Speaking of a difference of opinion, although I agree with James Freeman about the dangers we’re facing in the too cozy relationship among the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Department of Justice, I disagree with his proposed solution. We already know that the Clinton campaign and the DNC were involved in what amounted to a criminal conspiracy to evade the campaign financing laws, siphoning off state and local funds into the Clinton campaign’s coffers. Things being the way they are they’ll never be prosecuted.
Here’s the way he portrays the situation:
The Wall Street Journal reports:
A top FBI agent and an FBI lawyer, who were involved in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email arrangement and the probe into Russian electoral meddling, exchanged texts disparaging then-candidate Donald Trump, including calling him an “idiot†and a “menace,†according to copies of the messages the Justice Department provided Congress.
Peter Strzok, 47 years old, was one of the highest-ranking agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was removed from his post with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling this past summer after a Justice Department watchdog launched an inquiry into the texts.
The messages between Mr. Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page include one in which Ms. Page tells him in August 2016: “Maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace.â€The New York Times reports on another 2016 text:
On July 27, Ms. Page wrote, “She just has to win now. I’m not going to lie, I got a flash of nervousness yesterday about Trump.†That text message was sent after the Clinton investigation had been closed. Days later, the F.B.I. began investigating possible coordination between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.
Recently the Journal’s Kim Strassel noted the stone wall against congressional oversight that has been constructed by Mr. Mueller, his Department of Justice colleagues, and Mr. Mueller’s deputies, many of whom have demonstrated their political opposition to the President.
Is there really no way to run a special counsel’s office or a federal law enforcement agency without appointing liberal political activists—or at least people with close ties to the President’s adversaries—to senior roles?
Simply stated, that isn’t the way our government and politics are supposed to work. Campaigns should not control political parties and Justice Department investigators shouldn’t be political operatives. And there shouldn’t be such close ties between Justice Department officials and oppo research organization as this:
A co-founder of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS acknowledged in a new court document that his company hired the wife of a senior Justice Department official to help investigate then-candidate Donald Trump last year.
The confirmation from Glenn Simpson came in a signed declaration filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., and provided a fuller picture of the nature of Nellie Ohr’s work – after Fox News first reported on her connection to Fusion GPS.
Her husband, Bruce Ohr, was demoted at the DOJ last week for concealing his meetings with the same company, which commissioned the anti-Trump “dossier†containing salacious allegations about the now-president.
At the very least it conveys the impression of corruption. Caesar’s wife should be above reproach. However, this solution:
The better path is the constitutional one. The existing special counsel should resign, given numerous documented conflicts of interest, and let the President direct federal law enforcement as the law demands. If voters don’t like his execution of the laws, they can fire him and hire a replacement in 2020.
Does anybody believe that the Trump Administration is capable of investigating itself? Or even willing to? Or that turning the DOJ from an anti-Trump political advocacy group to a pro-Trump political advocacy group would be an improvement?
It’s certainly a tangled web. There are far too many conflicts of interest.
Trump is screwed. It’s the Russian money and his idiot circle talking with Russians and then lying about it. Plus he almost certainly, in a technical way, obstructed justice. And if he fires Mueller, they’re just going to leak everything they have, which will, in the end, make him look like a whore for Russian money.
He’s not going to get impeached. But so what? His defenders are literally banging on the fact that two FBI agents called him an ‘idiot’ in text messages to their spouses. Oh no–his Secretary of State called him a ‘fucking idiot.’ Maybe there’s another agent who called him a ‘dumb-ass motherfucker’. I’m sure The Federalist can hire some hack to faint about all of this, but normal people are going to put it on Trump rather than Hillary Clinton, who kicked it anyway and is not, thank god, coming back.
The GOP really needs for him to have a heart attack and die in office. But as Hunter S. Thompson said–too weird to live and too rare to die.
Omitted in that excerpt, the same agent called Bernie Sanders an idiot, O’Malley from MD a douche (a Democrat) and hated Eric Holder. He says bad things about a lot of politicians, and what is concluded from that is that he is an activist against Trump. There was time 30-40 years ago, maybe even more recently, that making fun of politicians was pretty normal behavior.
