Archive for the ‘Investigations’ Category

A year ago, CNN’s Don Lemon asked what is President Trump hiding? A month ago, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace asked the same question. Yesterday on FNC’s The Five, Juan Williams asked the same question. Since this seems to be the Democrats’ favorite question, let’s try and determine what they’re talking about.

Yesterday, the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress. (This is as meaningful as finding out whether unicorns are real.) During the course of that kangaroo court, we learned that Part II, aka the obstruction of justice part, of the Mueller Report was 182 pages long from Rep. Tom McClintock, (R-Calif.) Later, we learned that a whopping total of 6 lines were redacted from those 182 pages.

That isn’t even enough to qualify as a rounding error.

Here’s a question for showboating Democrats. How is it possible to hide evidence of obstruction of justice in just 6 lines? Here’s another question. Is it possible to hide evidence of obstruction of justice 6 lines? Let’s remember that these 6 lines aren’t consecutive in the report. They’re spaced throughout those 182 pages.

What this provides is a picture of how intellectually unimpressive House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, (D-NY), is. Based on his performance thus far, I’m betting that boxes of cereal have more gravitas than Chairman Nadler. Then again, some of the sideline commentators aren’t the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, either:

Let’s be clear about something. Jerry Nadler is the opposite of a principled person. Nobody mistakes him for a man of integrity.

Like the Democrats she leads, Speaker Pelosi keeps getting more radical by the minute. She recently told the NYTimes that she’s “worried President Trump might not step down if defeated in 2020”, saying “We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that”, urging Democrats to “win the debate that matters most to many voters inside the party: electability. ‘Own the center-left, own the mainstream.'”

First, Democrats of 2019 aren’t center-left. Which of you reading this thinks that Steven Cohen, David Cicilline or Jerry Nadler represents the mainstream of American politics? Next, there’s this:

Pelosi also said that in order to beat Trump, liberals have to play at his level, and the best way to do that is to win big, so he can’t challenge the results. “If we win by four seats, by a thousand votes each, he’s not going to respect the election,” she said. “He would poison the public mind. He would challenge each of the races. He would say you can’t seat these people.”

Thanks to the Democrats’ investigation-only agenda, Democrats won’t keep their majority in the House. According to this, Democrats can only afford to lose 17 seats if they want to keep their majority. The likelihood of that happening isn’t high. Here in Minnesota, the likelihood of flipping the Second and Third districts back to the Republicans looks quite possible. Don’t be surprised if Republicans regain House seats in California, Virginia and Pennsylvania, too. The Democrats’ majority is anything except rock-solid.

Last Wednesday, Pelosi pushed out a statement taking aim at the Trump administration in the aftermath of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, blasting the president as “immoral, unethical, corrupt and unpatriotic.”

That’s rich coming from the political party that lied to the American people that President Trump committed treason and had obstructed justice, then had to scamper after the special counsel’s grand jury determined the opposite. Now Michael Horowitz, the DOJ Inspector General, is investigating whether Democrats abused “the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” when they investigated “President Trump and associates of his 2016 campaign.”

Finally, there’s this:

It isn’t easy to get Bill Barr to smile, much less laugh. Ted Cruz accomplished those things during his questioning of Attorney Gen. Barr:

In laying things out so beautifully, Sen. Cruz demolished Speaker Pelosi’s arguments. The good news for Speaker Pelosi is that she doesn’t have to worry about getting exposed because the MSM, aka the media wing of the Democratic Party, won’t cover Sen. Cruz’s questioning of Bill Barr.

Democrats keep digging their PR hole deeper each day. Today, a multitude of Democrat activists/propagandists in the MSM insisted that Bill Barr lied. E.J Dionne’s article is a perfect example of that. Dionne fancies himself as a leading Democrat intellectual, which, if true, is frightening.

Here’s one of Mr. Dionne’s best arguments:

It’s not good enough that a redacted version of the report was eventually made public. For 27 days, the debate over Mueller’s findings was twisted by Barr’s poisonous distortions that implied a full exoneration of President Trump. Many public statements and much punditry were devoted to insisting that Trump’s opponents owed the president an apology, that the Russia matter was never what it was cracked up to be, that the president was free and clear.

Mr. Dionne, is it that difficult to admit that Robert Mueller has closed shop without filing a single indictment of conspiracy or obstruction of justice against anyone connected with President Trump?

For months, Democrats insisted that “the walls are closing in on” President Trump or that Mueller’s team was preparing to indict various family members of President Trump’s family. None of those things happened. One bombshell after another turned into a dud. Finally, the Mueller team closed up shop after getting Paul Manafort or Michael Cohen to plead guilty for crimes they’d committed long before the Trump campaign started (Manafort) or after President Trump’s inauguration (Cohen).

