the fact just to wash its own hands.
You’re addressing an argument I did not actually make, which is a reform of the various federal agencies, and in particular the intel agencies. That is absolutely necessary, but the argument here has not been about that but rather about opening up various investigations and prosecutions of people in those agencies so as to find and punish those who ginned up the Mueller fiasco – investigations which many in this thread believe will somehow reach Hillary, Obama, and others.
Who is this “they” of whom you speak? Again, this is attempting to counter an argument I’ve nowhere made. I’ve not spoken of any “they” or “them”, I’m warning of political consequences to our own party.
There needs to be an adjustment. I fear you’re overlooking what Andrew Breitbart correctly pointed out: the mainstream media is the Democrat Party. He correctly called it the “Democrat-Media Complex.”
The mainstream media is government. The First Amendment freedom of the press was guaranteed as a check against government. We ought not permit government to wield such an imbalance of power over We the People.
I agree that reform of the institutions is the important thing.
Karl Rove has an article in today’s WSJ about how Trump should just let the origins of the Mueller investigation go. The subheadline says, “Obsessing over the investigation’s origins isn’t the way to win over swing voters.”
I say two things: (1) Mr. Rove, people like you are the reason we need Trump. (2) You should quit obsessing about winning over swing voters, and think more about how we can have good government. If it were possible to separate the two, I’d rather have a Democrat president than a corrupt administrative state of the kind we now have.
Morning Mig,
Sir Humphrey and Brennan are night a day, as Sir Humphrey, might say “when one considers the nature of the backgrounds and the nature of their educations where one goes to one of the two universities and one reads graphic novels, one ends up comparing opera and radio 4 with Cardi B.” Brennan is a thug in a suit. How do we attack the deep state? Using the fake news model, we drive up the negatives. Considering that the media has less credibility and is trusted less than the congress, I conclude that Trump’s attacks on the media have had their effect. Also the media has in the case of CNN lost audience. The media and the intel agencies thought that a constant drip of leaks and daily sensational Russia stories would drive down Trump’s approval numbers, so the idea that a chronic low level stream of negative assertions is effective is not a novel idea. Trump can turn the tables on both the deep state and the media, he can tweet information and challenge the media not to cover it. He could say, “CNN was interested in Melania’s Shoes, but they can’t cover the FISA documents.” He could say to the NYT and the WP, “ you were obsessed with the color of our Christmas trees but you bury the email between x and y.” Trump could, in his Rodney Dangerfield way, mock the media and force them either to cover the corruption of the deep state or by their absence of coverage highlight their complicity and the corruption it self. To expose the corrosive nature of the admin state is a worthy goal.
Morning Skipsul,
I have not said that my goal was to reach Hillary or Obama, However in focusing on the handling of Clinton’s email violations and funding of the dossier in comparison with how process crimes were used and treated in the case of the Trump investigation, the basic unfairness and two tiered nature of how justice was applied can be spotlighted. Folks in general do not like Smollett like justice, where certain people get off, this general desire for fairness is a big stick. I am after the deep state, Obama and Hillary will be stained by implication, it happened under their watch, to their benefit, and used against their opponents, that will be hard to spin away. We know that any commission or governmental review or investigation will do nothing, dating back to who was at fault for the loss of the USS Indianapolis, we can see that the guilty are always shielded and that a fall guy is always found, and nothing changes in the admin state. Given that, I want the attack on the admin state to be a political attack from the outside. I want the admin state to be treated like the VA, always under public scrutiny, with increased public skepticism. Your have offered no method of preventing another coup attempt the next time a Republican president is elected, we haven’t even learned from Scooter Libby, an earlier successful use of the deep state to hobble a president.
What makes you think another Republican President will ever get elected again. I suspect trump is one of the methods the liberals planned to keep GOP from being elected again.
I’m going to have to disagree pretty profoundly with that, just as I’d disagree with the assertion that Hollywood, the universities, and entertainment television are the government. In America, government is well-defined legal entity, and pretending that it isn’t in order to impose restrictions on free speech we happen not to like seems dangerous and misguided.
We need more speech, not less. The threat to our liberty comes more from our silence than from the dishonest spin of a left-leaning press.
Well, considering your prognosticatory track record, I’d probably consider your skepticism on the matter to be good news for the GOP.
When I wrote that, what I really had in mind was that the worst offenders at Justice would be ferreted out and fired — with disgrace, if possible. I don’t expect a full-on audit and review of government; I don’t think such a thing is even possible. But the most blatantly questionable moments, the FISA warrant, for example, should be reviewed, and anyone who acted poorly sent off to the private sector.
Oh, and a bunch of security clearances for ex-DOJ people should probably be yanked, if only to communicate our displeasure.
Government will always attract the corrupt, the overzealous, the arrogantly superior, and the misguided technocrat. We can’t prevent that, but, when there’s pretty clear evidence of abuse, we should turn over a few rocks and stomp on whatever scurries out, if for no other reason than that it keeps the rest on their toes.
You surely don’t disagree that the Framers and Ratifiers guaranteed freedom of the press as a check against government, do you?
You surely don’t disagree that the Democrat Party is the party of government, do you?
So your only disagreement is with my and Andrew Breitbart’s characterization of the mainstream media as the Democrat-Media Complex?
Morning Fake,
You ask a good question. It is plain that the Domocrat and admin state strategies have been to either prevent a Republican president from being elected, or if one is elected to geld that president, or to insure that the only Republican president that is elected is one who will not give Barbara Bush a heart attack. And from their point of view their behavior is entirely logical and to be expected. Given that the Democrat party and the admin state and media are alllies if not cousins, then one might consider that attacking them as a unit might be beneficial, especially if one considers the admin state to the republics greatest threat. And if we consider that the admin state is the republic’s greatest threat, then maybe we should act like it is, or tell us what is a greater threat, Russia.
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”
Seriously, my “only disagreement” is with redefining non-governmental entities as “government” so that we can curtail their First Amendment liberties.
But that’s objection enough.
Good point, but when they share the same bed (literally, in this case) it’s sometimes hard to tell.
Why? I tend to be right more than not with the exception of the Trump wildcard. Trump mess stuff up in that he tends to play different than expected thus he got elected. Thus he got Kavanaugh on the SCOTUS, in that he was the only GOP that would fight for him and that got the other GOP going. He even managed to pull off a Mueller sort of exoneration. But Trump will be gone soon enough one way or the other and his effects with him so thing will proceed as expected.
Truth is that a GOP may get elected again after Trump. Just not in my lifetime.
Is it reasonable to define the mainstream media as independent from the Democrat Party, which is the party of government?
Is it unreasonable to deny constitutional protection to an organization that is not independent of government?
By this logic, Fox News should be equally regulated as an arm of the Republican Party.
Do you mean Fox still hasn’t switched over to the Democrats? I’m surprised it’s taking so long. It didn’t take CNN nearly that long.
This is called sophistry.
We have a government. We have partisan institutions. Those institutions are not part of government when their favored people are in power, and then not part of government when their favored people are out of power. That isn’t how it works.
This isn’t a matter of what feels “unreasonable.” This is a matter of what is. And no, I won’t endorse curtailing the Constitutional liberties of people who happen to favor one side in the great political debate, just because they happen to like to work in journalism.