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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Hillary Clinton’s Judges Destroy Attorney Client Privilege What are a few civil rights violations between friends? Daniel Greenfield

Hillary Clinton picked Judge Kimba Wood to be her husband’s Attorney General. According to various accounts from the period, Hillary was looking for someone “loyal” who would allow her to stack the Justice Department with her own political allies. It was still early in the game, but Hillary had always been Bill’s main plumber and she was anticipating all of the Clinton scandals that were yet to come.

Hillary had interviewed Kimba Wood for twice as long as her husband did. But the Clintons had also been allegedly encouraged to pick Wood by Michael Kramer who had been Time’s chief political correspondent and the judge’s husband. After interviewing Bill for Time’s fawning Man of the Year piece, he allegedly suggested that the President of the United States make his wife his Attorney General.

But even though Kramer had compared Bill Clinton to Lincoln and FDR, it was not to be. Between Wood’s employment of an illegal alien and her past as a Playboy bunny, it was all over. Kimba Wood, whose “rectitude” the media never stopped praising, went on to be involved in a sleazy scandal. She became known as the “Love Judge” for her role in her current husband’s affair. She filed for divorce accusing her former husband of withholding sex. Rectitude doesn’t get more old-fashioned than this.

“Wood is universally described as a woman of almost old-fashioned rectitude” (New York Magazine) and “Kimba Wood’s rectitude is something between a legend” (Detroit Free Press).

James Comey and the Stinking Fish Factor By Joan Swirsky

(Author’s note: In August 2016, I wrote an article entitled “James Comey and the Stinking Fish Factor,” warning readers that the Comey fish was already rotting and that things were bound to get worse. Clearly, they just did. And it’s just as clear that the uncontrolled hysteria we are witnessing from Democrats has to do not with bogus accusations about Russia but about the criminal indictments coming down the pike for the people they’ve blindly defended for decades—that would be Bill & Hill Clinton—and possibly against even bigger fish! I’ve updated this article by abbreviating its length but also adding a few sentences. -JS)

I always thought that James Comey was a company man. As it happens, the company he headed is among the most influential, powerful and scary companies in the world—the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But still, a company guy. Whether working for a president on the moderate-to-conservative spectrum like G.W. Bush or for a far-left Alinsky acolyte like Barack Obama, makes absolutely no difference to this type of obedient—and also subservient—accommodator.

The red flag of skepticism should have gone up years ago to the American public when lavish praise was heaped on Comey by people who revile each other. While the spin insists that Comey is a lot of virtuous things—“straight-shooter,” “unbiased,” “fair-minded,” “non-partisan” “man of his word”—don’t be fooled. That’s Orwellian newspeak for someone who will do and say anything to keep his job, including, as Comey did in yet another Clinton fiasco case last summer, allow her to…

1. Create out of whole cloth an “intent” criterion in federal law to let a clearly corrupt politician––that would be Hillary––off the hook, and,

2. Appropriate the job of the Attorney General in announcing what the outcome of the FBI’s investigation should be.

While citing Hillary’s “extreme negligence” in handling classified information, a virtual litany of illegal acts committed by the then-Secretary of State, and the fact that hostile foreign operatives may have accessed her email account, Comey said he would not refer criminal charges to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department. Hillary, he said, was “extremely careless” and “unsophisticated,” among other spitballs he hurled in her direction before completely letting her off the hook!

Comey’s friend and colleague, Andrew C. McCarthy, said that the FBI director’s decision is tantamount to sleight-of-hand trickery. “There is no way of getting around this,” McCarthy wrote. “Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation…in essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.”

The Comey Coverup Vladimir Putin knows more about the 2016 outcome than the American people do. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

In his memoir, James Comey cites a “development still unknown to the American public to this day.” This mysterious development, he says, was central to his decision to intervene publicly in the Hillary Clinton email case.

Now this is strange because the big mystery was apparently disclosed in a flurry of reporting by the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN a year ago. His insistence in his book that the secret is likely to remain classified for decades also seems a bit hilarious when so much of the story was spontaneously declassified by anonymous leakers last spring, likely including Mr. Comey or people working for him.

