RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/419193-trump-russia-and-lessons-from-the-mob-did-godfathers-steer-collusion

Back in the mafia’s heyday, FBI and IRS agents had a set of surveillance rules.

If one mobster showed up in town, pay notice. If two arrived, be suspicious. If three or four were in the same vicinity, something was going down.

And if five or more headed to the same neck of the woods, a meeting of consiglieri or La Cosa Nostra’s council was likely happening. (This, because there were always five families in New York and some adjunct families elsewhere that made up the council’s leadership.)

There also was another rule of thumb: Mobsters would always have the same calling card, or excuse, to be in town. Attending a funeral (the mid-1980s mob meeting in Chicago) or a vacation in the sticks (the infamous 1957 gathering in upstate New York) were some of the more memorable ones.

Early in my reporting that unraveled the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion probe, tying it to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and possible Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuses, I started to see patterns just as in the old mob meetings: FBI or intelligence-connected figures kept showing up in Trump Town USA during the 2016 campaign with a common calling card.

The question now is, who sent them and why?

Interviews with more than 50 witnesses in the Trump case and reviews of hundreds of pages of court filings confirm the following:

At least six people with long-established ties to the FBI or to U.S. and Western intelligence made entrees to key figures in the Trump business organization or his presidential campaign between March and October 2016;

Campaign figures were contacted by at least two Russian figures whose justification for being in the United States were rare law enforcement parole visas controlled by the U.S. Justice Department;

Intelligence or diplomatic figures connected to two of America’s closest allies, Britain and Australia, gathered intelligence or instigated contacts with Trump campaign figures during that same period;

Some of the conversations and contacts that were monitored occurred on foreign soil and resulted in the creation of transcripts;

Nearly all of the contacts involved the same overture — a discussion about possible political dirt or stolen emails harmful to Hillary Clinton, or unsolicited business in London or Moscow;

Several of the contacts occurred before the FBI formally launched a legally authorized probe into the Trump campaign and possible collusion on July 31, 2016.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/robert-mueller-plan-trump-russia-investigation-report-not-case/
Special Counsel Mueller is building a report, not a case.

R ight after Special Counsel Robert Mueller racked up yet another guilty plea to a false-statements charge on Thursday, a friend asked me, “Doesn’t this destroy Michael Cohen’s credibility as a witness?”

Easier to destroy Satan’s conscience, I thought. Cohen would have to have some credibility before it could be destroyed, and how much could reside in a self-described “fixer” who openly compared himself to Tom Hagen, the lawyer-gangster in The Godfather. (I’ll stipulate that he has a law degree, but Cohen has always struck me as the Fredo of Trump World.)

Nevertheless, the flaw in my friend’s question was not the assumption that Cohen had some smidgeon of value as a witness until it was extirpated by his plea of guilty to lying to Congress (after he had already, in August, pled guilty lying to a financial institution, among other fraudulence). The real flaw was the assumption that Special Counsel Mueller is lining up witnesses and building a criminal case, like prosecutors do.

He is not.

No prosecutor builds a case the way Mueller is going about it. What prosecutor says, “Here’s our witness line-up: Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Alex van der Zwaan, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen. And what is it that they have in common, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? Bingo! They’re all convicted liars.”?

For a prosecutor, like any trial lawyer, what the jury thinks is at least as important as what the law says. If the most memorable thing the jury takes into the deliberation room is that no one should believe a word your witnesses say, you are not going to convict the lowliest grifter, much less the president of the United States of America.

As a prosecutor, you build a case by having your cooperating accomplice witnesses plead guilty to the big scheme you are trying to pin on the main culprit. After all, what makes these witnesses accomplices, literally, is that they were participants in the main culprit’s crime. That’s the scheme you’re trying to prove. So, on guilty-plea day, the cooperator comes into court and admits guilt to the same conspiracy on which you are trying to nail the lead defendant.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-and-racial-division-1543621887

Democrats are taking racial politics to new heights—and no wonder, since the tactic has again succeeded. This week Republican Senator Tim Scott said he will oppose the nomination of Thomas Farr, tapped for a federal judgeship in North Carolina. Senator Jeff Flake is voting no to showcase his opposition to Donald Trump, and the two GOP defections are enough to torpedo Mr. Farr’s appointment this year.

Mr. Scott cited legal work that Mr. Farr performed decades ago for North Carolina’s then-Senator Jesse Helms. After the 1990 election, the Justice Department accused Helms of trying to intimidate black voters by sending a postcard claiming that people who recently moved were ineligible to cast ballots. Mr. Farr defended Helms in the matter. But he told the Senate last year that he wasn’t consulted on the postcard’s content and didn’t know it had been sent until Justice sent a letter to the campaign.

A 1991 internal Justice memo, published this week, says that Mr. Farr, who also had coordinated “ballot security” for Helms in the 1984 election, discussed the idea of sending some kind of postcard in 1990, but that he counseled against it. Nonetheless, Mr. Scott said Thursday that the memo “shed new light on Mr. Farr’s activities” and “created more concerns.”

There’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of Mr. Scott, the Senate’s only black Republican. But Democrats will see Mr. Farr’s defeat as a vindication of their most underhanded and inflammatory racial tactics.
***

Consider a second complaint against Mr. Farr: that the North Carolina Legislature retained him to defend its 2013 voter-ID law. “This is a man who stands for disenfranchisement of voters, particularly minority voters,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said this week. In a letter last year, four members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote that in Mr. Farr the White House could hardly have found a nominee “with a more hostile record on African-American voting rights.”William Barber II, a former leader of the North Carolina NAACP, called Mr. Farr “a product of the modern white supremacist machine.”