Robert Mueller, Former F.B.I. Director, Is Named Special Counsel for Russia Investigation

It actually fits well. Santa (a supernatural, eternal being, jolly or not), the Easter Bunny (a grotesquely large, sentient, supernatural rabbit) and the tooth fairy (a gruesome, hyper-violent flying creature) all exert power in independent and unaccountable ways.

 

I think about hats.

 

Poor Commodore doesn't understand what counterintelligence is.

 

Ukraine embassy says DNC operative reached out for dirt on Trump in 2016

I am pretty sure this is the left's definition of collusion.

 

This is a letter (from the same experienced legal personnel who produced this: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/DOJ_Letter_10.10.16.pdf ) in the process of collecting more signatories:

(Note: I have no idea why the lines appear in this about half way through. I've tried to edit and adjust three times, but it always turns out as you see below.)

STATEMENT BY FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTORS
We are former federal prosecutors. We served under both Republican and Democratic administrations at different levels of the federal system: as line attorneys, supervisors, special prosecutors, United States Attorneys, and senior officials at the Department of Justice. The offices in which we served were small, medium, and large; urban, suburban, and rural; and located in all parts of our country.

Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.
The Mueller report describes several acts that satisfy all of the elements for an obstruction charge: conduct that obstructed or attempted to obstruct the truth-finding process, as to which the evidence of corrupt intent and connection to pending proceedings is overwhelming. These include:

· The President’s efforts to fire Mueller and to falsify evidence about that effort;

· The President’s efforts to limit the scope of Mueller’s investigation to exclude his conduct; and

· The President’s efforts to prevent witnesses from cooperating with investigators probing him and his campaign.
Attempts to fire Mueller and then create false evidence
Despite being advised by then-White House Counsel Don McGahn that he could face legal jeopardy for doing so, Trump directed McGahn on multiple occasions to fire Mueller or to gin up false conflicts of interest as a pretext for getting rid of the Special Counsel. When these acts began to come into public view, Trump made “repeated efforts to have McGahn deny the story”—going so far as to tell McGahn to write a letter “for our files” falsely denying that Trump had directed Mueller’s termination.

Firing Mueller would have seriously impeded the investigation of the President and his associates—obstruction in its most literal sense. Directing the creation of false government records in order to prevent or discredit truthful testimony is similarly unlawful. The Special Counsel’s report states: “Substantial evidence indicates that in repeatedly urging McGahn to dispute that he was ordered to have the Special Counsel terminated, the President acted for the purpose of influencing McGahn’s account in order to deflect or prevent scrutiny of the President’s conduct toward the investigation.”

Attempts to limit the Mueller investigation

The report describes multiple efforts by the president to curtail the scope of the Special Counsel’s investigation.

First, the President repeatedly pressured then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his legally-mandated decision to recuse himself from the investigation. The President’s stated reason was that he wanted an attorney general who would “protect” him, including from the Special Counsel investigation. He also directed then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to fire Sessions and Priebus refused.

Second, after McGahn told the President that he could not contact Sessions himself to discuss the investigation, Trump went outside the White House, instructing his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to carry a demand to Sessions to direct Mueller to confine his investigation to future elections. Lewandowski tried and failed to contact Sessions in private. After a second meeting with Trump, Lewandowski passed Trump’s message to senior White House official Rick Dearborn, who Lewandowski thought would be a better messenger because of his prior relationship with Sessions. Dearborn did not pass along Trump’s message.

As the report explains, “ubstantial evidence indicates that the President’s effort to have Sessions limit the scope of the Special Counsel’s investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President’s and his campaign’s conduct”—in other words, the President employed a private citizen to try to get the Attorney General to limit the scope of an ongoing investigation into the President and his associates.

All of this conduct—trying to control and impede the investigation against the President by leveraging his authority over others—is similar to conduct we have seen charged against other public officials and people in powerful positions.

Witness tampering and intimidation

The Special Counsel’s report establishes that the President tried to influence the decisions of both Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort with regard to cooperating with investigators. Some of this tampering and intimidation, including the dangling of pardons, was done in plain sight via tweets and public statements; other such behavior was done via private messages through private attorneys, such as Trump counsel Rudy Giuliani’s message to Cohen’s lawyer that Cohen should “leep well tonight[], you have friends in high places.”
Of course, these aren’t the only acts of potential obstruction detailed by the Special Counsel. It would be well within the purview of normal prosecutorial judgment also to charge other acts detailed in the report.

We emphasize that these are not matters of close professional judgment. Of course, there are potential defenses or arguments that could be raised in response to an indictment of the nature we describe here. In our system, every accused person is presumed innocent and it is always the government’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. But, to look at these facts and say that a prosecutor could not probably sustain a conviction for obstruction of justice—the standard set out in Principles of Federal Prosecution—runs counter to logic and our experience.

As former federal prosecutors, we recognize that prosecuting obstruction of justice cases is critical because unchecked obstruction—which allows intentional interference with criminal investigations to go unpunished—puts our whole system of justice at risk. We believe strongly that, but for the OLC memo, the overwhelming weight of professional judgment would come down in favor of prosecution for the conduct outlined in the Mueller Report.

