RUTHFULLY YOURS

Shazam! The crack legal team of Herr Robert Mueller have pounced on a real crime (they say), and all the loudest voices in today’s politics have agreed on this farce, just as if it were the real thing. Liberals around the country are getting chills up their spines as the official Master Sleuths close in on…whom, exactly? And why, exactly? And in obedience to what principle in the Constitution, or in common law, or in common sense, for that matter?

The answer is that there is no legal, moral, or sane principle to be seen. None whatsoever. This is pure, emotional mob scapegoating under color of law – but not any law that adheres to the U.S. Constitution. The American Founders were steeped in the Western Enlightenment of the 18th century, and they would chew up and spit out all the rationalizations of all the liberal witch hunts since Watergate. This is all made up legal fiction, in direct violation of the very basis of civilized legality.

There is actually no sane or rational basis for the special prosecutor. Special prosecutors are really “special” – they are magicked into being from some extra-constitutional fringe of the law, whenever the Democrats and the Monsters of the Deep feel threatened, as happened during the Stalin years (when the State Department featured Stalin agents); during the George W. years (when the Democrats first voted for the Iraq War, and then, when American troops were in the field, stabbed them in the back); and in last year’s election, when Ms. Hillary was downed by a fiendish Electoral College, which (according to the Democrats) isn’t even in the U.S. Constitution.

(Actually, the electors are in there, but you have to look for them. DNC Chief Perez apparently lost his Cliff’s Notes to the U.S. Constitution, because he can’t find the electors – Article I, Section 2, Clause 1-3, etc.)

What do you expect from our lousy education system?

So Mr. Mueller has indicted his ham sandwich, responding to the fierce outcry of The American Public (as shown in the New York Times op-ed pages and the WaPo). He is giving us a couple of victims to hang. There, that should make everybody happy.

This is pure and simple mob justice, of the kind practiced throughout ancient history under the heading of scapegoating.

Remember, in the Book of Leviticus, the scapegoat was an actual goat – quite innocent of any crime – that was driven off to its death in ancient Israel, to carry with it all the sins of the people.

The act of scapegoating is not limited to Scripture. It is a human universal, and it belongs in the ancient gallery of emotional defenses against guilt and anxiety. Scapegoating was a favorite practice of European mobs in Poland and Russia, and in Germany and France, and anywhere else where an evil Other could be found. Africans practiced mob scapegoating in Rwanda, and Muslims have been doing it in Sudan for the last thirty years.

In Europe, the Jews were convenient scapegoats much of the time, and Russian Orthodox priests scapegoated Polish Catholic priests and vice versa. Catholics did it to Lutherans, and Lutherans did it to Catholics.

In Obama’s childhood home of Jakarta, the Indonesian Army scapegoated the Communist Party and the Muslims, but then everybody scapegoated the Overseas Chinese, who were easy to recognize as an ethnic group, and they were rumored to be rich, besides.

The Klan is the most notorious example of mob scapegoating and yes, murder, in recent American history. The late Robert Byrd could tell you all about that.

Politicians reflexively attack perceived gender bias in private companies. But it’s important to ask how those politicians are doing with their own hiring.

Do government payrolls reflect a “gender hiring gap?”

Our OpenTheBooks.com Oversight Report – Federal & State Government’s Gender Hiring Gap analyzed government payrolls:

25 largest federal agencies: the 500 most highly compensated employees from each of the largest 25 federal agencies
Congress: the 1,000 top-paid staffers – including payroll analysis of republican and democratic leadership in U.S. House & Senate
White House staff
Five largest states: the 1,000 most highly compensated public employees within each of the five most populous states: California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois.

We found that top-paid men outnumbered women two to one at the federal level. Across the states, just two in 10 top-earners were women.

Politicians talk about a “war on women” in an effort to score political points. Many of those same politicians have striking gaps between male and female wages and employment on their own payrolls.

That’s pure hypocrisy.

Here are a few examples of what you’ll uncover:

We analyzed the 500 most highly compensated employees at the 25 largest federal agencies. Among 12,500 key employees, we found 7,869 men collectively earned $1.5 billion in compensation and 4,631 women collectively earned $817 million.

