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Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
Homeless tent city outside of Angels Stadium, Anaheim, CA.
I remember to this day the look of agony, desperation and forlorn hopelessness in the eyes of a beautiful young woman begging on the streets of New York City one very cold night years ago. I remember thinking, as she peered up at me from the doorway where she was huddled, that she had been, not long before, a person of some accomplishment and, perhaps even affluence, based upon her now-shabby and dirty clothing. I remember so clearly going back to the hotel room and telling my wife that I would probably never be able to get those eyes, and their nightmarish fear, out of my memory. That was years ago, and those eyes came back to me as I thought about sharing a recent, and very unsettling, experience while visiting New Orleans and seeing its block after block homeless tent city, just one of a number spread throughout the Central Business District.
We had made a trip down to New Orleans to visit my wife’s brother after recent surgery at Tulane Medical Center, located amidst intersecting Interstate approaches and off ramps. Leaving the Center takes one down a street near the Superdome, under one of the major expressways. And here one drives for blocks of what seemed hundreds of tents jammed together so tightly there was hardly room to walk between them. Their occupants slept on the concrete neutral ground which is hard to imagine in mild weather and impossible to comprehend in freezing, rainy, stormy weather so common in our area in the Winter. Turning a corner, we passed very close to the opening of one of the tents, in which a very young mother was tending to her very small child–on the concrete sidewalk.
I had been generally aware of the increasing severity of the homeless problem in a number of major cities and had recently read the excellent and superbly reported articles about the steadily deteriorating streets of San Francisco published recently by The Federalist. These articles, San Francisco’s Homeless Encampments Expose The Failure of a Liberal Utopia, by John Daniel Davidson and San Francisco is Suffering From the Excesses of its Own Liberalism, by Erielle Davidson, paint a vivid picture of the descent of that once-beautiful city into a dystopian landscape, including scenes like the following:
“In November of 2017 alone, 6,211 needles were collected while via the 311 App (the “concerned citizen” reporting app set up by recently deceased San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee), 1,498 requests were made to clean up human feces. The public defecation problem has become so intolerable in San Francisco that private citizens have built an online map to track the concentrations of poop in the city, so that pedestrians may know to avoid certain areas.
“And it’s not just poop. The overwhelming smell of urine on parts of Mission Street and Market Street would make your nose bleed. I recall the first time I rode BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit, San Francisco’s subway system) and was nearly knocked over by the sheer stench of the station. I was surprised to learn that exiting the station supplied little to no relief — the urine smell hangs heavy in the more populated areas of the city and is nearly inescapable. In a dark twist of humor, the city has had to replace numerous different street poles due to urine eroding the foundation.
“What drives a large part of the human waste issue is San Francisco’s homeless population. The homeless epidemic in San Francisco is tragic and frightening — in a 47-square mile city, we have around 7,500 homeless people, meaning there are approximately 160 homeless people per square mile. Unsurprisingly, it’s not uncommon to see frequented streets downtown blocked by what people dismally have coined “tent cities,” large enclaves of tents that homeless people have set up with little to no pushback from local authorities. What makes the homeless problem particularly alarming is that a variety of tents are often juxtaposed next to $4,000-per-month apartments. In a region where the median income is just under $100,000 and where the economic growth — fueled by brilliantly innovative minds — has been nothing short of astounding, there is some of the country’s most abject and abysmal poverty.”
Commenting on the relative recency of the tent city phenomenon, one author explains:
“Homelessness has always been a feature of life in the Golden Gate City, but the encampments—and the concentrations of used needles, feces, and urine that come with them—are new. Dozens of tent camps now line freeway underpasses and sidewalks throughout the city, despite a 2016 ordinance authorizing city officials to clear them out. The best the city can do, according to Mohammad Nuru, director of the city’s Department of Public Works, is stay in “firefighter mode.” “When you have needles or you have poop or you have places with the stench of urine, those are the priorities,” he said in a recent interview. “In Public Works land, that’s like a 911 call.”
“The tent camps have increased visibility of the city’s homeless even as the homeless population has remained relatively stable. A recent survey found there were about 7,500 homeless people in the city, about the same as the last count, in 2015. That’s the year the tents first showed up in large numbers, during citywide cleanup efforts ahead of the Super Bowl. Housing activists feared the cleanup would result in forced removal of San Francisco’s homeless population—and for good reason. “They are going to have to leave,” said the late Mayor Ed Lee at the time. “We’ll give you an alternative, we are always going to be supportive, but you are going to have to leave the streets.”
This article noted that the middle class is disappearing from San Francisco, as a recent report found:
“But while the homeless encampments have made the poor more visible, the middle class is quietly disappearing. A recent report from the real-estate site Redfin found San Francisco lost more residents than any other city did in the last quarter of 2017, and demand for moving trucks in the Bay Area is so high that U-Haul is charging customers as much as ten times more for trips out of the region than for trips in.
“Seen in this light, the homeless encampments are just one aspect of a larger problem afflicting one of the wealthiest and most progressive enclaves in the country. The city’s infamous NIMBY-ism consistently blocks the construction of new housing, which is one reason the median price of a single-family home in San Francisco is now $1.5 million.”
New Orleans has made frequent stabs at solving this problem, but, based on what we witnessed with our own eyes just a few days ago, those attempts have quite obviously been colossal failures. As noted in a piece about a 2014 attempt by the City Council to address the problem:
“In a Sept. 11 statement to Gambit, Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s communications director Garnesha Crawford said “last night, the City began to actively notify the public of the new laws that allow for the removal of tents, furniture, and other items in order to keep public spaces clean, safe and accessible. To the extent this amendment affects our homeless population, the City will continue to inform the public that all identified obstructions must be removed from public rights-of-way within 72 hours of notice and to transition those who are camped in areas across the city into clean and safe shelter.”
“The city also wants to link homeless people with the 60 service providers working with the city.
“At the Sept. 4 City Council meeting, which passed the “obstruction” ordinance introduced by District B Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell, there were two opposing votes: District C Councilwoman Nadine Ramsey and District E Councilman James Gray. Gray called the ordinance “an attack on the homeless.” Proponents of the measure admitted it’s an imperfect plan and would return to review how to enforce rules and regulations. Today, Gray told Gambit that, “If you’re going to put together a plan to deal with the problem, you need to look at the plan as one unit. You cant make a good decision with the left half of the plan until you’ve looked at that right half.””
The person who cast one of the dissenting votes against the ordinance made a statement which succinctly sums up the humane-and hard-truth which must be faced, somehow:
“Gray said there has not yet been a timeline for City Council discussion for drafting that plan, and he said it will require guidance from the health department. Gray also is concerned about the city’s seizure of homeless property. “Do we really want a storage somewhere where we’re holding blankets and tents of homeless people?” he said. “Do we really want to seize a sleeping bag on a cold winter night? Since we haven’t gotten to those details, we haven’t given thought to them, and once we do, we might need to take a much harder look at this. Right now it’s not cold outside but the constitution still applies.” “
I was moved to start this conversation because (1) I saw a sight in New Orleans with my own eyes which was troubling, to put it mildly, (2)which signifies a serious societal problem to which I do not pretend to have even the beginning of an answer but which leaves me with a feeling, as Andrew Klavan mentioned in a recent podcast, that “it’s just not right” and (3) to which I would welcome any ideas, suggestions, proposals, etc., anyone might care to offer.
Have you witnessed this apparently recent phenomenon lately–a jam-packed tent city in your town? Have you had to dodge or step around needles, feces, piles of broken glass and all the other detritus these tent cities bring with them? Has your City Council or State Legislature grappled with this problem, and, if so, to what effect?
A letter to the Editor of our regional newspaper, The Advocate, stated what many of citizens of New Orleans, San Francisco, and other cities feel in which this recent societal problem has arrived; after recalling his service with the Peace Corps in Ecuador the writer related:
“By my definition, though, Ecuador was certainly “Third World.” The other day I was walking down Canal Street in downtown New Orleans. Over a stretch of about eight blocks, I was approached by five different people begging for money and food. I also saw two people sleeping on cardboard mats beneath storefront awnings. At almost every major intersection in the city, there is a homeless person soliciting for handouts; and, beneath an overpass, there is a veritable city of tents. It reminds me of Ecuador. Years ago, there was a popular bumper sticker that read: “Louisiana, Third World and Proud of It!” Back then I thought it was funny. Today, it makes me feel ashamed.”
As I struggle with the sequelae of this recent development, and recall the terrified eyes of that young lady so long go in New York City, I am left with an abiding conviction that this is, indeed, “just not right.”
Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
That word is one of the kinder descriptions of Andrew Weissmann found in Sidney Powell’s excellent book Licensed To Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice:
“The most polite description I had heard of Weissmann by any defense counsel who had dealt with him was that he was a ‘madman'” (p. 46)
The author goes on to relate, regarding Weissmann’s unbounded regard for himself:
“Weissmann fancied himself a god among prosecutors.” (p. 35)
Ms. Powell’s book, which I cannot possibly recommend too highly, is a massively detailed analysis of the depth and entrenchment of the corruption, lying, deceit, blatant dishonesty and disregard of, if not open contempt for, the Rule of Law in the Department of Justice. And, while it causes me pain, both personally and professionally, to acknowledge it, the picture she paints of certain Federal Judges is not, as the saying goes, “a pretty sight,” either.
The author’s bona fides are, to put it mildly, most impressive, as she has been lead counsel in more than 500 appeals in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, had been in private practice for 20 years at the time of publication (2014) and had amassed a long list of professional honors and accolades. Significantly for purposes of this discussion, she was Lead Counsel for one of the wrongly (and clearly corruptly) convicted defendants at the hands of the Enron Strike Force, Jim Brown of Merrill Lynch. To say that she knows whereof she speaks invites the use of the ancient legal maxim Res Ipsa Loquitur — the thing speaks for itself.
