RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Americans deserve to know how Russia interfered in the 2016 campaign, but one problem with special prosecutors is that they exist to prosecute—someone, somewhere for something—more than they shed light. The latter should be Congress’s job, and the Members should keep pressing to tell the complete story.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for tax fraud on Monday, and the main charge against Donald Trump is poor judgment for hiring the notorious Beltway operator.

The indictment accuses Mr. Manafort (and business partner Richard Gates ) of funneling money from a pro-Russia party in Ukraine into offshore shell companies and bank accounts. They then allegedly used these accounts to fund their spending habits, neglecting to declare the money to the IRS.

The indictment also accuses Mr. Manafort of failing to register as an agent for a foreign government as required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). This is news mainly because violations of that law haven’t been successfully prosecuted since 1966. The Russia probe has exposed the degree to which lobbyists ignore this statute that the Justice Department has failed to enforce. (Democrat Anthony Podesta announced Monday that he is leaving his lobbying firm amid the Mueller probe. He is the brother of John Podesta, who ran Hillary Clinton’s campaign.)

The most striking news is that none of this involves the 2016 election campaign. The indictment makes clear that Mr. Manafort’s work for Ukraine and his money transfers ended in 2014. The 2016 charges are related to false statements Mr. Manafort made to the Justice Department.

In other words, Mr. Manafort stands accused of a financial and lobbying scam, which is exactly what Mr. Trump risked in hiring a swamp denizen. Mr. Manafort has lobbied for a rogues gallery of dictators, with the occasional domestic scandal (HUD contracts).

Separately, Mr. Mueller released a guilty plea by Trump campaign policy adviser George Papadopoulos for lying to the FBI in early 2017 about his interaction with “foreign nationals whom he understood to have close connections with senior Russian government officials.” The plea suggests Russians might have been attempting to supply the Trump campaign with opposition research on Hillary Clinton. But Mr. Mueller provides no evidence this happened.

One popular theory is that Mr. Mueller is throwing the book at Mr. Manafort so he will cop a plea and tell what he knows about Russian-Trump campaign chicanery. But that assumes he knows something that to date no Congressional investigation has found. Prosecutors typically try to turn witnesses before they indict, and Messrs. Manafort and Gates pleaded not guilty on Monday.

Meanwhile, we’ve learned in recent days that Fusion GPS, the oppo research firm hired by Democrats to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump, was hired initially by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website largely funded by GOP donor Paul Singer. This is embarrassing for the Free Beacon, which has been caught jumping in bed with sleazy operators like Fusion.

But none of this absolves Democrats from their role in financing Fusion to hire Christopher Steele, the former British spook, to collect information about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia. The Free Beacon says it had nothing to do with Mr. Steele or his dossier.

The admission is in; the sentence awaits us. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl admitted deserting his Afghan post and endangering fellow troops. By all accounts this is the most serious betrayal of presidential authority in my life time.

In 2014 President Obama attempted to cover Bergdahl with the achievement of a war hero, even inviting his Idaho based parents to the Rose Garden to celebrate news of his release. President Obama pointed out at the time that five Taliban leaders were freed from Guantanamo so that Bergdahl could be released from captivity. To gild the lily, National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, said Bergdahl served “the United States with honor and distinction.”

Yet everyone in the White House and the Pentagon knew this was a lie with monumental implications. In fact, Army officials refused to list Bergdahl as a POW. An internal 2009 Army report found that he walked off his post on more than one occasion and even said he wanted to join the ranks of the enemy. This report also noted he shipped his laptop back to Idaho with a note expressing his disillusionment with the American position in the war.

President Obama had all of this information at his disposal before he made a deal releasing Bergdahl. Why then did he mislead the American people? The answer can be found in the president’s desire to satisfy antiwar liberals keen on emptying Gitmo. At the Rose Garden event the president admitted as much when he said, “We’re committed to winding down the war in Afghanistan and closing Gitmo.” It is instructive that the CIA has evidence at least three of the released Taliban leaders have returned to the battlefield.

With this exchange and the elevation of Bergdahl’s rank, the president compromised national security knowingly and willfully. Although Bergdahl will not receive capital punishment when his sentence is determined, he probably should be tried as a traitor whose actions led directly to three soldiers seriously injured during search and rescue missions to find him. But if this fiasco is linked to American injuries and, perhaps deaths, one might well ask if the commander in chief should be held accountable as well.

