Tag Archives: Mueller Report

Buyer’s Remorse

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The Russian Collusion Hoax had failed. The Mueller Report was a nothing burger. So the left wing of the House Democrats sold Nancy Pelosi a bill of goods that finally led to her allowing the Impeachment Hoax to go forward. And then it dawned on the Speaker that it would be Cocaine Mitch who would take charge of the action when the Impeachment reached the Senate.

Now, it may be that she had thought that 2019/202 would be like 1974 and that a group of Republican senators would go to the President and tell him to resign rather than face a trial. But 2020 isn’t 1974. In 1974 there was an underlying crime and a cover up of that crime. In 2020, there’s merely whining about Orange Man Bad. Indeed, it appears that there was significant criminal activity that tainted the 2016 election, but the President was among the victims of those crimes. In 2020, the Republicans in the Senate seem prepared to give the President an opportunity to present his defense, and the President seems to look forward to vindication rather than removal from office.

Hence, the Speaker’s problem. If the case goes forward to the Senate, more of the Truth about who did what is likely to come to light, and that is not likely to be beneficial to Pelosi, her allies, or Democrats as a whole. No wonder she’s having trouble articulating her talking points.

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

 

Democrats v. Barr

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Those of us who live in the DC area can listen to WCSP-FM, the radio station operated by C-SPAN. Yesterday, I had the Barr hearing playing in the background while I was working. It went pretty much as I expected with the Democrats on the committee grasping for straws that might be found in Mueller’s just-released letter complaining about the Attorney General’s initial summary of his report not having a desirable effect on press coverage.

Meh.

Of all the pixels spilled commenting on the Democrats’ behavior, David French’s piece over at NRO may have the best analysis of their real dilemma.

Opinions about Donald Trump are remarkably consistent. While there are significant events that might move the needle between now and the election — a recession, a bungled foreign crisis, irrefutable evidence of major crimes — public opinion is largely set, and each new incremental revelation of dishonesty, impulsiveness, or incompetence simply doesn’t move the needle. If Bill Barr had released Mueller’s summaries instead of his own memo, we’d be having exactly the same debates, impeachment would be just as implausible (and imprudent), and Trump’s approval rating would be unchanged. Trump’s public standing is one piece of stability in our otherwise unstable times.

And it’s driving the Democrats even more crazy.

The TL:DR on the Mueller Report

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Victor Davis Hanson has a post up titled Mueller Investigation Was Driven by Pious Hypocrisy. Here are the money quotes.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year, $30 million, 448-page report did not find collusion between Donald Trump and Russia.

Despite compiling private allegations of loud and obnoxious Trump behavior, Mueller also concluded that there was not any actionable case of obstruction of justice by the president.

And …

Yet Mueller’s team went down every blind alley relating to its investigation — except where Obama-era officials were likely culpable for relevant unethical or illegal behavior.

And …

The problem with the Muller investigation, and with former intelligence officials such as Brennan, Clapper, Comey and McCabe, is pious hypocrisy. Those who have lectured America on Trump’s unproven crimes have written books and appeared on TV to publicize their own superior virtue. Yet they themselves have engaged in all sorts of unethical and illegal behavior.

Read the whole thing. It provides a useful top level summary of over two years’ wasted effort. Well, wasted if the point of the exercise was to get Trump and cover up certain Deep State indiscretions.

As the Initial Cloud of Dust Settles

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We’re beginning to see commentaries by people who appear to have actually read the Mueller Report, and the bulk of them fall into two categories which I’m labeling I Told You So and Bitter Clinging. Here are examples of each.

First, Conrad Black in National Interest.

The Mueller Report, despite the best efforts of the chief author and his partisan investigative staff, is a bone-crushing defeat for the president’s enemies. There is not a whit of evidence that any American collaborated with any Russian to alter the results of the 2016 presidential election, and there is extensive evidence that the Trump campaign was the subject of enticements to collaborate and rebuffed all of them at all levels.

Now, Walter Shapiro in The Nation.

The Mueller report didn’t deliver the smoking gun of unrealistic liberal fantasies. (“The money is being wired to the Cayman Islands. Love, Vlad.”) But beyond making clear how close Mueller came to recommending the indictment of a sitting president for obstruction of justice, the report is brimming with tantalizing clues about the uncanny synchronization between the Trump campaign and the Russians—and may increasingly diminish the public’s confidence in giving the president another four years.

It’s not surprising that the two camps of interpretation are filled with mostly conservatives among the I Told You Sos and leftists among the Clingers. But I found it interesting that the more experienced leadership on The Left quickly realized that Mueller really had spent two years searching but had found no there there. Steny Hoyer, for example, remarked last week that impeaching the President was “not worthwhile.”

While Shapiro is correct in noting that the report contains things that aren’t helpful for Trump, and smart Democrats could use them as part of their 2020 campaigning, the report simply doesn’t contain a shred of evidence of any high crimes or misdemeanors. I suspect that Pelosi, Hoyer, and others with Bill-Clinton-era political experience will have their hands full trying to manage their colleagues who will want to spin the Mueller Report into articles of impeachment.

 

Obstruction of Justice

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The phrase Obstruction of Justice has technical meaning in a legal sense as a type of crime. The statutes of the various jurisdictions specify the phrase’s exact legal meaning in those venues. However, when used in the broader context of the English language, the phrase could describe acts that, while not illegal, are immoral or unjust. Simply put, it’s not unreasonable for someone to describe an act that prevents or delays a just outcome in a situation as “obstructing justice.”

With that in mind, how might one describe a prosecutor who prolonged an investigation long after he knew no crime had actually been committed?

We’ve Got a Little List

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Roger Kimball has a piece over at American Greatness about the criminal referrals being made by Congressman Nunes to the Department of Justice. There are eight referrals which may involve upwards of twenty persons. Five are for specific crimes such as lying to Congress or leaking classified information. Three are more open-ended: Conspiracy to lie to the FISA court, manipulation of intelligence for partisan political ends, and what Nunes calls “global leaks” of highly sensitive information (such as the contents of telephone calls between President Trump and foreign leaders). Who had access to such information?
Who used it illegally?

But who do you think makes the list? Were I a modern-day Koko, my little list would include former CIA Director John Brennan, an implacable enemy of the president and a good candidate for the title of fons et origo of the Trump-Russia investigation.

It would include the FBI’s Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former acting attorney general Sally Yates, Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie who (unbelievably) actually worked for Fusion GPS.

That other James, the oleaginous James Comey, former Director of the FBI, would certainly be on the list, as would several people in the Obama Administration: the aforementioned Susan Rice, for example, and former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, who, like Rice, did a lot of unmasking in her final months in office.

There are others—quite a few others, in fact, as anyone who has been keeping up with the reporting on this unfolding scandal knows well.

Read the whole thing.

Sticking with allusions to The Mikado, let’s hope that Attorney General Barr channels the title character.

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time—
To let the punishment fit the crime,
The punishment fit the crime …

Stay tuned.

Colluding with Reality

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I’m so old, I remember when Reality was supposed to have a “liberal bias.”And Reality has been doing violence to much of the Left’s cherished agenda for the past few days.

UPDATE—

Leftist ideas can’t withstand debate. Leftists know that, which is why they’re always trying to silence their opponents, generally in the name of some sort of decency or compassion that they themselves spectacularly lack.

—Glenn Reynolds