Archive for the ‘DOJ’ Category

First, today isn’t President Trump’s birthday. June 14th is. The reason I’ve titled this post is because Michael Horowitz has announced that he’s releasing the much-anticipated DOJ Inspector General’s report on President Trump’s birthday.

According to Fox News reporting, “In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Horowitz said ‘we anticipate releasing the report on June 14, 2018.’ That day is also President Trump’s birthday. The inspector general also told committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, in the letter that he has accepted the invitation to testify about the report on June 18, meaning his scheduled appearance before the committee is being delayed again.”

If Andrew McCabe, Jim Comey and Loretta Lynch aren’t worried, they should be. It’s already been reported that McCabe wants immunity to testify against Comey. Lawmakers are already hesitant to grant him immunity. If McCabe’s attorney can’t offer an impressive proffer, then McCabe shouldn’t get immunity. If he’s subpoenaed to testify, he can plead the Fifth and take his chances with a DC jury:

Horowitz’s review has already put top FBI official Andrew McCabe in legal jeopardy. The Justice Department’s internal watchdog sent a criminal referral for McCabe in April to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington.

Good luck with that, Andy.

The inspector general’s review uncovered the anti-Trump texts from FBI official Peter Strzok, who famously called Trump an ‘idiot’ and texted about an ‘insurance policy’ against a Trump presidency. Strzok had been assigned to Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe, but has since been reassigned.

I suspect that Mr. Horowitz’s investigative findings will lead to several people in the DOJ and FBI wearing prison uniforms.

CNN’s article about President Trump starts off by reading like a fashion critique rather than like a serious news article.

Early in the article, it says “This may be the first Department of Justice criminal investigation ordered via Twitter feed. Given the importance of a presidential decision regarding a possible criminal investigation, the use of Twitter was completely inappropriate. It trivializes the entire process. What’s next in the presidential communication arsenal, the use of Facebook and Instagram with photos?”

The message from that paragraph seems to be ‘how dare he use Twitter to express his opinion’. That’s kind of disappointing considering the fact that the investigation President Trump ordered was about determining whether the Obama Justice Department or the Obama FBI sought to infiltrate the Republicans’ presidential campaign for strictly partisan reasons. At a time when people get their news from social media, why wouldn’t President Trump use Twitter to put pressure on the Deep State? Why wouldn’t President Trump use Twitter to put John Brennan, Jim Comey and Jim Clapper on notice that they’d better hire a good lawyer?

The CNN article also treats this situation like it was normal:

In modern times, though, most presidents have taken a hands-off approach with respect to specific criminal investigations in a deliberate effort to keep them out of partisan politics and to preserve public respect for the integrity of federal law enforcement authorities.

This investigation is totally about partisanship. The fact that the NYTimes and the Washington Post tried spinning it as the Obama administration’s attempt to protect the Trump campaign is laughable. It’s disgusting that CNN tries peddling that same line in their article:

Part of the DOJ and the FBI ‘s job is after all the conduct of counterintelligence investigations and, if warranted by the evidence, the warning of presidential candidates that the Russians might try to infiltrate their campaigns to influence the American election. One would think that Trump would be grateful rather than suspicious about the warning.

Apparently, CNN didn’t notice that the DOJ and FBI didn’t warn the campaign. Rather, when then-President-Elect Trump insisted that his campaign had been surveilled, people openly ridiculed him, saying that couldn’t happen in America. Now they’re peddling this infiltration of the Trump campaign like it’s a public service? Seriously?

In the end, Trump’s attempt to embarrass his own Department of Justice and FBI is likely to wound only his own presidency. If Inspector General Horowitz makes the highly unlikely finding that the DOJ and the FBI acted criminally in their conduct of a counterintelligence operation related to the Trump campaign, a criminal referral will be necessary.

I’m almost to the end of the article and the ‘reporter’ still hasn’t told us what the investigation is about. I’ve heard about burying the lede but this is ridiculous.

The lede should be that Obama DOJ or FBI political appointees might have tried interfering in a presidential election. While the article hints at that, it certainly doesn’t lead with that.

Sunday’s Twitter order to commence a new investigation to smear the Obama administration is likely to backfire and extend the Mueller investigation. It may also cause Mueller to look at an interesting new idea — was the presidential order to commence such a frivolous investigation itself really an attempt to block the progress of the Mueller investigation and obstruct justice?

What would a CNN article be without them defending either Hillary or the Obama administration? Here’s something for CNN to think about. The thought of a presidential administration of one political party using its intelligence services to gather information on the presidential campaign of the other political party is a true threat to our system of government. There’s nothing trivial about such an investigation. Watching Kimberley Strassel lay this out is what real journalism looks like:

Unlike this CNN ‘article’, Kim Strassel’s articles have been the work product of a professional journalist.

Technorati: Trump Campaign, Department of Justice, FBI, Republicans, Election 2016, Obama Justice Department, John Brennan, Jim Clapper, Jim Comey, Rod Rosenstein, Loretta Lynch, Investigation, CNN, Deep State, Democrats

Judge Mukasey’s op-ed helped open the floodgates questioning the Mueller investigation. Mark Penn’s op-ed is actually more damning because Penn is a Democrat. Penn’s op-ed connects lots of dots that Mueller, Comey and Rosenstein don’t want connected.

