RUTHFULLY YOURS

No matter how much sane Democrat strategists desperately want her to go away, Hillary Clinton refuses to leave the stage.

“As the 2020 presidential race ramps up, plenty of top Democrats we talk to would prefer new energy and faces to Clinton nostalgia/redemption,” Axios reports.

That’s an understatement.

Eighteen months after the American people told Hillary exactly where to go, the soulless political operative the great William Safire called a “congenital liar,” is everywhere. Promoting her whiny What Happened memoir and hurting her party by keeping her almost innumerable misdeeds front and center. Likening Republicans to Klansmen and Nazis. Supporting the left-wing Resistance to President Trump. Embarrassing her fellow Democrats with her abusive rhetoric aimed at half of America.

In recent travels overseas, Hillary has been badmouthing President Trump and her fellow Americans. During a March visit to India, Hillary viciously unloaded on her enemies – in particular, the 63 million Americans who voted for President Trump in 2016. Ordinary Americans are pessimistic, racist, sexist hicks, she said.

“If you look at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won,” she said. “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards.”

“‘You know you didn’t like black people getting rights,” she said. “You don’t like women getting jobs. You don’t like seeing that Indian Americans [are] succeeding more than you.”

Special Counsel and former FBI boss Robert Mueller is on record that President Trump is not a target of his investigation, yet the questions he wants to ask the president have now been leaked to the media. Since the questions are fully predictable and totally without significance, President Trump should not waste his time. On the other hand, the president, and all Americans, might pony up a few questions for Herr Mueller his own self.

Investigations normally pursue a crime. What crime, exactly, are you investigating? Given the time and money you have put in, the people have a right to know.

Special Counsel Mueller, if you operate in search of collusion, what statute, exactly, would you use to prosecute collusion? Please supply the numbers in the U.S. code.

Special Counsel Mueller, you have been called a man of great integrity. Why did you front-load your investigative team with highly partisan supporters of Hillary Clinton? Were independent, non-partisan lawyers not available?

If your target is Russian influence in general, Special Counsel Mueller, why are you not investigating the Clinton Foundation and its dealings with Russia? Have you consulted the book Clinton Cash?

Special Counsel Mueller, what is your understanding of Fanny Ohr? She is the Russia expert, wife of demoted DOJ official Bruce Ohr, who worked for Fusion GPS on the Steele dossier. In your expert opinion, why might Fanny Ohr have acquired a short-wave radio license about that time? Was it to communicate with Russian contacts and avoid detection? Did the FBI monitor any of Ohr’s communications?

During his first 15 months as president, Donald Trump has postured as the bad cop.

He railed about NATO members welching on their promised contributions to the alliance. Trump rhetorically reduced North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to “short and fat” and “rocket man.” He ordered the dropping of a huge bomb on the Taliban and twice hit Syrian chemical weapons sites. He talked of trade wars and hitting back at China.

Through all the bombast and follow-ups, Trump’s supposedly more sober and judicious appointees—especially former National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, along with Defense Secretary James Mattis—played good cops against the outnumbered lone-wolf Trump.

This script was well known from the days of Richard Nixon and his national security adviser and then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Nixon often postured as if he were eager to bomb the North Vietnamese to smithereens, to go to Dr. Strangelove levels to stand down the Soviets, or to unleash Israel to do whatever it took to defeat its enemies.

Then Kissinger was sent over to reassure both troubled allies and tense enemies. He pleaded for modest concessions to ward off what might be far worse. He confided to leaders that Nixon was a madman who terrified Kissinger as much as he did the world abroad.

Former first lady Michelle Obama surfaced at a Reach Higher 2018 College Signing Day event at Temple University in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Speaking on behalf of her Better Make Room initiative, Michelle was gussied up in a black jumpsuit and a denim jacket and sounded a bit like rapper Common.

During her keynote speech, the former FLOTUS paused in all the right places and used ghetto-talk and hip-hop hand gestures to keep with the flow of her sing-songy exhortation to 8,000 Philadelphia high school students signing up for college. After sharing sad experiences from her childhood, the former first lady officially announced that despite the discouragement of “haters,” she became America’s “forever first lady.”

In other words, despite Melania Trump being the current “first lady,” much as Michelle’s husband Barack fancies himself “forever president of the United States,” according to Mrs. Obama, she is, and always will be, America’s “forever first lady.” Based on the cheering coming from the audience, the kids agreed.

Here’s what Rapping Michelle had to say:

Robert Mueller has plenty of questions for President Trump, and maybe he will get to ask them. Most of them seemed like perjury traps rather than real questions for the president and, surprisingly, they contain very little that wasn’t in the public domain though prior leaks. In other words, the president is not a target because they have nothing implicating him, and so they want to use the interview to create such material.