Female Congressional employees fared even worse. Among the 1,000 top-paid Congressional staffers, male employees who earn up to $172,500 outnumbered female employees who earn the same 2-to-1. Men, collectively, made $105.4 million, while females earned $58.6 million.

At the state level, we analyzed the 1,000 most highly compensated public employees in each of the five most populous states. In the states, collectively, the men earned $1.6 billion versus $386 million for the women. Across the five states, just seven women were employed in the top 100 highest-earning positions.

At every level of government, the number of women employed in the top-paid positions lags the number of men by an enormous
margin.

Download a PDF copy of our report, click here.

Read our press release, click here.

Eight people were killed and at least a dozen injured on Tuesday when a truck mowed down pedestrians and cyclists on a lower Manhattan bike path in what officials said was a “cowardly act of terror,” the deadliest attack in New York City since Sept. 11, 2001.

The driver shouted “God is great” in Arabic when he got out of his truck and was confronted by police, a law-enforcement official said.

He was identified by officials as Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old from Tampa, Fla., who came to the U.S. in 2010 and is originally from Uzbekistan. He is in custody at a local hospital after he was shot in the abdomen by an officer, police said.

A law-enforcement official said police found handwritten notes near the truck saying that the suspect carried out the attack in the name of ISIS.

The terror unfolded shortly after 3 p.m., when the suspect drove a flatbed pickup truck rented from Home Depot for nearly a mile along a picturesque stretch of a bike path along the Hudson River, leaving behind mangled bikes and bodies.

The carnage ended at an intersection in Tribeca near the World Trade Center, where the truck smashed into a small school bus. Then the suspect exited his truck, brandishing a paintball gun and pellet gun before being shot by a New York Police Department officer.

From Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes:

Mostly she was mad – mad that she’d lost and that the country would have to endure a Trump presidency… Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. ‘She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way,’ this person said.

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

“Mook” is campaign manager Robby of that ilk, and “Podesta” is John, her campaign chairman and, with his brother Tony Podesta, one of the two Podestas who founded the Podesta Group, now under investigation for violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Notice Mr Allen and Miss Parnes’ choice of words: Whether or not the election in reality “wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up”, Messrs Mook and Podesta and the rest of the Clinton team decided to “engineer the case” that it wasn’t.

And engineering-wise they did a pretty impressive job, as you’ll know if you’re one of the impressionable rubes who gets his news from ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN. If the campaign team had worked its precision engineering half as well on the actual campaign, they would have won the election “on the up-and-up” and saved themselves the need for a post-election campaign.

By “Russian hacking” of the election, they mean that some Internet trolls from halfway round the world bought a few fake Facebook ads, half of which weren’t seen until after election day. For purposes of comparison, the one hundred grand these trolls spent to “interfere” in the US election works out at less than two per cent of what Hillary paid a high-ranking spy of a foreign power to interfere in the US election …and post-election.

It started in April 2016, when it became clear that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination. The Hillary campaign and the DNC gave millions of dollars to Marc Elias, a Clinton lawyer, who in turn hired Fusion GPS, who in turn hired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. Why use Mr Elias as a cutout? Because Hillary and the DNC could then itemize the expense as “legal services” rather than list payments to Mr Steele, which would be in breach of federal law.

Mr Steele used to be head of “the Russia house”, to go all John le Carré on you. So he asked his contacts in Moscow to come up with some stuff on Trump, and they responded with some pretty thinnish material that Steele managed to stretch out to a total of about 33 pages. I can tell you, after six years in the fetid craphole of the District of Columbia Superior Court for the Mann vs Steyn case, that the most routine procedural motion therein runs at least three times the length. The most “salacious” (in James Comey’s word) assertion of the dossier is that Trump likes getting urinated on by Russian hookers. Having met him, I regard this as most unlikely: He is a germaphobe who resents having to do all the unhygienic gladhanding required in American politics. I find it easier to imagine almost any other Republican bigshot enjoying the erotic frisson of micturition, if only from Chuck Schumer. But judge for yourself: You can read the dossier here.

