Mark Steyn: Mueller & the Deep State Dumpster Fire

Photo credit: sharonherald.com

We all know the bottom line: no more indictments from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his band of witch-hunters. However, some of the unfolding developments in the investigation over the past two years have been complex and difficult to follow. The exposure of Deep State corruption in the FBI and DOJ; the cast of characters including bad cops and insubordinate staffers; the blatant abuse of the FISA court in targeting Carter Page as a means of expanding surveillance into the Trump campaign; the weaponization of the previous administration; and the collusion of most of the media – it’s a scandal of intimidating proportions, all of it intended to invalidate the results of the 2016 Presidential election.

My favorite columnist, Mark Steyn, has the best summary that I have read. And as always, it’s succinct, easy to follow, and entertaining. He begins:

For two years, the prefatory "Russia" has been intended to give the word "investigation" more heft, to make it seem as if there was something more than let's-get-Trump-on-anything. But even the unlimited resources of a wretchedly corrupt federal justice system couldn't keep that going without something more than Michael Cohen's taxi medallions (only in America) and a few Russian troll farms, one of whom has amusingly decided to push back in court against Mueller and his showboating cronies.

Mr. Steyn concludes:

Trump Tweeted his way out of the Deep State's grip. I doubt any other Republican president would have proved so wily: It's not difficult to imagine President Jeb deciding to do the right thing and resign for the good of the country - without ever being able to figure what it was he'd done wrong. We have witnessed an extraordinary sustained attempted coup in which senior officials of the "justice" department shoot the breeze about wearing a wire to get the goods on the elected chief executive. If there are no consequences to that, it will happen again.

And the entire article is here. Highly recommended.

# # #

An odds-on prediction or wishful thinking?

Bruce Plante cartoon credit: laprogressive.com

Conrad Black has another provocative analysis of the national political landscape (“The Fatuous Democrats” at National Review online here):

As the revelations of political manipulation and malfeasance in the FBI and the intelligence agencies under the Obama administration and the early Trump days oozes out of the slowly accelerating investigation of those events, and from the self-serving books of people who are prime targets for indictments, the character of the Democratic opposition is evolving in unusual and even exotic ways. The Clinton party, founded as “new Democrats” who favored the original Gulf War and whose standard bearer declared “the end of the era of big government,” has been renounced as abusive of women and generally insufficiently progressive. After 25 years as the Napoleon and Josephine of the Democracy, the Clintons have been banished to the broom closet, an embarrassment from another day.

The successor royal political couple, the Obamas, isn’t faring much better. He presided over the deluge of slime that his Justice Department, FBI, and intelligence agencies poured over the 2016 election and its aftermath, and that is now finally being exposed. The extent to which the former president was involved in the Clinton-email whitewash and the false applications for surveillance of the Trump campaign will become a matter of high public interest. Practically the entire Obama legacy was Obamacare, Green Empowerment and the Paris Climate Accord, and the Iran Nuclear Treaty. All were disasters and all have been dismembered or repudiated. Mr. Obama was cranking up to being a long-term, high-prestige ex-president. There have not been such since Mr. Truman and General Eisenhower. President Johnson and President Nixon and George W, Bush left office in too much controversy; President Ford and President Carter were not successful enough to have great impact, President Reagan was elderly and in declining health, President Bush Senior enjoyed a bit of it, but not the great eminence of Truman and Eisenhower, two-term victorious war-time leaders identified with great enterprises such as the Marshall Plan and the founding of NATO.

The Democrats placed all their bets on Hillary Clinton, and kept raising the ante in the misplaced belief that President Trump could be driven from office as a traitor, a crook, and an incompetent. They bet everything and will lose everything, and some of their prominent personalities will be doing the tap dance before the grand jury in the run-up to the next election. Their vast media claque will suffer a severe lapse of credibility and ratings, given how heavily invested they are in peddling hatred and contempt of the president, which has vastly exceeded fair comment and any acceptable standard of journalistic professionalism.

. . .

If whoever limps through the Democratic nomination process looks and sounds anything like this group and is weighed down by the hare-brained nostrums the party worthies have been spouting in the last few months, they will provide an entertaining variation on what will then be the lengthy and numerous legal trials of some of the stars of the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Mr. Black’s column is here. He seems confident that miscreants at FBI, DOJ, etc. will be indicted, while many other pundits and readers expect nothing to happen to any of them.

Mr. Black's column further describes -- in unflattering terms -- the leading contenders so far in the Democratic presidential primary race.  It's an expanding field; Battleswarm blog has the latest update on the "Democratic Presidential Clown Car."

