RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/buzzfeed-report-michael-cohen-mueller-investigation-secrecy/

It is long past time that the public was told exactly what the president is alleged to have done.

BuzzFeed published an explosive allegation that the president of the United States ordered his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to congressional committees investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Specifically, in a news story sourced to two anonymous law-enforcement officials said to be “involved in an investigation of the matter,” the site reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had learned, though multiple witnesses and documents, of President Trump’s alleged instruction to Cohen; subsequently, upon being confronted by prosecutors, Cohen had supposedly admitted that Trump gave the order.

As a rule, Mueller does not comment on press reports about his probe. Yet, in a highly unusual move Friday night, the prosecutor refuted the story by reporters Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier. Through a spokesman, Mueller asserted:

BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.

Clearly, Mueller did the right thing. The reporting had triggered a frenzy of commentary by Trump critics that impeachment was imminent, and even many chagrined Trump supporters conceded that, if the report was true, the presidency was in grave peril. Had Mueller stood idly by, the administration, and thus the governance of the nation, would have been engulfed in a ruinous storm of suspicion. It is not the special counsel’s job to correct bad reporting, but it would have been irresponsible to stay mum in these circumstances if the story was false.

Nevertheless, this incident highlights how investigative secrecy has wrongly been given pride of place. In the Mueller probe, the desire of prosecutors to go about their business in stealth — to attempt to build a case on undisclosed crimes based on unknown evidence; to prevent witnesses from gaming their testimony and evidence from being tampered with — has been prioritized over the president’s ability to govern the country.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/alan-dershowitz-buzzfeed-report-and-mueller-rebuke-a-vivid-example-of-get-trump-medias-mindset

As soon as I read the explosive BuzzFeed News report alleging there was evidence that President Trump had directed his former attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, I was very suspicious.

Even before the Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued a statement Friday night saying that the BuzzFeed account was “not accurate,” I wrote an op-ed for the New York Daily News raising questions about whether there was actually credible evidence that Trump suborned perjury or obstructed justice by telling Cohen to lie to lawmakers.

It seemed obvious that there were no smoking gun emails containing any such direction from the president. Nor would there be eyewitnesses to any such alleged conversation.

Unlike the obstruction of justice case that led to articles of impeachment being drafted against President Nixon and his resignation – where tape recordings proved criminal conduct by Nixon – the accusations against President Trump would have to rely on the credibility of Cohen, who has a long history of lying and little if any credibility.

In fact, Cohen was sentenced in federal court in December to three years in prison after pleading guilty to lying to Congress, campaign finance violations and financial crimes.

President Trump’s spokeswoman and his lawyers strongly disputed the BuzzFeed report, which was published Thursday, even before the statement from Mueller’s spokesman knocking down the story.

“Two words sum it up better than anything anybody else can say, and that is ‘categorically false,’” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Friday.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/19/schiff-for-brains

It’s a good thing President Trump canceled the Democrats’ overseas excursion this weekend because Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has some work to do here at home. For starters, he needs to take a red pen to his memo that defended the deceptive tactics used by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant on Trump campaign aide Carter Page days before the 2016 presidential election.

The new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee authored a memo dated January 28, 2018, ironically titled, “Correcting the Record—The Russia Investigation.” But it is Schiff who needs to correct his own record in light of new and damaging information that contradicts several claims he made in that document.

The California congressman might also want to apologize to his predecessor, Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who Schiff has spent the better part of a year trying to smear and discredit—even suggesting Nunes should be removed as chair of the committee—for releasing his memo that exposed how the FBI manipulated and misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to spy on the Trump campaign.

Thanks to reporting by The Hill’s John Solomon and others, we now know that the Justice Department and the FBI were in possession of parts of the dossier far earlier than Schiff suggested in his memo and that the dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, also was in contact with top officials months before Schiff claimed he was. Further, these same officials were warned about Steele’s motivations as well as the connection between the wife of a key Justice Department lawyer, who also was employed by the same opposition research firm that had retained Steele.

The new details also bolster Nunes’s contention that a footnote in the FISA application did not fully and accurately inform the court about the political origins of the dossier, even though the department’s hierarchy was well aware of its partisan provenance at the time.