RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn’s endlessly hyped plea bargain does not signal the beginning of the end for the Trump administration, no matter how ardently the mainstream media and left-wing political hacks want it to be so.

It is merely an inevitable consequence of the perjury traps set by the corrupt Washington swamp-dwelling Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and sprung by otherwise law-abiding Trump operatives. Mueller was appointed May 17 by Rod J. Rosenstein, in his capacity as acting Attorney General by virtue of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ self-initiated recusal in the Russian electoral interference investigation.

The euphoria on the Left is premature.

The Flynn matter is an inconvenient bump in the road with bad political optics in the short term, not a harbinger of Armageddon. It may even constitute an admission by Mueller that this is all he has against the Trump administration and that he is running out of options as a prosecutor.

For now at least, there is still no evidence President Trump covered up a crime, either before or after taking office, or even that there was an underlying crime to be covered up. But the longer this runaway wrecking ball of an investigation into the Left’s utterly unsubstantiated Russia-Trump electoral collusion conspiracy theory goes on, the greater the likelihood that well-intentioned Trump administration officials will get caught up in its merciless machinery.

There is no underlying crime. There is no indication an underlying crime of any kind whatsoever will ever be discovered. “Collusion” is not a crime, but if it were former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose family and family foundation were enriched by the Russians, would presumably be guilty of it for letting the Russians run wild. Obama’s infamous hot-mic statement to then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to wait until after the 2012 election for action on missile defense is evidence of a kind of collusion, if not treason, against the United States.

The smoke is clearing from an explosive Mueller investigation weekend of charges, chattering, and tweets. Before the next aftershock, it might be helpful to make three points about where things stand. In ascending order of importance, they are:

1.) There is a great deal of misinformation in the commentariat about how prosecutors build cases.

2.) For all practical purposes, the collusion probe is over. While the “counterintelligence” cover will continue to be exploited so that no jurisdictional limits are placed on Special Counsel Robert Mueller, this is now an obstruction investigation.

3.) That means it is, as it has always been, an impeachment investigation.

Building a Case

Many analysts are under the misimpression that it is typical for federal prosecutors to accept guilty pleas on minor charges in exchange for cooperation that helps build a case on major charges. From this flawed premise, they reason that Mueller is methodically constructing a major case on Trump by accepting minor guilty pleas from Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos for making false statements, and by indicting Paul Manafort and an associate on charges that have nothing to do with Trump or the 2016 election.

That is simply not how it works, strategically or legally.

As I’ve tried to explain a few times now (see here and here), if a prosecutor has an accomplice cooperator who gives the government incriminating information about the major scheme under investigation, he pressures the accomplice to plead guilty to the major scheme, not to an ancillary process crime — and particularly not to false-statements charges.

Strategically, and for public-relations purposes (which are not inconsequential in a high-profile corruption investigation, just ask Ken Starr), a guilty plea to the major scheme under investigation proves that the major scheme really happened — here, some kind of criminal collusion (i.e., conspiracy) in Russia’s espionage operation against the 2016 election. The guilty-plea allocution, in which the accomplice explains to the court what he and others did to carry out the scheme, puts enormous pressure on other accomplices to come forward and cooperate. In a political corruption case, it can drive public officials out of office.

Petraeus, Obama’s CIA Director, lied to FBI agents about passing classified materials to his mistress. Despite being caught in the lie on a recording, he was never charged for it, as Flynn was. Instead he only pleaded guilty to mishandling classified information and received a slap on the wrist.

While Justice Department personnel had wanted to hold Petraeus accountable, the final decision was made by Attorney General Holder and FBI Director Comey. Lawyers for Petraeus insisted that he couldn’t be charged with lying to the FBI because DOJ guidelines recommend not charging “in situations in which a suspect, during an investigation, merely denies guilt in response to questioning by the government.” Petraeus admitted making false statements, but was never charged over them.

That’s what makes Flynn’s case so striking.

General Petraeus lied about committing a crime. His mishandling of classified information was a serious issue. And yet he was never charged for it.

General Flynn lied about something that was not a crime. His conversations were authorized by officials in the incoming Trump administration. And even by the outgoing Obama administration.

A week before Trump’s inauguration, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that there was nothing “necessarily inappropriate about contact between members of the incoming administration and foreign officials” because Flynn was “part of the transition team.”

The question had been about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador.