The president’s dissimulation clearly violated the military code and has had a profound effect on morale. Those I know in the military invariably ask how a president could honor a deserter when he was fully aware of his prior actions. This, of course, wasn’t the first time President Obama allowed politics to determine a course of ethical behavior, but it may be among the most egregious examples. One intelligence official argued: “It’s probably a tie as to who is the bigger traitor” – Bergdahl or Obama. With a political ecology in which standards have been debased, many have attempted to rationalize President Obama’s decision. In my judgment, however, his actions that jeopardized national security should be fully investigated and, where blame exists, the full weight of public opinion should be employed to condemn the president and his assistants.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/453244/print

The Paul Manafort indictment is much ado about nothing . . . except as a vehicle to squeeze Manafort, which is special counsel Robert Mueller’s objective — as we have been arguing for three months (see here, here, and here).

Do not be fooled by the “Conspiracy against the United States” heading on Count One (page 23 of the indictment). This case has nothing to do with what Democrats and the media call “the attack on our democracy” (i.e., the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 election, supposedly in “collusion” with the Trump campaign). Essentially, Manafort and his associate, Richard W. Gates, are charged with (a) conspiring to conceal from the U.S. government about $75 million they made as unregistered foreign agents for Ukraine, years before the 2016 election (mainly, from 2006 through 2014), and (b) a money-laundering conspiracy.

There are twelve counts in all, but those are the two major allegations.

The so-called conspiracy against the United States mainly involves Manafort’s and Gates’s alleged failure to file Treasury Department forms required by the Bank Secrecy Act. Specifically, Americans who hold a stake in foreign bank accounts must file what’s known as an “FBAR” (foreign bank account report) in any year in which, at any point, the balance in the account exceeds $10,000. Federal law also requires disclosure of foreign accounts on annual income-tax returns. Manafort and Gates are said to have controlled foreign accounts through which their Ukrainian political-consulting income sluiced, and to have failed to file accurate FBARs and tax returns. In addition, they allegedly failed to register as foreign agents from 2008 through 2014 and made false statements when they belatedly registered.

In the money-laundering conspiracy, they are alleged to have moved money in and out of the United States with the intent to promote “specified unlawful activity.” That activity is said to have been their acting as unregistered foreign agents.

On first glance, Mueller’s case, at least in part, seems shaky and overcharged.

Even though the Ukrainian money goes back to 2006, the counts involving failure to file FBARs (Counts Three through Nine) go back only to 2012. This is likely because the five-year statute of limitations bars prosecution for anything before then. Obviously, one purpose of the conspiracy count (Count One) is to enable prosecutors, under the guise of establishing the full scope of the scheme, to prove law violations that would otherwise be time-barred.

The offense of failing to register as a foreign agent (Count Ten) may be a slam-dunk, but it is a violation that the Justice Department rarely prosecutes criminally. There is often ambiguity about whether the person’s actions trigger the registration requirement, so the Justice Department’s practice is to encourage people to register, not indict them for failing to do so.

It may well be that Manafort and Gates made false statements when they belatedly registered as foreign agents, but it appears that Mueller’s office has turned one offense into two, an abusive prosecutorial tactic that flouts congressional intent.

Specifically, Congress considers false statements in the specific context of foreign-agent registration to be a misdemeanor calling for zero to six months’ imprisonment. (See Section 622(a)(2) of Title 22, U.S. Code.) That is the offense Mueller charges in Count Eleven. But then, for good measure, Mueller adds a second false-statement count (Count Twelve) for the same conduct — charged under the penal-code section (Section 1001 of Title 18, U.S. Code) that makes any falsity or material omission in a statement to government officials a felony punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment.

Obviously, one cannot make a false statement on the foreign-agent registration form without also making a false statement to the government. Consequently, expect Manafort to argue that Mueller has violated double-jeopardy principles by charging the same exact offense in two separate counts, and that the special counsel is undermining Congress’s intent that the offense of providing false information on a foreign-agent registration form be considered merely a misdemeanor.

Finally, the money-laundering conspiracy allegation (Count Two) seems far from slam-dunk. For someone to be guilty of laundering, the money involved has to be the proceeds of criminal activity before the accused starts concealing it by (a) moving it through accounts or changing its form by buying assets, etc., or (b) dodging a reporting requirement under federal law.

