Call and Response with my liberal friend on the Mueller investigation.

The following is a response point by point to a friend's statements on the Mueller investigation. His statements are in blue while mine are in black.

My understanding of this argument is that you were denying any need for an investigation because you have not seen any hard evidence of a crime being committed. Now It sounds you agree that there should be an investigation, but that there is still no hard evidence of a crime and that the investigation will not solve anything. But I don’t understand, if you think it won’t solve anything, then why investigate?  Maybe you don’t understand why there are at least three ongoing investigations.  Or maybe you think it’s all a witch hunt and therefore all just for show.  So after investigating Hillary Clinton numerous times, after so many Congressional hearings, what could they find on her? But, I hear you say, if they couldn’t find the smoking gun on her (and by the way, the left-wing media that you criticize, I think unfairly, also wrote many pieces about her), then why should they bother with Trump?

Good question. What would be the benefit of having an investigation if there is no crime committed? There could be a number of answers including improving the cybersecurity of any federal agencies or bodies involved. But that is NOT going to happen, because the Democratic National Committee has refused to allow (SLATE) the FBI to examine its computer server. If they did, there is the possibility that not only will the Russian hacking theory collapse, but that the leaks will be revealed to have been done by an internal whistleblower.

Why investigate Hillary Clinton (and Bill, don’t forget) if as of right now there have been no convictions notwithstanding numerous investigations of her? But what did become of those investigations? You attempt to pretend that just because the investigations did not bring down the Clintons themselves that they were cleared of all crimes. A fairer statement would be that their accomplices took the fall. Here are just a few of the scandals they have been involved in that did yield criminal or civil penalties:

• Cattlegate (trading of cattle futures with insider info): Tyson Foods legal counsel James Blair, HRC’s investment advisor, used the services of commodities trader Robert L. “Red” Bone in order to make a $100k windfall. Bone was later suspended for three years for irregularities and insider trading.
• Whitewater (Madison Guaranty S&L) - While Bill and Hillary were in the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock they invested in MGS&L, a banking savings and loan owned by friends James and Susan McDougal. Jim McDougal, like Clinton, had been an aide to US Sen. J. William Fulbright. In 1989, the bank was seized by the Federal S&L Insurance Corp., a regulator due to real estate deals that bilked investors for worthless properties.  Hillary Clinton, as a Rose Law Firm attorney, was the counsel for MGS&L and was found to have billed 30 hours to Seth Ward, a straw investor who was directly implicated  in McDougal’s use of investor funds to pump money into the Castle Grande development, one of the Whitewater properties. Ward’s son-in-law was Webb Hubbell, Hillary’s close partner at Rose, representing a clear conflict of interest. You have a lender (MGS&L/McDougal) lending money to the father in law of the partner (Hubbell) of a legal counsel (Hillary Clinton) with investments in it. Convicted partners: James and Susan McDougal, Webb Hubbell, Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, David Hale (Clinton donor), Stephen Smith (Bill Clinton aide as Arkansas governor).
• Filegate (1996): In this matter Pres. Clinton’s aides in the White House requested and received illegally FBI security-clearance documents on hundreds of individuals that had worked under the Reagan and Bush administrations.  In the course of this affair, it was discovered that the files were given over to White House Office of Personnel Security Craig Livingstone, a person with no authorization to view them. Livingstone was never able to provide documentation as to why the files were received, and in fact claimed that it was due to an outdated list of personnel given to him by the Secret Service. But that list was destroyed in 1994 by one of his aides. Livingstone and his aide Anthony Marceca resigned as a result of the matter, and there has never been any explanation of why he was appointed and by whom. (Source: Unlimited Access by Gary Aldrich (former FBI White House liaison, pp. 140-141).

