Tag Archives: Robert Mueller

The Truth Will Set Us All Free, by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on August 31, 2018 | 1 comment

It’s time, as SLL has argued, to get to the bottom of the attempt to prevent Trump from being elected president or forcing him out once he took office. From Victor Hanson Davis at theburningplatform.com:

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was star-crossed from the start. His friend and successor as FBI director, James Comey, by his own admission prompted the investigation — with the deliberate leaking of classified memos about his conversations with President Donald Trump to the press.

Mueller then unnecessarily stocked his team with what the press called his “dream team” of mostly Democratic partisans. One had defended a Hillary Clinton employee. Another had defended the Clinton Foundation.

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Trump Is Right About “Flipping”, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on August 31, 2018 | Leave a comment

Offer a prisoner $10,000 for his testimony and you go to jail. Offer him a dramatically reduced sentenced for his testimony and you must be a prosecutor. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

In the wake of the federal criminal conviction of former Trump official Paul Manafort and the guilty plea in federal court of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, the mainstream press is singing the praises of special prosecutor (and former FBI Director) Robert Mueller and the Justice Department.

In the process, Trump’s critics are condemning his denunciation of “flipping,” the process by which federal prosecutors offer a sweet deal to criminal defendants in return for testifying against a “higher-up” who the feds are also prosecuting. The press and the anti-Trumpsters say that such a practice is part of the “rule of law” and essential to the proper administration of justice.

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Trump is using the Bill Clinton playbook and it just might work, by Joseph Moreno

Posted on August 26, 2018 | Leave a comment

Slick Donny? From Joseph Moreno at thehill.com:

The parallels are remarkable. Twenty years ago this month, a special prosecutor investigating the president was weeks away from releasing a report accusing the chief executive of illegal conduct unrelated to his official duties. Three months later, Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives on charges of lying and obstructing justice to hide a extramarital affair from his wife and the country. While this may have meant he lost a battle, there is no question that Clinton ultimately won the war against independent counsel Ken Starr by not only surviving but continuing on to complete an otherwise successful presidency.

Today, President Trump is not only following Clinton’s playbook to a tee, he stands a good chance of winning his war of words against an opponent who remains unable to fight back. Just as we are seeing with the ongoing Russia probe, Starr’s original investigation started specific and broadened over time. In Starr’s case, his 1994 appointment was to investigate potential violations of criminal law relating to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the “Whitewater” land deal. Four years and $50 million later, Starr’s most impactful findings involved Clinton’s affair with a White House intern and his lying about it under oath.

Robert Mueller’s original mandate was also narrow. He was appointed to find evidence of “any links” or “coordination” between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign. Fifteen months and more than $16 million later, it is impossible to know when and how the probe will conclude. However, the conviction of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafortand the guilty plea of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen on grounds entirely unrelated to Russia mirror how Starr’s investigation also morphed into altogether new areas.

What is also being mirrored is how Trump is taking the fight with Mueller in the court of public opinion. At some point, Clinton decided that rather than wait until Starr completed his investigation, he would step up and fight on his own terms. Lacking the benefit of a Twitter account, Clinton used surrogates who repeatedly attacked Starr as a highly partisan Republican operative obsessed with bringing down Clinton. Starr was accused of being fixated on sex, and being a runaway Inspector Javert who spent years and millions of dollars on a wasted effort. In the reported words of a Clinton White House official, the attacks were “part of our continuing strategy to destroy Ken Starr.”

To continue reading: Trump is using the Bill Clinton playbook and it just might work

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Do Democrats Want an Impeachment Fight? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on August 24, 2018 | Leave a comment

The Democrats want to impeach Trump because he won the election, which is outside of the offenses specified in the Constitution. Do they have the stomach for taking it all the way through on a couple of dubious campaign finance infractions? The Republicans faltered on Bill Clinton’s impeachment. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer,” said President Donald Trump ruefully, “I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen.” Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn.

Tuesday, Trump’s ex-lawyer, staring at five years in prison, pled guilty to a campaign violation that may not even be a crime.