Thus, it is most informative to hear her opinions on the sleazy conduct of the person Robert Mueller chose to be his Lead Prosecutor in the almost two-year-old (with not a shred of publicly known evidence so far) Russia-Trump Campaign “collusion” investigation:
Sidney Powell, who served as lead counsel in more than 500 federal appeals, filed an ethics complaint against Mr. Weissman along with William Hodes, one of the bar’s leading ethics experts. It alleged he not only hid evidence but also called “cooperating witnesses” who gave what he knew to be false testimony.
“During his years on the Enron Task Force, Prosecutor Weissmann was widely known for intimidating witnesses, hiding evidence, and unethical and heavy-handed, if not illegal, tactics,” said Powell, who has written about the case for the legal site Seeking Justice.
The Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction that Mr. Weissmann and the Enron Task Force secured [against] the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. The Court specifically cited him giving jury instructions that removed criminal intent from the law and improperly portrayed the law Andersen was charged with breaking.
“Indeed, it is striking how little culpability the instructions required,” former Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in the opinion. “Only persons conscious of wrongdoing can be said to ‘knowingly corruptly persuade.'”
Ms. Powell noted that jury was told “even if petitioner honestly and sincerely believed its conduct was lawful, the jury could convict,” which was not true.
The emails obtained by Judicial Watch are a peek into what many legal scholars have warned is a totally corrupted, partisan Department of Justice. (Ed. note: emphasis in original)
Here is more of what she thinks of Mueller’s pick to be his top assistant, with some insight as to the reason for his selection of this particular “pit bull”, avid admirer and financial supporter of Hillary Clinton, and one who expressed his “awe” and pride of Sally Yates for defying a direct order of the President of the United States when she served as Acting Attorney General:
Manafort, a Trump associate, is simply a small step in Weissmann’s quest to impugn this presidency or to reverse the results of the 2016 election. Never mind that months of investigation by multiple entities have produced no evidence of “collusion.” Mueller’s rare, predawn raid of Manafort’s home — a fearsome treat usually reserved for mobsters and drug dealers — is textbook Weissmann terrorism. And of course, the details were leaked — another illegal tactic.
She follows with an excellent summary of Weissmann’s Storm Trooper tactics (my phrase, not hers, as I have expressed my opinion here earlier that I thought the Manafort raid by Mueller and Weissmann to be pure Gestapo tactics) in the case of the totally unjustified and frighteningly ruthless home invasion of Manafort’s home in the early, pre-dawn hours:
Weissmann is intent on indicting Manafort. It won’t matter that Manafort knows the Trump campaign did not collude with the Russians. Weissman will pressure Manafort to say whatever satisfies Weissmann’s perspective. Perjury is only that which differs from Weissmann’s “view” of the “evidence” — not the actual truth.
We all lose from Weissmann’s involvement. First, the truth plays no role in Weissmann’s quest. Second, respect for the rule of law, simple decency and following the facts do not appear in Weissmann’s playbook. Third, and most important, all Americans lose whenever our judicial system becomes a weapon to reward political friends and punish political foes.
It is long past the due date for Mueller to clean up his team — or Weissmann to resign — as a sign that the United States is a nation of laws that are far more important than one Weissmann. (Ed. note: published before Manafort’s indictment)
We often hear the expression “Don’t get too far into the weeds” when explaining something, and while that may be good advice in general, it simply does not apply in the matters covered by this book, as one cannot truly understand how deep the corruption goes with regard to the Enron cases– Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, and those of a number of individuals, without getting deeply into the “weeds” of the these sometimes convoluted prosecutions. However, to sum up those matters which are proven in the book and as to which there is little or no dispute, here are a few of the “accomplishments” of this “God among prosecutors”:
Almost all of the cases in which he was involved were reversed either by the Supreme Court or the Courts of Appeal.
He, quite literally, created “crimes” out of thin air, the deficiencies of which were noted by then-Chief Justice Rehnquist, as noted above, in one of the many reversals of his “masterful” work as a prosecutor.
He sent one defendant, “guilty” of a non-crime, to a maximum security prison, including periods of solitary confinement, because he would not give testimony he insisted the defendant give.
He sent Ms. Powell’s client, Jim Brown, to prison for lying to a grand jury after instructing him to share with the grand jury whatever his “personal understanding” was — whether it was accurate or not. (p. 76)
His team of disgraces to the Bar kept her client under threat of further trials, appeals, returns to maximum security prison, for nine years, the entire teenage years of his children and one-fifth of his own lifespan.
Other persistent, deliberate, carefully planned acts of concealment of evidence and blatant and open intimidation of witnesses and defendants so deeply buried in “The Swamp” it took almost nine years of tirelessly hard work by many lawyers dedicated to the Rule of Law, like Ms. Powell, to unearth.
As noted in the foreword of the book, by Judge Alex Kozinsky, former, now retired, Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals:
Another important responsibility of prosecutors is to disclose to the defense any exculpatory information of which the government is aware. The Supreme Court announced this as a constitutional requirement in the 1963 case of Brady v. Maryland, and it has confirmed its underlying principles many times since.
…there is, as I’ve said elsewhere, ‘an epidemic of Brady violations abroad in the land.
For this reason, and in the interest of completeness, no discussion of the intricate web of dishonesty and corruption which has enveloped the Department of [In]Justice, as Ms. Powell sometimes refers to it, would be complete without noting the stellar example of Judge Emmet Sullivan in holding a number of prosecutors accountable for similar conduct in the trial of Senator Ted Stevens, RIP, in 2009. It bears noting, as potentially significant in the current “FISA-gate” scandal, that Judge Sullivan is the Judge who took over the Gen. Michael Flynn case after Judge Contreras was recused for reasons still unknown as of this writing.
Here, the Judge –one of the very few to do so– “took the bull by the horns” and called a number of prosecutors publicly–by name–to account for their corrupt practices in getting a guilty verdict against Sen. Stevens. In a hearing on April 7, 2009 (of such momentous importance that the author entitled one of the several chapters on the Stevens case “The Mother of all Hearings”) after announcing all charges had been withdrawn, Judge Sullivan announced:
Accordingly the court shall commence criminal contempt proceedings against the original prosecution team, including William Welch, Brenda Morris, Joseph Bottini, Nicholas Marsh, James Goeke, and Edward Sullivan … based on the failures of those prosecutors to comply with the court’s numerous orders and potential obstruction of justice.
The Court, again in a very rare action, appointed a Special Prosecutor who, after an investigation which spanned two years, turned in a 500-page report, excoriating the conduct of the prosecutors and recommending severe disciplinary action against them.
It is difficult to “get into the weeds” of these despicable acts of corruption and dishonesty and not have real, good-faith, legitimate questions about Mueller’s real agenda in hiring a “lawyer” (it makes me sick to have to acknowledge him as such) with such a well known reputation for out-of-control zealotry, not to mention a proven record of so many reversals–four by the Supreme Court alone! While no one knows where all this is going, no one has described the source of the stench it has raised better than the very courageous author of this book, in a recent article:
The federal swamp is deep, dense, and deceiving. It is infested with a corrupt cabal that protects its own, and it can’t be drained fast enough.
Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
Reading Wednesday’s article by Mollie Hemingway (far and away one of the best writers in Washington) “Criminal Referral Confirms Nunes Memo’s Explosive Claims of FISA Abuse,” then reading the entire Senate Referral memo comes very close to causing one’s head to simply explode. There is ample evidence contained within of the most blatant kind of dishonesty and fraud practiced upon a Federal Court. These are the kind of lies to a court which would – and should — get almost any lawyer whose name is not Clinton or Obama permanently disbarred, or at the very least severely disciplined by a Bar Association.
Which raises a naturally occurring question: has the DC Bar Association completely shut down? Is it no longer a functioning organization with the usual disciplinary enforcement procedures?
But, the question we (my wife and law partner and I) keep coming up with is this one, and to which there is no logical answer we can see, unless there are major facts not yet in the public record: why has the entire Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, en banc, not issued contempt show cause orders to Comey, Rosenstein the Reptile, Yates, McCabe, Strzok, and the whole barrel of twisting, hissing, frighteningly dangerous snakes who lied and lied and lied to the Court, time and time and time again? I simply cannot understand it unless, as one must say to be as fair as possible under these circumstances, there is very strong evidence yet to come outside the Nunes memo and now this Senate Memo.
I only know that if I had done this to a Court, I would be sitting in my newly-hired lawyer’s office getting ready for a contempt hearing, after which would come a disciplinary hearing before the Office of Disciplinary Counsel of the Louisiana State Bar Association.
Don’t think Gestapo tactics could ever happen here in America? Ask Gen. Flynn, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, et al., what they think about that.
Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
I’m sure Andrew McCarthy is as much a favorite of many of us as he is of mine, especially considering his vast experience as a Federal Prosecutor in one of the major terrorist cases of our time, the successful prosecution of “the Blind Sheikh” in the first World Trade Center bombing. Another reason he is a favorite of mine is his very cautious approach to so many of these stories, which are addressed with maniacal hyperbole and hysteria by so many reporters. He is the last one to ever say anything overtly critical of many of these major players in the current dramas, and I always admire him for this caution as I can always rest assured that he is not offering anything that he is not satisfied is solid and should be reported and documented with solid supporting evidence.