Obama’s own people had been carrying on talks with Iran and Syria before he entered the White House. The Iranian contacts eventually climaxed in an illegal agreement in which the Obama regime shipped billions in foreign currency to the terror regime on unmarked cargo planes. Those billions have helped finance Iran’s current war in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Israel, Lebanon and around the region.

Flynn was doing his job.

Team Mueller, with its string of Obama and Hillary backers, hasn’t actually found a crime that he committed. The only crime it could find was created wholly out of its own investigation.

When a crime wouldn’t exist without an investigation, then the investigation created the crime.

And it’s the investigation that is the crime.

The secondary crime here was created by entrapping Flynn as part of an investigation that was supposedly pursuing a primary crime that it, once again, failed to prove.

Although the instances of hate crimes documented by the government are worrisome and deserving of condemnation, the statistics published by the FBI over the last 17 years refute both the Islamophobia narrative and the claim of a widespread backlash against Muslims in the aftermath of terrorist attacks by Islamists.

The myth of a post-9/11 “backlash” against Muslims is politically motivated and spread by groups such as the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which presents itself as a civil rights group, but was founded to serve as a front organization for the terrorist group Hamas. The effort to persuade the public that America is Islamophobic stemmed largely from the aim to shift the narrative about terrorism to that of an Islamist war on the West to one according to which Muslims are terrorized by and in the United States.

Although Jew-hatred remains a greater problem in America than hatred against Muslims, this would not justify a charge that the United States is an anti-Semitic country. By the same token, it is unjust to call America Islamophobic.

The annual release of the FBI’s hate crime statistics report has attracted little attention by the mainstream media in the past few years. The most recent report, however — revealing a rise in hate crimes targeting Muslims and whites in 2016 — has been greeted with more notice than usual by the daily newspapers; even CNN chimed in to highlight the results of the report.The reason for the sudden interest in the report was that its data appeared to confirm some of the conventional wisdom about the impact of the U.S. 2016 presidential election on anti-Muslim sentiment in America. According to the report, compared to 2015, there were increases in most categories of hate crimes. The bulk of them were based on race, ethnicity and ancestry — with the total number of such incidents rising by 5%. Still, it is the increase in anti-Muslim crimes, which increased by 20% since 2015, that stands out.

The credibility of Robert Mueller’s Russian collusion investigation of Donald Trump took two huge hits in the last 24 hours, as it is now an open question whether the FBI can conduct an unbiased probe into the allegations against the president.

First, it’s been revealed that one of Mueller’s chief investigators was fired for exchanging anti-Trump texts with a mistress who is a top lawyer in the bureau. Peter Strzok, a former deputy director for counterintelligence at the FBI was removed earlier this year and now, the inspector general is looking into other “politically sensitive cases” that Strzok was involved in, including the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Strzok was also FBI liaison with the CIA.

Also, House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes issued an angry letter to the FBI demanding to know why he and his committee were kept in the dark about the firing of Strzok. Taken together, the picture that emerges of the Mueller probe is one of a fatal anti-Trump bias that should disqualify Mueller – and the FBI – from carrying out what is supposed to be a non-partisan, independent, and unbiased investigation.

Byron York:

House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes has issued an angry demand to the FBI and Department of Justice to explain why they kept the committee in the dark over the reason Special Counsel Robert Mueller kicked a key supervising FBI agent off the Trump-Russia investigation.

Stories in both the Washington Post and New York Times on Saturday reported that Peter Strzok, who played a key role in the original FBI investigation into the Trump-Russia matter, and then a key role in Mueller’s investigation, and who earlier had played an equally critical role in the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email investigation, was reassigned out of the Mueller office because of anti-Trump texts he exchanged with a top FBI lawyer, Lisa Page, with whom Strzok was having an extramarital affair. Strzok was transferred to the FBI’s human resources office — an obvious demotion — in July.

The Post reported that Strzok and Page exchanged text messages that “expressed anti-Trump sentiments and other comments that appeared to favor Clinton.”

Word of the messages and the affair were news to Nunes, even though the committee had issued a subpoena that covered information about Strzok’s demotion more than three months ago. The committee’s broadly worded subpoena for information related to the so-called Trump dossier went to the FBI and DOJ on Aug. 24. In follow-up conversations on the scope of the subpoena, committee staff told the FBI and DOJ that it included information on the circumstances of Strzok’s reassignment.