Now, it is surely a terrible thing to take money, under the guise of “political consulting,” from an unsavory Ukranian political faction that is doing the Kremlin’s bidding. But it is not a violation of American law to do so. The violations occur when, as outlined above, there is a lack of compliance with various disclosure requirements. Mueller seems to acknowledge this: The money-laundering count does not allege that it was illegal for Manafort and Gates to be paid by the Ukrainian faction. It is alleged, rather, that they moved the money around to promote a scheme to function as unregistered foreign agents, and specifically to avoid the registration requirement.

That seems like a stretch. To be sure, the relevant money-laundering statute includes in its definition of “specified unlawful activity” “any violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938.” (See Section 1956(c)(2)(7)(D) of Title 18, U.S. Code.) But the prosecution still has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the money was the proceeds of unlawful activity in the first place. Moreover, the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that

Manafort and Gates (a) knew the money was the proceeds of illegal activity and (b) transported the money the way they did with the specific intent of avoiding having to register as foreign agents. This count will thus fail if there is any doubt that the Ukrainian money was illegal under American law, that Manafort and Gates knew it was illegal, that they knew the work they were doing required them to register as foreign agents, or that it was their intention to promote a failure-to-register violation.

Even from Paul Manafort’s perspective, there may be less to this indictment than meets the eye — it’s not so much a serious allegation of “conspiracy against the United States” as a dubious case of disclosure violations and money movement that would never have been brought had he not drawn attention to himself by temporarily joining the Trump campaign.

From President Trump’s perspective, the indictment is a boon from which he can claim that the special counsel has no actionable collusion case. It appears to reaffirm former FBI director James Comey’s multiple assurances that Trump is not a suspect. And, to the extent it looks like an attempt to play prosecutorial hardball with Manafort, the president can continue to portray himself as the victim of a witch hunt.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

The release of an NPR poll in which a majority of white people (55%) answered that they face racial discrimination was treated with the media’s usual cocktail of condescension, disbelief and contempt.

But it’s not up for debate.

Racial discrimination against white people today is as real as the discrimination against black people was under segregation. We can talk about subjective experiences and do statistical correlations about differential outcomes until the cows come home. And that’s what most talk about racism is these days.

That and emotional outbursts, cries of, “Hands up, don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe”.

But only one racial group in America is subject to a system of codes, regulations and laws discriminating against members of its race when it comes to employment and education.

Affirmative action is an inescapably real and racist as segregated water fountains.

Affirmative action is racial discrimination, not as a matter of opinion, but as a hard objective fact. Racial preferences reward and punish people based on their race. These preferences, no matter how they are disguised, pervade not just one region, the way that segregation did, but much of the country. Diversity is a mandate on campuses and in corporations across the country. And it’s the very definition of racism.

Defenders of affirmative action claim that such measures are necessary. And we can have that debate. But it’s really a debate defending racial discrimination by the government, by the educational system and by many of the country’s biggest corporations. And so before we have that debate, we should clarify that we are debating whether racial discrimination is sometimes justified.

And the side arguing for racial discrimination should not be allowed to legitimize its racism through weasel words like “reverse racism”. Racism is racism. No matter who the perpetrators and victims are.

Justifying racial discrimination is a repugnant idea. The defenders of affirmative action feel that they are justified. But George Wallace and Malcolm X felt the same way. Racists generally feel that they are justified. When their views are socially acceptable enough, they don’t even recognize their own racism.

The condescension, disbelief and contempt at that 55% number come from that willful blindness. And from class differences between white college educated elites and the white working class.

Working class white people are much more likely to feel discriminated against. But the perception of discrimination correlates across races with success and wealth. The poorer you are, the more likely you are to feel discriminated against. African-Americans have the highest perception of discrimination while Asian-Americans are the minority group with the lowest perception of discrimination.

But a majority of every racial group now feels discriminated against. And sizable majorities of every racial group blame the “prejudice of individual people” over government laws for their discrimination.

Antisthenes the Cynic, when informed that he had been applauded by bad men, said, “I’m horribly afraid I have done something wrong.” Too many Republicans need to learn that being praised by progressives is a bad sign.