In the interests of brevity, please consider these actions that may have played a role in the Clintons’ avoiding of prosecution. The pattern should be obvious:

• Destruction of Vince Foster’s Whitewater documents following his death in 1993. The shredding of the documents occurred during the period that independent counsel Robert Fiske was appointed to examine Whitewater in 1994.
• The 1996 Chinagate  (Washington Post) campaign financing scandal when Chinese-Indoneseian banker James Riady and Chinese national John Huang were implicated for funneling money to the DNC and Clinton campaign. Several of the go-betweens in this affair would be inconveniently “indisposed” to testify such as Commerce Secretary Ron Brown (died in a plane crash, Croatia 1996) and his mistress and lobbyist Nolanda Hill who claimed in court that the Clintons were complicit in a separate scheme to sell seats on trade mission flights in exchange for campaign contributions and that they used WH public liaison Alexis Herman (later Labour Secretary) as their intermediary.
• The use of private detectives Ivan Duda, Jack Palladino, Cody Shearer and others to intimidate Bill Clinton’s sexual harassment and rape accusers (Target, by Kathleen Willey; Their Lives, by Candice Jackson).
• Immunity agreements for Cheryl Mills and other Clinton aides, and pleading of the 5th amendment in the Clinton email investigation. The use of such tactics, while not an admission of guilt, would not be necessary were not there a crime committed. The granting of immunity is typically done in exchange for evidence against a more central defendant. Therefore one would question why the FBI extended immunity to potential defendants in a case where ultimately no one was charged. This

Therefore let me ask you this question - Do you see any of the tactics that I’ve described above in the Trump case and if so please cite: Witness tampering, destruction of documents, immunity agreements, pleading the 5th,

Maybe I’m putting words into your mouth, but that’s pretty much what I recall you saying during that walk home. The FBI is a bunch of clowns, partially because they couldn’t dig up enough dirt on Bill or Hillary to prosecute. Apparently they didn’t see the hard evidence that you saw. Maybe you should become a federal prosecutor so you can show them up.

Me? A federal prosecutor? I appreciate your attempt at humour, but I would probably be a better defense counsel. There is no need to “dig up dirt”; the Clintons themselves are the dirt. As I’ve stated numerous times there are so many individuals with direct financial or personal ties to them that have been convicted of crimes in matters that directly involve them whether it is McDougal (deceased), Webb Hubbell, Tony Rodham (brother), or . I could go on writing for a whole day, but it would be futile. Your leniency towards the Clintons is not due to your having exculpatory arguments that establish their non-guilt but due to your conscious insistence on living in ignorance of the evidence to the contrary.

But if you want to go back in time, then maybe you should look into the Iran-Contra affair. Reagan got away with that. Bill probably did something wrong, but for some reason the Congressional Republicans decided to prosecute him on account of lying about having sex with an intern. Really? If there was so much evidence against him, why did they bother with that? Maybe it’s not all that simple; maybe there’s much more to the story of why these officials don’t get indicted. Maybe it has nothing to do with the FBI, but with politics. Maybe it’s simply because of a lack of evidence to prosecute.

This has nothing to do with a lack of evidence, but with a conscious complicity on the part of both main political parties that likely ensures that there is less scrutiny on other crimes that are peripheral to the Clintons. To deflect and try to compare this to the Iran-Contra Affair is ludicrous, as that matter is more comparable to the “Fast and Furious” matter where the Obama Justice Department funneled guns to Mexican drug cartels.

Was there illegality involved in the Iran-Contra matter? Yes.

Was it for personal gain? No.

Here was the federal government illegally selling weapons to a sanctioned state (Iran) in order to use the proceeds to fund a guerrilla movement whose financial support was proscribed by Congress. The strongest thread between this and any Clinton scandal was that Oliver North was found to have destroyed documents leading to an obstruction of justice charge.

The investigations are necessary, because if a crime was committed, then someone has to be held accountable. In this case, we KNOW that people in the Trump campaign had meetings and connections with Russian diplomats and lawyers; we KNOW that Trump made statements during the campaign that suggested that Russia should get more dirt on Hillary (asking a foreign adversary to get involved in U.S. politics by a private citizen is a big no-no); we KNOW that Roger Stone made a prediction about emails coming out days (or was it a week?)

Very interesting D*****. So are you attempting to make the argument that meetings between Trump associates and Russian individuals (many of them unaffiliated with the government) where there is as of yet no evidence of material exchange of goods or services rises to a higher level of campaign violation than direct cash contributions by the government of PRof China in 1996 (see here)? By the same standard  why are you not calling for an investigation into the DNC’s meetings with actual Ukrainian embassy officials in order to request evidence against Donald Trump during the election? Also, there is the matter of the Russia Dossier researching group Fusion GPS having acted against the Magnitsky Act on behalf of pro-Russian groups before and receiving funding by the DNC in order to craft the dossier by contacting Russian government officials through Christopher Steele. So do you want to talk about that collusion?