Let’s recall what spawned that year-ago leakfest. It’s a question Mr. Comey leaves untouched in his book. Many in the FBI thought the intelligence was fake, possibly a Russian plant. The final reporting word was CNN’s, which cited sources saying Mr. Comey knew the evidence was probably fake but still considered it a threat to discredit the Justice Department’s handling of the Clinton email case.

A few weeks later, though, Sen. Lindsey Graham told CBS that Mr. Comey (presumably in closed hearings) had twice confirmed that the secret intelligence inspired his actions in the email case but “as early as a month ago, he never mentioned it was fake.”

Let us guess that this matter will remain classified for “decades” because it is embarrassing to Mr. Comey and the FBI. It’s also embarrassing, perhaps fatally so, to the intelligence agency that presented the intercept to Mr. Comey. The implication ought to set your hair on fire. Mr. Comey’s first intervention led to his second intervention, reopening the Hillary investigation 11 days before the election, which he now concedes he might have resisted if he had not been sure Mrs. Clinton was going to win anyway.

Many analysts, including Mrs. Clinton, believe Mr. Comey’s actions—possibly driven by fake Russian intelligence—changed the outcome of the election.

In brief, an intercepted Russian document cited a Democratic Party email that, in turn, referred to a private conversation in which Attorney General Loretta Lynch assured a Clinton aide that Ms. Lynch would sit on the email investigation.

In his book, Mr. Comey says of this unnameable intelligence that political opponents of Mrs. Clinton could use it to cast “serious doubt” on the credibility of the Justice Department investigation.

Let’s roll back the tape because Mr. Comey’s original intervention makes even less sense now. If the email was fake, how does it compromise Ms. Lynch? And whether or not it was fake, how did Mr. Comey improve matters? In fact, by intervening, didn’t he just confirm that Justice couldn’t be trusted? Finally, if the intel wasn’t fake, where are the subpoenas and obstruction-of-justice indictments that naturally follow? CONTINUE AT SITE

Gorsuch’s Good Opinion Trump’s nominee protects liberty like Scalia would have.

President Trump said he wanted Supreme Court Justices in the mold of Antonin Scalia, and on Tuesday he got his wish. Though Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the four liberals on an immigration case, his logic would have made the late Justice proud.

In Sessions v. Dimaya, the government sought to deport a legal resident twice convicted of first-degree burglary. The Immigration and Nationality Act lets the government deport any immigrant convicted of a “crime of violence.” The question is whether first-degree burglary is a violent crime.

Section 16b of the criminal code includes a residual clause that defines a violent crime as “any other offense that is a felony and that, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.”

Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan invoked the Court’s Johnson precedent and held that the residual clause was void for vagueness. In Johnson (2015), Justice Scalia’s majority opinion rejected a similar residual clause in the Armed Career Criminal Act and ruled that its vague language produced “more unpredictability and arbitrariness” than the Constitution allows.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s minority opinion tries to distinguish the residual clauses in the two cases to save Section 16b, which he notes “is incorporated into many procedural and substantive provisions of criminal law.” But he appears as concerned with the policy results of the Court’s decision as the legal merits.

The big news is Justice Gorsuch’s elegant concurring opinion that joins the majority result but for different reasons. “Vague laws invite arbitrary power,” he writes, “leaving the people in the dark about what the law demands and allowing prosecutors and courts to make it up.” (See Comey, James nearby.)

Justice Gorsuch writes that Congress is free to define 16b with more specific crimes. But until it does the vague statute violates the due process right of individuals by giving license to police and prosecutors to interpret laws as they wish. This defense of individuals against arbitrary state power was a Scalia staple. Justice Gorsuch adds that vague laws also threaten the Constitution’s ordered liberty because they “risk allowing judges to assume legislative power.”

Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee is sending a useful message that Congress should write clearer laws that aren’t subject to arbitrary interpretation. Congress can rewrite immigration law, and the President should be pleased with his nominee for doing what he promised.

Trump, Cohen and Attorney-Client Privilege The protection has limits, but is it worth testing them over a possible campaign-finance offense? By Michael B. Mukasey

Who’d have dreamed that with all the horrors committed by Bashar Assad, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, the small change of American political discourse would be whether the attorney-client privilege is being used to conceal the source of hush payments to “actresses”? But here we are.

In the 16th century, when our English forbears began resolving disputes through trial by jury rather than ordeal or battle, disputants had to rely on lawyers to present evidence and arguments. Thus the need for a rule that would encourage clients to disclose information to their lawyers.