Cohen had fronted the cash, $130,000, to pay porn star Stormy Daniels for keeping quiet about a decade-old tryst with Trump. He had also brokered a deal whereby the National Enquirer bought the rights to a story about a Trump affair with a Playboy model, to kill it.

Cohen claims he and Trump thus conspired to violate federal law. But paying girlfriends to keep past indiscretions private is neither a crime nor a campaign violation. And Trump could legally contribute as much as he wished to his own campaign for president.

Would a Democratic House, assuming we get one, really impeach a president for paying hush money to old girlfriends?

Hence the high-fives among never-Trumpers are premature.

But if Cohen’s guilty plea and Tuesday’s conviction of campaign manager Paul Manafort do not imperil Trump today, what they portend is ominous. For Cohen handled Trump’s dealings for more than a decade and has pledged full cooperation with prosecutors from both the Southern District of New York and the Robert Mueller investigation.

Nothing that comes of this collaboration will be helpful to Trump.

Also, Manafort, now a convicted felon facing life in prison, has the most compelling of motives to “flip” and reveal anything that could be useful to Mueller and harmful to Trump.

Then there is the Mueller probe itself.

Twenty-six months after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had resigned. Twenty-six months after the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, Mueller has yet to deliver hard evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Putin’s Russia, though this was his mandate.

To continue reading: Do Democrats Want an Impeachment Fight?

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Connnecting some dots, by u/lonestarbeliever

Posted on August 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

The same cast of characters has been appearing in various scandals since 2001. From u/lonestarbeliever at reddit.com:

I am passing this on from someone who’s connecting some dots with input from sources he cannot reveal.

Here’s what it looks like when all the pieces are sewn together

It smells like conspiracy and treason. Everyone needs to read this. Slowly, and patiently, because it’s very important……

From 2001 to 2005 there was an ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

A Grand Jury had been impanelled.

Governments from around the world had donated to the “Charity”.

Yet, from 2001 to 2003 none of those “Donations” to the Clinton Foundation were declared. Now you would think that an honest investigator would be able to figure this out.

Look who took over this investigation in 2005: None other than James Comey; Coincidence? Guess who was transferred into the Internal Revenue Service to run the Tax Exemption Branch of the IRS? None other than, Lois “Be on The Look Out” (BOLO) Lerner. Isn’t that interesting?

But this is all just a series of strange coincidences, right?

Guess who ran the Tax Division inside the Department of Injustice from 2001 to 2005?

No other than the Assistant Attorney General of the United States,

Rod Rosenstein.

Guess who was the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during this time frame?

Another coincidence (just an anomaly in statistics and chances), but it was Robert Mueller.

What do all four casting characters have in common?

They all were briefed and/or were front-line investigators into the Clinton Foundation Investigation.

Another coincidence, right?

Fast forward to 2009….

James Comey leaves the Justice Department to go and cash-in at Lockheed Martin.

Hillary Clinton is running the State Department, official government business, on her own personal email server.

The Uranium One “issue” comes to the attention of the Hillary.

Like all good public servants do, supposedly looking out for America’s best interest, she decides to support the decision and approve the sale of 20% of US Uranium to no other than, the Russians.

Now you would think that this is a fairly straight up deal, except it wasn’t, America got absolutely nothing out of it.

However, prior to the sales approval, no other than Bill Clinton goes to Moscow, gets paid 500K for a one hour speech; then meets with Vladimir Putin at his home for a few hours.

To continue reading; Connnecting some dots

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The Shape of Trump to Come, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on August 20, 2018 | Leave a comment

Trump will strike back. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

I thought I’d make list of things we can expect to emanate from the White House over the coming year or so. I’m sure you will agree, wherever you stand on the political roller coaster, that there’s little chance things are going to be boring going forward. Here goes:

Trump will end the ‘monopolies’ of Facebook, Google, Twitter et al. The intelligence community will hate this, but they already hate him anyway, so why bother? And besides, it’s the only thing to do that makes any sense. The AT&T model might be useful, essentially creating Baby Bells, though the international reach of the companies may add a layer or two of complications.