[B]efore the details actually did come out; we KNOW that Trump asked Comey for his fealty to the tryrant; we KNOW that Trump dismissed Comey because of the investigation; we KNOW that Russia meddled into 21 state electoral systems; we KNOW that Russia sent its bots to create fake news on social media; and, lastly, we KNOW that Russia has meddled into electoral systems of other countries. We KNOW these things. Not because of the NY Times, not because of the Washington Post, not even because of CNN, but rather because of data collected by intelligence agencies here, and in other countries. All these news outlets are reporting the stuff as it comes out. It is to be expected. How much air time did Faux News dedicate to Hillary’s emails and Benghazi, even when evidence showed there was no scandal nor any crime.

You’re still trying to deflect by attributing to me partisan Republican motives, when I’ve stated repeatedly that I’m not a Republican. I don’t watch Fox News, and I’ve only cited other media outlets here so I have no opinion either way on them. Obviously I despise the Democrats and Republicans for different reasons; one of them I believe facilitates a post-modernist/Marxist agenda in society and government while the other intentionally deceives free market capitalists like me into supporting the military-industrial complex.  As it happens there are a select few exceptional politicians in the GOP (Rand Paul, Trey Gowdy) and to a lesser extent the Democrats (Tulsi Gabbard) that I think are working to improve transparency and reduce the intrusion of government into the lives of private citizens. If you want to know WHY the Republicans may have not gone for “the jugular” with regards to the Clintons, you should look into the close back-channel relationship between Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss) and President Clinton in passing many of the “triangulation” policies advocated by Dick Morris (Behind the Oval Office, Morris; available from me).

As for James Comey’s dismissal, it is now known that Comey facilitated a leak of an internal memo of a meeting with Donald Trump in order to facilitate a special counsel investigation into Donald Trump’s connection to Russia. This was while he was testifying to Congress that he would discipline his own agents and other government officials that would be found to have leaked information to the media. These revelations alone should make you wonder why any president would trust an FBI director to prevent leaks of information within his administration when he is a leaker himself. Comey had also recommended ex-FBI chief Bob Mueller, a personal friend, as special counsel thereby establishing a clear conflict of interest should he himself become a target for examination in the probe. During the Clinton investigations Comey committed several acts that are in retrospect unmistakeable shows of tampering including:

1. Calling a press conference on 02JUL2016 where despite presenting evidence of clear violations of security protocol by Sec. Clinton, Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and other State Dept. acolytes, he broke protocol by declaring that “no reasonable prosecutor” would press charges on the matter. As an investigator (not a prosecutor) Comey is not entitled to make a judgment in favour of or against prosecution.
2. Moreover, his use of absence of intent as the reason to rule out prosecution is ludicrous given that intent is NOT REQUIRED in order to prosecute for improper handling of classified information as shown from the David Petraeus scandal.
3. Comey reopened the case in October 2016 but apparently saw it fit to close the matter one week later.
4. In Congress before the House Cmte.  on Government Oversight and Reform (07JUL2016) Comey stated that Clinton had made false statements to the FBI as to the presence of classified info on her private server, the number of devices she used, the returning of work related emails to the State Department, and the deletion of work related emails, the reading of the emails by her lawyers.

Notice I did not say we KNOW that the Russians hacked the DNC. That is something the Post alleges to be true because they broke the story.  I’m not sure if the Times alleges it to be true and factual; I actually did a Google search “ny times Russia hacks dnc,” and I didn’t find any Times articles that had anything about that in the headlines, maybe I didn’t dig deep enough. Be that as it may, even if it turns out to have been leaked, that doesn’t change the equation of WHY there is an investigation.

OK, then if you think that the FBI should investigate a leak, please explain why the DNC has not turned over its server to the FBI.

Maybe these charts will make you understand why there is an investigation.https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/connections-trump-putin-russia-ties-chart-flynn-page-manafort-sessions-214868

Again the evidence of “collusion” is tenuous here. Rex Tillerson, who I’m not a fan of by any means and believe is possibly the worst Secretary of State since. . . well, I’ll be honest they’ve all been garbage since Schultz, . . . was the CEO of Exxon Mobil. Exxon has holdings in Ecuador, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China and other countries. Does that means that Ecuador tampered with the election? There are plenty of reasons to hate Tillerson, but “collusion” with Russia is probably far down the list.