# # #

Today’s Excellent Read: High Crimes and Misdemeanors

art credit: gallerycartoon.blogspot.com

Douglas MacKinnon at Investor’s Business Daily brings a lot of the dossier-DOJ-FBI-Russia-collusion-spy scandals into clearer focus, and it is not pretty. A few morsels:

As ever more deliberately concealed evidence is being uncovered of factual "collusion" between the Obama White House, the failed presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and Russia; of professional operatives in our intelligence services openly trying to first, cripple the campaign of Donald Trump, and then, having failed at that criminal objective, to delegitimize his presidency; and of secretly funded far-left anarchist groups proudly preaching violence against those they oppose, it seems the perfect time to ask three questions:

First, what is the definition of a "Police State?

Second, what is the definition of "Treason?"

And last, what – as defined in the Constitution of the United States of America – is the meaning of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors?"

. . .

When you collude with foreign espionage agents to manufacture evidence to obtain a warrant to spy on citizens of the United States for purely political and ideological reasons, you are not only breaking the laws of the United States, but are introducing those very questions of treason, bribery and high crimes and misdemeanors into the conversation.

. . .

What is happening now is not only chilling to the bone, it's dramatically more dangerous because these crimes are being aided, abetted and covered-up by a number of partisans in the mainstream media.

Read the rest here.

# # #

Hillary, Doug Schoen, and the FBI investigation(s)

photo credit: RT.com

Over the weekend, Democrat pundit Doug Schoen stunned TV viewers when he went wobbly on his support of Hillary Clinton. He's concerned about the fallout from the FBI investigation. From his follow-up column at The Hill:

However, in good conscience, and as a Democrat, I am actively doubting whether I can vote for the Secretary of State. I also want to make clear that I cannot vote for Donald Trump as his world view and mine are very different.

So, it would seem that Mr. Schoen will either vote third party or not vote for any presidential candidate. Either way, that’s more bad news for Mrs. Clinton.

On a related subject, Andrew McCarthy raised some interesting points concerning the FBI Director’s decision to re-open the email investigation. From PJ Media:

I have never been a fan of the notion – at the Justice Department, it is the received wisdom – that the election calendar should factor into criminal investigations.

Law-enforcement people will tell you that taking action too close to Election Day can affect the outcome of the vote; therefore, it should not be done because law enforcement is supposed to be apolitical. But of course, not taking action one would take but for the political timing is as political as it gets. To my mind, it is more political because the negatively affected candidate is denied any opportunity to rebut the law-enforcement action publicly.

The unavoidable fact of the matter is that, through no fault of law enforcement, investigations of political corruption are inherently political. Thus, I’ve always thought the best thing to do is bring the case when it’s ready, don’t bring it if it’s not ready, and don’t worry about the calendar any more than is required by the principle of avoiding the appearance of impropriety.

A problem arises, however, when you start bending other rules. FBI Director James Comey bent a few of them when he decided to (a) make a public recommendation against prosecution, (b) nevertheless make a public disclosure of the evidence amassed by the FBI, and (c) include a public announcement that the investigation was closed.

McCarthy had more to say about Director Comey’s decisions and his bending of the rules at NRO here.

It is fair enough to say that Director Comey should not have started down the wayward road of making public comments about pending investigations in which no charges have been filed. Such comments inexorably lead to the need to make more comments when new information arises. Not that the director needs advice from me, but at this point, he ought to announce that — just as in any other investigation — there will be no further public statements about the Clinton investigation unless and until charges are filed, which may never happen.

As for the election, Mrs. Clinton is under the cloud of suspicion not because of Comey but because of her own egregious misconduct. She had no right to know back in July whether the investigation was closed. She has no right to know it now. Like any other criminal suspect, she simply has to wait . . . and wonder . . . and worry.

There were other worthy Democrats, but the party chose to nominate the subject of a criminal investigation. That is the Democrats’ own recklessness; Jim Comey is not to blame. And if the American people are foolish enough to elect an arrantly corrupt and compromised subject of a criminal investigation as our president, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Read the rest here.

# # #

HOLD HOLDER in Contempt for Fast and Furious

Fast and Furious:

Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force

HOLD HOLDER in Contempt!

Last week (June 20, 2012), Fox News reported that

President Obama has granted an 11th-hour request by Attorney General Eric Holder to exert executive privilege over Fast and Furious documents, a last-minute maneuver that appears unlikely to head off a contempt vote against Holder by Republicans in the House.

