DiGenova mentioned President Obama's key role in perpetuating Russiagate almost in passing because everyone who's closely followed the story most assuredly believes it was Obama who cooked up the hoax, which was designed to put a crimp in Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency and if worst came to worst, eject him from White House if he won the election.
But Americans would want to listen closely to DiGenova's discussion of fallout from the Attorney General's summary of the Special Counsel's report, which has dominated the news in the United States since it was released on March 24. In a few words, DiGenova conveyed the scope of the rot that has eaten away at the American justice system. The rot was there even before Barack Obama took office; all Obama did was take advantage of the rot, which under his watch also ate away at the top echelon at the FBI.
So where do we go from here?
We await the publication of the Special Counsel's full report, which several congressional Democrats and Republicans are calling for, although it's iffy whether this will include all the documentation, including grand jury testimony, that Robert Mueller's team collected. (At the moment the Senate majority leader is blocking a nonbinding resolution calling for the immediate release of the full report, citing national security concerns.) But the AG's summary of the report has already made clear that conspiracy and collusion charges against Trump are off the table, meaning the Democrats can kiss goodbye to their hope of impeaching Trump.
All the Democrats are left with is the straw of cooking up an obstruction of justice charge against Trump. But this straw is more a ghost of a straw, given that there is no underlying crime to obstruct and that Trump was acting well within his authority when he fired FBI Director James Comey.
The best the Democrats can do is use their control of the U.S. House of Representatives to launch investigations that will lead nowhere but will give the Democratic Party-controlled news media yet more fodder with which to continue crapping up the U.S. news cycle with Russiagate stories. This could continue all the way up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond if voters return Trump to the White House.
The Republicans for their part are waiting for the next report from the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General. From an op-ed for Fox News, March 25, by a former FBI Assistant Director, Chris Swecker:
Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s highly anticipated report on Russian collusion is complete, it is time to focus on the other half of the equation: Did members of the intelligence community [more to the point, the domestic justice community] “weaponize” their powers for the purpose of discrediting a political campaign and a sitting president? Fortunately, there is an ongoing Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigation that addresses this and other important questions.
It is critical for this country to know if a small cadre of Justice Department and FBI executives abused and violated U.S. laws and guidelines on the conduct of investigations when former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe rushed to open an investigation into a sitting president for obstruction of justice.
McCabe was angry and reacting to the president’s firing of his boss, former FBI Director James Comey, for insubordination and violating well-established DOJ procedures and possibly U.S. laws in exonerating Hillary Clinton in a grandstanding press conference in July 2016.
The OIG is also looking at the role played by a seedy “dossier” [the Steele Dossier] containing opposition research that was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. That unsubstantiated document found its way into an FBI FISA warrant application to spy on the Trump campaign, which was granted just weeks before the 2016 election.
Rather than conduct more kangaroo investigations, as House Democrats seem intent to do, Congress should spend our taxpayer dollars designing remedial legislation to fix the systemic problems within the Department of Justice that we have seen play out over the last two years.
There is plenty of material to work with, as the DOJ OIG has already completed and published two extremely thorough investigations. The results of a third significant inquiry will soon be released, which may well be the most important and potentially impactful.
[...]Is the Democrats' sturm and drang in the wake of the AG's summary of the Special Counsel's findings an attempt to distract national public attention from the OIG's next report? That could be part of it. But they could always say that Barr is a Trump go-fer and that Barr tainted the Justice Department's OIG. (Different federal agencies have their own OIGs to handle complaints of misconduct.)
However, the Republicans could also launch counter-investigations in response to Democratic-led investigations, including naming another Special Counsel to investigate the role of Hillary Clinton and other top officials in the Obama administration in instigating and sustaining Russiagate, which was already been shown to be nothing more than a political hoax. The hoax turned on what's called in the political industry "opposition research," in this case famously constructed by a 'former' British MI6 operative named Christopher Steele.
Could a new Special Counsel reach as high as investigating Obama himself? On paper, yes, but somehow I don't envision him having to answer questions from the FBI or any Special Counsel or congressional committee. Obama is untouchable, although this might change if he decides to put his wife into the running for the Democratic Party's nominee for U.S. President in 2020.
In short, we now have what Americans call a Mexican Standoff, with Democrats and Republicans making threats, calling each other bad names, and challenging each other to shoot first.