Now, Nancy Pelosi, the leading Democrat in the House, accused AG Barr of lying to Congress without presenting any proof. There seems to be lots of that going around within the Democratic Party. Check this out:

Something’s bothering Pelosi. Look how much she’s aged since regaining the Speaker’s gavel. What’s probably bothering her most is the fact that she can’t control the pro-impeachment radicals in her caucus.

It was Van Hollen who, two weeks after Mueller had registered his complaint, had asked Barr an un-senatorially direct question: “Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion?” Barr replied: “I don’t know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion.”

Lawyers might argue over whether this was an outright lie, but to call Barr’s answer misleading and obfuscatory is rather kind. Trump must have been very proud of his attorney general.

Actually, for people who use nuance and words for a living, it isn’t even slightly misleading. Mueller’s team was upset. That’s entirely different than asking if Mueller himself was upset.

Nowhere in Mr. Dionne’s article does he provide proof of his ill-advised allegations. These days, Democrats don’t believe in the presumption of innocence or due process but they definitely think allegations and trash-talking constitute proof. Saying that Democrats, starting with Ms. Pelosi, think that the Constitution is a nuisance that gets in the way of them total victory is understatement.

In November, 2020, we need to re-elect Donald Trump, grow the Republican majority in the Senate and retake the majority in the House. I’m confident that that’s totally possible, especially if Democrats keep acting this deranged.

This morning, Attorney General William Barr will testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Lindsey Graham. Less than 12 hours before Barr testifies, a supposed bombshell letter was leaked to the Washington Post.

The headline for the article was “Mueller complained that Barr’s letter did not capture ‘context’ of Trump probe.” As usual, the headline isn’t what’s important. That’s the clickbait portion of the article. The important portion of the article is where it says “A day after the letter was sent, Barr and Mueller spoke by phone for about 15 minutes, according to law enforcement officials. In that call, Mueller said he was concerned that news coverage of the obstruction investigation was misguided and creating public misunderstandings about the office’s work, according to Justice Department officials. When Barr pressed him whether he thought Barr’s letter was inaccurate, Mueller said he did not, but felt that the media coverage of the letter was misinterpreting the investigation, officials said.”

To be clear, there were some professional disagreements between Barr and Mueller, starting with this:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.

As with most supposed bombshells, this article is more dud than bombshell. Still, it’s sure to cause Senate Democrats to rattle their sabers this morning.

Let’s be clear about something. A number of Democrat committee chairs are constitutional illiterates. Either that or they’re exceptionally corrupt or both. It’s something I’ve spent a big chunk of time thinking about. Here’s what finished things off for me.

When House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings issued subpoenas for President Trump’s private financial records when he was a private citizen, President Trump’s attorneys filed a lawsuit to prevent the production of those records.

The legal complaint from Trump’s legal team reads “Chairman Cummings has ignored the constitutional limits on Congress’ power to investigate. Article I of the Constitution does not contain an ‘Investigations Clause’ or an ‘Oversight Clause.’ It gives Congress the power to enact certain legislation. Accordingly, investigations are legitimate only insofar as they further some legitimate legislative purpose.”

That’s true as far as it goes but I’d add that they didn’t mention a separation of powers conflict, too. Congress isn’t tasked with investigating private citizens before they were part of the government. That’s the jurisdiction of the executive branch. Specifically, the Department of Justice has the statutory authority to investigate private citizens. The investigations of private citizens is the responsibility of the FBI or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The only people vested with the responsibility of convening grand juries are the DOJ attorneys, U.S. attorneys or a special counsel.

This won’t be a terribly difficult case to decide. The legislative branch has the constitutional authority to give advice and consent, pass legislation, provide legislative oversight and to ratify treaties.

House Democrats don’t have the authority to investigate the private activities of private citizens. That’s the job of the executive branch. Period. Mark Levin discussed another possible explanation with former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on Sunday night’s Life, Liberty & Levin:

I don’t know if that’s what these Democrats are trying to do but I won’t rule it out. It’s pretty frightening when the People’s House is weaponized to torment private citizens. Though that precedent hasn’t been sent, Speaker Pelosi did say that subpoenas might be a way to negotiate with President Trump:

Apparently, Pelosi and other Democrats don’t think playing fair is required. That’s why they need to voted out of office in 2020. The bigger the landslide in the House and Senate, the better. It’s clear that Democrats don’t see limits on their investigative powers:

I suspect that they’ll be stopped cold by the Supreme Court. I can’t wait to hear about that ruling. What’s chilling is hearing E.J. Dionne say that going after a private citizen’s private financial records “is the right thing to do.”

I’m normally a fan of HotAir’s Allahpundit. This isn’t one of those times. After reading this post, I can’t help but object to some of AP’s statements.

