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Mueller scours Team Trump for Russian collusion as Dems marinate in it

Special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigators resemble axe-wielding firefighters frantically stomping through a house and not finding so much as a lit birthday candle. Meanwhile, the home next door burns to the basement.

Team Mueller’s never-ending hunt for reds in October 2016 has found zero evidence of Russian collusion among Team Trump. In contrast, Russian collusion among Democrats has been as hard to miss as a California wildfire. And yet they still miss it.

Team Mueller did find Russian interference in the 2016 election — and how! The February 16 announcement of federal criminal indictments against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies was a Cold War flashback. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told journalists that Russians close to the Kremlin infiltrated the last presidential campaign “to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy.”

But Rosenstein threw a bucket of wet sand onto the Left’s simmering narrative that DJT = KGB. The Russian meddling began in 2014, well before Donald J. Trump’s campaign commenced. The Russians promoted Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s Democratic-primary bid and Green-party nominee Jill Stein’s general-election effort. After Trump won, the Russians organized pro-Trump and anti-Trump demonstrations, once in New York City on the same day. They also staged an anti-Trump rally in Charlotte.

Furthermore, Rosenstein said, “There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity.” Thus far, anyone on Team Trump who might have worked with Russians did so after being hoodwinked, not due to treason — as Democrats have shouted for more than a year.

Also, none of this should comfort Hillary Clinton. Rosenstein said: “There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.” So, rather than blame Russia for her epic fail, Hillary finally should concede that she lost a mismanaged campaign that barely visited Michigan and avoided Wisconsin as if it had been quarantined.

Mueller may be seeking to defend at least the investigative decisions made by the FBI and the Justice Department, institutions he served for many years.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been a busy fellow for the past week. Rapid fire, his indictment of several Russian nationals for meddling in the 2016 election has been followed by a guilty plea, for lying to investigators, from a lawyer tied to Trump-campaign figures Paul Manafort and Richard Gates; a new indictment against Manafort and Gates that, as anticipated, added tax- and bank-fraud charges (in Virginia) to already existing money-laundering charges (in Washington); and finally, just breaking as this is written, a guilty plea from Gates on charges of defrauding the United States and lying to the FBI.

As President Trump’s champions emphasize, what is most notable about this array of allegations is an omission: Nowhere has the special counsel charged any kind of criminal collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Of course, “collusion with Russia” was the suspicion — or, skeptics would counter, the carefully crafted political narrative — that launched the Mueller investigation. So has the collusion theory been abandoned? Is the fundamental rationale for the Justice Department’s appointment of a special counsel, which has addled the Trump administration for seven months, now a big “Never mind”?

I don’t think so. At least, I don’t think that’s the way Mueller is looking at it.

To be sure, not only is there no “collusion” allegation in the new indictments; the Trump campaign is barely mentioned. It has no ostensible relevance to the charges against Manafort, Gates, and the lawyer, Alex van der Zwaan. To the limited extent that the campaign is mentioned in the indictment against the Russian nationals, any contacts that campaign officials had with Russians are said to have been unwitting. That fact would seem to cut sharply against the notion of collusion, for had there been a collusive Trump–Russia relationship, there would have been no need for Russian operatives to dupe Trump-campaign officials.

Add to the mix the other charges Mueller has filed against Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, who have pled guilty. In neither instance did Mueller allege any kind of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime. Both defendants served the campaign, and both had contacts with apparent Putin-regime operatives (the Russian ambassador in Flynn’s case, more-shadowy figures claiming regime ties in Papadopoulos’s). Yet Mueller permitted each defendant to resolve the case by pleading guilty to a single count of making false statements to the FBI — a mere process crime, and one that, by branding them as liars, would undermine their effectiveness as cooperating witnesses if there were any eventual “collusion” case against other campaign figures. Again, this cuts against the idea that Mueller is contemplating a collusion case.

At the very least, I believe, Mueller intends to illustrate that he showed appalling judgment in putting his campaign in the hands of Manafort and Gates, who were up to their necks in collusion with agents of Putin’s regime.

A release last week of texts showed that Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose memos regarding the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia are referred to as the Steele dossier, reached out to Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, through a Russian-linked Washington, D.C., lobbyist named Adam Waldman. Among Waldman’s clients is Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In a text dated March 16, 2017, Waldman texted Warner, “Chris Steele asked me to call you.”