The evidence against Flynn is equally ridiculous and includes a 2013 visit to the headquarters of the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noje Upravlenije (GRU), Russia’s military intelligence. Only one problem: It was on behalf of and sanctioned by the Obama Administration, for whom he served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. So was the Obama administration also colluding with Russia? The same Politico article you use cites Flynn’s work with Russia Today, a Kremlin connected media outlet as evidence of “collusion”. This might be the most ridiculous assertion of all as the worst cover for a spy would be to work out in the open as a media commentator. Do interviews with China-owned CGTN of Obama Sec. of State John Kerry and Treasurer Jack Lew constitute spying for China?

The smear attacks against Julian Assange are also highly ironic. I’m not claiming that Assange is Joan of Arc or John Lennon, but his demonization by the media defies logic. Tell me, if Wikileaks is a Russian intelligence collaborator as indicated in the article, then why would the Obama White House have pardoned Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning last year? I would go into the other “colluders” cited, but I don’t have all day so maybe later.

If it looks bad, then investigate to see what it turns up.

What you call the “mindless bullshit” of Paul Krugman, I call very sensical and realistic. What you think of Paul Krugman has no bearing on the values of journalistic integrity of the NY Times. You just don’t like him because he’s a Keynsian economist. Maybe we should have a separate discussion about that.  

Paul Krugman is the great deceiver of now two generations of American financial readers. He was a central press shill that validated the Obamacare campaign through a long series of elitist declamations in favour of this ill-conceived Frankenstein monster of corporate welfare masquerading as public health policy. Before that he was one of the idiots that advocated intrusions in the mortgage market that helped trigger the financial markets:

• 2013: Gloats prematurely that premiums will “plunge” under Obamacare.
• 2001-2003: Advocates in favour of creating a housing bubble.

Krugman should be dumped by conservatives and progressives alike for his self-important and delusional view of the government’s role in the private markets.

Yes, big media publications foul up sometimes, just like anyone else. That doesn't mean that they don't have high standards. They still have the highest editorial standards you'll find anywhere else. And you're hinging their credibility on one of their foul-ups and their higher up connections (and, apparently, on your hatred of Paul Krugman). Why would they risk their integrity by knowingly promoting a false story? That makes no sense. The reporters for those two outlets are some of the best in investigative reporting and their editorial standards are exceptionally high.  Investigative reporting is their job, if something comes up, they follow it and report it.

Are you not forgetting media encouragement that led up to the Iraq War? How about the cover-up of the Weinstein scandal? Both NBC and the New York Times covered that up for 13 years! If you’re not following the current shakeout in the media from the Glenn Thrush and Charlie Rose accusations, then you are still living in the mid-1980s. The Washington Post also gave up on its credibility this year when it hired ex-Clinton and Obama lieutenant John Podesta who is a central figure in several scandals relating to last year’s election. Podesta’s hiring I believe will come back to haunt the WaPo as he is directly tied to the same lobbying activities for which Paul Manafort has been implicated on behalf of Ukrainian ex-president Viktor Yanukovych.

What astonishes me to no end are the “liberal” and “conservative” Jewish “Israel advocates” that constantly whine about NY Times’ biased coverage of Israel including this, but then they will turn around accept its coverage of domestic politics or other international stories. If you will not honestly scrutinize the content of these clearly biased news outlets, then there’s no reason you can condescend over someone that trusts Fox News Channel implicitly, which they shouldn’t either.

What you’re calling a conspiracy is itself a conspiracy, a conspiracy of the “left-wing” media that’s out to get every right-winger.

If you think media bias only impacts those with conservative views, maybe you should speak to some of my friends that are Bernie Sanders supporters. The attacks on him by the Clintonian media were in many cases based on total bullshit such as that his supporters are “sexist”. There are many things I’m willing to say about Bernie, but “sexist” is not one of them. The media is generally more protective of the Clintons than they are of anyone else, whether Republican or Democrat and when they do attack Democrats they are usually ones in relatively safe states or areas like Rod Blagojevich (Illinois) and Eliot Spitzer (New York).