BTW, I have yet to see one real conflict of interest for Mueller. Just made up stuff.
Steve
This was not even the worst; there’s a text where Strzok mentioned an “insurance†policy Page had discussed with the deputy director in case Trump won.
So there is two ways to think about Comey in this affair; either he didn’t know what his underlings were up to, in which case he is an incompetent director even by the standards of the FBI, or he knew and was okay with it, in which case he better get a good lawyer.
I am puzzling over Mueller’s actions despite knowing all this since July. He thought it was bad enough to take Strzok off the case; but left all the clearly never Trumper prosecutors in place, creating a big image problem. Couldn’t he have found 10 prosecutors around the country who had not donated to Democrats but eager to make a name and take down Trump? If Mueller thinks he has a good case a delay of a couple of months to get new persecutors up to speed won’t make a difference in the long run.
Also, why did Mueller charge Flynn for lying to Strzok of all the things he could have charged him with? It looks to me Strzok sent up that meeting with ulterior motives then finding the truth about the contacts with the Russian ambassador.
CuriousOnlooker,
If there’s an insurance policy, it was to go after Trump for his illegal actions, or to make them up.
Good luck with proving the latter. Meanwhile, in the real world, everyone around Trump is putting safe distance between their roles and him. The Post is talking about how Trump thought admitting Russia was behind the DNC was a ‘trap’. Whoever said this wants to make him guilty, or at least pave the way for that to be the case. Is he a Russian spy? Compromised? Probably not. He’s a demented idiot. But when you get a sentence like this: The personal insecurities of the president — and his refusal to accept what even many in his administration regard as objective reality — have impaired the government’s response to a national security threat.–the knives are coming out with the option of it being more than mere insecurities.
I am definitely convinced of my errors.
Tonight, I shall ask Madame Defarge to knit onto her sweater Trump, everyone in his administration, and Putin!
That just tells us they’re Clintonistas, not that they’re not biased.
I’m not even arguing with you. Maybe you’re right. The FBI builds bad cases all the time. They’re police. Police arrest activists and charge them with conspiracy for being near a burning trash can.
I do think it’s hysterical that Trump–the guy who loves sheriffs into killing prisoners in their jails–and his Blue Lives Matter base is basically saying the FBI is a state psy-op that tricked them into lying multiple times about their contacts with Russia.
Maybe it’s a shock, but civil servants are people and thus are likely to have political opinions and preferences. Most are smart enough to at least keep up a professional appearance, but that gets more difficult in the age of digital and social media.
I haven’t followed this story much so I may be missing some facts, but it seems to me that taking them off the case should be sufficient.
It’s not having opinions and preferences that’s a problem, Andy. It’s acting on them. In particular how much of what’s going on is actually a violation of the Hatch Act? And how would you even tell?
There are some practical impacts.
The more it looks like the investigation and the FBI generally were improperly politicized, the more it justifies Trump firing Comey; a big aspect of Mueller’s investigation is obstruction of justice in regards to Comey’s firing.
It impacts the political legitimacy of the investigation. At the ultimate level should it get there; the judge and jury will be Congress and by extension the American people. If the investigation is seen by enough people as a “whale hunt” rather than a fair one, you can ask Ken Starr for the result.
Removing folks is one smart thing to do; another is to figure out how it affected any and all investigations as it relates to the 2016 campaign; and the 3rd is figure out rules for the FBI and DOJ so 2016 doesn’t recur.
There happens to be a middle ground between a set of rank Clinton partisans and having the Trumpers investigate themselves.
Every single time we hire counsel they run a conflict of interest check to see if there is any client relationship that could possibly be construed as a conflict. The Mueller investigation makes a mockery of that. It’s absurd, as comes out every day now.
Steve, I don’t believe you are stupid, but Mueller hand picked this crew. Hand picked. And then he very quietly put Strzok in HR, but did not fire him. Why do you say such transparently stupid things?
I think the moral of the current upheaval, in broad strokes, is that it is suddenly no longer possible to force others to accept any given narrative, and that has broad strategic implications.
I think this is more a technological matter of “gradually, and then all at once” then it is an explosive change, but suddenly, shouting down others with your own preferred explanation just isn’t working anymore. And that is a welcome sea change.