In 2009, Waldman filed papers with the Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) registering himself as an agent for Deripaska in order to provide “legal advice on issues involving his U.S. visa as well as commercial transactions” at a retainer of $40,000 a month. In 2010, Waldman additionally registered as an agent for Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, “gathering information and providing advice and analysis as it relates to the U.S. policy towards the visa status of Oleg Deripaska,” including meetings with U.S. policymakers. Based on the information in his FARA filings, Waldman has received at least $2.36 million for his work with Deripaska.

A letter dated Feb. 9 sent by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley to a London-based lawyer may shed light on why Steele used Waldman as an intermediary. (Waldman’s office did not reply to an email from Tablet requesting comment.)

February 9, 2018
VIA ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION
Paul E. Hauser, Esq.
Partner
Bryan Cave
88 Wood Street
London, EC2V 7AJ UK

Dear Mr. Hauser:

The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary has been investigating issues relating to the Russian government’s disinformation efforts targeting the 2016 Presidential election, as well as the nature of the FBI’s relationship with Christopher Steele. Part of that inquiry involves examining the connections between those involved and Russian interests.

Over half a century after the “Red Scare,” playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman, whose name is often coupled with her adversary Senator Joe McCarthy, seems to have emerged relatively unscathed in the court of elite progressivist opinion despite the exposure of her manifold fabrications and deceptions. The liar, it appears, is the incarnation of a higher truth. Such is the power of the press and the cultural salience of left-wing attitudes in America.

Hellman, a passionate supporter of the Soviet Union even when Stalin’s crimes had been widely publicized, was subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee by McCarthy and was subsequently lionized by the media, the commentariat, and the entertainment industry from the 1950s to the present for refusing to name names. She was elevated to the plinth of truth and courage while McCarthy was effectively consigned to the Eighth Circle of the Inferno as an evil counselor and a sower of discord.

We can agree that McCarthy cast too wide a net, and many will argue that he was responsible for a climate of national hysteria, but we cannot deny, after the release of the Venona transcripts, that he was mainly right. There was indeed a concerted and largely successful attempt to infiltrate the White House by Soviet agents during the 1940s and 1950s. This was McCarthy’s truth. Hellman, however, was a notorious liar, of whom novelist Mary McCarthy (no relation to Joseph) said, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'” Historian Alice Kessler-Harris in her hagiographic 2012 volume A Difficult Woman attempted to justify Hellman as a literary fabulist with a poor memory who believed that truth is larger than fact. Dorothy Gallagher in her 2014 biography Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life is having none of it, turning a postmodern extenuation into a historical indictment. “She dissembles … hedges, misleads,” Gallagher writes, and proves it. Even the pro-socialist Joan Mellen in Hellman and Hammett concurs.

In her acclaimed memoir Pentimento, Hellman told of her revolutionary generosity and grave personal risk in smuggling money to a certain Julia, a member of the anti-fascist underground in Austria just prior to the war – a blatant lie, perpetuated by Jane Fonda playing Hellman in the film Julia. There was no Julia. Hellman’s reported adventures in to Berlin and her cloak-and-dagger activities were the stuff of pure fiction, like something out of The Maltese Falcon. (Ironically, the word “pentimento” refers to a scumbling technique in visual art – i.e., something painted over.) The real-life risk-taker, Muriel Gardiner, stated that she had never met Hellman, and when Gardiner wrote a letter to Hellman about her anti-fascist exploits, Hellman affected never to have received it. Gardiner’s book Code Name “Mary” (1983) and her subsequent television documentary The “Real” Julia (1987)are as definitive as you can get, the latter suggesting that Hellman may have learned about the specific details of Gardiner’s activities from their mutual friend and lawyer, Wolf Schwawbacher.

I just joined the National Rifle Association. https://amgreatness.com/2018/02/23/one-more-for-the-nra/

Although I’ve always been somewhat open-minded about gun control, especially high-powered weapons, the current mob mentality of the Left—incited by propagandists in the media—has closed my mind. The spectacle over the Florida school shooting proves the Left will exploit any tragedy, manipulate any victim, and demonize any detractor in their scorched-earth strategy to regain power. Further, its purported solution seeks to empower the public authorities who utterly and despicably failed to stop this massacre at every chance.

Unhinged elites + corrupt government = my gun.

The ruling class cannot be trusted. The revelation yesterday that a deputy sheriff stood down while helpless teenagers were slaughtered by a disturbed young man goes beyond a dereliction of duty. It reflects the lack of common decency pervasive among our protected institutions and their bureaucratic lackeys, whether they be positioned at the Department of Motor Vehicles, Veterans Administration hospitals, the top brass at the FBI, or in your local police force. In addition to their incompetence and inhumanity, we are further humiliated as they lie to us, place blame on others, and then get to “retire” with full benefits. (It’s only a matter of time before we find out Scot Peterson, the deputy who cowardly crouched outside Stoneman Douglas High School, listening to bullets and screams, will still get his taxpayer-funded pension and collect a sizable portion of his six-figure salary package.)