But you simply can’t have a few roomfuls of boys and girls ban and shadowban people with impunity from networks that span the globe and reach half of the world’s population on the basis of opaque ‘Terms and Conditions’ that in effect trump the US constitution the way they are used and interpreted. Whether they are private companies or not will make no difference in the end.

At some point an ‘entity’ becomes a ‘utility’. Twitter and Facebook already are the most efficient way to alert people in cases of emergency. To throw people out of such systems is indefensible.

The CIA and FBI will protest like there’s no tomorrow, but they have to realize that spying on Americans the way they do at present in conjunction with Alphabet and Facebook is just as indefensible as throwing people off these services. The judicial system will at some point be forced to curtail these powers. Better for the executive power to be ahead of that. Baby Bells it is.

Trump will tell his people to open up to Mueller . He’s already done this, but will do it again, loudly and publicly, citing the need to wrap up the Mueller investigation ASAP. That will be the target: stop the ‘inquisition’. Mueller has talked for 30 hours over the past nine months to White House lawyer Donald McGahn II, and at some point enough is enough.

To continue reading: The Shape of Trump to Come

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What if Russiagate is the New WMDs? by Jack Hunter

Posted on August 20, 2018 | Leave a comment

Russiagate is the new WMDs: a bogus story concocted by the intelligence agencies. From Jack Hunter at americanconservative.com:

Democrats, certain in their accusations of guilt, sound a lot like Republicans in 2002.

“The evidence against Trump and Russia is huge and mounting every day,” declared liberal celebrity activist Rosie O’Donnell at a protest in front of the White House last week. “We see it, he can’t lie about it,” she added. “He is going down and so will all of his administration.”

“The charge is treason,” O’Donnell declared. Protesters held held large letters that spelled it out: “T-R-E-A-S-O-N.”

O’Donnell is by no means alone in her sentiments. Trump’s guilt in “Russiagate” is now assumed by much of the American left, and reaches greater levels of fervor with every passing day.

This kind of partisan religiosity is not new.

In the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, conservative pundit Ann Coulter accused war opponents of “treason” and insisted of Saddam Hussein, “We know he had weapons of mass destruction.”

Coulter was confident and she wasn’t alone. Virtually the entire mainstream American right—from pundits like Coulter and Sean Hannity to President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress—was deeply invested in the notion that Hussein possessed WMDs and that the Iraq war was justified based on that unshakeable premise. This belief was so ingrained for so long that many excitedly rushed to pretend that chemical weapons discovered in Iraq as reported by the New York Times in 2014 were somehow the same thing as the “mushroom cloud” the Bush administration said Saddam was capable of.

Unfortunately for the right (and America, and the world), that premise turned out to be false. There were no WMDs. Today, only a minority of delusional, face-saving hawks and unreconstructed neoconservatives still parrot that lie.

And far from being “traitors,” Iraq war opponents today are considered to have been on the right side of history.

To continue reading: What if Russiagate is the New WMDs?

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‘Too Big to Fail’: Russia-gate One Year After VIPS Showed a Leak, Not a Hack, by Patrick Lawrence

Posted on August 17, 2018 | Leave a comment

The conclusive analysis that the DNC emails were leaked via direct download rather than hacked over the internet has been out there for a year now. Almost none of the mainstream media have picked up on it. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

One year later, the VIPS memo contending that the DNC emails were leaked and not hacked has yet to be successfully challenged. Meanwhile, the country sinks deeper into the morass of the new McCarthyism, comments Patrick Lawrence.

A year has passed since highly credentialed intelligence professionals produced the first hard evidence that allegations of mail theft and other crimes attributed to Russia rested on purposeful falsification and subterfuge. The initial reaction to these revelations—a firestorm of frantic denial—augured ill, and the time since has fulfilled one’s worst expectations. One year later we live within an institutionalized proscription of proven reality. Our discourse consists of a series of fence posts and taboos. By any detached measure, this lands us in deep, serious trouble. The sprawl of what we call “Russia-gate” now brings our republic and its institutions to a moment of great peril—the gravest since the McCarthy years and possibly since the Civil War. No, I do not consider this hyperbole.

