RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/the-olc-guidance-against-indicting-a-sitting-president/

After Mueller, it is worth another look at its role in the report and its fallout.

T his is Part Two of a two-part series. In Part One, we took a look at the OLC guidance that bars the indictment of a sitting president. (The OLC is the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.) In particular, we looked at (a) how, in investigating President Trump for purported obstruction, special counsel Robert Mueller’s staff distorted the guidance into a prohibition against even considering whether an offense occurred; and (b) the futile hope of congressional Democrats, during Wednesday’s hearings, that Mueller would contradict his final report on this point.

In Part Two, we explore why Mueller’s staff of very able lawyers, many of them activist Democrats, twisted the OLC guidance. (Spoiler: Their priority was to get their evidence to Congress, intact and as quickly as possible, in hopes of fueling an impeachment drive, or at least damaging Trump politically.) We also analyze how attorney general Bill Barr deftly dealt with the Mueller staff’s gamesmanship.

As we observed at the end of Part One, Mueller’s report makes the whopper of the claim that prosecutors construed to OLC guidance to forbid them to make a charging decision on obstruction because they were trying to protect President Trump.

How’s that?

Well, Justice Department protocols prohibit prosecutors from prejudicing suspects by publicizing the evidence against them unless and until they are formally charged. The idea is that the government must refrain from speaking until it files an indictment. For at that point, the person becomes an “accused” under the Constitution, vested with all the due process guarantees our law provides: assistance of counsel, confrontation of witnesses, subpoena power — the full array of rights to challenge the government’s indictment.

https://www.steynonline.com/columns-essays
Not sure it’s possible to tally up how many times special counsel Robert Mueller claimed he couldn’t say, wouldn’t say or simply didn’t know during his testimony yesterday before congress. Odd that a guy who’s supposedly been looking under every rock and behind every door for evidence of Russian collusion now sees everything as “outside of my purview.”

Front and center during the testimony, in particular during Republican congressman Jim Jordan’s questioning of Mueller, was the role of Maltese “professor” Joseph Mifsud, who disappeared from public view in 2017. Of course, Mueller couldn’t get into it.

Mifsud’s part in all this is also central to what happened to George Papadopoulos, whom Mark interviewed earlier this year.

Given the renewed relevance of the Papadopoulos affair, we’re also making the transcript of Part 1 of the interview available below to all our readers.

Transcript:

Mark: Hey welcome along and my guest today is the author of the book, Deep State Target, the subtitle’s worth reading too: How I got caught in the crosshairs of the plot to bring down President Trump.

And if you watch a lot of the media, read a lot of the big mainstream newspapers you’ll be thinking “Hey that’s crazy talk.” And what makes this book such a great read is because most of us would think that was just crazy talk until the slow dawning realization that we’re in the middle of a terrible setup.

My guest today is the man who was at the center of that setup, George Papadopoulos. George is an ex-convict; he’s actually served time in jail for a phony baloney non-crime, the crime of misremembering to the FBI, which in fact should not exist as any crime at all. When they can’t get you on anything they get you on misremembering and as a result George went to jail for a fortnight but he got two days off for good behavior so he was out in 12 days and we are thrilled to have him with us.

George I’d like to ask you because basically it’s because of your involvement with the Trump campaign that all this happened to you and you were very unusual because you were working at a Washington think tank and you saw Donald Trump come down that escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 and unlike a lot a swamp dwellers you were pro-Trump from that first appearance, correct?

https://housely.com/dangerous-neighborhoods-baltimore/

10 of the Most Dangerous Neighborhoods in Baltimore
Orangeville.
Cherry Hill. …
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West Baltimore. Topping the list is the West Baltimore neighborhood. …

This is what Cummings an unrelenting “impeachnick” said on July 24 about the President after the Mueller meeting in Congress:

Cummings:

CUMMINGS: I first wanted to applaud Chairman Nadler and–who heads our judiciary committee and certainly our chairman of intelligence committee for what they did today and their committees. What they did was paint a picture for America.