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel—a Democrat—should be the poster boy for the ruling class’s pathetic cocktail of bravado, ineptitude, and blame-shifting. On February 21, he appeared on CNN’s town hall meeting, refusing, in dramatic fashion, to accept any culpability for what happened: “America, there’s one person responsible for this act, that’s the detestable, violent killer. He is responsible for this act.” (Your friendly reminder that sheriffs are politicians, too. Israel once compared himself to Don Shula, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King while defending his crony hiring practices.)

He confronted NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, after she ticked off a string of documented warning signs displayed by the shooter, scolding her that she was “absolutely not the litmus test for how law enforcement should follow up. You’re wrong.”

In a time of competing narratives and virtually unprecedented levels of polarization, there is one sad truth that Americans can readily agree on: our mental-health system is broken.

Specifically, the U.S. has long faced a critical shortage of inpatient psychiatric-treatment beds, with devastating societal consequences. From its historic peak in 1955 to 2016, the number of state psychiatric-hospital beds in the United States plummeted almost 97 percent, in a trend known as “deinstitutionalization.” There are now fewer beds per capita in the United States than there were in 1850. An analysis of the broader system of both inpatient and other 24-hour residential-treatment beds similarly found a 77.4 percent decrease from 1970 to 2014.

While inpatient treatment beds represent only one aspect of a functioning mental-health system, they are a vital one. Without access to a bed, acutely ill individuals are left to wait for the proper treatment, forcing mental-health professionals to triage the most severely ill in hopes of short-circuiting the next awful, unnecessary massacre. At the same time, families are caught in their own nightmare, watching helplessly as their loved ones deteriorate in the absence of the right care. With nowhere else to turn, those in need end up in the only remaining systems that cannot say no: emergency rooms, homeless shelters and, too often, jails and prisons.

Without treatment beds, the criminal-justice system has become our de facto mental-health system. By 2014, ten times the number of people with serious mental illness were in prisons and jails as in state mental hospitals. Astoundingly, the largest mental-health facilities in the nation are now the Cook County and Los Angeles County jails.

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The ideological strivings of our Founding Fathers were rooted in freedom, liberty, limited government, and the separation of church and state. They sought to create a more perfect union – a society of individuals cooperating by mutual consent. Psychiatrist Lyle Rossiter’s stunning book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness details America’s extraordinary achievement of ordered liberty, how its infrastructure complements the nature of man, and how the collectivist liberal narrative is pathologically antithetical to ordered liberty.

The ideological moorings of ordered liberty require consensus on what is real. This is no small thing. Language is based on consensus of what is real. Laws are based on consensus of what is real. Without agreement on what is real there is no societal order only chaos.

Senator Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.” Well said. Opinions are based in the subjective reality of feelings, facts are based in the objective reality of actuality. Feelings are not facts.

This is worth repeating – objective reality is defined by facts and subjective reality is defined by feelings. The Leftist Culture War on America is attacking the ideological strivings and ideological moorings of ordered liberty by attacking its most basic requirement – consensus on what is real. The left-wing liberal attack strategy seeks to replace factual objective reality with subjective multiple realities based on feelings. This is how it works.

The much-hyped Obama intelligence report that determined “Vladimir Putin ordered” Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails hacked and leaked “to help Trump’s chances of victory” has been accepted as gospel among DC punditry and given the investigations besieging the Trump presidency their legs. To date, no evidence has publicly emerged to corroborate the report, and the reason may have a lot to do with that sketchy dossier bought and paid for by Clinton.

Suspiciously, Barack Obama’s Intelligence Community Assessment matches the main allegations leveled by the Clinton-paid dossier on Trump, which wormed its way into intelligence channels, in addition to the FBI, Justice Department and State Department, during the 2016 campaign.

In fact, the shady dossier makes exactly the same claim — that Putin personally “ordered” the cyberattacks on the Clinton campaign and leaked embarrassing emails to “bolster Trump,” as part of “an aggressive Trump support operation.” Like Obama’s ICA, Clinton’s dossier provides no concrete evidence to back up the claim.

After learning Obama Justice and FBI officials relied heavily on unsubstantiated rumors in the dossier to wiretap a Trump adviser during the election, congressional leaders now suspect the dossier also informed Obama intelligence officials who compiled the ICA.