At which point things took a strange and disturbing turn. Steele’s dossier was passed along to the FBI. It seems a reasonable inference, to put it as blandly as possible, that the dossier was used to justify the opening of what the Feds call an “FI” (Full Investigation), which in turn was used to justify a FISA order permitting the FBI to put Trump’s associates under surveillance. Indeed, it seems a reasonable inference that the dossier was created and supplied to friendly forces within the bureau in order to provide a pretext for an FI, without which surveillance of the Trump campaign would not be possible.

In October 2016, things took a stranger and more disturbing turn. Steele “reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the Bureau to pay him to continue his work”. In other words, the permanent bureaucracy and the ruling party were collaborating to get the goods on their political opponent, by illegally paying a foreign spy to interfere with the election. Why would the most lavishly funded investigative agency on the planet need the services of a British subject and his modest consulting firm? Not just for plausible deniability but also for plausible reliability: Hey, investigating Trump would never have occurred to us, but the former head of the Russia desk at MI6 thought we ought to know about this… Which, in case you haven’t noticed, is the precise equivalent of Bush crediting British intelligence as the unimpeachable source for his belief that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire yellowcake from Niger.

A month later, Trump did the impossible and won the election. And within twenty-four hours Mook and Podesta had begun “engineering the case” that the election “wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up”. On November 18th, Andrew Wood, formerly British Ambassador in Moscow, and John McCain, the Senator from Arizona and fierce Never Trumper, met at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia. Sir Andrew told Senator McCain about the dossier and said he’d known Steele when they were both on Her Majesty’s service in Russia and that he was a splendid chap, very sound and awfully decent.

[UPDATE! Steve McIntyre, slayer of hockey sticks, notes that Andrew Wood is not merely a former ambassador but an Associate of Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd (Steele’s company).]

One month after the election, on December 9th, McCain met with FBI Director Comey and handed over the dossier. It is not known if Comey replied, “Oh, this old thing? As a matter of fact, we used it as a pretext to get surveillance warrants on Trump. Do you know what it’s like to sit through hours of phone transcripts about how ‘The Apprentice”s ratings have tanked since they hired that loser Schwarzenegger?”

Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former presidential campaign manager for a brief time, was indicted Monday by a federal grand jury, along with one of his business associates Richard W. Gates, on twelve counts. The charges, which cover conduct going as far back as 2006 and continuing through 2016, include conspiring to defraud the United States in business dealings with Ukraine, conspiracy to launder money, false and misleading FARA [Foreign Agent Registration Act] statements, and being an unregistered agent of a foreign principal. While the charges have been brought as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between President Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, they have nothing to do with Mr. Trump’s campaign. In response to the news of the charges, President Trump tweeted: “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????”

In fact, at least some of the charges brought against Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates may turn out to be millstones around the necks of the Podesta Group, the Democrat leaning consulting and lobbying firm co-founded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and his brother Tony. It was reported that special counsel Mueller has opened a federal investigation into Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has reported some additional details about the relationship between Manafort and the Podesta Group that may provide some context for the charges brought against Manafort and Gates. Carlson said he was told by an unnamed source claiming to be a former senior employee of the Podesta Group that “Paul Manafort spent years working with The Podesta Group on behalf of Russian government interests. That relationship extends back to at least 2011 when our source claims Manafort had dinner with both Podestas, Tony and John.”

In the years following that dinner, Carlson’s source said he saw Paul Manafort in the Podesta Group offices frequently, “representing Russian business and political interests, who sought to influence Capitol Hill, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and the Obama administration.” Tony Podesta in turn had direct discussions with Hillary Clinton while she was the Secretary of State.

Tony Podesta also had connections to the Clinton Foundation. The subject of one meeting between Tony Podesta and the Clinton Foundation, according to Carlson’s source, involved the Uranium One deal in which the Russians gained control of 20 percent of U.S. uranium reserves while the company’s principals gave more than $100 million to the Clinton Foundation. “As our source put it, Tony Podesta was basically part of the Clinton Foundation,” Carlson reported.

Carlson proceeded to describe the vehicles Paul Manafort and the Podesta Group used to push the agenda of their Russian and Russian-friendly Ukrainian clients in high level Obama administration circles. One such vehicle, called the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, was a major client of the Podesta Group and Manafort. This relationship went at least as far back as 2012.