For instance, I must object when AP says “Here’s my question for Kushner, though: What would he have had Rod Rosenstein and Bob Mueller do? Granted, the Russiagate probe was bitterly divisive and contributed to Trump’s delegitimization among his critics. But given all the contacts between Trump officials and Russians during the campaign, given Trump’s weird apologetics for Putin and Wikileaks, given the fact that his campaign did benefit to some negligible degree from Russian interference, how could the DOJ not look into it?”

The answer is simple. The DOJ shouldn’t have named a special counsel since it hadn’t identified a crime that was committed. So what if Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats whine all day long? Who cares if Adam Schiff and other Democrats lie about having seen evidence of Trump-Russia collusion? I don’t care if these Democrats stomped their feet and held their breath until they were blue in the face.

The special counsel law is pretty precise. If Shepard Smith wants to throw a hissy fit, that’s his problem. When his contract expires, here’s hoping he isn’t rehired and that they replace him with Trace Gallagher or Ed Henry. They’d be miles ahead if they did that. Listen to Smith’s temper tantrum:

Why is anyone surprised that Putin tried contacting both campaigns or that Putin tried interfering in our election? That’s as surprising as finding out that Bill Gates is rich.

Here’s a question for lefty Smith: why isn’t he interested in the Clinton campaign’s using Russian sources for the infamous discredited dossier? It isn’t news that both parties compile an opposition research file. What is news is that the Clinton campaign, then the FBI, relied on the dossier to trash a man with unverified information. Why isn’t Shepard Smith upset about that? Why aren’t other Democrats upset, too?

It’s time for that no-talent hack (Smith) to get fired.

In his quest to return the House majority to Republicans in 2020, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler subpoenaed former White House Counsel Don McGahn, saying “The Special Counsel’s report, even in redacted form, outlines substantial evidence that President Trump engaged in obstruction and other abuses. It now falls to Congress to determine for itself the full scope of the misconduct and to decide what steps to take in the exercise of our duties of oversight, legislation and constitutional accountability.”

Frankly, I can’t wait for that hearing. The Democrats are operating from the premise that President Trump’s telling McGahn to fire Mueller right after the ‘investigation’ began is obstruction. It isn’t. Without an underlying crime to charge President Trump with, there’s nothing to obstruct. Further, there are mountains of proof that President Trump cooperated with Mueller’s partisan investigators. The definition of cooperate is “to work or act with another or other persons willingly and agreeably.” I can’t wait to hear Democrats explain, especially Chairman Nadler, how a person can work “with another person willingly and agreeably” while obstructing, which means “delaying or preventing of business before a deliberative body.”

Democrat Nadler then said “His [McGahn’s] testimony will help shed further light on the President’s attacks on the rule of law, and his attempts to cover up those actions by lying to the American people and requesting others do the same.” Chairman Nadler, what attacks? I know Democrats (now) think that firing Jim Comey was an attack on the rule of law but it wasn’t. Firing a corrupt and incompetent FBI director isn’t an attack on the rule of law. It’s the right decision. This video highlights the Democrats’ hypocrisy on the issue of President Trump’s firing of Comey:

My question to Nadler and other Democrats is simple: which spin will you stick with? With all the Democrats’ spinning, you’d think that it isn’t easy to determine what’s truth and what’s spin. Actually, it’s quite simple. If a Democrat’s lips are moving while talking about President Trump, that Democrat is lying.

The “Media Wing of the Democratic Party”, aka the MSM, is painfully, albeit only partially, admitting that they might’ve gotten the Trump-Russia collusion story wrong. Other Democrats, especially Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters, haven’t admitted the obvious. It isn’t likely they will.

Nonetheless, articles have surfaced that give us clear-eyed analysis. One such article was written by John Kass. He writes “When the report was released, if you walked past a news screen, you would have heard them babbling. CNN had several panels of experts channeling Blanche DuBois, and none of them said anything about depending on the kindness of strangers. Instead they damned Attorney General William Barr, a longtime friend of Mueller’s, as a creature of evil.”

He continued, saying:

Some of the more tribal residents of the left might want to condemn me for conservative thinking. But it’s not about left or right. It’s about reality. And the journalist Glenn Greenwald is not a conservative by any measure.

Greenwald’s article is both detailed and devastating to Democrats:

The key fact is this: Mueller, contrary to weeks of false media claims, did not merely issue a narrow, cramped, legalistic finding that there was insufficient evidence to indict Trump associates for conspiring with Russia and then proving their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That would have been devastating enough to those who spent the last two years or more misleading people to believe that conspiracy convictions of Trump’s closest aides and family members were inevitable. But his mandate was much broader than that: to state what did or did not happen.