The two latest examples of this failure of discernment are Senators Bob Corker and Jeff Flake. They have both announced that they will not run for reelection, at the same time recycling all the stale talking points about “presidential decorum” and “character” and “boorish behavior.” And like the NeverTrump Republicans, both pols have been praised by the progressive establishment. Here’s a tweet from long-time Senate operator Chuck Schumer: “Jeff Flake is one of the finest human beings I’ve met in politics. He is moral, upright, strong & will be missed in the Senate.”

These pats on the head are the reward for Flake’s being a reliable “good Republican” (i.e. Trump-hater). In a sympathetic story in The Washington Post, Flake’s “more-sorrow-than-anger” decision included pious pronouncements such as “I couldn’t sleep at night having to embrace the president or condoning his behavior or being okay with some of his positions,” he said. “I just couldn’t do it — it was never in the cards.” Hillary running-mate Tim Kaine tweeted that Flake is a “friend,” “a good man,” and “an honest broker.” And then they wonder why the average voter complains about the “deep state” and RINOs. They know that such praise is code for “a chump we can roll.”

Meanwhile, Republican voters can smell the moral preening and virtue-signaling from Flake a mile away. His haughty disdain for rank-and-file Republicans is obvious in the Post story when he calls support for Trump a “fever” he is “confident” will eventually “break.” In other words, only someone with a moral and cognitive disease could support such a political monster. But read the Post article carefully and Flake’s real careerist calculation becomes apparent. Here’s the key sentence: “The fight he picked with Trump followed years of cooperation with Democrats on immigration policy, global trade deals and reestablishing diplomatic ties to Cuba.”

That is, as a consequence of plumping for progressive policies anathema to average Republicans and common sense, Flake finds himself down by double-digits in the polls months before the primary. Maybe he’s acting on principle, or maybe he’s just showing some Falstaffian “valor,” which is defined by shamelessly seeing to one’s own best self-interests. Thus he validates the perception that establishment Republicans are more interested in their own status and self-regard than in undoing the decades of progressive misrule.

Similarly, Bob Corker, who acted as Obama’s political flak in supporting the atrocious Iran nuclear deal, claims he’s not running again because Trump is “debasing” the nation with his “reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior.” And he too has earned praise from establishment Democrats. Tim Kaine likened him to Flake in that they both are amenable to bipartisan cooperation “no matter what their leadership says, no matter what the polls say.” An ex Obama spokesman added, “we should embrace rational Republicans that are willing to stand up to Trump and to combat the erosion of democratic ideals and institutions.”

As usual, “bipartisan” in Prog Speak means giving the Dems what they want even when the policies–– like amnesty for illegal aliens, or letting a fanatical apocalyptic cult acquire nuclear weapons––are dangerously wrong-headed and contrary to the wishes of the voters. And speaking of “democratic institutions,” as much as the progressives have dismantled the Constitutional order, we still have one of the critical foundations of political freedom: regularly scheduled elections in which politicians are held accountable to the people. In the reckoning of the people of Tennessee, according to one poll, two-thirds of those who have paid “some” or “a lot” of attention to Corker’s spat with Trump disapprove of the Senator. The vox populi may not be the voice of God, but it will be the voice of doom when you ignore it.

A grand jury convened by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III has indicted an unidentified person on unspecified charges in Mueller’s off-the-rails investigation into the Trump campaign’s hypothesized electoral collusion with Russia, according to media reports.

The indictment could be unsealed as soon as today. Three congressional committees are also investigating the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), a former federal prosecutor, said the person concerned probably already knows what’s on its way. “Believe me, if you’re the person, you know,” Christie said on a public affairs show Sunday.

“If you’ve been told you’re a target, believe me, you’re not sleeping well anyway.”

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, speculated yesterday that the indictment could name former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort or former U.S. National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, both of whom quit their posts over ties to foreign governments. The two men may be at the top of Mueller’s list because foreign entanglements are what his probe is supposed to be about.

Meanwhile, it was reported over the weekend that the FBI has been investigating more than $3 million in suspicious wire transfers made in 2012 and 2013 by offshore companies linked to Manafort. The theory is that Manafort, who has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, may have helped the Ukrainian regime close to Russian President Vladimir Putin launder money.