Donald Ayer
Former Deputy Attorney General

Renato Mariotti
Former Assistant United States Attorney, Northern District of Illinois

Mary McCord
Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security

Barbara McQuade
Former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan

Wendy Olson
Former United States Attorney for the District of Idaho
Kristy Parker

Former Deputy Chief of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division

Tim Purdon
Former United States Attorney for the District of North Dakota

Lorin Reisner
Former Chief of the Criminal Division, Southern District of New York

Mimi Rocah
Former Assistant United States Attorney, Southern District of New York

Paul Rosenzweig
Former Senior Counsel, Office of Independent Counsel (In re: Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan)

Joyce Vance
Former United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama

 

translation, she was a CIA spy

 

But what color hat did she wear?

 

Why does he has to keep repeating it as Russian hoax.
Both parties are vociferously calling Russian interference.. yet he says Russian hoax!! Bizarre!!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/us/politics/trump-putin-phone-call.html

 

No collusion! No collusion!

 

I missed the part where the Ukraine military was activity breaking into the RNC with a sophisticated campaign to get Hillary Clinton elected and I also missed the part where their president was actively wanting to destroy our democracy to bolster his own power & global influence.

Also... if a DNC operative broke any election laws I want them prosecuted. Foreign governments shouldn’t be involved in our elections. If they have information on a candidate they should be talking to the FBI like Christopher Steele ultimately was. There’s also a huge difference in a British intelligence officer and the Freaking Kremlin. One is trying to protect American interests... the other trying to destroy it.

See how hard that was?

 

a different perspective:

Ethics Dunces: “More Than 370 Former Federal Prosecutors”
MAY 6, 2019 / JACK MARSHALL

It’s time to add former federal prosecutors to the nauseatingly long list of professionals and professions who have violated basic ethical principles out of uncontrolled animus towards President Trump.

From the Washington Post:

This isn’t even a close call. Professionals don’t do this if they have any respect for their profession, whatever it is. Retired doctors don’t sign statements saying that a doctor in a high profile case should have treated the patient differently. Judges, retired or otherwise, don’t sign statements questioning the rulings of other judges. This is one more political hit to bolster “the resistance,” and it ought to be taken as that, and only that. There are thousands of retired federal prosecutors; 370 is large only in the sense that it is embarrassing to the majority that so many are willing to violate their professional norms.

Amusingly, the first signatory named in the Post report is Bill Weld, the former Massachusetts governor who has announced that he will be running against Trump in the primaries. No personal agenda there!

Not one of these ex-prosecutors would have been anything but furious if a crew of former prosecutors challenged the integrity of their professional calls, and with good reason. It is unfair to everyone involved: the President, the Justice Department, the Attorney General, and Mueller, and his team, though I would not be surprised to find that a dissenting member of the investigation was behind this effort.

The opinions of the individuals who signed this mean absolutely nothing, other than their signature impugning their own integrity. Among other things, the report isn’t the investigation itself; the 400 page redacted document is itself a summary. How many of the 370+ even read the entire report? We know they haven’t reviewed all of the transcripts and evidence. My guess is that, at best, most read the second section of the report, which was essentially a law journal explanation of the law of obstruction.

Buried deep in the Post story is the misleading statement that

No, it’s not a partisan organization, at least not officially and explicitly. Protect Democracy is, however, an anti-Trump organization, an arm of “the resistance,” as a brief perusal of its website will make clear to anyone who examines it. I’d say that a link on the very top of the home page that reads, “Learn more about PEN America v Trump” is fairly self-explanatory, wouldn’t you?

Oddly, the Post doesn’t seem to find this to be something that readers should have pointed out to them. Oddly.

Every ex-prosecutor who signed the statement is accepting the exploitation of this group to advance its political agenda. The depressing episode is just one more large group of passengers jumping on to the Mueller Investigation Ethics Train Wreck.

​

https://ethicsalarms.com/2019/05/06/ethics-dunces-more-than-370-former-federal-prosecutors/

 

So this guy has no argument other than people are unprofessional for pointing out something they think is true?

The premise of his argument is that people have animosity towards Trump for basically no good reason, as if a 400 page report didn’t come out that revealed some disturbing facts about him. I consider that a false premise and honestly this is a terrible article that has basically no substance other than “people hate Trump and are unprofessional if they give their informed opinions via a signature.”

 

And of course, the turtle deflects blame to former President Obama...

 

The number of signatories has now grown to 650...

 

Make that 663, and growing...

 

No indication that the DNC itself was aware of any communication. Ukraine said they did not entertain request at all. The request seems to be to have Poroshenko make statements that would be embarrassing for the Trump campaign, not to do anything that was illegal. Seems to be disagreement if any information was requested, but it'd been on Manafort instead of Trump. And the woman's name is "Chalupa" for god's sakes. But, all that said, if there's any actual crime in there, let's go ahead and charge it. I have no problem with that at all.

It is common for journalists to make agreements to protect the anonymity of their sources in exchange for a scoop. If the alternative is to not get the story at all for the sake of 'full disclosure' is that what you'd want? This seems like an extremely naive complaint.

Have to wonder about the ethics of an ethicist who would say your responsibility as a professional is more important than your responsibility of conscience or your responsibility as a citizen.

 

The Deep State is deeper than we first thought.