That rule was the attorney-client privilege. It compromised the public’s otherwise unrelenting claim to every man’s evidence so as to encourage full and frank communication between lawyers and clients. The trade-off was that legal disputes were a search for the truth, and we would wind up with more truth if we didn’t search the parties’ lawyers to get it. Otherwise no client would disclose any unhelpful truth to a lawyer, and the process would collapse.

The privilege has a limit, the crime-fraud exception. The privilege is not recognized if the client is using the lawyer to commit a crime. For the most part this exception is read narrowly, to cover only the motive of the client. If the lawyer is acting on his own—for the client’s benefit but without the client’s authorization—evidence of the lawyer’s conduct would not be privileged, although evidence of the client’s statements would remain so.

That’s tidy in the abstract, and if a lawyer is served with a subpoena for information. But things get messy when, as occurred here, the party seeking the information is the government, and the means of getting it is a search warrant.

As to any particular client, the lawyer’s records will include myriad information, some of it client disclosures, some concerning conduct undertaken with the approval of the client—all of that privileged. There may also be records of the lawyer’s conduct and statements in pursuance of a criminal scheme, on his own or with the client—none of it privileged.

The government agents executing the warrant must isolate records that are relevant and unprivileged. They have no obvious way to do that other than to look at all records they seize, which means necessarily that they will look at records that should not be subject to a government search.

Agents typically do that by sending in a “filter team,” whose members have no contact with those involved in the investigation. That ensures that information that should not be examined—whether privileged or not—does not seep into, or “taint,” the investigation.

That’s the theory. Its success depends on the skill and honor of the filter team, and even in the best case it doesn’t prevent some government personnel from examining private records that are none of the government’s business.

The process risks damaging the significant public interest that led to the creation of the privilege in the first place. Is it worth the reward? One would think that would depend at least in part on the seriousness of the crimes under investigation.

In this case, the government has redacted any reference to particular crimes, although we learned earlier that perhaps Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, spent $130,000 on the eve of the 2016 election to buy the silence of Stephanie Clifford, a k a Stormy Daniels, about a sexual encounter she claimed she had with Mr. Trump several years ago. The payment itself would violate no law, but if its sole motive was to improve Mr. Trump’s chances in the election, it could constitute an in-kind campaign contribution that was not disclosed, in violation of campaign laws. The amount, more than $25,000, would put the violation in the felony category.

Have such violations been vigorously prosecuted in the past? In 2012 President Obama received campaign donations exceeding $2 million from sources that were not disclosed; he received another $1.3 million that exceeded contribution limits. The matter was settled after the election by the Obama Justice Department for a fine of $375,000 and no felony prosecution.

Another possible crime said to justify the search warrant is bank fraud. Here, one theory is that Mr. Cohen might have defrauded his bank by falsifying the purpose of the home-equity loan that was reportedly the source of the $130,000. But if Mr. Cohen’s equity is sufficient to provide collateral for the loan, why would its purpose matter to the bank? And if it doesn’t matter, there’s no fraud.

We can’t be certain that this is all that is under investigation. But if it is, the potential gains from an intrusive and unusual search warrant look meager compared with the interest put at risk. How confident are we in the self-control of those who set these events in train—who after all were supposed to be at work protecting the integrity of our elections?

Oddly, an episode involving a poison no doubt familiar to all three madmen mentioned in the first paragraph gives pause.

After anthrax spores killed five people, infected 17 others, and showed up in envelopes mailed to U.S. senators and media organizations in 2001, the current special counsel, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, spent years chasing and destroying the reputation of a microbiologist named Steven Hatfill, zealous in the belief that Mr. Hatfill was the guilty party. Another zealot, James Comey, then deputy attorney general, said he was “absolutely certain” no mistake had been made.

After Mr. Hatfill was exonerated—he received more than $5.5 million in damages from the government—Mr. Mueller then decided that another microbiologist, Bruce Ivins, was the culprit. When Ivins committed suicide, Mr. Mueller pronounced the case closed. A subsequent investigation by the National Academy of Sciences suggests Ivins too was innocent.

Mr. Mueller is not a bad man, nor is Mr. Comey. It’s just that both show particular confidence when making mistakes, which makes one grateful for safeguards like the attorney-client privilege.

Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general (2007-09) and a U.S. district judge (1988-2006).

Judge Overseeing Cohen Case Officiated George Soros’ Wedding in 2013 By Debra Heine

The federal judge overseeing the case against Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen is the very same judge who officiated the wedding of left-wing billionaire George Soros and his then-42-year-old bride Tamiko Bolton in September of 2013, according to news reports.

Judge Kimba Wood performed the non-denominational ceremony, an honor that is often reserved for close and trusted members of a couple’s inner circle:

According to a Reuters report, the couple said their vows at Soros’ estate in Bedford, New York, in front of 500 “select guests.” The guest list included House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, then-California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Prime Minister of Albania Edi Rama.

Twenty years earlier — at the behest of Hillary — Kimba Wood was nominated by President Bill Clinton to be attorney general. Wood withdrew her name from consideration after it became known that she had employed an illegal immigrant as a nanny.

Mike Pompeo, Gina Haspel Face Senate Headwinds Trump’s state and CIA picks face resistance over their stances on Iran, interrogation By Byron Tau

WASHINGTON—Nominees to lead the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency are encountering resistance in the Senate, where critics of President Donald Trump’s are prepared to make their confirmation battles a referendum on his foreign-policy positions.

Mike Pompeo, the current CIA director and Mr. Trump’s pick to be the next secretary of state, is in danger of receiving an unfavorable committee recommendation, over concerns that his past hawkish statements complicate his ability to conduct diplomacy. While the full Senate could still vote to confirm him, that would mark the first time in more than 70 years the chamber would have bypassed a committee to do so.

Gina Haspel, the nominee to lead the CIA and now the agency’s deputy director, is expected to face questions about her involvement in a post-9/11 interrogation program that detractors say amounted to torture. Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) said he would oppose her nomination over her role in the interrogation program, while Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.)—who was tortured while a prisoner of war in Vietnam—has asked for additional details about Ms. Haspel’s involvement.

Several other Republicans have told The Wall Street Journal they have concerns about Ms. Haspel and haven’t decided whether to support her nomination. One Democrat was unsatisfied with her answers in a private briefing about her role in the destruction of videos of the interrogations, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Gina Haspel, now the CIA’s deputy director, is expected to face her confirmation hearing in coming weeks. Photo: handout/Reuters

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to vote on Mr. Pompeo’s nomination as soon as next week, while the White House has yet to formally submit Ms. Haspel’s nomination to the Senate. The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to hold a confirmation hearing for her in the coming weeks. CONTINUE AT SITE

Last’s Week’s Raids May Be the Least of Cohen’s Problems By Andrew C. McCarthy

At a hearing in Manhattan federal court Monday afternoon, a judge denied a request by President Trump and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to prevent investigators from reviewing materials seized from Cohen’s office and residences.

Cohen, who describes himself as the president’s “fixer,” has not been charged with any crimes at this point. Clearly, though, he is the focus of a serious criminal investigation by the FBI and federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY). Yesterday’s hearing before District Judge Kimba Wood addressed the question of whether last week’s raids violated the attorney–client (A-C) privilege of President Trump and Cohen’s other clients — though there turn out to be precious few of those.

Yet we are already way beyond that question. Anti-Trump journalists are titillated by a side issue: the hearing’s revelation that talk-radio and Fox News host Sean Hannity, an ardent Trump supporter, has been identified as one of Cohen’s clients. But the real news is that prosecutors say Cohen has been under investigation for months. The probe involves a range of crimes, “many of which have nothing to do with his work as an attorney, but rather relate to Cohen’s own business dealings,” the government explained.

Consequently, even before the raids, the court authorized the FBI and prosecutors to search various email accounts maintained by Cohen. While the government reports that “zero emails were exchanged [by Cohen] with President Trump,” the existence of this monitoring means prosecutors long ago had to implement procedures to safeguard the A-C privilege.

The raids, then, are almost beside the point. The investigation is apparently far along, a grand jury is considering evidence, and the revelation that the probe is largely unrelated to Cohen’s law practice makes sense since he doesn’t appear to have much of one.

Four takeaways.