The Associated Press had previously reported last year that Manafort and Gates introduced the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine to the Podesta Group and another lobbying group named Mercury LLC. The Podesta Group did not file a Foreign Agents Registration Act disclosure until this past April, years after it engaged in lobbying work for the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine. The Podesta Group reportedly received $1.13 million from the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine between June 2012 and April 2014.

The criminal indictment of Manafort and Gates ties some strings together, referring specifically to the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, and to two unnamed lobbying companies in the United States solicited by Manafort and Gates.

Paragraph 11 states, “The European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (the Centre) was created in or about 2012 in Belgium as a mouthpiece for Yanukovych and the Party of Regions. The Centre was used by MANAFORT, GATES, and others in order to lobby and conduct a public relations campaign in the United States and Europe on behalf of the existing Ukraine regime.” The Party of Regions was a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine. Yanukovych was the former pro-Russian president of Ukraine who was ousted in 2014.

The enemy of empiricism is ideology. Translated that means politics make people see the world as they want it to be, rather than as it is.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/30/when-fantasy-trumps-reality/

Take the NFL. Any disinterested observer could see that since 2016 and the beginning of Colin Kaepernick’s crusade to sit or kneel during the National Anthem, the player protests have been an utter financial and public relations disaster for the NFL.

Depending on the calibrations of game attendance and television viewing, and adjustments for diverse local markets and weekly venues, most estimates range from a 15 percent to a 20 percent drop in patronage from the pre-Kaepernick 2015 norms. The league stands to lose well over $1 billion per year.

Yet social justice warriors still praise Kaepernick to the skies and suggest that he is making headway in winning over others to his cause. Supporters of the protests have even said the NFL was mostly unaffected financially or, in Orwellian fashion, that a drop off in viewers was actually due to Kaepernick’s supporters’ own solidarity with the protesting players.

For more than a year sports analysts have cited almost every possible extraneous reason for a decline in viewership—from worries over brain injuries to saturation of the market to competition from other entertainment and recreation. All, in theory, are true. All, in fact, are not the main reason why the league is suffering an abrupt erosion of support.

The truth is, most NFL viewers—middle-aged, male, and center-right politically—want entertainment and a refuge from politics. They do not tune in for multimillionaire players to insult the National Anthem. They do not want uninformed, 20-something multimillionaires lecturing fans on their purported sins. How can it ever be wise for a business to insult its consumer base? Again, reality apparently has been intolerable to the owners, the players, and the media. So it is massaged, disguised, or rejected—up to the point when facts make further fantasy impossible.

Collusion Fantasies
The same disconnect is true of the entire “Russian collusion” narrative. An empirical examination would conclude that if several congressional committees, federal investigators, a frenzied media, and highly motivated Democratic operatives could not—after a year(!)—find proof of Trump’s personal collusion with the Russians, then there likely was none. To save the credibility of the investigation Mueller has had to advise indictment for former and fired Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, in part on the basis of his wheeler-dealer past.

If Manafort’s indictment now sets the bar for “collusion,” then an entire array of Clinton, Inc. operatives are facing even more exposure. Why would Russian interests pay Bill Clinton $500,000 for a brief speech or give more than $140 million to the Clinton Foundation (do they continue to do so now?)—when at roughly the same time control of sizable percentages of small but vital U.S. uranium holdings were transferred to Russian companies, sanctioned by a decision in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had considerable influence?

Why would anyone believe that a “dossier” with bizarre salacious detail, funded by an opposition research firm with a history of destructive invective, and purchased by the Clinton campaign—and later by the FBI to warrant politically motivated surveillance on U.S. citizens—be considered disinterested “proof” of Trump wrongdoing, especially given that it relied on bought Russian sources? And how could a fine man like Robert Mueller escape charges of conflict of interest? His very appointment was the result of deliberate leaks and machinations of his former associate and successor at the FBI, the now largely discredited James Comey—while Mueller himself had overseen, in 2010-11, FBI investigations into Russian efforts to rig the transfer of U.S. uranium? Eventually, there will be an investigation into what Mueller himself found out about Russian collusion six years ago, what he did about it, and why his findings were either ignored or set aside. Pretending there is no conflict of interest, does not mean there is not any.