Trump defenders say Mueller has too many serious conflicts of interest to be leading the probe and that the president should fire him. Mueller “has so many conflicts of interest it’s almost an absurdity,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said previously.

Mueller, whose investigative team is chock full of Democrats, may himself end up being implicated in the Russian uranium scandal.

As Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, The Hill newspaper reported recently that in 2009 the FBI “gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States.”

The FBI kept that information from Congress and the public … even as Hillary Clinton’s State Department in 2010 approved a deal that transferred control of more than 20% of America’s uranium supply to a Russian company. The Hill also reported the FBI had documents showing that during this period Russia engineered the transmission of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.

An informant is said to be ready to testify that a $500,000 fee a Russian concern paid to Bill Clinton for a single speech, along with the millions of dollars of so-called donations to the Clinton Foundation constitute a “quid pro quo” given in exchange for Hillary’s help.

“My client can put some meat on those bones and tell you what the Russians were saying during that time,” the informant’s lawyer, Victoria Toensing, told Fox News.

A political group tied to the former president — Obama for America (OFA) — paid nearly a million dollars to the same law firm used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary for America to funnel money to Fusion GPS, The Federalist reported Sunday. Fusion GPS is the shady opposition research firm behind the unverified Steele dossier.

OFA has paid over $972,000 to Perkins Coie, an international law firm, since April of 2016, Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show.

As the Washington Post reported, last week, FEC filings show that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid Perkins Coie a combined $12.4 million in 2016. Marc Elias, general counsel to Hillary for America and a partner at Perkins Coie, retained Fusion GPS in April of 2016 to dig up dirt on President Trump. In the spring and summer of 2016, Fusion GPS also received money indirectly from a senior Russian government official, according to Bill Browder, the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last July.

Fusion GPS calls itself a “research and strategic intelligence firm” but is well known in Washington to be an opposition-research group for Democrats. The firm’s founders are reportedly “more political activists than journalists” and in 2016 had “a pro-Hillary, anti-Trump agenda.”

Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, to compile a dossier on Trump.

The result was a salacious hodgepodge of unverified sexual allegations and political allegations that Trump and his campaign colluded with the Russian government during the 2016 election. According to top Russia expert David Satter, the dossier “employed standard Russian techniques of disinformation and manipulation.”

Via The Federalist:

OFA, Obama’s official campaign arm in 2016, paid nearly $800,000 to Perkins Coie in 2016 alone, according to FEC records. The first 2016 payments to Perkins Coie, classified only as “Legal Services,” were made April 25-26, 2016, and totaled $98,047. A second batch of payments, also classified as “Legal Services,” were disbursed to the law firm on September 29, 2016, and totaled exactly $700,000. Payments from OFA to Perkins Coie in 2017 totaled $174,725 through August 22, 2017.

FEC records as well as federal court records show that Marc Elias, the Perkins Coie lawyer whom the Washington Post reported was responsible for the payments to Fusion GPS on behalf of Clinton’s campaign and the DNC, also previously served as a counsel for OFA. In Shamblin v. Obama for America, a 2013 case in federal court in Florida, federal court records list Elias as simultaneously serving as lead attorney for both OFA and the DNC.

OFA, which grew out of Obama’s 2008 campaign, became “Organizing for Action,” a non-profit, tax-exempt group, in early 2013. The retooled organization was focused on building public support for his left-wing agenda in his second term. OFA relaunched again after the 2016 election to use its resources to oppose President Trump. CONTINUE AT SITE

On Friday, an anonymous source leaked to CNN that a federal grand jury had approved the filing of charges against a person involved in the Russian collusion investigation. CNN could not identify that person or the charges against him, and a spokesman from Robert Mueller’s special counsel office declined to comment.

The timing of this report is suspicious. Earlier in the week, the Hillary campaign and the DNC had been identified as having funded the famous Trump dossier, in which the first allegations of Trump-Russia collusion appeared. This had been the week’s top story, until the leak from Mueller’s office.

Is the special counsel’s office trying to divert media attention? Are Mueller’s people timing leaks to undercut the focus on Hillary? The leaker told CNN to expect an arrest today. When we learn the identity of the culprit and the charges against him, MSM commentators will speculate about what these new developments imply about Trump’s involvement and the future of his presidency, and Hillary’s pay-for-Russian-gossip story will be yesterday’s news.