Much has happened since Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity published its report on intrusions into the Democratic Party’s mail servers on Consortium News on July 24 last year. Parts of the intelligence apparatus—by no means all or even most of it—have issued official “assessments” of Russian culpability. Media have produced countless multi-part “investigations,” “special reports,” and what-have-yous that amount to an orgy of faulty syllogisms. Robert Mueller’s special investigation has issued two sets of indictments that, on scrutiny, prove as wanting in evidence as the notoriously flimsy intelligence “assessment” of January 6, 2017.

Indictments are not evidence and do not need to contain evidence. That is supposed to come out at trial, which is very unlikely to ever happen. Nevertheless, the corporate media has treated the indictments as convictions.

To continue reading: ‘Too Big to Fail’: Russia-gate One Year After VIPS Showed a Leak, Not a Hack

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US Intelligence Community as a Collapse Driver, by Dmitry Orlov

Posted on July 25, 2018 | Leave a comment

The US intelligence agencies are sucking the life out of the country. From Dmitry Orlov at cluborlov.com:

In today’s United States, the term “espionage” doesn’t get too much use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of industrial espionage, but with regard to Americans’ own efforts to understand the world beyond their borders, they prefer the term “intelligence.” This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on how you look at things.

First of all, US “intelligence” is only vaguely related to the game of espionage as it has been traditionally played, and as it is still being played by countries such as Russia and China. Espionage involves collecting and validating strategically vital information and conveying it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact that you are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.

In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide capsule; these days torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that get caught patiently wait to be exchanged in a spy swap. An unwritten, commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and that those released are never interfered with again because doing so would complicate negotiating future spy swaps. In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing prisoners is a good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders, not professional spies, sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as “Al Qaeda.” There was no such thing before US intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.

Most recently, British “special services,” which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence. There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and British spies working in Russia should probably be issued good old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly super-powerful Novichok stuff the British keep at their “secret” lab in Porton Down doesn’t work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).

To continue reading: US Intelligence Community as a Collapse Driver

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Opinion: One FBI text message in Russia probe that should alarm every American, by John Solomon

Posted on July 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

Two days after Robert Mueller launched his probe, one of his chief investigators, Peter Strzok, admitted there was nothing to probe. From John Solomon at thehill.com:

Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the reported FBI lovebirds, are the poster children for the next “Don’t Text and Investigate” public service ads airing soon at an FBI office near you.

Their extraordinary texting affair on their government phones has given the FBI a black eye, laying bare a raw political bias brought into the workplace that agents are supposed to check at the door when they strap on their guns and badges.

It is no longer in dispute that they held animus for Donald Trump, who was a subject of their Russia probe, or that they openly discussed using the powers of their office to “stop” Trumpfrom becoming president. The only question is whether any official acts they took in the Russia collusion probe were driven by those sentiments.

The Justice Department’s inspector general is endeavoring to answer that question.

For any American who wants an answer sooner, there are just five words, among the thousands of suggestive texts Page and Strzok exchanged, that you should read.

That passage was transmitted on May 19, 2017. “There’s no big there there,” Strzok texted.

The date of the text long has intrigued investigators: It is two days after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee an investigation into alleged collusion between Trump and the Russia campaign.

Since the text was turned over to Congress, investigators wondered whether it referred to the evidence against the Trump campaign.

This month, they finally got the chance to ask. Strzok declined to say — but Page, during a closed-door interview with lawmakers, confirmed in the most pained and contorted way that the message in fact referred to the quality of the Russia case, according to multiple eyewitnesses.

The admission is deeply consequential. It means Rosenstein unleashed the most awesome powers of a special counsel to investigate an allegation that the key FBI officials, driving the investigation for 10 months beforehand, did not think was “there.”

By the time of the text and Mueller’s appointment, the FBI’s best counterintelligence agents had had plenty of time to dig. They knowingly used a dossier funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign — which contained uncorroborated allegations — to persuade the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to issue a warrant to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page (no relation to Lisa Page).

To continue reading: Opinion: One FBI text message in Russia probe that should alarm every American

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