Despite the absence of proof of Trump collusion and the plethora of evidence that pointed the other way, the media and larger culture have clung to the Trump collusion narrative all the way to the point of absurdity. If Paul Manafort’s indictment hinges on Robert Mueller’s evidence that Manafort was receiving Russian money, it will more likely establish standards by which the Clinton campaign will face even greater legal exposure—given that its purchase of the Steele document was, in essence, a transfer of monies to Kremlin sources.

As related in my earlier column on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Paul Manafort and an associate, today on balance is a good day for the Trump administration. Of course, you never want to see your former campaign chairman get charged with crimes. Nevertheless, after all these months of investigation, the much-anticipated Manafort charges turned out to be unrelated to Russian meddling in the 2016 election, let alone to any purported Trump-campaign collusion therein.

On that collusion question, today’s other development in Mueller’s investigation seems more relevant. As David French and Dan McLaughlin detail, the special counsel announced the guilty plea of George Papadopoulos — which apparently happened on or about October 5 — to a single count of making false statements to government investigators. As Rich Lowry observes, Papadopoulos was a low-level Trump-campaign adviser. He had contacts with Russians who claimed to have close connections to the Putin regime.

As outlined in a 14-page “Statement of the Offense,” Papadopoulos’s principal offense was to lie to the FBI about when these contacts occurred. He told the FBI they happened before he joined the campaign; in fact, they happened not only after he was aboard but only because he was aboard. Upon close examination, the story unfolded in the offense statement is actually exculpatory of Trump and his campaign. To understand why, we need to revisit the term “collusion.”

First, some background.

Papadopoulos is a climber who was clearly trying to push his way into Trump World. We recall that much of the Republican foreign-policy clerisy shunned Trump during the campaign. Thus did comparatively obscure people like Carter Page get seats at the table. George Papadopoulos was another of these: a 30-year-old who graduated from DePaul in 2009, later got an M.A. from the London School of Economics, and worked at the Hudson Institute for about four years.

While living in London in early March 2016, he spoke with an unidentified Trump-campaign official and learned he would be designated a foreign-policy adviser to the campaign. These arrangements are very loose. Papadopoulos was a fringe figure, not plugged into Trump’s inner circle.

In London, Papadopoulos met an unidentified Russian academic (referred to as “the Professor”), who claimed to have significant ties to Putin-regime officials and who took an interest in Papadopoulos only because he boasted of having Trump-campaign connections. There appears to be no small amount of puffery on all sides: Papadopoulos suggesting to the Russians that he could make a Trump meeting with Putin happen, and suggesting to the campaign that he could make a Putin meeting with Trump happen; the Professor putting Papadopoulos in touch with a woman who Papadopoulos was led to believe was Putin’s niece (she apparently is not); and lots and lots of talk about potential high- and low-level meetings between Trump-campaign and Putin-regime officials that never actually came to pass.

In the most important meeting, in London on April 26, 2016, the Professor told Papadopoulos that he (the Prof) had just learned that top Russian-government officials had obtained “dirt” on then-putative Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. The dirt is said to include “thousands of emails” — “emails of Clinton.” The suggestion, of course, was that the Russians were keen to give this information to the Trump campaign.

This may raise the hopes of the “collusion with Russia” enthusiasts. But there are two problems here.

First, Papadopoulos was given enough misinformation that we can’t be confident (at least from what Mueller has revealed here) that the Professor was telling Papadopoulos the truth. Remember, by April 2016, it had been known for over a year that Hillary Clinton had used a private email system for public business and had tried to delete and destroy tens of thousands of emails. The Russians could well have been making up a story around that public reporting in order further to cultivate the relationship with Papadopoulos (whom they appear to have seen as potentially useful). Note that the Professor suggested the Russians had Clinton’s own emails. But the emails we know were hacked were not Clinton’s — they were the DNC’s and John Podesta’s (Hillary is on almost none of them). So, Papadopoulos’s Russian interlocutors could well have been weaving a tale based on what had been reported, rather than on what was actually hacked and ultimately released by WikiLeaks.