It is for this reason that I cannot recommend too strongly his recent column, “Rod Rosenstein is Shirking his Duty to Supervise Robert Mueller,” in which he sets forth the dangers posed by an uncontrolled special prosecutor such as Mueller, dangers which I have heard of from those who have been the subject of the exact kind of out-of-control prosecution as that being conducted by the person Rosenstein is statutorily charged with supervising. As the column notes, in a statement which is very rare for Mr. McCarthy’s style of reporting,
Back in May, besieged by Democrats feigning outrage over FBI director James Comey’s firing — the same Democrats who wanted Comey’s scalp for purportedly costing Hillary Clinton the election — Rosenstein preemptively surrendered. In appointing Mueller, he flouted regulations requiring that he specify the crimes that supposedly necessitated the appointment of a special counsel. He promised Democrats that Mueller would have carte blanche — no limits and no supervision from his nominal supervisor, Rosenstein. And now, with Mueller poised to pressure the president to submit to interrogation — despite the absence of a crime, despite the absence of any suggestion that Trump has essential information that Mueller is otherwise unable to acquire — Rosenstein is nowhere to be found, at least when he’s not impeding congressional committees from conducting oversight of the Justice Department’s actions in the Clinton emails and Russia investigations. Without Justice Department supervision, Mueller answers only to his own whim. Well, what if all prosecutors did that? (Emphasis mine)
I cannot urge too strongly that you read this entire piece of very fine reporting of Andrew McCarthy — it is chilling, frightening, perhaps gravely prescient as to what a monstrosity has been loosed upon the American Republic by these denizens of the Deep State (yes, unlike some of our more, shall we say, sanguine observers on this site, I really do believe it exists. Don’t believe it? Just look at Rosenstein’s eyes.) who have abandoned all thought of the good of our Beloved Country in the pursuit of their nemesis, read: anyone who opposes their overturning of the election in which we elected our choice to be President of the United States.
Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
Someone has called the traitorous and treasonous conduct of the Obama administration (an oxymoron if there ever was one) what it really was. They got on their knees before the Ayatollahs of Iran and did everything and anything in their power to push through the most insane deal in American history, including allowing Hezbollah to run a million(s)-dollar drug ring through the southern border in order to placate the Mullahs.
I note the fabulous short column by one of my favorite writers today, Charles Hurt, titled “The Nuclear Option: Amid Anti-Trump Hysteria, Obama Treason Exposed,” which reports on the “extraordinary and thorough report by Politico” on Project Cassandra by the DEA. Hurt creates a brief outline of some of the more outrageous insults to the rule of law by the administration of the worst president in American history. It includes the ATF gun-running insanity that resulted in the death of at least one Border Patrol Agent; Benghazi (what kind of bloodless reptile does one have to be to lie to the face of bereaved loved ones over the caskets containing the remains of their lost heroes, as did Obama and Hillary?); the rigging of the Democratic Party “to thwart the will of its own voters”; and the truly unbelievable use of “our government’s most powerful intelligence apparatus to spy on his political opponents during the height of a presidential campaign.” About that last item, he has these pungent words:
That these vermin colluders failed has in no way deterred them. They remain as committed to undoing the Trump presidency today as they were before the election.
He then moves to the one he deems treasonous, although all or most of the above would certainly qualify to many, and to me for sure, with the following:
But the most sinister twist — the most brazen conspiracy caper of all — in this entire spy novel extravaganza we are now enduring has to be the eight-year scheme by the Obama administration to betray the American people and hand unbridled power to one of our most ardent and determined enemies.
An extraordinary and thorough report by Politico exposes a vast left-wing conspiracy at all levels of the Obama administration to collude with a terrorist organization in hopes of empowering a nation devoted to the death of America.
According to the report, Obama officials pressured federal investigators to back off investigations into huge money-laundering, weapons and drug trafficking operations by the terrorist group Hezbollah. The Obama administration offered this protection even as Hezbollah was raking in $1 billion a year and extending its murderous anti-American influence far beyond the Middle East.
And why did Obama and his barrel of snakes push this bizarre agenda? Charlie Hurt states in such beautifully succinct and common-sense terms that which so many of us were thinking at the time, and are looking at with the benefit of the deep analysis of the Politico piece. (Full disclosure: I have started it, but it is an intimidating 60+ pages print, so I will take it in small readings. From what I can see in the early stages of the report, it is well worth reading to understand the full treasonous nature of what they did here.):
All in the name of what? Upholding the U.S. Constitution? Fighting the war on terror? Peace in the Middle East?
Not hardly. It was all in the name of placating Iran — Hezbollah’s patron nation — so that the Obama administration could ink a ridiculously lopsided deal on Iran’s nuclear program. A deal that scored Iran hundreds of millions in cash and billions more in sanctions relief.
At the very, very, very end of the whole deal, Iran gets to weaponize its nuclear program anyway.
If that is not outright treason, then nothing is.
There it is, in all its unadorned grotesqueness and horror: Treason. That’s what I considered so many of the acts of the Obama-Jarrett-Holder-Brennan-Clapper-Rice-Power-Lynch-Comey, et al. Thugocracy to be, and I here express very publicly my genuine respect and appreciation to Mr. Hurt for saying in print for wide distribution what so many of us have felt for so long.
We had, for eight pathetic years, a traitor in the Oval Office of the White House. Think about that. I thank God he is gone and that a real American has not only taken his place but assured that we would not have another Hate-America-First person follow him there.
The system our Providential Founders gave us worked — one more time. I pray, for the future of our beloved nation, that their wisdom continues to be our guiding force.
Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
I have been alarmed at how ready many citizens have been to so quickly convict Roy Moore of the grievously serious crime of child molestation with scarcely a passing thought of any of the factors which would go into such a momentous decision — the right of confrontation of the witnesses, the right of cross-examination to test the veracity of their accounts, but, first and foremost, one of the most cherished of all our rights guaranteed to an American citizen, the presumption that one is innocent until proven guilty.
One story is illustrative of how far this has gone, and not only in the reliably loony far left mainstream media. In listening to one of my favorite podcasts recently, I heard a person I know to be a most intellectually gifted commentator of the center-right declare, with great certitude, that Judge Moore was a child molester, was also probably at least guilty of attempted rape, and that he had been banned from the mall in Gadsden, AL. The account of the first two offenses have been cast in great doubt by subsequent reporting and the manager of the mall during the relevant time period has told reporters that Judge Moore was never, to his knowledge, banned from the mall.
As one who spent many decades as an actual, working, practicing trial lawyer, a claim I still make with pride (admittedly, one among a steadily decreasing number, sad to say) in order to assure that I distinguish myself from those of the TV/billboard variety, it concerns me that we are truly witnessing, as the title of an excellent piece in The Federalist styles it, A Society Murdering Due Process,
The real story today is that emotional feeding frenzies in public discourse put us on a path that leads—unless something dramatic changes—to the end of due process. Due process and the rule of law are concepts fast becoming meaningless to Americans hypnotized by media.
As the mainstream media has told it for decades: there should be a presumption of guilt based on any accusation of sexual misconduct, whether a Moore character running for Senate or a hapless college kid accused of rape or anybody else. Oh, and the media has the prerogative of controlling the narrative, picking and choosing who’s guilty.
The author, Stella Morabito, then briefly reviews the sordid outbreak of lechery — and rank hypocrisy as a result of same — on the part of a number of far-left “notables”, with Al Franken leading the list most recently, and the truly pathetic calls for “justice” for Bill Clinton by such luminaries as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was campaigning with one and the same alleged rapist mere months ago.
That is followed by an excellent brief summary of the root causes of the collapse of our respect for Due Process, and, I would argue, also the Rule of Law:
Whatever today’s circus means, it should serve as an object lesson that due process first dies in the public square. It’s only going to get worse unless people learn to focus more on the causes of our lethal disease (e.g., political correctness, agitprop, power-mongering, the practice of ritual defamation, etc.) than on the symptoms of certain media- and politico-selected diseased people.
If we could wrest our brains away from the sewer of social media, perhaps we could see that we’re living in the Twilight Zone. Trying to discern what is real from what is fake is a tall order in today’s media world, unless you’ve worked hard to cultivate a sense of discernment. Navigating the “news” is like taking a walk through a labyrinthine hall of smoke and mirrors.
This is why I think Moore’s case, as with all Gloria Allred-sponsored side shows and their unpredicted spawn, is really about the future of due process. Will it live or die? Will we be able to revive the true meaning of due process, i.e., the basic principle that people should be judged fairly on the basis of evidence? Or will we succumb to raw emotion and all of the thoughtless lynching that goes with it? Will the term “due process” simply end up as a garbage term that means whatever anybody wants it to mean?
Then, she presents what may be the best short analysis I have seen of the gargantuan hypocrisy reflected in the double standard at play in the Al Franken-Roy Moore circus:
A huge swath of Hollywood and the media have been dictating to us for decades that due process should not apply to hicks and unsophisticated moralists, as they’ve labelled Moore. If it applies at all, then it only applies to upstanding and enlightened citizens like Sen. Al Franken. Now we learn that Franken sexually harassed women, including newcaster Leeann Tweeden. He admits to the photographic evidence of doing so. But longtime media rules say he’s entitled to “due process,” or at least a sense of lenience and forgiveness.
That’s certainly not the case for the likes of Moore, although he denies the allegations. Worse, he has preached that there are moral standards of right and wrong, which means he stands accused of both moral turpitude and hypocrisy, of violating his own moral code. Hollywood and the media seem to have declared this combination not only unforgiveable, but proof positive that moral standards don’t even exist. Or at least they do not exist for those who enjoy the media’s protection.