One of the most chilling things that I have noticed that–that I’ve witnessed is when a member of–former member of our committee, Mr. Amash, a Republican, went to his town hall meeting and got a round of applause in a Republican district after he had said that he felt that the president should be impeached. But that wasn’t the thing that got me. What really got me was when a lady at the end of the–the town hall meeting said I didn’t know that there was anything negative in the Mueller report about President Trump. That says a lot.

And to her credit, our Speaker made it clear that we needed to paint a picture for America for they could–so that they could fully understand what is going on. This is a critical moment in–and our country’s history. Don’t–don’t be fooled. And it is a moment which people will be talking about and reading about 3, 400, 500 years from now. And they are going to ask the question what did you do when we had a president who–who knew the rules and knew that our founding fathers had done a great job of creating a constitution and had put in all the guardrails but never anticipated that we would have a president that would just throw away the guardrails.

And that’s why what happened today is so critical. It was a giant step in making sure that the American people were–got a picture of all of this and hopefully will look towards the future and say we’re not going to have this. Both Mr. Nadler and Mr. Schiff said something that’s very critical. This isn’t normal.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/resistance-inc/Why impeachment isn’t going away.

Trump supporters are right to feel vindication after Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress. At times the special counsel seemed unfamiliar with the contents of his own report. He came across as aloof and confused and often unable to answer both Democratic and Republican questions to the lawmakers’ satisfaction. The same media figures that began the day saying Mueller’s appearance might be the game changer ended up calling it a flop. “Democrats now have one option to end Trump’s presidency,” read the headline of Dan Balz’s analysis in the Washington Post. “The 2020 election.” Trump, as always, put it more memorably: “truth is a force of nature!”

The real truth is Mueller’s testimony was never going to interrupt preexisting trends. Support for impeachment has been stable for a year at around 40 percent in the Fox News poll of registered voters. Fox asks, “Do you think President Trump should be impeached and removed from office, or not?” In June 2018, 39 percent of respondents answered yes. Last week, 42 percent said the same. Opposition to impeachment has hovered around 50 percent during all this time. When the most recent Fox News poll asked if Mueller’s testimony might cause voters to change how they felt about Trump, only 8 percent said there was a strong chance of that happening. Forty-nine percent said not at all.

Views of President Trump are cast iron. Mueller might have overturned this equilibrium by offering new evidence incriminating Trump or by saying definitively that Trump obstructed justice. He did neither. Nor was he going to. It was clear from his May press conference that Mueller did not want to appear before Congress and that he had said all he was willing to say in his report. The negotiations over his testimony that stretched into midsummer, the sudden delay of his testimony by a week, and the addition of his chief of staff as counsel further indicated his reluctance as well as his lack of assurance before the cameras. The presence on the committee of Republicans hostile to Mueller’s investigation and to his findings meant that the hearing would not be entirely favorable to Democrats. Sure enough, Mueller’s performance was a disappointment.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/trump-goes-nuclear-on-cummings-his-dist

It misinterprets the rule against indicting a sitting president.

Editor’s Note: This is the first article in a two-part series; the second will appear tomorrow.

Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony was such a bumbling fiasco that it was easy for a viewer to be confused — and stay that way — about the main bone of Democratic contention regarding his report: the “OLC guidance” that prevents the Justice Department from charging a president with crimes while he is in office. Specifically, how did it factor into the special counsel’s decision — or, rather, non-decision — on the main question he was appointed to answer: Did President Trump obstruct justice? How did the special counsel’s dubious reliance on it as a rationale for abdicating on this question affect the publication and ramifications of the Mueller report?

We’ve plowed this ground before, but it is worth revisiting. We will do that in this weekend’s two-part series. This is Part 1.

The OLC Guidance

The OLC is the Office of Legal Counsel, the lawyers’ lawyers in the Justice Department who formulate policies that guide federal prosecutors throughout the United States. The OLC guidance at issue in the Mueller investigation is the prohibition on indicting a sitting president. This rule is said to be derived from constitutional and prudential considerations.