If Paul Manafort is guilty of failing to register as an agent of a foreign government, something that occurred when Manafort was not running the Trump campaign, then so is Tony Podesta, the brother of Hillary Clinton campaign manager, who is also up to his eyeballs in collusion between the Democrats and Hillary Clinton and Russia and Ukraine:

One of Washington’s most powerful lobbying firms did not disclose the wide extent of its lucrative political work for a Ukrainian group tied to both onetime Trump adviser Paul Manafort and to pro-Russian politicians, new records show.

The firm, the Podesta Group, said nothing in a 2012 lobbying report to Congress about at least 32 meetings, emails and other communications it had with the State Department, at a time when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was scrutinizing Ukraine’s upcoming election, records show.

The new disclosures shed light on the web of contacts between Russian-leaning Ukrainians, Washington lobbyists and U.S. policymakers during the Obama administration. The Podesta Group filed new, detailed lobbying disclosures in April to augment lobbying reports from 2012 to 2014 that had given little detail. The firm is run by Tony Podesta, whose brother, John, is a longtime adviser to Clinton and was chairman of her 2016 presidential campaign. John Podesta was a senior counselor to President Barack Obama in 2014 and had previously been lobbying partners with his brother. He is not currently affiliated with his brother’s firm.

The Podesta Group was representing a Ukrainian nonprofit, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, as it sought to counter the Obama administration’s critical stance toward Ukraine’s pro-Russia government and Congress’ growing annoyance with Ukraine’s leaders.

It is easy to forget in the hyperventilation by the legacy media that it was Paul Manafort’s efforts on behalf of the Podsta Group, not Trump, that caused Special Counsel Robert Mueller to expand his investigation to include the Podestas and their group and that Manafort’s alleged crimes do not involve work for the Trump campaign:

A thus-far-reliable source who used to be involved with Clinton allies John and Tony Podesta told Tucker Carlson that press reports appearing to implicate President Trump in Russian collusion are exaggerated. The source, who Carlson said he would not yet name, said he worked for the brothers’ Podesta Group and was privy to some information from Robert Mueller’s special investigation.

While media reports describe former “Black, Manafort & Stone” principal Paul Manafort as Trump’s main tie to the investigation, the source said it is Manafort’s role as a liaison between Russia and the Podesta Group that is drawing the scrutiny…

The source said the Podesta Group was in regular contact with Manafort while Hillary Clinton was America’s chief diplomat…

During this time, the Uranium One deal was being facilitated by the White House.

According to Carlson, “Manafort was clear that Russia wanted to cultivate ties to Hillary” because she appeared to be the presumptive 45th president.

Two former senior Trump campaign staffers pled not guilty yesterday to evading taxes on millions of dollars over a period of years and a litany of other charges sought by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III that appear wholly unrelated to the alleged Russian intervention in last year’s election that he was commissioned to investigate.

It was a busy day in the nation’s capital yesterday.

Paul J. Manafort Jr. and Richard W. Gates III were arraigned in federal court in Washington, D.C., and released on a $10 million bond and a $5 million bond, respectively. The defendants are not allowed to leave their homes except under narrowly defined circumstances.

Trump defenders have long said Mueller has too many serious conflicts of interest to be leading the probe of the electoral collusion fairy tale and that the president should fire him.

At 10:25 a.m. Monday, President Trump tweeted his disgust at the indictments, which in his view are aimed at the wrong people. “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????” Minutes later he tweeted, “there is NO COLLUSION!”

Recent news reports indicate at least one Democrat, “power lobbyist” Tony Podesta, has been under Mueller’s microscope. Podesta, brother of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, abruptly resigned yesterday from the Podesta Group.

“Podesta announced his decision during a firm-wide meeting Monday morning and is alerting clients of his impending departure,” according to Politico. The Podesta Group partnered with Manafort on a public relations campaign to promote Ukraine in the U.S.