I would be remiss if I did not note at this point that my concerns about the loss of our respect for Due Process is buttressed by a most unlikely source — Nancy Pelosi! In a piece carrying a title which definitely brought a smile to my face, “Why Nancy Pelosi Gave a Big Boost to Roy Moore,” John Podhoretz noted her remarks on “Meet the Press” just a few days ago, discussing why that great “icon” John Conyers should not be forced to resign but should be accorded — you guessed it — Due Process:
She praised Conyers for being an “icon” — which, I’ll grant you, is one way of describing an 89-year-old man who has served for a ridiculous 52 years in the House of Representatives, a record that suggests he is less a captain of the ship of state than he is a barnacle permanently attached to its hull.
She said we’re strengthened by “due process” in this country. You cannot judge “just because someone is accused.” This wasn’t a problem for her in many other cases in which sexual misconduct was alleged — just so long as it was being alleged about people she didn’t like.
And, of course, no treatment of the wretched two-faced treatment of favored stars of the “D” variety would be complete without noting the towering bravery and heroic conduct of that deeply revered “Lion of the Senate”:
Sen. Ted Kennedy, for example, left MaryJo Kopechne to drown while he first called his lawyer then took a nap after extricating himself from the car he drove off a bridge, with her in it, at Chappaquiddick. He went on to win numerous re-elections, honored by his colleagues as the “Lion of the Senate.” Today’s censures by the Left of Kennedy’s behavior and Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct are nothing but stopgap measures. Only a free people who understand and appreciate the meaning of freedom can call out such cynical posturing.
Charles Hurt, an excellent analyst at the Washington Times, reflected recently on the distrust of our Alabamian friends, especially with spokespersons of the elites like Peggy Noonan and almost every writer at the New York Times and Washington Post telling them how they should vote, used an old lawyer joke — strange as it may seem, I love lawyer jokes! — to illustrate why all of their holier-than-thou preaching may backfire on them:
This is the same media that exudes such deep and open contempt for Christians and Christianity, with which Judge Moore has cloaked himself his entire political life. So is it really such a stretch to imagine these jackals manufacturing a fake scandal in order to destroy a Christian on the verge of power — especially one who is such an unreconstructed Washington outsider?
Perhaps the moment that did the most to feed the deep suspicions of Alabama voters was when another accuser came forward to tearfully tell of a similar encounter with Judge Moore decades ago. As if scripted by Harvey Weinstein, the woman held a press conference with famed legal feminist Gloria Allred.
And you know what they say?
“How do you know when a lawyer is lying? His lips are moving.”
How do you know when a woman is lying? She is seated beside Gloria Allred and her lips are moving.
Loath as I may be to offer even the tiniest advice to a writer as accomplished as Mr. Hurt, the only thing I would have added to the above would be to note that in my opinion, Gloria Allred is a lawyer joke!
Ms. Morabito’s concluding thoughts should give us all pause as we continue in our “lynch mob” mentality for those of whom we disapprove and preach Due Process for those “on our side”:
There can be no room for even the pretense of due process if we allow our social discourse to cherry-pick morality. If we are going to automatically adopt a lynch mob mentality whenever someone is accused of a crime, then we are paving a path into darkness where anyone and everyone can be presumed guilty and lynched.
Granted, in the public square, we aren’t bound to presume innocence in expressing our opinions about who’s guilty in any given scandal. But once our public discourse habitually trashes the concepts of presumption of innocence or due process, then we open the door for kangaroo courts and show trials. And due process enters its death throes.
My own closing thoughts might differ just a bit from this fine essay, as I strongly feel it is the fact that we feel we aren’t bound to presume innocence about who is guilty in any given scandal which is fueling much of this feeding frenzy and that if we don’t get back to bedrock principles on which this, the Greatest Nation in History, was founded, including, most importantly such rights as the Presumption of Innocence and Due Process of Law, we will continue in this precipitous slide into our decline, and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
There is an excellent analysis in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal illustrating in a chillingly frightening way how the enormously conflicted Comey and Mueller are endangering the American Rule of Law. The author compares it to the insane chase after Scooter Libby in the Valerie Plame case, when the actual blameworthy person had been identified months before the investigation was even opened.
Likewise, there is a frantic search by Mueller and his pack of Obama-Clinton sycophants to find something, anything, on President Trump, considering every business dealing he ever had or any friend of his ever had, or anything any member of his family ever did. Not to mention Comey’s probably-criminal usurpation of the proper role of the Lynch “Justice” Department in declaring, with no legal authority to do so, Madame Secretary’s “innocence” in the e-mail scandal. The author shows a clear pattern of favoring Democrat targets over Republicans.
His conclusion:
Mr. Mueller has adopted scorched-earth tactics in pursuit of Paul Manafort, who ran Trump’s presidential campaign from June to August 2016. The special counsel’s team has reached back more than a decade into Mr. Manafort’s financial affairs and conducted a predawn, guns-drawn raid on his home on a day he was scheduled to testify before Congress as a cooperating witness.
One crucial difference distinguishes the probe of Mrs. Clinton from the two Comey-instigated special-counsel investigations of Republican administrations. Mr. Fitzgerald’s multiyear investigation of the Bush administration and Mr. Mueller’s ever-widening scrutiny of the Trump campaign exhibit a tenacious and nearly unconstrained search for persons and crimes to prosecute. In contrast, Mr. Comey’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton reflects a determination not to prosecute systematic and obvious unlawful conduct.
Both excesses threaten the rule of law—but the dogged search for persons and crimes to prosecute poses the graver threat to constitutional government.
Madame Secretary is not the only actor in all of these current scenarios who will forever “smell of the goat.” Mueller and Rosenstein should be terminated immediately and, if he does not act soon, so should Sessions.
Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
@OldBathos has written a very fine, tightly reasoned, short post about the ongoing scandal involving the Obama-Clinton-Holder-Rosenstein-Mueller-Comey cover up of, as his post refers to it, the “real Russian collusion story.” This is in no way meant to “step on” that post, but to add an exclamation point to it by highlighting an article I consider to be the finest single piece of analysis written on the entire tawdry (of course! It involves the Clintons. What other adjective could one possibly use?) story.
This is the piece which appeared Saturday morning in National Review Online by Andrew C. McCarthy, a former Federal prosecutor, assistant US Attorney in New York, titled “The Obama Administration’s Uranium One Scandal.” In addition to being the product of one who has actual prosecutorial experience “in the trenches”– he worked for years building the successful prosecution of “the Blind Sheik” who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing — he offers a good bit of context of which I was unaware, and I have made an attempt to read everything on this affair I could get my hands on.
In doing so, he places many of the major steps in the various episodes as they were developing in the context of how they matched up with political events of the day. When these puzzle pieces are placed side by side with those developments, one sees there can be little doubt that this was a deliberate cover-up in which many of the principals in the current Mueller debacle are directly, and very possibly criminally, implicated. In setting the stage for this discussion, he makes it clear that this is not “just” a Clinton scandal (How many have there been? It’s easy to lose track, isn’t it?) but reaching far beyond that:
Here’s the kicker: The Uranium One scandal is not only, or even principally, a Clinton scandal. It is an Obama-administration scandal.
The Clintons were just doing what the Clintons do: cashing in on their “public service.” The Obama administration, with Secretary Clinton at the forefront but hardly alone, was knowingly compromising American national-security interests. The administration green-lighted the transfer of control over one-fifth of American uranium-mining capacity to Russia, a hostile regime — and specifically to Russia’s state-controlled nuclear-energy conglomerate, Rosatom. Worse, at the time the administration approved the transfer, it knew that Rosatom’s American subsidiary was engaged in a lucrative racketeering enterprise that had already committed felony extortion, fraud, and money-laundering offenses.
The Obama administration also knew that congressional Republicans were trying to stop the transfer. Consequently, the Justice Department concealed what it knew. DOJ allowed the racketeering enterprise to continue compromising the American uranium industry rather than commencing a prosecution that would have scotched the transfer. Prosecutors waited four years before quietly pleading the case out for a song, in violation of Justice Department charging guidelines. Meanwhile, the administration stonewalled Congress, reportedly threatening an informant who wanted to go public.
Reading this analysis, one is reminded of the history going all the way back to the administration of George H.W. Bush who agreed with the new Russian federation “that U.S. nuclear providers would be permitted to purchase uranium from Russia’s disassembled nuclear warheads (after it had been down-blended from its highly enriched weapons-grade level). The Russian commercial agent responsible for the sale and transportation of this uranium to the U.S. is the Kremlin-controlled company “Tenex” (formally, JSC Techsnabexport). Tenex is a subsidiary of Rosatom.”
These efforts continued under the George W. Bush administration:
Naïvely viewing Russia as a “strategic partner” rather than a malevolent competitor, the Bush administration made a nuclear-cooperation agreement with the Kremlin in May 2008. That blunder, however, was tabled before Congress could consider it. That is because Russia, being Russia, invaded Georgia.
Then came the Obama-Clinton regime with its embarrassingly juvenile red plastic “reset button,” and it was early in that administration that events were set in motion which resulted in what I have to term an unspeakable and dangerous act of working against the very national security interests these “leaders” took an oath to protect — the sale of close to 20 percent of our own uranium reserves to Russian interests close to and controlled by Putin.
Around this time, as outlined in the essential reading on this whole criminal enterprise, Clinton Cash, by Peter Schweitzer,
…four senior House members steeped in national-security issues — Peter King (R., N.Y.), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R., Fla.), Spencer Bachus (R., Ala.), and Howard McKeon (R. Calif.) — voiced grave concerns, pointing out that Rosatom had helped Iran, America’s sworn enemy, build its Bushehr nuclear reactor. The members concluded that “the take-over of essential US nuclear resources by a government-owned Russian agency . . . would not advance the national security interests of the United States.” Republican senator John Barrasso objected to Kremlin control of uranium assets in his state of Wyoming, warning of Russia’s “disturbing record of supporting nuclear programs in countries that are openly hostile to the United States, specifically Iran and Venezuela.” The House began moving a bill “expressing disfavor of the Congress” regarding Obama’s revival of the nuclear-cooperation agreement Bush had abandoned.
