RUTHFULLY YOURS

Leakers and lawbreakers rewarded with Clinton-administration jobs — and the American public none the wiser about deep-state corruption

There are lots of possible counterfactuals to think about had Hillary Clinton won the presidency as all the experts had predicted.

The U.S. embassy would have stayed in Tel Aviv. “Strategic patience” would likely still govern the North Korea dilemma. Fracking would be curtailed. The — rather than “our” — miners really would be put out of work. Coal certainly would not have been “beautiful.” The economy probably would be slogging along at below 2 percent GDP growth.

China would be delighted, as would Iran. But most important, there would be no collusion narrative — neither one concerning a defeated Donald Trump nor another implicating a victorious Hillary Clinton. In triumph, progressives couldn’t have cared less whether Russians supposedly had tried to help a now irrelevant Trump; and they certainly would have prevented any investigation of the winning Clinton 2016 campaign.

In sum, Hillary’s supposedly sure victory, not fear of breaking the law, prompted most of the current 2016 scandals, and her embittering defeat means they are not being addressed as scandals.

For example, why would FBI director James Comey have been so foolish as to ask for a FISA warrant request without fully informing the judge of the compromising details of the Steele–Fusion GPS dossier? Or why would Attorney General Loretta Lynch have been so reckless as to meet with Bill Clinton in a stealthy jet rendezvous on an Arizona tarmac when her department was concurrently investigating his spouse?

As we await the coronation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller by the Senate Judiciary Committee, it’s worth reviewing a few of the national security and prosecutorial disasters marking the man’s tenure as FBI Director. Contrary to Mueller’s media beatification as a non-partisan exemplar of public service, these disasters mark Mueller as a reliable political fixer. Now, it looks as if he will become his own branch of government.

Why? For services rendered to the people? I don’t think so.

Robert Mueller became Director of the FBI exactly one week before 9/11. No account of his Bureau tenure is complete without underscoring his shocking obstruction of efforts to bring to light information about key cells of the Saudi-centered conspiracy and terror attacks against the United States: in San Diego, explained here by Andrew Cockburn, and in Sarasota, explained here by Dan Christensen.

From the very start, FBI Director Mueller was not one to follow evidence where it leads. Instead, as the 9/11 record shows, he was one to divert others from where evidence leads.

The following chronology draws from compilations by Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist (MH), GlobalResearch.org (GR) and my own (DW).

1991:GR: As chief of DOJ Criminal Division, Mueller fails to prosecute the BCCI scandal aggressively

2001: GR: Quashes FBI investigation that might have prevented 9/11

“You remember Iraqgate,” the always trenchant William Safire wrote in 1993 ….

Er, well, not exactly ….

Iraqgate, the former-Nixon-Agnew-speechwriter-turned-NYT-columnist continued, was

the White House corruption of Agriculture’s loan guarantee program to slip foreign aid billions through an Italian bank to Saddam Hussein, which he used to finance his secret nuclear buildup. The Bush Justice Department sought to contain the scandal by pretending the Italian bank knew nothing of its Atlanta office’s huge Iraqi dealings — despite suppressed C.I.A. evidence to the contrary.”

That would be the Bush 41 White House & Justice Department under the extremely murky Attorney General William Barr and criminal division chief, later US attorney, later acting deputy attorney general, later FBI director, current Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

As Safire pieced things together in a series of columns a quarter century ago, it all started when Prince Bandar (a.k.a. “Bandar Bush”) convinced Bush 41 to make Saddam Hussein into the sheriff of the Middle East. This disastrous strategy would include a backdoor (i.e., illegal) military (nuclear) build-up via the Ag Department via an Italian bank, which, far from bringing Saddam’s Iraq into “the family of nations,” as Bush 41 seemed to hope, created the aggressive state actor whom Bush 41 would go to war against, briefly, in 1992. Stories about the banking/Justice/Ag/CIA/White House/State scandal that had erupted into war broke while the nation was still celebrating that same war’s “100 hour” victory. Somehow, the establishment bigfeet WaPo and NYT just never mustered much enthusiasm for this Bush 41 “-gate” …

Safire’s recap continued:

During the ’92 campaign, Al Gore accurately charged that “the C.I.A. reported to Secretary of State James Baker . . . that Iraq was clandestinely procuring nuclear weapons” while State was urging more loan guarantees to appease the dictator.