The report was released Jan. 6, 2017 — the same day intelligence officials attached a written summary of the dossier to a highly classified Russia briefing they gave Obama about the dossier, and the day after Obama held a secret White House meeting to discuss the dossier with his national security adviser and FBI director.

Republicans have held the political high ground on gun rights for decades, and they’ve done it by sticking together and sticking to the facts. Nothing will lose them that credibility faster than if they jump on the false-hope bandwagon.

The Parkland, Fla., school shooting is rightly causing a new national debate. With astounding cynicism, Democrats rushed to capitalize on dead teens, while ineffectually dragging out the same fatigued arguments they’ve been making since the Clinton era. They are back again with the “assault weapons” cry—calling for an arbitrary ban on a handful of scary-looking guns, when millions of other firearms can kill just as efficiently. (The 1994 assault-weapon ban was still in effect at the time of the 1999 Columbine massacre.) They are back again with confiscation, even though they know it’s a nonstarter with the Supreme Court and the public. The Parkland community deserves real policy proposals, not more empty posturing.

The GOP has excelled in recent decades in pointing out the barrenness of this gun-control agenda with statistics and common sense. And they’ve pointed out the unifying thread behind these mass-shooting events: mental illness. Former Pennsylvania Rep. Tim Murphy spent three years pushing legislation to overhaul and bring accountability to federal mental-health programs, and President Obama finally signed it in December 2016.

The Murphy bill was the product of a methodical and thoughtful effort to reform a system that wasn’t working. Such deliberateness is in contrast with the half-baked proposals now emanating from President Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio. Both men have said they favor banning adults under 21 from buying rifles. Mr. Trump is also talking about training and arming schoolteachers, and Mr. Rubio is latching on to restrictions on the size of magazines.

This is the politics of false-hope—Democrat-lite. Age limits may sound good, but most teenage violent criminals steal firearms from adults. An age limit wouldn’t have stopped Adam Lanza in Sandy Hook (who used his mother’s guns) or the Columbine killers (who obtained their guns from adult friends). It wouldn’t have stopped the Virginia Tech shooter or the Umpqua Community College shooter in Oregon, who were 23 and 26, respectively. An age limit is as empty a gesture as a ban on so-called assault weapons. As is a call for a large-capacity magazine ban, which is easily circumvented by reloading quickly. Arming teachers is an interesting idea, but it still doesn’t get to the root of the problem—stopping insane people from getting guns.

The Trump-Rubio proposals stem from that fatal Washington compulsion: a need to be seen as doing something. What’s odd is that it is unnecessary. There’s plenty Republicans could do in Parkland’s wake that is far more sensible, and would do far more good.

House and Senate committees could investigate the FBI’s failure to respond to warnings about the Parkland killer. This doesn’t need to be a bash-the-FBI episode, but law-enforcement failure has—along with mental health—become a defining feature of many mass shootings. CONTINUE AT SITE

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office announced this afternoon that a federal grand jury in Virginia has returned a superseding indictment against Paul Manafort and Richard Gates. The new indictment, which charges 32 felony counts, replaces the original 12-count indictment filed in late October.

The indictment dramatically alters the case, although not in a way that will surprise National Review readers.

There continues to be no connection to the Trump campaign (which Manafort briefly chaired and Gates also served), much less any suggestion of collusion between the campaign and Russia. The new indictment, however, retreats from the original allegations of money laundering, failure to register as foreign agents, and the so-called conspiracy against the United States.

We observed back in November that all of these charges seemed problematic – the money-laundering theory was shaky, failures to comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act are rarely charged criminally, and there is no “conspiracy against the United States” in federal law (the charge is either conspiracy to defraud the United States, which seemed to be what Mueller was alleging, or conspiracy to violate a federal criminal law).

We also noted at the time that the oddest thing about the original indictment was the absence of tax-evasion and bank-fraud charges. Mueller had seemed to lay the groundwork for these allegations but to have refrained from charging them.

Voila! The case is now exclusively a tax and bank-fraud case.

Counts 1 through 10 charge Manafort with subscribing false tax returns from 2010 through 2014, and Gates with assisting him in their preparation. Gates is also charged with subscribing to false tax returns in those same years (in Counts 15 through 20 – including two returns for the year 2013). Counts 11 through 14 charge Manafort with failing to file required “FBAR” reports regarding his controlling interest in foreign bank accounts (an offense that appeared in the original indictment); and Counts 21 through 23 charge Gates with that same FBAR offense.