And, then, the cover up:
Clearly, in this atmosphere, disclosure of the racketeering enterprise that Rosatom’s American subsidiary was, at that very moment, carrying out would have been the death knell of the asset transfer to Russia. It would also likely have ended the “reset” initiative in which Obama and Clinton were deeply invested — an agenda that contemplated Kremlin-friendly deals on nuclear-arms control and accommodation of the nuclear program of Russia’s ally, Iran. That was not going to be allowed to happen. It appears that no disclosure of Russia’s racketeering and strong-arming was made to CFIUS or to Congress — not by Secretary Clinton, not by Attorney General Holder, and certainly not by President Obama. In October 2010, CFIUS gave its blessing to Rosatom’s acquisition of Uranium One.
A Sweetheart Plea Helps the Case Disappear
Even though the FBI had an informant collecting damning information, and had a prosecutable case against Mikerin by early 2010, the extortion racket against American energy companies was permitted to continue into the summer of 2014. It was only then that, finally, Mikerin and his confederates were arrested.
As the McCarthy piece asks, why then? Very simple, the statue of limitations was about to run out on them and they had to do something, anything, so they did — very, very quietly:
Still, a lid needed to be kept on the case. It would have made for an epic Obama administration scandal, and a body blow to Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes, if in the midst of Russia’s 2014 aggression, public attention had been drawn to the failure, four years earlier, to prosecute a national-security case in order to protect Russia’s takeover of U.S. nuclear assets.
The Obama administration needed to make this case go away — without a public trial if at all possible.
The next part of McCarthy’s analysis is what I regard as the most invaluable part, although it does, as they say on all the talk shows, “get in the weeds.” But these are the weeds one needs to understand to fully appreciate the depth of the corruption of some of the people now in charge of investigating President Trump and all of his associates and all of his friends and all of his business associates and all of his family with not a shred of evidence to date:
Mikerin was arrested on a complaint describing a racketeering scheme that stretched back to 2004 and included extortion, fraud, and money laundering. Yet he was permitted to plead guilty to a single count of money-laundering conspiracy.
Except it was not really money-laundering conspiracy.
Under federal law, that crime (at section 1956 of the penal code) carries a penalty of up to 20 years’ imprisonment — not only for conspiracy but for each act of money laundering. But Mikerin was not made to plead guilty to this charge. He was permitted to plead guilty to an offense charged under the catch-all federal conspiracy provision (section 371) that criminalizes agreements to commit any crime against the United States. Section 371 prescribes a sentence of zero to five years’ imprisonment.
The Justice Department instructs prosecutors that when Congress has given a federal offense its own conspiracy provision with a heightened punishment (as it has for money laundering, racketeering, narcotics trafficking, and other serious crimes), they may not charge a section 371 conspiracy. Section 371 is for less serious conspiracy cases. Using it for money laundering — which caps the sentence way below Congress’s intent for that behavior — subverts federal law and signals to the court that the prosecutor does not regard the offense as major.
Yet, that is exactly what Rosenstein’s office did, in a plea agreement his prosecutors co-signed with attorneys from the Justice Department’s Fraud Section. (See in the Hill’s report, the third document embedded at the bottom, titled “Mikerin Plea Deal.”) No RICO, no extortion, no fraud — and the plea agreement is careful not to mention any of the extortions in 2009 and 2010, before CFIUS approved Rosatom’s acquisition of U.S. uranium stock. Mikerin just had to plead guilty to a nominal “money laundering” conspiracy charge. This insulated him from a real money-laundering sentence. Thus, he got a term of just four years’ incarceration for a major national-security crime — which, of course, is why he took the plea deal and waived his right to appeal, sparing the Obama administration a full public airing of the facts.
Interestingly, as the plea agreement shows, the Obama DOJ’s Fraud Section was then run by Andrew Weissmann, who is now one of the top prosecutors in Robert Mueller’s ongoing special-counsel investigation of suspected Trump collusion with Russia.
After all these years, after all this intricate structure of cover up so carefully put together to protect the almost-certain election of Hillary Clinton to the Presidency, there was still just this one little loose thread, as the old Columbo character would have put it– just one more little question I need to have answered and then I’ll be on my way…. the problem of the confidential informant, who was more than ready to tell all:
There was still one other problem to tamp down. That was the informant — the lobbyist who alerted the FBI to the Russian racketeering enterprise back in 2009. He wanted to talk.
Specifically, as his attorney, Ms. Toensing, explains, the informant wanted to tell Congress what he knows — about what the FBI and the Justice Department could already have proved in 2010 when CFIUS signed off on Russia’s acquisition of American nuclear material, and about what he’d learned of Russian efforts to curry favor with Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he was not allowed to talk.
It turns out, the lawyer explains, that the FBI had induced him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The Justice Department warned him that it was enforceable — even against disclosures to Congress. (Because, you know, the FBI is opposed to all leaks and disclosures of confidential investigative information . . . except those initiated by the FBI, of course.) In addition, when the informant was primed to file a federal civil lawsuit to recover his own losses from the scheme, he claims that the Justice Department threatened him with prosecution, warning that a lawsuit would violate the non-disclosure agreement. The Hill reports that it has obtained emails from a civil lawyer retained by the witness, which describe pressure exerted by the Justice Department to silence the informant.
I learned tonight from a Fox News report, the sole remaining outlet with a shred of integrity left in television, that the person who made that call was none other than the Obama Attorney General herself, Loretta Lynch, the one and the same person who met with the titular head of the Clinton Criminal Family Foundation a few days before she was “exonerated” by her own FBI Head. Does anyone believe the Attorney General herself would have made such a phone call, personally, absent a call from above? I don’t.
The McCarthy piece ends with the observation that those pressures from the Obama-Lynch “Justice” Department came in 2016, the final run of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. And, he observes, pungently: “This stinks.”
Indeed it does, and I must note a little note I sent my personal list just yesterday, we call ourselves The Patriot Friends, which seems to be a nice fit with Mr. McCarthy’s final observation:
In his closing argument in the Impeachment Trial of our esteemed former President BJ Clinton, Congressman Henry Hyde made these remarks about the arguments his attorneys set forth; for some reason this came back to me this morning in thinking about the aroma Felonia vonPantsuit carries around with her and I looked it up in the Congressional Record of February 12, 1999, to be sure I got it right— here it is:
“Secondly, I want to compliment the president’s counsel. They have conducted themselves in the most professional way. They have made the most of a poor case, in my opinion. Excuse me. There’s an old Italian saying, that has nothing to do with the lawyers, but to your case, and it says: ‘‘You may dress the shepherd in silk, but he will still smell of the goat.’’
No matter how many bags of gold she stacks up, no matter how many new pantsuits she buys with her ill-gotten gains, she will still “smell of the goat”!
It is way past time for the Trump Justice Department to start issuing indictments against all of these treacherous, and I use that term advisedly, “leaders” of our Government, every one of whom took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and have them brought before the Bar of Justice to account for their crimes.
Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
I really do need help here as, for the life of me, I simply cannot see the difference between the early morning raid of Mueller’s enforcers in which the picked the lock (let that sink in for a moment) at Paul Manafort’s home, then stood over the “suspect” and his wife holding guns on them (am I overstating the similarity of scenes straight out of the late ’30s?) in bed, as more fuily described in an excellent piece by Andrew C. McCarthy in the National Review this morning:
It was not enough to get a search warrant to ransack the Virginia home of Paul Manafort, even as the former Trump campaign chairman was cooperating with congressional investigators. Mueller’s bad-asses persuaded a judge to give them permission to pick the door lock. That way, they could break into the premises in the wee hours, while Manafort and his wife were in bed sleeping. They proceeded to secure the premises — of a man they are reportedly investigating for tax and financial crimes, not gang murders and Mafia hits — by drawing their guns on the stunned couple, apparently to check their pajamas for weapons.
While I do not profess to have a scintilla of expertise or experience in Federal Criminal Law, McCarthy certainly does, and I have found his writings to be very measured, especially about James Comey, who he considered to be a personal friend from their days in the US Attorney’s office in New York City. And, drawing upon that experience, he details the legal reasons this kind of raid was so outrageous, aside from the very troubling, to put it most euphemistically, image it presents of goons in black uniforms going about the gory business of frightening people into telling them what they want to hear–anything will do:
Mueller’s probe more resembles an empire, with 17 prosecutors retained on the public dime. So . . . what exactly is the crime of the century that requires five times the number of lawyers the Justice Department customarily assigns to crimes of the century? No one can say. The growing firm is clearly scorching the earth, scrutinizing over a decade of Manafort’s shady business dealings, determined to pluck out some white-collar felony or another that they can use to squeeze him.
You are forgiven if you can recall only vaguely that supposition about Trump-campaign collusion in Russian espionage against the 2016 election was the actual explanation for Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. To the extent there was any explanation, that is. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Trump appointee, did not comply with the regulations requiring a description of the crimes Trump’s Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate, purportedly necessitating a quasi-independent special counsel.
The way it’s supposed to work, the Justice Department learns of a crime, so it assigns a prosecutor. To the contrary, this Justice Department assigned a prosecutor — make that: 17 hyper-aggressive prosecutors — and unleashed them to hunt for whatever crime they could find.