Ask Moore, Franken, Trump, the NFL Protesters, or any random armchair political commenters how effectively they are shaping other people’s narratives these days…
Assuming that narrative dominance will still carry the day is rapidly becoming a “last war” tactic, or the modern-day equivalent of the French infantry in WWI charging the German guns with little more than _elan_.
I still think the winning tactic is going to be forced for technological reasons to evolve toward building upon already established common ground (“us” rather than “us/them”), but there is going to be rather a lot of flailing about before the players figure it out.
I hope we survive.
Piercello: I like that. Thought.
Looking at some Harvard polling the Hill is reporting today:
“Do you think independent counsel Robert Mueller has conflicts of interest as the former head of the FBI and a friend of James Comey
or do those relationships not amount to a conflict of interest?”
54% yes
46% no
75% of conservatives say yes
51% of moderates say yes
37% of liberals say yes
Me: That’s ideologically skewed, but not as strongly as one would suspect. Also 60% of people who voted for someone other than Trump or Clinton for president say yes.
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/364931-poll-54-percent-say-mueller-has-conflict-of-interest
Drew- Because I have lived in reality, not on blogs. Who here has not called the President, whoever they were, an idiot for something they did? Suppose we pulled out all of the texts of everyone who investigated Clinton? Wanna bet we see them saying bad things about her? Are we really going to say that if you are going to investigate a Republican, you can’t have A Democrat involved, or vice versa? That you can never say bad things about a politician?
Your analogy is useless. Of course you can do that with a business deal. In a country where roughly half are Dems and half GOP, how would that work? Aint happening so how can you even suggest something so stupid? Mueller is a Republican, first nominated by Bush. His law firm worked for Manafort and Kushner. So, the leader of the investigation has strong ties to those being investigated. If their is concern about bias, you have to be concerned that he may be too lenient based upon his past.
Or, we could just judge based upon actions and results. We knew Flynn lied before the FBI figured it out. Papdop…. plead guilty. Manafort is the definition of sleazy political operative. Strzok? As Andy noted, civil servants are going to have opinions. An occasional “I think the president is an idiot is perfectly normal and we all know it. However, if there was a real pattern, then taking him off the case was appropriate. Kicking them off because they once donated to a Democrat? Really? How about if they once said something nice about Trump? Should that exclude them? This is almost all made up BS to undercut whatever results are found. Whatever. Let’s just insist that there be zero Republicans on any team that investigates people Trump wants investigated.
Steve
” It’s acting on them. In particular how much of what’s going on is actually a violation of the Hatch Act? And how would you even tell?”
I agree and it’s very hard to tell. I think it’s probably just good practice to have redundancy in any investigation to guard against people trying to skew the result.
I’ll make a gentlemens bet, steve. Clinton, Comey, Mills, Abedin, the Ohrs and Strzok all have major legal problems. Mueller investigation is on life support.
Where do you get your magic mushrooms, Modulo?
I was promised a perp walk, and I am still waiting for it. If you cannot believe a famous fiction writer, who can you believe?
Or maybe, he was right about the perp walk but wrong about the perps.
Curious onlooker is right, the “insurance policy” text is the damning one. The other texts with insults go to motive but that one describes an action being taken.
It’s cryptic (at the moment) but when put together with other pieces it suggests they were going after an indictment of Trump whether the facts supported it or not. And if this investigation by now had produced something on Trump it might put those statements in a different light, but the thinness of results suggests that this was a scheme to frame Trump.
Insulting a presidential candidate or president is not a crime and the opinions expressed by Strzok and Page would find wide agreement. But I would hope most people could see that using the apparatus of he FBI to disseminate political oppo research (and legitimize shaky allegations) in order to overturn election results is far more dangerous to our republic than anything a single president might do, even if he’s an idiot.
You got it Drew. Another gentleman’s bet. They will never investigate the emails and texts of the people who investigate Clinton, Comey, Mills, etc. If i am wrong and they do, they will also find negative comments.
” using the apparatus of he FBI to disseminate political oppo research”
When was this done? Are you referring to when the FBI announced it would investigate Clinton a week before the election?
Steve