Over the weekend, former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy (who wrote the book on the jihad organization led by the “Blind Sheik” in the first WTC bombing) published an analysis of Fast and Furious that is devastating to the administration assertions of Executive Privilege, and to the continued stonewalling by Holder himself. Essentially, McCarthy sets forth the internal organizational structures in the DOJ and how cases are categorized and funded; he makes the case that Fast and Furious was categorized as an OCDETF, that is Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. OCDETF cases are, by definition, under the direct authority of “Main Justice,” the AG’s DC department. Extracts from this Must Read [my emphases]:

ATF and the U.S. attorney had to apply to Main Justice for OCDETF status. A case gets approval for funding — which can run well into the millions of dollars — only if senior Justice Department officials, after studying the formally submitted proposal, determine that the investigation has great promise.

The Obama Justice Department made exactly that determination. And this was no rubber stamp — it never is, given the number of agencies across the country competing over the OCDETF pot of gold. Chairman Issa’s most recent memo (dated May 3, 2012) explains that, to win its OCDETF designation, Fast and Furious was “reorganized as a Strike Force including agents from ATF, FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component of the Department of Homeland Security.” Because of the investigation’s importance, a senior ATF agent (who later became a whistleblower) was transferred to Phoenix to help oversee the case.

…the defining features of OCDETF are investigative coordination under the Justice Department’s leadership and the liberal sharing of information across the department’s array of agencies. No OCDETF case is an outlier.

. . . in January 2010. It was then that the case became an OCDETF investigation. . . . It is a deliberate process. ATF and the U.S. attorney had to apply to Main Justice for OCDETF status. A case gets approval for funding — which can run well into the millions of dollars — only if senior Justice Department officials, after studying the formally submitted proposal, determine that the investigation has great promise.

The Obama Justice Department made exactly that determination. And this was no rubber stamp — it never is,

. . .

OCDETF cases get the attention of the Justice Department’s top hierarchy. What gets that level of attention gets the attorney general’s attention.

McCarthy cites chapter and verse, including memoranda that Darrell Issa has already received, not from Eric “Stonewall” Holder, but from whistle-blowers, that put the AG at the center of this deadly scandal.

Alert for this week: Call Rep. John Boehner to make sure he knows WE know about the OCDETF status of Fast and Furious. One American border patrol agent is dead, one ICE agent is dead, and hundreds of Mexican citizens are dead. And the House should vote to hold Eric Holder in contempt. For starters.

Rep. John Boehner:

• Phone (202) 225-6205
• Fax (202) 225-0704
• Or go here for Twitter, Facebook and other social media links to his office

Holder in Contempt over Fast & Furious?

From Tea Party Patriots --

House leaders confirmed on May 3, 2012, they have drafted a contempt order against Holder for his refusal to produce to Congress documents requested in the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal.  “We have a few other options (but) to a great extent we’ve been stonewalled by the Justice Department,” said Issa, R-CA.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is the executive department of the federal government responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice.   How is justice administered when the head of that department, Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., is found in contempt of the laws it exists to enforce?

The resolution, if approved by the House, could force Holder to release thousands of pages of documents related to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Fast & Furious program.   The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has requested 80,000 documents and been provided with only 7,000 to date, according to Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.  ““We have issued a subpoena.  We have bent over backward to be patient.”

Since last August Senator John Cornyn, R-TX, has been outspoken about his concern that the DOJ knew that guns were sold illegally to members of Mexican drug cartels which resulted in the death of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.   “I don’t think we know all the facts because the DOJ has stonewalled. They simply need to come clean. If Holder is implicated, let’s hold him accountable,” Sen. Cornyn said.  Cornyn was adamant that Holder be held accountable for his department’s actions and not be allowed to continue to block access to documents critical to the investigation into the mishandled gun-tracking program.

According to the House Oversight Committee, the Justice Department has not fully cooperated with the investigation into gunwalking that occurred in Operation Fast and Furious.  Although some documents have been produced, Holder has maintained a pattern of denial or non-responsiveness to Congress in the Fast and Furious matter.  He has yet to admit to perjury or prove otherwise by producing the documents.

It remains to be seen whether House Oversight Committee members will cite Holder for contempt.   Attorney General Holder owes it to the American people to provide full disclosure of his knowledge and involvement in the failed program, but it could literally take an act of Congress to make that happen.

Senator Cornyn can be contacted at www.cornyn.senate.gov/public  / or at 202-224-2934.