DOJ Furor Latest Attempt To Help Democrats Hide Spygate, Undermine Elections By Joy Pullmann
https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/17/doj-furor-latest-attempt-to-help-democrats-hide-spygate-undermine-elections/
When the cockroaches are all scurrying across the floor, you can be sure that somebody shone a light on their nest.
Another spin operation appears to be afoot to thwart Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the Russia collusion hoax and others perpetrated by high-ranking federal bureaucrats. The eye of the hurricane this weekend has focused on the Department of Justice, with news Friday that an assistant U.S. attorney declined to press charges against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for documented lying to federal investigators under oath.
Becket Adams explains that
In 2016, McCabe, who is now a paid CNN contributor, leaked sensitive details of the bureau’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation to the press. He then misled members of the FBI’s Inspection Division when they interviewed him about the leaks, according to a February 2018 Justice Department inspector general report. McCabe provided investigators with four misleading statements, three of which were while he was under oath.
Giving false statements to federal investigators is a crime. In fact, it is the same crime for which the Justice Department went after President Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
On Friday, news broke that Barr “has appointed the top federal prosecutor in St. Louis to review the criminal case against Michael Flynn – former national security adviser to President Donald Trump,” according to Reuters. This all occured in the same week an assistant U.S. attorney recommended up to nine years in prison for former Trump campaign associate Roger Stone on the grounds that he lied about gossiping about what WikiLeaks knew about Hillary Clinton’s emails.
So it appears McCabe is allowed to lie to federal investigators about corruption affecting the U.S. government, cover it up with more lies, and get off scot-free even though what he did is a crime, while Stone faces years in prison for lying about gossip that affected nothing of public importance. Flynn appears to have been entrapped by FBI agents into possibly contradicting himself while unaware that was the situation, and now faces possible prison time, to say nothing of years of legal harassment plus potential threats by prosecutors against his son. Andrew McCarthy points out the same double standard has applied to the political prosecution of former Trump campaign associate George Papadopoulos, who “was convicted of making a trivial false statement about the date of a meeting.”
CNN’s Erin Burnett made a big deal Friday out of a federal judge saying last September that politicized decisions about whom federal lawyers prosecute are the stuff of a “banana republic.” She attempted to apply that description to the Trump Justice Department’s revisions to its prison-time request for Stone.
Yet it far better applies to unelected career bureaucrats’ use of their power to prosecute their political enemies, which comprises the heart of the “resistance” to Republican rule that will endure so long as bureaucracy has enough power to challenged elected branches of government. This bureacrac weaponization was also a hallmark of the Obama presidency, with — ironies of ironies — perhaps the biggest evidences again coming from the Department of Justice under attorneys general Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.
Remember them? The people who held tarmac meetings with Bill Clinton about hiding Hillary’s email scandal, oversaw Internal Revenue Service persecution of conservative grassroots clubs, and refused to enforce immigration laws at the behest of the president?
Now the chest-thumpers in the media are coming to obscure this weaponization of bureaucracy by attacking Trump’s outrage over the outrageous and corrupt double standards of an executive branch federal agency he is supposed to control through appointing its leaders. On Sunday, “More than 1,000 former U.S. Justice Department officials on Sunday called for Attorney General William Barr to resign” for directing the department he ostensibly controls to reduce its requested prison sentence for Stone.
On Friday, coinciding directly with the announcement of McCabe’s effective federal pardon, Sally Yates, of all people, was published in the Washington Post accusing Trump of treating Justice as “his personal grudge squad.” Yes, the deputy attorney general who helped the Obama administration set up Flynn as an early fall guy in the Spygate scandal is now taking to the pages of the Washington Post to wax poetic about DOJ’s duty to provide “impartial justice” and perform as a “neutral zone” that provides “justice without fear or favor.”
“While it is appropriate to communicate about administration policies and priorities, discussion with the White House about specific criminal cases has traditionally been off-limits,” Yates writes. Is that so? Then why was Yates, according to Obama official Susan Rice, at a meeting with President Obama about the administration’s “investigation” into the political opponents soon replacing them in the White House? Why did she “run to the White House and get it on the record that she believed Flynn to be in imminent danger of becoming a compromised national security liability, despite being fully aware that such compromise was impossible”?
Only if Yates is using cynical lies to cover her behind from what everybody will learn she and other Obama administration officials did with their power if Barr is not stopped, soon.
When the cockroaches are all scurrying across the floor, you can be sure that somebody shone a light on their nest. Earlier this week, in fact, House intelligence committee ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs that the prosecutors who resigned over the altered prison recommendation for Stone are “not going to be the only example. We think there’s other examples of things that they did during the Mueller investigation that I think you and your listeners and the American people will be very interested to learn in the coming weeks, as we start to unpeel the onion of what the Mueller team was really doing.” More:
NUNES: Because I would say this, when Mueller was appointed, you have — we have to ask ourselves, he walks in the door the first day and said, OK, show me all the evidence you’ve got on the Russians.
They’re like, Bob, sorry, we don’t have any Russians here. We don’t have any evidence.
DOBBS: Yes.
NUNES: So what the h-ll did they do for two years? They set up an obstruction of justice trap. And they sit —
DOBBS: And tried —
NUNES: — they went after a whole bunch of people that now got sentenced. Some already served their time. And I think all of this has to come into question now at this point.
Then on Friday, former special counsel Robert Mueller’s top “pit bull,” Andrew Weissmann, whom some speculate was the actual leader of Democrats’ unlimited Trump probe, told MSNBC host Chuck Todd that Barr’s agency has opened another investigation into McCabe plus fellow FBI corrupt-o-crats James Comey and Peter Strzok.
The real investigators are closing in on the crooked cops. No wonder they’re freaking out and using their media friends to start helping them pretend all of a sudden that they care about “democracy” while using their power to subvert the presidential administration Americans elected in 2016. What Barr is doing is what “oversight” looks like: When unelected bureaucrats are called to publicly account for what they have done with the public purse, time, and trust.
Once the whole truth has finally come out, Congress needs to be thinking about how they are going to make sure this never happens again. They will not do that by making the Department of Justice even less accountable to elected officials, as Democrats are demanding. They will do it by slashing and burning the bureaucracy and its powers. Government by and for the people will perish from the earth if unelected officials are capable of weaponizing government against the people’s elected representatives. That’s what a banana republic really is. And we don’t want one here.
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