The revelations of the last few days are, though disguised, the crash in ignominy of the Robert Mueller putsch. But they are far from the end of the story. While the sire of the Mueller hit-squad assault, former FBI director James Comey, declared 245 times at last Friday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing that he did not recall events that occurred in the last several years, the president’s official enemies confessed that the best they could do to show collusion between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign was that lawyer Michael Cohen, who had almost nothing to do with the campaign, had received a message in 2015 from someone promising “synergy” between Russia and a Trump presidency. Cohen did not respond to the message. There is no evidence of such collusion, as chief FBI bloodhound Peter Strzok acknowledged to his intimate colleague Lisa Page in 2016, and collusion is not a statutory offense anyway, unless it is for an illegal purpose. Despite 29 months of mighty investigative effort, not a shred of evidence of such wrongful collusion has been adduced.
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What makes the Southern District’s U.S. attorney leap to (all of) his feet, snarling and snapping and with dreams of publicity and political sugar plums dancing in his head in the manner of many American prosecutors, is that as part of his plea bargain, Cohen claimed that the payments to the two women were illegal campaign contributions, as they were made to spare candidate Trump embarrassment in the last phase of the 2016 election, and that Trump knew about them. This has invited and created the inference in the Trump-hating media that the president is an unindicted co-conspirator. That he may be so in the mind of an American prosecutor carries no more weight than did the opinions of a few flaky West Coast federal judges last year that Trump had no right to exercise his constitutional prerogative of controlling entry by foreigners into the United States.
It’s an opinion and a headline. But the U.S. attorney catechized Cohen into the claim that it was a campaign contribution when, in fact, Trump paid Cohen’s bills and a candidate can contribute to his own campaign. It will likely be found, if necessary, that a prosecutor cannot indict an incumbent president, and has to send anything regarded as incriminating evidence to the House Judiciary Committee for possible action. Even the incoming chairman of that committee, Jerrold Nadler, whose every fifth word since the last presidential election has been “impeachment,” will have difficulty imagining that this tawdry and comical business has legs as an impeachment case. Cohen is charged, inter alia, with lying to Congress, and if every such episode in the pre-presidential lives of U.S. presidents were judged as retroactively impeachable, at least ten previous presidents would be dragged from their honored immortality and besmirched. It is obvious that both Mueller (with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort) and the federal prosecutors in New York (with Michael Cohen) are negotiating sentences in exchange for the confection of more damaging evidence against the president. In any serious foreign jurisdiction, the prosecutors would be disbarred, though this perverted plea-bargain system is the core of American criminal justice and its North Korean levels of conviction.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/robert-muellers-investigations-got-nothing/
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What makes the Southern District’s U.S. attorney leap to (all of) his feet, snarling and snapping and with dreams of publicity and political sugar plums dancing in his head in the manner of many American prosecutors, is that as part of his plea bargain, Cohen claimed that the payments to the two women were illegal campaign contributions, as they were made to spare candidate Trump embarrassment in the last phase of the 2016 election, and that Trump knew about them. This has invited and created the inference in the Trump-hating media that the president is an unindicted co-conspirator. That he may be so in the mind of an American prosecutor carries no more weight than did the opinions of a few flaky West Coast federal judges last year that Trump had no right to exercise his constitutional prerogative of controlling entry by foreigners into the United States.
It’s an opinion and a headline. But the U.S. attorney catechized Cohen into the claim that it was a campaign contribution when, in fact, Trump paid Cohen’s bills and a candidate can contribute to his own campaign. It will likely be found, if necessary, that a prosecutor cannot indict an incumbent president, and has to send anything regarded as incriminating evidence to the House Judiciary Committee for possible action. Even the incoming chairman of that committee, Jerrold Nadler, whose every fifth word since the last presidential election has been “impeachment,” will have difficulty imagining that this tawdry and comical business has legs as an impeachment case. Cohen is charged, inter alia, with lying to Congress, and if every such episode in the pre-presidential lives of U.S. presidents were judged as retroactively impeachable, at least ten previous presidents would be dragged from their honored immortality and besmirched. It is obvious that both Mueller (with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort) and the federal prosecutors in New York (with Michael Cohen) are negotiating sentences in exchange for the confection of more damaging evidence against the president. In any serious foreign jurisdiction, the prosecutors would be disbarred, though this perverted plea-bargain system is the core of American criminal justice and its North Korean levels of conviction.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/robert-muellers-investigations-got-nothing/
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