In the last few days, while the Department of Justice did shred with redactions the court-ordered Special Counsel Memo declassifications, certain other actions have come to light:
- AG Barr went to Italy last week on official business. The Dems opined he was running away from the Impeachment/Ukraine Collusion committee hearings, but alas a much better explanation was that he was in Italy to investigate the activities of one Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese diplomat with ties to Italian intelligence, and a key figure in the lead up to the Russian Collusion Hoax / CounterIntelligence Investigation / Special Counsel investigation frauds.
- In a WSJ op-ed Monday, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey via a post by Roger Simon at PJ Media “Mukasey OpEd should strike Fear in the Democrats”:
True, much media and political effort has gone into sometimes close and often willful parsing of President Trump’s July 25 conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky —ironic when you consider Mr. Trump’s well-known linguistic promiscuity—not to mention the celebrated whistleblower complaint, which contains no firsthand information. Little notice has been given, however, to another document lying in plain sight: a Justice Department press release issued the day the conversation transcript became public.
That Justice Department statement makes explicit that the president never spoke with Attorney General William Barr “about having Ukraine investigate anything relating to former Vice President Biden or his son” or asked him to contact Ukraine “on this or any other matter,” and that the attorney general has not communicated at all with Ukraine. It also contains the following morsel: “A Department of Justice team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. While the Attorney General has yet to contact Ukraine in connection with this investigation, certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information to Mr. Durham, which he is evaluating. [Bold mine]
The number of countries includes the U. K. and Italy, the latter of which was just visited by one William Barr.
So what’s going on? More from Mukasey:
Published in General“The definitive answer to the obvious question—what’s that about?—is known only to Mr. Durham and his colleagues. But publicly available reports, including by Andrew McCarthy in his new book, “Ball of Collusion,” suggest that during the 2016 campaign the Federal Bureau of Investigation tried to get evidence from Ukrainian government officials against Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, to pressure him into cooperating against Mr. Trump. When you grope through the miasma of Slavic names and follow the daisy chain of related people and entities, it appears that Ukrainian officials who backed the Clinton campaign provided information that generated the investigation of Mr. Manafort—acts that one Ukrainian court has said violated Ukrainian law and “led to interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016 and harmed the interests of Ukraine as a state.””
I have little sympathy for Manafort but it is obvious that he was no more corrupt than a slew of Democrat ex-officials like Gregg Craig, let off last week by the proverbial DC jury, and the Podesta brothers.
I do have sympathy for Manafort, in that he was singled out and given the full weight of the Federal Governments highly selective, scorched earth, prosecutorial treatment because the corrupt Weissmann Special Counsel incorrectly held out hope Manafort had some dirt on Trump.
Weissmann had exactly zero interest in the Manafort tax evasion, FARA, and other process crimes.   Weissmann was bracing Manafort for dirt on Trump.  Manafort was jailed in solitary confinement for white collar tax evasion, and FARA crimes while violent criminals routinely receive more lenient pretrial treatment.
Was lobbyist DC insider wheeler dealer Manafort guilty of the above white collar crimes …. yes …. he plead guilty to the charges.
Could many other wheeler dealer DC lobbyists insiders withstand the Weissmann proctological exam given to Manafort and come out unscathed ….. I doubt it.
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I’ll believe in justice, when I see justice.
It is interesting how what Manafort is criminal. But Biden and Son is just peachy keen. Â
One of the reasons I am a life time Democrat is because of how many things are illegal if you are not. Â
I do like the concept of avoiding any investigation, criminal or otherwise, by simply running for public office against an incumbent administration.
If law enforcement begins an investigation, the alleged “dirty” political challenger simply claims the entire “matter in question” has been looked into with no wrong doing found, then the challenger announces any investigation is politically motivated with the incumbent administration abusing it’s police powers.
But again, this strategy can only work with the compliance of the Fourth Estate, thus making this strategy inoperable for the (R)’s.