For instance, Penn wrote “At this point, there is little doubt that the highest echelons of the FBI and the Justice Department broke their own rules to end the Hillary Clinton ‘matter,’ but we can expect the inspector general to document what was done or, more pointedly, not done. It is hard to see how a yearlong investigation of this won’t come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong in a secret ‘no aides allowed’ meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac. With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.”

This isn’t the outcome they were hoping for. They were hoping to take down a president they thought wasn’t qualified. Instead, Mueller, Lynch, Rosenstein and Comey have ruined their reputations and their legacies. Straight shooters like Judge Mukasey and Mark Penn are asking all the right questions and making the right observations while putting this puzzle together.

But it is backfiring. They started by telling the story of Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, as having remembered a bar conversation with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. But how did the FBI know they should talk to him? That’s left out of their narrative. Downer’s signature appears on a $25 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation. You don’t need much imagination to figure that he was close with Clinton Foundation operatives who relayed information to the State Department, which then called the FBI to complete the loop. This wasn’t intelligence. It was likely opposition research from the start.

Contributing to the Clinton Foundation isn’t illegal by itself. It’s just convenient for this contributor to point the finger at Mr. Papadopoulos. With the Clintons, it isn’t wise to think that coincidences are truly coincidental. More often than not, these ‘coincidences’ are manufactured with precise intent.

This isn’t flattering to Mueller:

Flush with 16 prosecutors, including a former lawyer for the Clinton Foundation, and an undisclosed budget, the Mueller investigation has been a scorched-earth effort to investigate the entirety of the Trump campaign, Trump business dealings, the entire administration and now, if it was not Russia, maybe it’s some other country.

I’ll put this simply. It’s time to wrap this fishing expedition up. It’s been spinning its wheels for over a year.

In the past, politicians, mostly senators, have warned President Trump not to fire Robert Mueller. This morning, a legal heavyweight wrote this op-ed offering a different opinion. Michael Mukasey’s opinion isn’t coming from a politically-motivated standpoint. It’s coming from a legal standpoint.

He wrote “Recall that the investigation was begun to learn whether the Trump campaign had gotten help unlawfully from Russia. Justice Department regulations permit appointment of a special counsel only if (i) there is reason to think that a federal crime has been committed, and (ii) investigating it would present a conflict of interest for the Justice Department or there is another overriding public reason to take the investigation outside DOJ.” In other words, based on DOJ guidelines, there wasn’t a legitimate basis for launching this investigation.

Judge Mukasey continued, saying “Although Rosenstein apparently tried to correct his mistake in a new appointment memo, he has thus far refused to disclose, even to a federal judge, a complete copy of it. In other investigations supposedly implicating a president, Watergate and Whitewater come to mind, we were told what the crime was and what facts justified the investigation. Not here. Nor have any of the charges filed in the Mueller investigation disclosed the Trump campaign’s criminal acceptance or solicitation of help from the Russians. The one indictment that relates to Russian criminality charges that the Russians hacked Democratic Party computers and committed other social media abuse, but says specifically that if the Trump campaign got the benefit of it, that was ‘unwitting’ — i.e., without criminal intent.”

The harm this fishing expedition is doing is to the Intelligence Community’s reputation. The Deep Staters have tarnished the FBI’s and the DOJ’s reputations. Who knows how long it will take to repair that damage? The political heat is increasing on Mueller to wrap things up. First, it was Judge T.S. Ellis III who questioned the Mueller investigation’s scope. Now, it’s former Attorney General Michael Mukasey questioning Rod Rosenstein’s appointment of a special council.

Sprinkle in Sen. Chuck Grassley’s letter demanding production of Rosenstein’s scope memo. Combine these things and you have pressure building from people who aren’t seen as overtly partisan. That, more than anything, will hurt Mueller’s credibility.

For weeks, Rod Rosenstein has refused to turn over a document now known as the ‘Scope Memo’ to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. The explanation has been that the DOJ thought that turning it over to Nunes would be the same as turning it over to the White House.

That fight is behind the DOJ and Rosenstein. Technically, they won. They won’t have to turn it over to Chairman Nunes. Officially, Rosenstein and the DOJ lost because Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley has demanded to see the memo. In his letter, Chairman Grassley wrote “This Committee likewise should be permitted to review the true nature and scope of the special counsel’s investigation. Like the Judiciary, Congress is a separate branch of government with its own constitutional duties that often require access to Executive Branch information. In this case, the interests relate to both legislative and oversight responsibilities.”

There’s no denying the memo from Grassley from a political standpoint. Rosenstein could win a fight with Chairman Nunes because the media had unjustifiably criticized him. That option doesn’t exist with Chairman Grassley because he’s one of the most decent, well-respected men in DC.

Grassley also appears interested in the timing of the Rosenstein memo. “The August Memorandum states that it addresses the special counsel’s authorization as of the date he was appointed. Why was this memorandum not drafted until August 2017?” Grassley asked.

Grassley has been a supporter of the Mueller investigation, the committee chairman noted. He has publicly warned President Trump against taking steps to shut down the investigation or fire Mueller. “As I have said numerous times, that investigation should be free to follow the facts wherever they lead without any improper outside interference. However, that does not mean that it is immune from oversight or that information about the scope of its authority under existing Department regulations should be withheld from Congress,” Grassley said.

Mueller would face a difficult fight vs. Sen. Grassley if Sen. Grassley pushed him on exceeding his authority. While some want to think this is a law enforcement matter, it’s a political battle, too. In a fight against Sen. Grassley, Rosenstein will lose if it comes to that.