Mueller has been investigating Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group, NBC News reported last week. The probe has “morphed into a criminal inquiry into whether the firm violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

As Breitbart News reports,

The Podesta Group has also lobbied for Uranium One, the Canadian-based energy company that has come under scrutiny as well. In 2010, the Obama administration allowed Uranium One to be sold to Russian energy company Rosatom, giving the company control over one-fifth of American uranium-mining capacity to Russia, despite an ongoing FBI investigation into a Rosatom subsidiary involved in a racketeering scheme. The Podesta Group received $180,000 from Uranium One over several years between 2012 and 2015, according to records at opensecrets.org.

Hillary Clinton infamously approved the Uranium One transaction when she was secretary of state and her husband received the suspiciously large sum of $500,000 for a single speech from Russian sources.

Commentator Sean Davis, co-founder of the Federalist website, reminded us on Twitter last week who the real villains are. “The Mueller probe is based entirely on two things: a dossier created by Dem[ocrat] collusion [with] Russia, and illegal leaks by [former FBI Director] James Comey.”

“Democrats and Comey didn’t just allow Russia to interfere with our elections. They let shady Russian operatives pervert our justice system,” he added.

Returning to Manafort, he managed the Trump campaign from June to August 2016, until his foreign business dealings, hyped relentlessly by the mainstream media, led to his firing. He was replaced by Kellyanne Conway and Bannon. Gates is a protégé of Manafort who served as his deputy in the campaign and partner in various business enterprises.

Mueller is already the textbook definition of an out-of-control independent prosecutor and these charges may be part of a legal stratagem to strong-arm the two men into cooperating as witnesses. In other words, the charges could be bogus or blown out of proportion, calculated to give the prosecutor leverage over the two defendants.

The best way to think of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Monday-morning indictments is as a compliment—backhanded as it may be—to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes.

Like the special prosecutor, Mr. Nunes and his committee have been investigating the 2016 presidential campaign. Unlike the special prosecutor, Mr. Nunes has unearthed hard evidence about both Russian influence on the election and domestic spying on Trump campaign officials. And if the committee gets the documents it has been demanding for months about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s handling of the salacious Christopher Steele dossier, this week may end even more explosively than it’s begun.

Right now that’s hard to imagine, given how Washington has been overwhelmed by Monday’s indictments of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his former business associate Rick Gates, as well as news that another former campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts. Though a court will determine whether Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates are guilty of the crimes they are accused of, surely it is worth noting that those charges, serious as they may be, have little to do with what Mr. Mueller was supposed to be investigating when he was named special prosecutor, to wit: “the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.”

Meanwhile Mr. Nunes and the Republicans on his intel committee plod on. They do so in the face of mockery and contempt from the Beltway press corps, and sabotage and obstruction by Democrats, especially those on the committee. The obstruction includes a manufactured ethics charge against Mr. Nunes that has deliberately been kept unresolved in the House Ethics Committee as part of an effort to keep a cloud hanging over Mr. Nunes so long as he continues to ask real questions about not only the Russians but our own government.

So what has Mr. Nunes’s committee found? Turns out that in the Obama years, especially in 2016, officials made many requests to unmask the identities of Americans, including Trump campaign officials, who were caught up in foreign surveillance.

When asked about it by PBS’s Judy Woodruff back in March, Obama national security adviser Susan Rice claimed she was “surprised” and told Ms. Woodruff “I know nothing about this.” Under oath before Mr. Nunes’s committee, Ms. Rice’s memory returned, and she admitted of unmasking senior figures in the Trump campaign.

Meanwhile the committee learned that Ms. Rice’s colleague at the United Nations, Ambassador Samantha Power, had made hundreds of unmasking requests. During Ms. Power’s appearance before the committee, she oddly claimed others were doing much of the asking—even though her name was on these requests. Did anyone outside the House committee think to ask why a Democratic White House was so free with such sensitive info in an election year?

Then there’s the Russian question. The Steele dossier is at the heart of the narrative that Mr. Trump had colluded with Moscow to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. Now the same people who pushed this narrative have lost all interest in the document that helped fuel it. When two of Fusion’s three partners invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination rather than reveal who paid for the dossier, it looked as though we might never find out. CONTINUE AT SITE