But the conduct of the investigation by the special counsel and his team has raised a lot of questions as to its foundation, conflicts of interest, fairness and methods. Most of the public, based on the last Harvard Caps-Harris Poll, supports Robert Mueller going forward with his investigation, but I wonder whether that would still be the case if he were required to answer a few questions himself.
When you interviewed for FBI director with President Trump, had you had any conversations with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, FBI Director James Comey or any other current or former officials of the U.S. government about serving as a special counsel? Didn’t you consider going forward with the interview or being rejected as FBI director to create the appearance of conflict?

When you picked your team, what was going through your mind when you picked zero donors to the Trump campaign and hired many Democratic donors, supporters of the defiant actions of Sally Yates, who at the time was deputy attorney general, and prosecutors who had been overturned for misconduct? What were you thinking in building a team with documented biases?

When you were shown the text messages of FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, why did you reassign them and not fire them for compromising the investigation with obvious animus and multiple violations of procedure and policy? Why did you conceal from Congress the reasons for their firing for five months and did you discard any of their work as required by the “fruits of a poisonous tree” doctrine?

What were your personal contacts with Rod Rosenstein and James Comey during the investigation as special counsel and before that as a private attorney? Would you be considered a friend of James Comey? Would that personal relationship not disqualify you as a prosecutor on the case under Justice Department guidelines?

The Justice Department should not permit the president to be interrogated on so paltry and presumptuous a showing.

I am assuming the authenticity of the questions that Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly wants to ask President Trump. The questions indicate that, after a year of his own investigation and two years of FBI investigation, the prosecutor lacks evidence of a crime. Yet he seeks to probe the chief executive’s motives and thought processes regarding exercises of presidential power that were lawful, regardless of one’s view of their wisdom.

If Bob Mueller wants that kind of control over the executive branch, he should run for president. Otherwise, he is an inferior executive official who has been given a limited license — ultimately, by the chief executive — to investigate crime. If he doesn’t have an obvious crime, he has no business inventing one, much less probing his superior’s judgment. He should stand down.

The questions, reported by the New York Times, underscore that the special counsel is a pernicious institution. Trump should decline the interview. More to the point, the Justice Department should not permit Mueller to seek to interrogate the president on so paltry and presumptuous a showing.

When should a president be subject to criminal investigation?
It is a bedrock principle that no one is above the law. The Framers made clear that this includes the president. But, like everything else, bedrock principles do not exist in a vacuum. They vie with other principles.

Two competing considerations are especially significant here. First, our law-enforcement system is based on prosecutorial discretion. Under this principle, the desirability of prosecuting even a palpable violation of law must be balanced against other societal needs and desires. We trust prosecutors to perform this cost-benefit analysis with modesty about their mission and sensitivity to the disruption their investigations cause.

Second, the president is the most essential official in the world’s most consequential government. That government’s effectiveness is necessarily compromised if the president is under the cloud of an investigation. Not only are the president’s personal credibility and capability diminished; such an investigation discourages talented people from serving in an administration, further undermining good governance. The country is inexorably harmed because a suspect administration’s capacity to execute the laws and pursue the interests of the United States is undermined. Naturally, this is of little moment to rabid partisans who opposed the president’s election and object to his policy preferences. By and large, however, Americans are not rabid partisans; they want the elected president to be able to govern, regardless of which party is in charge.

Ronald Reagan famously quipped that the trouble with liberals “is not that they’re ignorant. It’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” Reagan’s words aptly describe former President Barack Obama. Obama was an intelligent, well-educated, articulate man. He could woo crowds with soaring rhetoric and pacify True Conservative™ “intellectuals,” like David Brooks (who voted for Obama partly on the basis of the perfect crease in his trousers).

Obama was not only a scion of the American political class, he was also a new kind of leader: the first black president in history and one of the youngest.

With Obama, though, we were getting an incredibly manipulative individual who bought into the most dangerous and destructive left-wing academic theories. Obama was the ultimate “intellectual-yet-idiot.” Examples of his folly are plentiful, but there are perhaps no better illustrations of the disconnect between Obama’s intellectual prowess and his practical political judgment than the disastrous Affordable Care Act and the terrible nuclear agreement with Iran. Both were highly controversial, very unpopular, deeply secretive, and painfully naïve. They were also, it turns out, extremely harmful to the American people who voted for Obama.

Obamacare Fail
Obama believes in socialized medicine, more or less. Most Americans, even many Democrats, never would have supported a scheme that was honest about aiming toward that end. So just as Obama’s healthcare policy adviser (and former architect of the failed “Romneycare” plan in Massachusetts), Jonathan Gruber argued, Obama had to lie to the American voters about what his plan actually entailed.

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