Hillary has been on TV quite often these days as she’s gone around the country hawking her book What Happened. Up to now, she’s been taking questions from friendly moderators; on C-Span last week, she said, “Trump and his allies, including Fox News, are really experts at distraction and diversion.” Projection, anyone?

Hillary continued: “So the closer the investigation about real Russian ties between Trump associates and real Russians… the more they just want to throw mud on the wall. I’m their favorite target. Me and President Obama, we are the ones they like to put in the crosshairs.”

As Hillary’s book tour proceeds with ten more appearances before the end of the year, it will be interesting to see if she continues to take questions and whether she continues to speak about “ties between Trump associates and real Russians.” In light of recent information, that message would appear to be non-operational.

In the meantime, the investigative calendar is packed. A former FBI informant has just been released from an FBI-imposed nondisclosure agreement and will testify before Congress about his personal knowledge concerning the Russian purchase of Uranium One. Expect new revelations about Clinton corruption.

And expect more anonymous leaks from Mueller’s office.

The Trump presidency has been consumed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s efforts to uncover collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Mr. Mueller reportedly has secured one or more indictments that he will announce Monday. Some Republicans now seek a new special counsel to investigate if the Clinton Campaign “colluded” with Russians to smear Candidate Trump, along with other aspects of the Clintons’ relationship with Russia and Russian nationals. But one special counsel already is one too many.

During the 1980s and ’90s, American politics was repeatedly distorted, and lives devastated, through the appointment of independent counsels under the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act. These constitutionally anomalous prosecutors were given unlimited time and resources to investigate officials, including President Clinton, and scandals, such as Iran-Contra. Once appointed, almost all independent counsels built little Justice Departments of their own and set out to find something—anything—to prosecute. Hardly anyone lamented the expiration of this pernicious law in 1999.

But special counsels, appointed by the attorney general and in theory subject to Justice Department oversight, haven’t proved any better in practice. Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already morphed into an open-ended inquiry. It is examining issues—like Donald Trump’s private business transactions—that are far removed from the Russian question. It also has expanded its focus beyond the original question of collusion with the Russians to whether anyone involved in the Russia investigation has committed some related offense. That is evident from investigators’ efforts to interview White House aides who were not involved in the 2016 campaign, and from leaks suggesting that Mr. Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey might have “obstructed” justice.

That claim is frivolous, and it damages America’s constitutional fabric even to consider it. A president cannot obstruct justice through the exercise of his constitutional and discretionary authority over executive-branch officials like Mr. Comey. If a president can be held to account for “obstruction of justice” by ending an investigation or firing a prosecutor or law-enforcement official—an authority the constitution vests in him as chief executive—then one of the presidency’s most formidable powers is transferred from an elected, accountable official to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats and judges.

Mr. Mueller’s investigation has been widely interpreted as partisan from the start. Mr. Trump’s opponents instantaneously started talking of impeachment—never mind that a special counsel, unlike an independent counsel, has no authority to release a report to Congress or the public. Mr. Trump’s supporters count the number of Democratic donors on the special-counsel staff. The Mueller investigation is fostering tremendous bitterness among Trump voters, who see it as an effort by Washington mandarins to nullify their votes.

Mr. Trump can end this madness by immediately issuing a blanket presidential pardon to anyone involved in supposed collusion with Russia or Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign, to anyone involved with Russian acquisition of an American uranium company during the Obama administration, and to anyone for any offense that has been investigated by Mr. Mueller’s office. Political weaponization of criminal law should give way to a politically accountable democratic process. Nefarious Russian activities, including possible interference in U.S. elections, can and should be investigated by Congress.

Partisan bitterness will not evaporate if lawmakers take up the investigation. But at least those conducting the inquiry will be legitimate and politically accountable. And the question of whether Russia intervened in the 2016 election, and of whether it made efforts to influence U.S. policy makers in previous administrations, is first and foremost one of policy and national security, not criminal law.

The president himself would be covered by the blanket pardon we recommend, but the pardon power does not extend to impeachment. If Congress finds evidence that he was somehow involved in collusion with Russia, the House can determine whether to begin impeachment proceedings. Congress also is better equipped, as part of its oversight role, to determine whether and how the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence agencies might have been involved in the whole affair, including possible misuse of surveillance and mishandling of criminal investigations. CONTINUE AT SITE