1. Scope of the Cohen Investigation
In this weekend’s column, I posited that the SDNY would probably not go through the legal complications attendant to searching a lawyer’s premises unless crimes more serious than a potential campaign-finance violation were involved. The government was obviously exploring such questions as whether felony fraud or extortion had been committed in inducing two women to remain mum about sexual liaisons they claim to have had, a decade ago, with Donald Trump. Still, we do not know the full range of the Cohen investigation.

It is probably safe to assume that the SDNY investigation has no relation to supposed Trump-campaign collusion with Russia. If it did, Special Counsel Robert Mueller would have tried to fold it into his ongoing probe rather than referring it to the SDNY. But beyond that deduction, all we can say is that the probe involves more than Cohen’s legal representation of clients, which appears to be more of a sideline than a steady occupation.

10 Questions That ABC Didn’t Ask Comey By Peter Berkowitz

On Sunday evening, ABC preempted its regularly scheduled programming to broadcast an exclusive interview conducted by “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos with former FBI Director James Comey. The star treatment is part of an all-out publicity campaign that Comey, fired by President Trump less than one year ago, has launched to promote his new book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.” How Comey’s portrayal of himself as a virtuous man selflessly devoted to the public interest fits with his rush to cash in on public service by disclosing details of his relationship with a sitting president is one of the salient questions Stephanopoulos failed to pose Sunday night.

ABC’s chief political anchor did elicit from Comey a variety of denunciations of Trump. They were newsworthy but no surprise. Was anyone caught off guard, for example, when the disgruntled former employee who has traded barbs with the president on Twitter likened him to a New York City mob boss?

It was also, alas, no surprise that Stephanopoulos failed to ask Comey many questions that touch on eminently newsworthy issues and directly address the rule of law and the integrity of law enforcement agencies to which Comey proclaims devotion.

Here are 10:

1) In December 2003, you were deputy attorney general. When then-Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself, it fell to you to determine whether to appoint a special counsel to investigate the leak, in spring of that year, of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment. You named your good friend (and godfather to your daughter) Patrick Fitzgerald, who conducted a long, drawn-out investigation that resulted in the 2007 conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby (pardoned by President Trump on Friday) for obstruction of justice, making a false statement, and perjury — but not for leaking Plame’s employment. Indeed, by early autumn 2003 — a few months before you appointed Fitzgerald — Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had informed the FBI that he leaked Plame’s employment. By that time, the CIA had determined that the leak did not harm national security. If, as acting attorney general, you were aware in December 2003 of the leaker’s identity and that the leak had not harmed national security, why did you appoint a special counsel?

Colluders on the Loose By Victor Davis Hanson

Comey, McCabe, Clapper, Brennan, Lynch, Andrew Weissmann, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Harry Reid, Samantha Power, Clinton attorney Jeannie Rhee . . .

If collusion is the twin of conspiracy, then there are lots of colluders running around Washington.

Robert Mueller was tasked to find evidence of Trump and Russia collusion that might have warped the 2016 campaign and thrown the election to Trump. After a year, his investigation has found no concrete evidence of collusion. So it has often turned to other purported Trump misadventures. Ironically, collusion of all sorts — illegal, barely legal, and simply unethical — has been the sea that Washington fish always swim in.

Christopher Steele, hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign through a series of firewall intermediaries, probably paid Russian sources for gossip and smears. If there is a crime of collusion, then Clinton-campaign contractors should be under investigation for seeking Russian help to find dirt on Trump, to spread smears around throughout the DOJ, FBI, and CIA, and to make sure that the dirt was leaked to the press in the final weeks of the campaign — for the sole “insurance” purposes of losing Trump the election.

Some sort of collusion likely occurred when the Obama DOJ and FBI sought FISA-court requests to surveille Carter Page and, indirectly, possibly many other members of the Trump campaign. On repeated occasions, they all made sure the FISA-court judges were not apprised that the Steele dossier, the chief basis for these requests, was paid for by the Clinton campaign, that the dossier was not verified by the FBI, that the dossier was the source of media stories that in circular fashion were used to convince the FISA judges to grant the surveillance requests, and that the FBI had severed relations with Steele on the basis of his unreliability. Such a collusion of silence was similar to James Comey’s admission that he apprised President Trump of every iota of lurid sexual gossip about him — except that his source was a dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton and written by a campaign operative hired to find dirt on Trump and who had been working with Comey’s FBI to get FISA approval to spy on Trump’s own aides.