If you sense that this cuts against the presumption of innocence, you’re onto something. Because of that presumption, coupled with such other constitutional rights as the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable police searches, prosecutors are supposed to be measured in the use of their awesome powers, to employ only as much compulsion as seems appropriate under the circumstances. You don’t get a search warrant when a subpoena will do; if you have to get a warrant, you don’t do a covert pre-dawn entry when ringing the bell in the daytime will easily get you in the door.
In various places, our law reflects this common sense. For example, in applying for a wiretap authorization, besides describing the precise crime it suspects, the Justice Department must satisfy the judge that less intrusive techniques for obtaining evidence of similar quality have been attempted, or would be certain to fail if tried. (See section 2518(b) and (c) of the federal penal code.) The point is to instruct investigators that they must exercise restraint. The prosecutorial privilege to act “under color of law” comes with the duty to respect the rights the law guarantees.
Law enforcement is hard and sometimes dangerous work. Thus, there is leeway for officials to make errors in judgment. Without that leeway, they would be too paralyzed to do their jobs, and there would be no rule of law. But when prosecutors and investigators go way overboard just because they can, it is not law enforcement. It is abuse of law-enforcement power in order to intimidate.
There is no other way to interpret the brass-knuckles treatment of Manafort, a subject in a non-violent-crime investigation who is represented by counsel and was cooperating with Congress at the time Mueller’s Gang of 17 chose to break into his home. Did they really think they couldn’t have gotten the stuff they carted out of Manafort’s residence by calling up his well-regarded lawyers and asking for it? After he had already surrendered 300 pages of documents to investigative committees?
So, tell me, other than the fact that Mueller’s goons did not simply fire bullets into the brains of Mr. and Mrs. Manafort, what, exactly is the difference between what happened in that home in the pre-dawn quiet hours in a residential neighborhood in Virginia, and what was happening all over Germany during the horrible times of Krystallnacht and other atrocities?
This is so dangerous and alarming to the future of our freedoms and liberties that I intend to send the McCarthy piece to my Senators and Congressman, although the most I can hope for from my Senators, one in particular, he of Graham-Cassidy fame, is a form letter about rice acreage allotments for the coming year.
Is it just me, being an alarmist, and seeing this entire “Special” Counsel development as an in-your-face charade masking an actual coup of our Government?
Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
The Southern Poverty Law Center touts itself, according to a recent article:
[A]s a humble little non-profit doing the people’s work of identifying and eradicating racism. They’d have us believe they’re just an unassuming little band of warriors carrying out their mission from what they surely see as Racism Central … the deep South. In this case, Alabama.
The media, especially CNN of late, swallows its grossly inaccurate propaganda — for that’s exactly what it is — hook, line, and sinker, to the serious detriment of those it places on its “hate map” because it does not agree with their political and/or ideological views. However, the recent disclosures of its transfers of millions of dollars to offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, highly unusual, to put it most charitably (pun intended), for a 501 (c) (3) “non”-profit, are causing many to take a closer look at this obscenely wealthy hate machine. This was vividly illustrated by the excellent reportage of Joe Schoffstall of the Washington Free Beacon in one of several recent articles shining the bright light of sunshine on the true nature of this fundraising hatemonger.
It must be noted, however, that political commentators and analysts have been sounding the alarm for years, as shown by deeply researched articles going back to 2010, 2013, and several excellent and carefully documented studies over the past few months, here, here, and here.
One of the best brief summaries of the breadth and scope of the hateful, if I may be permitted to the use of that word to describe such an organization, slander and careless besmirching of names and reputations by this “Poverty” law group (by the way, when did that become a recognized sub-specialty in the law?) is found in a letter recently sent to the media by representatives of conservative and traditional values advocacy organizations. This letter urged the media to cease “using the SPLC’s data and its various lists and maps in your reporting”, after setting out a great deal of very persuasive evidence to support their characterization of the SPLC as a “a discredited, left-wing, political activist organization that seeks to silence its political opponents with a “hate group” label of its own invention and application that is not only false and defamatory, but that also endangers the lives of those targeted with it.”
The letter recounted the domestic terrorist attack by a deranged person on the Washington, D.C. office of the Family Research Council in 2012 in which he badly wounded the building manager who stopped him from engaging in a killing spree. The danger of the reckless slander spewed by the SPLC was illustrated by the evidence in the federal criminal case record:
That day, Corkins carried both the means to carry out this act of terrorism and a list of additional targets. The U.S. Attorney stated in federal court that Corkins targeted FRC and the additional targets by using the SPLC website’s “Hate Map.” On February 6, 2013, Corkins pleaded guilty to three felonies, and became the first person convicted of violating the District of Columbia’s Anti-Terrorism Act of 2002.
The letter also cited this evidence from the more recent case of Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson, who set out to shoot as many Republican members of Congress as possible, almost killing House Whip Steve Scalise:
More recently, James Hodgkinson, the attempted political assassin of House Whip, Rep. Steve Scalise and many other Republican members of the U.S. House and Senate, was discovered by the public to have “liked” the SPLC on Facebook. Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner, “Support for Southern Poverty Law Center Links Scalise, Family Research Council Shooters” (June 14, 2017). Scalise had for years been the subject of the SPLC’s vitriol.
Their “hate net” reaches far and wide, as vividly illustrated in a couple of recent examples, including attacking Presidential candidate and former neurosurgeon of universal renown, Dr. Ben Carson because of his biblical views:
Ben Carson had the unfortunate distinction of making the SPLC’s list in 2014, though the criticisms from the public were so vehement that the SPLC was pressured into removing him.
Recently, the SPLC made the apparently rare mistake of casting their net of hate over an organization which decided to fight back:
Fort Lauderdale, FL: Dr. Frank Wright, President & Chief Executive Officer at D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM), announced that DJKM filed suit today in the United States District Court against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The lawsuit alleges, among other things, that the SPLC illegally trafficked in false and misleading descriptions of the services offered by DJKM and committed defamation against DJKM arising from the publication and distribution of false information that libels the ministry’s reputation and subjects the ministry to disgrace, ridicule, odium, and contempt in the estimation of the public.
In a statement released today, Dr. Wright said: “We embarked today on a journey to right a terrible wrong. Those who knowingly label Christian ministries as ‘hate’ groups, solely for subscribing to the historic Christian faith, are either woefully uninformed or willfully deceitful. In the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center, our lawsuit alleges the latter.
Wright went on to say: “These false and illegal characterizations have a chilling effect on the free exercise of religion and on religious free speech for all people of faith. After having given the SPLC an opportunity to retract, we have undertaken this legal action, seeking a trial by a jury of our peers, to preserve our own rights under the law and to defend the religious free speech rights of all Americans.
But, while it has committed many outrages with its “hate maps,” “hate lists,” and various other scaremongering tactics, the slander which has raised the most ire recently has been the inclusion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the details of which are outlined in the letter referenced above:
The SPLC attacked numerous critics of radical Islam in one of its recent publications, “A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists,” but the seventh profile was particularly disturbing. In it, the SPLC slandered human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who has experienced the violent and misogynistic side of Islam first-hand. The first sentence of the two-page section defaming her stated, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born activist who says she endured female genital mutilation and fled civil wars and an arranged marriage in Africa.
Ms. Ali answered this sleaze attack in an op-ed in the New York Times, entitled “Why Is the Southern Poverty Law Center Targeting Liberals?”. After noting the millions of dollars donated by the CEO of Apple, celebrity George Clooney and J.P. Morgan Chase Bank (currently our bank; perhaps not much longer), she said:
I am a black woman, a feminist and a former Muslim who has consistently opposed political violence. The price for expressing my beliefs has been high: I must travel with armed security at all times. My friend and collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered in broad daylight.
Yet the S.P.L.C. has the audacity to label me an “extremist,” including my name in a “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” that it published on its website last October.
In that guide, the S.P.L.C. claims that I am a “propagandist far outside the political mainstream” and warns journalists to avoid my “damaging misinformation.” These groundless smears are deeply offensive, as I have dedicated much of my adult life to calling out the true extremists: organizations such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. Yet you will look in vain for the S.P.L.C.’s “Field Guide to Muslim Extremists.” No such list exists.
That’s a shame, because Islamic extremism — a movement that aims to impose a caliphate and Sharia law by violent means — is as toxic as white supremacy. In the past two decades, it has certainly been responsible for many more deaths.
Like neo-Nazis, Islamic extremists despise liberalism. They deny the equality of the sexes, justify wife-beating and, in some cases, even the enslavement of female unbelievers. The Islamic State and groups like it regularly murder gay people in the most heinous ways. Islamic extremists are also virulently anti-Semitic, like the Nazis before them. And like today’s American Nazis, they brandish swastikas, chant slurs and peddle conspiracy theories.
Ms. Ali closed her op-ed with a most interesting question, which serves as a perfect segue into a final discussion of some explosive revelations recently about the “unusual” financial transactions of this “non”-profit “charitable organization:
Cui bono? That question is nearly always the right one to ask of organizations like the S.P.L.C. Who really benefits from their activities? Repeatedly, and for more than a decade, journalists at publications ranging from Harper’s to Politico to The Nation to The Weekly Standard have pointed out that the center’s founders seem more interested in profiting off the anxieties and white guilt of Northern liberals than in upholding the civil rights of poor Southerners, or anyone else. There’s a less cynical explanation, though, which is that liberals are deeply and increasingly uncomfortable with calling out Islamic extremism for fear of being smeared as “Islamophobic,” or worse.
Cui bono, indeed! According to several meticulously reported exposés in the past few weeks, examination of financial records of this fundraising machine shows that it reports over $69 million of “non-U.S. equity funds” among the assets comprising the total endowment fund of almost $320 million. In other words, it has $69 million in offshore banks. Once again, that total asset figure – for a “non”-profit, tax-exempt charitable organization—is $320 million!
