RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s Note: The following is a memo crafted by the author as it ought to be written to Special Counsel, Robert Mueller from the two Judiciary Committee chairmen in Congress.

If only . . .
From: Charles Grassley – Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee & Bob Goodlatte – Chairman, House Judiciary Committee

To: Robert Mueller – Special Counsel, Department of Justice

Subject: Oversight of your office
As our committees consider the Justice Department’s budget request to authorize appropriations for the department’s many activities for the upcoming fiscal year, we try to understand those activities’ scope and efficacy, focusing especially on ones that raise questions with the public. Making well-informed judgments regarding funding and legislative guidance of departmental activities under our purview is our constitutional responsibility. We are confident that you, having been a valuable partner in this exercise of that responsibility during your years as director of the FBI, will answer these questions, because they are essential for the Congress and the public’s understanding of what your office is doing and not doing.

The deputy attorney general established your office to “to inform or consult with the Attorney General or others within the Department about the conduct of his or her duties and responsibilities” specifically about “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump…” .

If we read this correctly, you are to report to the nation’s chief law enforcement officials about their “duties and responsibilities.” The duties and responsibilities of the Department of Justice—correct us if we are mistaken—can only be the enforcement of the laws of the United States.

We hope that you will forswear any investigation not pursuant to the underlying crime, if any, specified in your appointment order, and can assure you that our committees will make sure that no funds authorized by us can be used for such purposes.

This being the case, would you enumerate for us the laws of the United States which you believe “individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” may have broken, who these “individuals” may be, and the “probable cause” for so believing in the possibility of their violation, that suffices as basis for investigating them or anyone else regarding “links and coordination “with “the Russian government.”

The Deputy attorney General’s establishment order also contains the anodyne words “any other matters that arose or may arise from the investigation.” To understand what these words mean to you, we must ask: For you to investigate any person, what relationship need there be between that person’s activities and any violation of a U.S statute related to that person’s “links and/or coordination between the Russian government…”? Since the Department of Justice’s purview stops at the edge of politics, what do you believe that these words do not authorize you to “inform or consult” about in a prosecutorial manner?

So I’ve been wondering: Why on earth does a prosecutor, brought in to investigate a case in which there is no apparent crime, need a staff of 14 lawyers?https://amgreatness.com/2017/06/21/muellers-empire-legions-lawyers-bottomless-budget-limitless-jurisdiction/

Or, I should say, “14 lawyers and counting.” According to the press spokesman for special counsel Robert Mueller—yeah, he’s got a press spokesman, too—there are “several more in the pipeline.”

Concededly, none of Mueller’s recruits requires Senate confirmation, as do Justice Department officials—notwithstanding that the former may end up playing a far more consequential role in the fate of the Trump administration. But does it seem strange to anyone else that, by comparison, the president of the United States has managed to get—count ’em—three appointees confirmed to Justice Department positions in five months?

A special counsel, the need for whom is far from obvious, has in just a few days staffed up with four times the number of lawyers. And all for a single investigation that the FBI has described as a counterintelligence probe—i.e., not a criminal investigation, the kind for which you actually need lawyers.

The way this is supposed to work is: the Justice Department first identifies a likely crime, and then assigns a prosecutor to investigate it. Here, by contrast, there are no parameters imposed on the special counsel’s jurisdiction. Mueller is loosed—with 14 lawyers and more coming—to conduct what I’ve called a “fishing expedition.”

Oh, and about those three Justice Department appointees: One of them, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has already recused himself from the investigation in question—the department’s most high profile undertaking. Another, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, is reportedly weighing whether he, too, should bow out. Perhaps he figures he has already done quite enough, having sicced a special-counsel investigation on the Trump Administration by flouting both the regulation that requires a basis for a criminal investigation before a special counsel is appointed, and the regulation that requires limiting the special counsel’s jurisdiction to the specific factual matter that triggers this criminal investigation.

The way this is supposed to work is: the Justice Department first identifies a likely crime, and then assigns a prosecutor to investigate it. Here, by contrast, there are no parameters imposed on the special counsel’s jurisdiction. Mueller is loosed—with 14 lawyers and more coming—to conduct what I’ve called a “fishing expedition.” But it is actually worse than that, as sagely observed in these pages by my friend John Eastman, the Claremont Institute scholar and former Chapman Law School dean. Mueller’s probe is the functional equivalent of a general warrant: a boundless writ to search for incriminating evidence. It is the very evil the Fourth Amendment was adopted to forbid: a scorch-the-earth investigation in the absence of probable cause that a crime has been committed.

For now, Mueller appears utterly without limits, in his writ and in his resources. As the ease with which he has staffed up shows, it is not hard to recruit lawyers. All you need is money. Mueller has a bottomless budget, thanks to a bit of Treasury Department chicanery known as “permanent, indefinite appropriations.”

Under the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause, no funding is supposed to be paid out of the treasury unless Congress has approved it in advance. Under the Framers’ design, with an eye toward limited, accountable government, every spending initiative must compete with every other one when Congress enacts a budget. Lawmakers must decide what we can and can’t afford when they draw on what is supposed to be the finite pot of money confiscated from taxpayers. We are supposed to know what we are underwriting and what it will cost.

John Eastman, law professor at Chapman University, writes in American Greatness this week that the powers invested in Special Counsel Mueller to investigate “Russian hacking/collusion/obstruction poses grave dangers to our body politic and our liberty.” His advice to President Trump: Fight fire with fire. Turn the law and the courts back on your opponents. Trump is being investigated without any probable cause of a crime. The Obama administration, in contrast, is a target-rich arena of criminal activity.

It is unconstitutional to issue a search warrant when there has been no crime and there is no probable cause. But that is exactly what President Trump’s DOJ has inflicted on the president and his team with Mueller’s special investigation. It was not just cowardice, but folly for the DOJ to buckle to the left-wing media’s hysterical insistence to investigate our president’s alleged collusion with the FSB.

According to Professor Eastman:

The special counsel will not to track down the details of a crime known to have been committed and determine “who dunnit,” but will scour the personal and business affairs of a select group of people – the President of the United States, members of his family, his business associates, and members of his presidential campaign and transition teams – to see if any crime can be found (or worse, manufactured by luring someone into making a conflicting statement at some point). This is not a proper use of prosecutorial power, but a “witch hunt,” as President Trump himself correctly observed. Or, to put it more in terms of legalese, this special prosecutor has effectively been given a “writ of assistance” and the power to exercise a “general warrant” against this select group of people, including the President of the United States, recently elected by a fairly wide margin of the electoral vote.

That is the very kind of thing our Fourth Amendment was adopted to prevent. Indeed, the issuance of general warrants and writs of assistance is quite arguably the spark that ignited America’s war for independence.

Professor Eastman suggests fighting fire with fire, prosecution with prosecution.