I do not believe the guidance is sound. But that’s beside the point: The guidance is binding on Justice Department lawyers, period. That means it is also binding on special counsels. By regulation, they are firmly in the Justice Department chain of command.

Consequently, the OLC guidance applied to Mueller’s investigation of President Trump. In particular, it was relevant to the obstruction aspect of the probe, which was always a criminal investigation. (For reasons that need not divert us, the “collusion” part of the case was pretextually conducted as a counterintelligence investigation.)

Because (a) the president was the principal subject of the obstruction probe and (b) the objective of such a criminal investigation is to indict wrongdoers, the pertinence of the OLC guidance is obvious. The question is: What is the effect of its application?

https://pjmedia.com/trending/amazon-purges-reviews-of-bestselling-anti-obama-book/

Reports of Amazon purging reviews from conservatives books on their site have been made for some time now. PJ Media’s Megan Fox reported in March 2018 that many conservative authors noticed a mass deletion of reviews. Well, another purge has taken place. This one targeted my book, The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. This book was approaching 1,000 reviews until Amazon decided to clean house. On Tuesday, the book had 945 reviews. On Wednesday, the book had only 693 reviews. A whopping 252 reviews (approximately 27 percent) simply vanished. Worse yet, most of the purged reviews appear to have been positive ones, as the average rating went down from roughly 4.5+ to 4.2 stars.

I can prove this because I have screenshots:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274432/weissmann-dossier-kenneth-r-timmerman

Anyone who watched more than a few minutes of Wednesday’s painful hearings with former Special Counsel Robert Mueller discovered a sad truth the Democrats and many in the media continue to hide: Mueller neither wrote his report nor did he master the content of it.

Repeatedly during the day, the former FBI director stumbled over what we had been told were his findings. He slowly leafed through a binder, searching for passages that lawmakers were quoting to him, only to say “okay” or “true” when he finally found them.

In the morning’s hearing at the House Judiciary committee, Rep. Doug Collins asked Mueller if “conspiracy” – the criminal law term used in the first part of his report about Russia – and the vernacular term, “collusion” were the same thing. Mueller replied, “No.”

Taken aback, Collins asked if he was changing his earlier testimony – ie, the report – which stated on page 180 that collusion and conspiracy were the same. When Mueller finally found the passage, he withdrew his earlier testimony and stood by the report.

Rep. Collins – and frankly, every member of the two committees who questioned Mueller – had the elegance not to state the obvious: Mueller was non compus mentis.

During the afternoon hearing, Rep. Peter Welch, D, Va, again asked whether he had found collusion. This time, Mueller was so far gone, he couldn’t find his words.

“We don’t use the word collusion,” he said. “The word we usually use is-ah-not collusion-ah. But one of the other-ah-terms that-ah-ah-that fills in when collusion is not used. In any event, we decided not to use the word collusion in so much as it has no relevance to the criminal law arena.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/nadlers-trump-hunt-is-dead-and-hes-the-only-one-who-doesnt-know/

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) on Friday outlined details of what he and the House Judiciary Committee will continue doing to further beat the dead horse that is his witch hunt investigation into President Trump.

To much of America, it came off as more of a cry for help. Here is a thirty-six second snippet of Nadler’s babble-fest:

House Judiciary Cmte. will file an application today for the grand jury material underlying the Mueller report, Chairman Nadler says.

For the past couple of years Democrats have been waiting for Robert Mueller to be their Santa Claus, delivering them a litany of impeachable offenses all neatly wrapped up with a pretty bow on top.

When Santa wrote them a letter in the form of the special counsel report and it didn’t include any clear mention of the presents, they were convinced that he would most definitely bring them in person.

So they subpoenaed him.

When Santa came down the Capitol Hill chimney on Wednesday all he brought with him to give the Democrats was a big bag of coal, which he then awkwardly delivered.

Almost everyone but the Democrats knew it was coal.