A reporter with the Washington Free Beacon, Joe Schoffstall, examined many records of this “charity” and observed:
The nonprofit pushed millions more into offshore funds at the beginning of 2015.
On March 1, 2015, SPLC sent $2,200,000 to an entity incorporated in Canana Bay, Cayman Islands, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) records and run by a firm based in Greenwich, Ct. Another $2,200,000 cash transfer was made on the same day to another fund whose business is located at the same address as the previous fund in the Cayman Islands, according to SEC records.
Tax experts contacted by the reporter expressed serious doubts about the ethics, if not the legality, of these transfers:
Tax experts expressed confusion when being told of the transfer.
I’ve never known a US-based nonprofit dealing in human rights or social services to have any foreign bank accounts,” said Amy Sterling Casil, CEO of Pacific Human Capital, a California-based nonprofit consulting firm. “My impression based on prior interactions is that they have a small, modestly paid staff, and were regarded by most in the industry as frugal and reliable. I am stunned to learn of transfers of millions to offshore bank accounts. It is a huge red flag and would have been completely unacceptable to any wealthy, responsible, experienced board member who was committed to a charitable mission who I ever worked with.
It is unethical for any US-based charity to invest large sums of money overseas,” said Casil. “I know of no legitimate reason for any US-based nonprofit to put money in overseas, unregulated bank accounts.
It seems extremely unusual for a ‘501(c)(3)’ concentrating upon reducing poverty in the American South to have multiple bank accounts in tax haven nations,” Charles Ortel, a former Wall Street analyst and financial advisor who helped uncover a 2009 financial scandal at General Electric, told the Free Beacon.
In my view, the most telling comment about these “questionable,” to put it mildly, transfers was made by a representative of one of the targets of SPLC’s hate net:
“I’ve never heard of a group with ‘Poverty’ in its name that has so much money,” said Kerri Kupec of the Alliance for Defending Freedom, an organization that has been on the receiving end of SPLC’s well-funded smear campaign. “On other hand, considering who we are talking about, it comes as no surprise. Whether it’s shady money transfers or being discredited for decades by investigative journalists and charity watchdogs as a ‘direct mail scam,’ the Southern Poverty Law Center lost its way a long time ago.”
The best way to sum up the extreme and hateful bile this organization spews so recklessly upon with whom it disagrees and the potential damage it can do to the lives of is to quote from a speech given by Israel’s Ambassador to the United States to a meeting of one of its targets. Speaking of the shock of learning that SPLC had placed Ayaan Hirsi Ali on one of its hate lists, he had this to say:
But the biggest shock of all came when I saw a name on that [SPLC] list of someone I regard as a hero – Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
For those of you who do not know Ayaan, she was the Dutch parliamentarian who in 2004 produced a film with Theo Van Gogh called Submission, which focused on the oppression of women in the Muslim world.
Because of that film, Van Gogh was assassinated by a fanatic Muslim and Ayaan was forced into hiding. She has had to live with death threats and under constant protection ever since.
Yet rather than cower in anonymity, Ayaan writes books, publishes articles, makes speeches and fights for her ideas – in particular, the need for sweeping reform in the Muslim world.
Today, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the world’s great champions of freedom, pluralism and tolerance.
And every self-respecting group that claims to value any of those things should be defending her not defaming her.
Yet in an Orwellian inversion of reality, a woman whose life is threatened every day by extremist Muslims is labeled by the SPLC an anti-Muslim extremist.
Have those who put Ayaan on that list no shame? Have they no decency?
The SPLC and others who asked me not to come here tonight claim to support free and open debate. But in reality, they seem to want to stifle debate….
Unfortunately, some have amended that famous Voltairian dictum to be “I hate what you say and I will never defend your right to say it.”
I will defame you as an extremist. I will label you a racist and a bigot. I will put you on the blackest of lists that should be reserved for Nazis, for the Klan, and for the true enemies of mankind.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t stand with the defamers and the blacklisters. I stand with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. We all should stand with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
For if we do not stand with her, then the values she champions – the same values we cherish – will be under threat and the dangers we face will only grow.
We must not let the defamers and blacklisters succeed….
While I devoutly wish I could answer the Ambassador in another way, the fact is that this organization has proven repeatedly that it has no shame, and it has no decency. The only way I see to stop this sleaze machine would be for far-leftist sources of big money to read such heartfelt pleas as that of the Ambassador and his friend Ms Ali’s op-ed so they can realize what a truly dangerous propaganda machine the SPLC really is.
However, for those of us who have taken the time and effort to inform ourselves, it is certainly true to say: “We must not let the defamers and blacklisters succeed”!
Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
I really, really, really do want all this unity I’ve been hearing about to happen and I do so wish I could actually get my hopes up that such a miracle — and that’s what it would amount to in today’s vile and mean atmosphere — could actually happen. I know many of us also harbor that hope, as evidenced by the comment of one of the members who characterized Paul Ryan’s speech about an “attack on one of us is an attack on all of us” as one of the great speeches of all time. While it was a nice speech and quite typical of the Speaker who says many “nice things”, as much as I would dearly like to believe all this kumbaya attitude will continue, I find myself in agreement with the brilliant commentator Mark Steyn, who stated, on the Tucker Carlson show last night:
“Yes, I think so,” said Steyn. “If you have people like the Southern Poverty Law [Center], which has become fabulously wealthy by labeling everyone they disagree with as a hate group, if you keep calling everybody a hater, and in fact, if your organization calls people haters, you are the hater. I would like to disagree with the tone of what we have heard today, including in the last hour for Martha MacCallum and Brit Hume, when they were talking about unity and will this unity last?”
“Obviously, the unity won’t last because ultimately, Rand Paul has very little that unites him with Bernie Sanders. We don’t actually need unity. We need robust, civilized disunity — people honestly recognizing that they disagree with each other on health care, on immigration, on Islam, on transgender bathrooms, and a bazillion other things, but that doesn’t make the other person a hater. Simply put, the left has to be willing to actually engage in debate with people that disagree with them.”
As if to put an exclamation point on this kind of argument, right on cue appears the truly vile Minority “Leader” Nancy Pelosi, who promptly blamed the action of an obviously deranged person of the far left on–you guessed it! — the President and the Republicans’ Politics of Personal Destruction!
“It didn’t used to be this way,” Pelosi said. “Somewhere in the 1990s Republicans decided on the politics of personal destruction as they went after the Clintons and that is what started and it has continued.”
“Again, I feel as if we’re having a family moment that is very, very serious and we’re talking about things that we can say, the discussion — save the discussion for another day,” Pelosi continued, before immediately attacking Trump.
“When the president says ‘I can shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and nobody would care’, when you have somebody say ‘beat them up and I’ll pay their legal fees’, when you have all the assaults that are made on Hillary Clinton, for them to be so sanctimonious is something that I really am almost sad that I had to go down this path with you because I don’t think it’s appropriate for us to have the fullest discussion of it. It will be for another day.”
Unity? This is unity? With this kind of venomous language from one of the “Leaders” of our Government, where is the basis for hope that there will be a basis for some kind of amicable cooperation between the two parties?
And, on a personal note, as a fellow Louisianian, we fellow Cajuns are praying for a full recovery of Congressman Scalise and all of those injured in this grotesque attack, and no one would be more happy to be wrong about the outlook than I. But I just don’t see it happening any time soon, what with the kind of rote response of the Pelosis of the Government, together with, right on cue, as well, another major media report based on nothing but anonymous sources to the effect that the new Special Counsel is using his many, many, many new and hungry Hillary and Obama supporters to determine if the expression of a “hope” amounts to obstruction of justice. This being the one and the same Special Counsel who is not only one of James Comey’s closest personal friends but is also (try to find this in the Mainstream Media) the Godfather of one of his children and who, if there was a shred of common sense left in Washington, should be removed on the basis of a glaring conflict of interest. Alas, there does not seem to be any such quality around and the Special Counsel machine will just continue to go clunking down the road until it finds something, Anything, to pin on someone! Just ask Mr. Libby about out-of-control machines just like this one.
Unity! Isn’t it just lovely? What a lovely thing to behold! ….. oh–must have dozed off there for a minute…have to get back to the real world! Too bad, really. Wish I could stay in that dream world just a little longer!
Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
This little story definitely falls under the heading of “you can’t make this stuff up!”
I am very proud of my flagpole in my front yard and have proudly flown “Old Glory” for many years. I try hard to keep it replaced when our frequent South Louisiana storms “have their way with” them and I try hard to observe all the rules with regard to the proper care of the American flag.
I was very happy recently to see an ad for a beautiful red flag with large white lettering reading “Make America Great Again” and immediately ordered it to fly with my brand new American flag, without ever giving a thought to the fact that someone might be so offended by the mere sight of the flag that they would voice loud complaints about it. Therefore, I was delighted when the flag came in and I immediately ran it up the flagpole to take its place of honor right below my spanking new American flag.
Shortly thereafter, I got a call from a neighbor and long-time friend, who explained that he was simply doing his duty as grievance Chair of the Homeowners’ Association in conveying to me a complaint he had received from a neighbor, who told him that as they were from Mexico the mere sight of the flag so upset them that they cried for quite some time after seeing it. My friend made it clear that he was doing his duty, but not necessarily in an enthusiastic way, and in the course of the conversation, he said words to the effect “I must tell you, I really like that flag!”
He asked for my response and I asked whether he wanted the dignified response or the one I would really like to give, and he said as he had known me for many years he could probably guess what the “undignified” response would be! So, I responded that it would take a final order of a Court of competent jurisdiction ordering me to take down the flag before it would move one inch; I have had no further complaints. As a matter of fact, another neighbor called me asking for information as to where he could get one for his own flagpole.