That’s precisely what he did: Mueller, in addition to concluding that evidence was insufficient to charge any American with crimes relating to Russian election interference, also stated emphatically in numerous instances that there was no evidence, not merely that there was insufficient evidence to obtain a criminal conviction – that key prongs of this three-year-old conspiracy theory actually happened. As Mueller himself put it: “in some instances, the report points out the absence of evidence or conflicts in the evidence about a particular fact or event.”

By this point, Democrats should have started crying “No mas, no mas” in the finest tradition of Roberto Duran in his 2nd fight against Sugar Ray Leonard.

Then there’s Andy McCarthy’s article:

Democrats claim Barr’s determination on obstruction was the equivalent of acting as Trump’s defense lawyer. But the only way for any prosecutor to assess the question of whether a suspect had corrupt intent is to catalogue the evidence that cuts against it — since, if corrupt intent cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, there can be no criminal case. Barr did not claim that Trump had conducted himself admirably; he said that proving corrupt intent would have been difficult, if not impossible, thanks to (a) the president’s extensive cooperation with the investigation (making White House witnesses available, disclosing over a million documents, asserting no claim of privilege) and (b) the non-corrupt thinking that fueled the president’s frustration (i.e., his belief that his presidency was being destroyed by a bogus collusion allegation). That Democrats do not like this outcome does not make it wrong.

The Democrats’ accusations aren’t terribly persuasive. How can you obstruct when you’re cooperating? President Trump didn’t attempt to forbid his staff from being interviewed by claiming executive privilege. President Trump didn’t claim executive privilege to redact parts of Mueller’s report.

Finally, if President Trump fired Jim Comey for being corrupt and incompetent, which Comey was, obstruction all but disappears. If Democrats want to continue beating this dead horse, they have the chairmanships to do it with…for now. I wouldn’t predict that they’ll have them much longer, though.

Now that the Mueller Report has morphed into the Barr Letter, it’s time to put 2 and 2 together. First, the Mueller Report emphatically stated that the Trump administration didn’t interfere with any request from the special counsel. Next, Attorney General Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein announced in their letter that Special Counsel Mueller hadn’t reached a decision on obstruction of justice. Then they announced that they had concluded that President Trump hadn’t obstructed justice.

Immediately, House Judiciary Chairman Nadler hinted that Barr and Rosenstein were stooges for President Trump:

I can’t wait to hear Chairman Nadler explain how a president (or any other member of the executive branch) could obstruct justice when a) there wasn’t an underlying crime and b) the special counsel’s funding requests were granted each time he made one. It’s difficult to obstruct when the acting AG is saying yes all the time.

There’s no doubt that Mueller should’ve made the decision on whether President Trump had obstructed justice but it’s also true that he all but made that determination that President Trump didn’t obstruct justice in his Friday report.

The naysayers have been wrong all along. They were either declaring that “the walls are closing in” on President Trump or that some journalistic rag had just published “a bombshell” report that would surely sink President Trump.

For the past 2 years, we’ve heard one “bombshell” report after another, often reported on the pages of Buzzfeed. Friday afternoon, Robert Mueller delivered his report on alleged Russian-Trump collusion. Now we know that the Democrats’ last great hope of impeaching President Trump fizzled out, though Democrats are certain to keep attempting to find the bombshell that finally takes President Trump down.

Good luck with that.

In the end, William Barr’s summary of the Mueller report turned into an historic dud. Think of the crow that CNN, MSNBC, Adam Schiff, John Brennan and Buzzfeed will have to eat as a result of Attorney General Barr’s summary report to Congress. For them, it’s truly a bombshell. Buzzfeed should take the heaviest hit because they ran major stories that couldn’t be verified. First was the article about the dossier. Finally, they published the article saying that President Trump told Cohen to lie to Congress. That went over like a fart in church.

Adam Schiff once said that he had evidence of collusion:

Rep. Schiff (D-Calif.) said in multiple TV interviews he had direct evidence of collusion. Any interviews moving forward should demand that evidence be presented along with an explanation how he has such evidence when the Special Counsel & all of its resources couldn’t find any.

— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) March 24, 2019

Chairman Schiff should be censured for lying to Congress. What he’s done is beyond disgraceful:

Pelosi and Schumer are failing in their attempt to spin this:

Pelosi/Schumer: Barr’s letter raises as many questions as it answers. The fact that..Mueller’s report does not exonerate the president on a charge as serious as obstruction of justice demonstrates how urgent it is that the full report and underlying documentation be made public

— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) March 24, 2019

The Mueller report stated clearly that they didn’t find any evidence of collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russia. That’s dramatically different than saying President Trump isn’t guilty. Saying that he and his investigators couldn’t find any evidence is especially strong.