As to whether the standoff will continue after the publication of some version of the Special Counsel's report, due maybe sometime in April, cooler heads on both sides are saying, 'Can we just please move on from Russiagate and focus on the business of governing?'
The problem with this commonsense suggestion is that for two years the Americans who believed Trump must have somehow stolen the presidency from Hillary Clinton were strung along by Democratic Members of Congress and the Democratic Party-controlled news media. These kept holding out the hope to Americans devastated by Clinton's loss that any day now Trump would be charged with treason for helping Vladimir Putin throw the American presidential election in his favor -- an impossibility, by the way, given that the election is governed the Electoral College, which is a state-by-state process.
The vast majority of such Americans remain to this day completely unaware that Donald Trump won the presidency because his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, orchestrated an absolutely brilliant "ground game" as it's called in the political industry, and Trump had the intelligence to appreciate that Kushner was on the right track.
Hillary Clinton either ignored Kushner's ground game or discounted it. She and her closest aides were living in a bubble; they were certain she had the presidency locked in.
As to why the majority of Americans don't know about the brilliant ground game, because it was only reported to the public once to my knowledge, in one publication, a financial magazine, and the Democratic National Party and its media flunkies refused to discuss the report. They and Clinton preferred to blame a conspiracy between Trump and Putin for her loss.
What might resolve the standoff is if Democratic Party bosses concede that keeping Russiagate limping along is not a winning strategy for the 2020 election.
As to the rest, namely trying to ward off a repeat of a massive political hoax, house-cleaning is needed in key American federal agencies. With regard to Russiagate, the rot was pretty much confined to the top floors of the FBI and Justice Department as Swecker's op-ed indicated, and the CIA. The lower echelons are filled with many 'lifers' -- people who make careers out of staying with one U.S. agency and take pride in avoiding political partisanship in their jobs. But the top slots are political appointees. There are regulations governing all U.S. federal agencies that are designed to guard against the worst abuses of these positions but clearly, these collapsed during the Obama years.
In any case, it will be up to Barr in his role as Attorney General to get control of the upper echelon of the Justice Department, which he's already given evidence he's doing.
And as Joe DiGenova pointed out yesterday, it will also be up to Barr to get control of the U.S. District Federal Courts, which have long been run like duchies, and with the Southern District of New York Court seemingly functioning as Obama's go-fer. Barr can do this by strongly reminding these district courts that they are not local and they're under the jurisdiction of the federal U.S. Department of Justice.
As to cleaning up the 'secret' FISA court, which played a key role in getting Russiagate off the ground by accepting as evidence the Steele Dossier in signing off on at least one warrant to secretly surveil Trump's campaign -- I don't know whether the AG's authority extends to that court; if not, it might take an Act of Congress or even the Supreme Court stepping in if only to publicly wag a finger at the court.
As to shutting down the FISA Court entirely, there have been calls to do this ever since Edward Snowden blew the lid off secret surveillance of American citizens in the USA. I think all we can know at this time is that some kind of action will be taken to rein in the FSIA Court in the wake of the Special Counsel's Russiagate findings, although this might occur behind closed doors if the court remains.
Regarding the CIA, if what happened at the U.S. Department of State when Trump first came to the White House is any guide, my assumption is that he put Mike Pompeo in charge at the CIA to gut departments and/or factions at the division levels that had confused loyalty to Barack Obama with loyalty to the United States of America. In any case, when Trump transferred Pompeo to State, he replaced him at the CIA with a tough-minded woman who by all accounts (so far) does things "by the book."
Regarding the FBI -- the worst offenders in the top echelon are already gone from the agency, leaving the demoralized lower echelons to pick up the pieces. But they are doing this under the AG's watchful eye; the FBI reports directly to the Department of Justice. As to the present FBI director, I will assume he was chosen because he also does things by the book and doesn't bump into the furniture.
To sum, Barack Obama famously said in October 2008, in the closing days of his first run for the White House, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
Although he backed away from the statement in 2014 in reply to a direct question from a Fox News TV host, only Americans who wend their way through a "wilderness of mirrors" to study Russiagate will ever know how close Obama came to keeping his word.
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2 comments:
*applause* I was wondering when you would weigh in, thank you.
Thank you, Piercello. Yes, I'm going back into the burning building. Not happy about it.
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