If someone tries to tell me there is no such thing as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I have a true story ready for them. It is real and it is really quite chilling to actually know someone to whom the mere sight of his campaign slogan on a piece of cloth causes them physical upset.
Although if I were truly fair about it, I would have to admit that when I saw a pink knit cap recently at a soccer match, commonly identified by a feline reference and which has become something of an icon for women in The Resistance, if that’s what it’s called this week, I did feel some kind of emotion, mostly sadness for the rather pathetic specimen who was wearing it.
But I did not cry. And if I had, I would never, ever, ever admit it to one living soul!
Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!
As one who very publicly proclaimed his belief that James Comey was one of the most honest, incorruptible public servants in Washington, before he permanently stained himself and his agency with the corruption so endemic to that swamp of mendacity in these times, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on the serious damage his decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton has done to our Nation. And, as one who really believed in his integrity and probity, I can certainly agree with his own words in describing himself in a Senate Committee hearing — “a deeply flawed and fallible human being.” That deficiency, obviously not peculiar to Mr. Comey, is one which addresses itself to Mr. Comey and those he has dragged with him into such disrepute. However, as with so much of the lawlessness which will forever be the real legacy of this most corrupt administration in our history, the damage to the Rule of Law — the very foundation of our Republic, as designed by the Founding Fathers — carries the potential of being dangerous and far-reaching. Should, God forbid, Hillary Clinton be elected President, it could well become permanent.
When James Comey was not eroding everyone’s belief in the competence of the FBI, he was acting as a political hack for the Obama’s and Clinton’s. One of the largest intelligence breaches in American history takes place and director Comey’s response is to hand out immunity to almost everyone involved, ask no follow up questions, and then say he could not prove intent by Hillary Clinton. John Schindler does an excellent job documenting the sham of an investigation.
It’s prudent to judge people by comparing how they found something against how they left it. James Comey has destroyed the credibility of the FBI. The man is a disgrace. I do not care if he was feeling pressure from Obama, if he was uncomfortable with that pressure then he should have resigned. He is just another apparatchik along with Loretta Lynch and John Koskinen in an increasingly corrupt and incompetent government.
I am a great admirer of the writings of Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who was the lead prosecutor of “the Blind sheik” in the successful prosecution of that radical Islamic terrorist for his role in planning the first World Trade Center attack in the early ‘90’s. Thus, when he analyzes matters prosecutorial, this non-criminal-defense lawyer credits his opinions as highly as any commentator on the scene today. Way back in the distant mists of February, he opined that:
As I explained in February, when it emerged that the White House was refusing to disclose at least 22 communications Obama had exchanged with then-secretary Clinton over the latter’s private e-mail account, we knew that Obama had knowingly engaged in the same misconduct that was the focus of the Clinton probe: the reckless mishandling of classified information.”
…Still, the difference in scale is not a difference in kind. In terms of the federal laws that criminalize mishandling of classified information, Obama not only engaged in the same type of misconduct Clinton did; he engaged in it with Clinton. It would not have been possible for the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton for her offense without its becoming painfully apparent that 1) Obama, too, had done everything necessary to commit a violation of federal law, and 2) the communications between Obama and Clinton were highly relevant evidence.
He concluded at that time:
To summarize, we have a situation in which (a) Obama knowingly communicated with Clinton over a non-government, non-secure e-mail system; (b) Obama and Clinton almost certainly discussed matters that are automatically deemed classified under the president’s own guidelines; and (c) at least one high-ranking government official (Petraeus) has been prosecuted because he failed to maintain the security of highly sensitive intelligence that included policy-related conversations with Obama. From these facts and circumstances, we must deduce that it is possible, if not highly likely, that President Obama himself has been grossly negligent in handling classified information.
More recent analyses have shown rather clearly that, in all probability due in large part due to the President’s own exposure to liability (see, e.g., United States v. Nixon) if these e-mails were to be made public, as they absolutely would be in any prosecution of Clinton, there never was a plan to do anything but let her skate.
As McCarthy discussed a few days ago, Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, her Chief of Staff during her tenure as Secretary of State (N.B.: not her attorney), who was a target of the investigation, was allowed to represent Clinton as her attorney in her “voluntary” interview—an “unheard-of accommodation … made in violation not only of rudimentary investigative protocols and attorney-ethics rules, but also of the federal criminal law.”
He further notes that Comey kept stressing that Clinton’s interview was “voluntary” and that she could impose any conditions on her appearance she wanted to impose. This is, of course, pure fantasy, as any person in that situation (except, of course, The Dowager Duchess of Chappaqua) who insisted on having present in her interview a target of the investigation, who was not her lawyer, would have simply been handed a subpoena and directed down the hall where a Grand Jury would be waiting for her to testify—“under oath and all by her lonesome, without any of her lawyer legion in attendance.”
In the Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel addressed questions posed by Rep. Tom Marino, a former Justice Department prosecutor, as to why
…Ms. Mills was so courteously offered immunity in return for her laptop—a laptop that Mr. Comey admitted investigators were very keen to obtain. Why not simply impanel a grand jury, get a subpoena, and seize the evidence?
Mr. Comey’s answer was enlightening: “It’s a reasonable question. . . . Any time you are talking about the prospect of subpoenaing a computer from a lawyer—that involves the lawyer’s practice of law—you know you are getting into a big megillah.” Pressed further, he added: “In general, you can often do things faster with informal agreements, especially when you are interacting with lawyers.”
The key words: “The lawyer’s practice of law.” What Mr. Comey was referencing here is attorney-client privilege. Ms. Mills was able to extract an immunity deal, avoid answering questions, and sit in on Mrs. Clinton’s FBI interview because she has positioned herself as Hillary’s personal lawyer. Ms. Mills could therefore claim that any conversations or interactions she had with Mrs. Clinton about the private server were protected by attorney-client privilege.
She then illustrates how easily Mills conned (there really is no other way to describe the way she lied her way into both the interview with Clinton and her own immunity agreement) the apparently eager-to-please FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers by telling them she did not know about Clinton’s server until they both left the State Department. At one point, she even said she didn’t even know what a server was! As McCarthy observed, these obvious fabrications don’t even pass the laugh test, but they were accepted hook, line and sinker by these inside-the-Beltway “investigators” (why does the phrase “Keystone Kops” come to mind?) who were busy constructing their Potemkin village to help Clinton stagger to the White House.
Now, if all that pile of corruption stench is not overpowering enough, it has just been learned that side agreements were reached with Mills and another member of the Clinton team in which the FBI agreed (1) to destroy their laptops after reviewing their contents and (2) limited their search to no later than January 31, 2015, preventing the Bureau from discovering if there was any evidence of obstruction of justice. According to a Fox News summary of these truly bizarre agreements:
Judiciary Committee aides told FoxNews.com that the destruction of the laptops is particularly troubling as it means that the computers could not be used as evidence in future legal proceedings, should new information or circumstances arise.
Committee aides also asked why the FBI and DOJ would enter into a voluntary negotiation to begin with, when the laptops could be obtained condition-free via a subpoena.
The letter also asked why the DOJ agreed to limit their search of the laptops to files before Jan. 31, 2015, which would “give up any opportunity to find evidence related to the destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice related to Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State.”
Aides expressed shock at the parameter, saying it is especially troubling as Mills and Samuelson already had immunity from the consequences of whatever might be on the laptop.
“You’re essentially extending immunity to everyone,” one aide said.
These house-of-mirrors shenanigans have now been brought to the attention of the D.C. Bar Association in a letter outlining the ethical violations by the Republican National Committee. Based on the Clintons’ records over the past 30 years, there is scant reason for optimism that these transgressions, which would bring this lawyer and any other not favored by the aura (perhaps “aroma” might be more appropriate here) of the Clintons into a disciplinary hearing, will be acted upon, but perhaps there is some reason to hope that the Bar will fairly discharge its obligations.
This strange and – may I say it?—deplorable parade of one corrupt act following closely upon the heels of another has even caused scholars of a decidedly leftist persuasion to raise questions about the glaring double-standards being applied. One such scholar had this to say:
As Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and who first defended the FBI’s decision not to prosecute Hillary, recently put it:
Of all of the individuals who would warrant immunity, most would view Mills as the very last on any list. If one assumes that there may have been criminal conduct, it is equivalent to immunizing H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman in the investigation of Watergate.
As Americans who love our country and who simply do not want to believe that the persons leading our government are engaged in the destruction of evidence, lying under oath, impeding proper investigations, granting favorable treatment and immunity to certain favored persons where no one else in the country would ever get such treatment—even to targets of a criminal investigation. As a lawyer who practiced in many Courts of Law for many years, it is especially grievous—painful!—to witness the steady dismantling of the Rule of Law by conduct which is clearly, under any objective analysis, thoroughly and deeply corrupt.
One of the best summaries of what we’re faced with was written by Col. Lawrence Sellin (US Army, Ret.), a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, and captures the way so many of us feel about the sewer known as the Obama Administration. He said:
Comey’s performance in office is symptomatic of a problem that cuts across the entire political-media establishment, namely the desperate attempts being undertaken by those trying to preserve the corrupt status quo.
As part of that effort, the FBI Director joins a long list of aspiring office holders and fawning journalists willing to exchange integrity for the opportunity to audition for a seat at Hillary Clinton’s Presidential dinner table.
President Trump should fire James Comey.
It is my fervent wish that this is President Trump’s second official act, right after ordering his Justice Department to forthwith issue an indictment against Hillary Rodham Clinton.