So I’ll conclude here. If there is nothing to be accomplished by the investigation, why investigate in the first place? Do you think they are just doing this to have fun or to simply find a way to spend taxpayer’s money? If this whole affair requires investigation, then there’s a reason for it. What will it accomplish? Well, if the investigation discovers enough evidence that the Trump campaign did indeed collude with Russia, we have a major scandal that could, or at least should prompt impeachment hearings.

The idea that a federal investigation is its own justification is very ironic coming from a person such as yourself. If you’re using that logic then from now on I guess the Army-McCarthy hearings of the ‘50s and COINTELPRO are above reproach. After all while they were often abusive, did not follow due process procedures and possessed the elements of a witch hunt, they did uncover several instances of communist subversion.

The motivation for this investigation is twofold and very simple.

1. To help muddy the waters in the public’s parallel quest to uncover the corruption of the Clinton campaign within the Democratic Party . . . AND
2. To help Obama and his national security officials cover up their own misconduct in allowing classified information from domestic surveillance programmes to be used for political reasons. Do you not think that at least this warrants an inquiry into why our intelligence services have so much power and reach into our information, especially now that your most hated person Donald Trump commands them?

This charade will go on as long as Clintonians and Obamacrats are willing to maintain the lie their peace within the party, which will not be for much longer as Clinton has worn thin the patience of many Democrats even among the neo-liberal wing loyal to Obama.

What is the crime? I don’t know. I do know that private citizens are not allowed to conspire with foreign governments for political ends. It may rise to the level of treason. I don’t know, I’m not the one in charge of that decision.  Maybe they do not know yet, maybe the crime still has yet to be determined.  Law enforcement doesn’t have to have hard evidence that a crime was committed to investigate, it just has to have enough to make an arrest; and then, when the trial proceeds, the jury will judge what the evidence itself shows. Here, it is clear that there is something wrong; the press is reporting on the progress of the investigations, because that is what a free press is supposed to do. The framers of the Constitution wanted a free press to hold authority accountable.

This paragraph essentially reveals how deluded your attitude is towards how the system of justice works. There “doesn’t have to have hard evidence that a crime was committed to investigate”? If there is no probable cause then there cannot be a charge levied or even a search conducted.

Are you not aware that without a break-in and arrest there would have been no Watergate? Without a Savings and Loan fraud there would have been no Whitewater. Without a separate sexual harassment lawsuit in which the president lied there would have been no Lewinsky scandal.

It may well be that some of the individuals being investigated could be implicated in other crimes such as Paul Manafort, but even so they are entitled to a fair trial. If it is determined that the Mueller team violated any of Manafort’s civil rights then much of the evidence collected in the course of the probe will become inadmissible and he may escape scot free. The successful conviction of Manafort for crimes unrelated to his work for Trump will also be meaningless. Did the conviction of Webb Hubbell bring down Hillary and Bill Clinton? Did the conviction of Scooter Libby bring down George Bush and Dick Cheney? Those cases had far more of a strong nexus between the accused and the sitting president than the Manafort case does. And don’t make me get into the ties between Manafort and Clinton henchman John Podesta.

You say that even if the campaign did collude, what’s the crime? This is what I find so aggravating, you and others who are willing to overlook all this and call it simply politics in action. When you become a criminal lawyer, or a lawyer for white-collar criminals, or a prosecutor for a major city, state, or federal attorney’s office, then you can talk with confidence that no crime has been committed.  And then you can go on all the big talk shows with your expertise and say “there is no crime.”

Sincerely,

D********

What you are doing there is trying to make an argument based on authority, meaning that because I have no legal training or have not served as a prosecutor I have no right to speak up on an issue of legal consequence. I could use virtually the same argument with you, apart from some law firm experience that you have which apparently you don’t seem to draw any analysis from. The fact of the matter is that when needed I can draw on legal opinions from numerous people that have the legal experience and credibility to help supplement my own. Here for example is Jonathan Turley, a law professor from George Washington University and Obama supporter who validates the legal grounds for Comey’s dismissal. Here you can see Alan Dershowitz getting into a pie fight with fellow The Hill contributor Brent Budowsky over who said what and why.

If you think that it requires a law degree or prosecutorial experience to comment on legal proceedings then why do you bother doing it either? Why then should people call for criminal justice reform or any other law-related issue unless they have the J.D. after their name? I think I’ll continue to say whatever I damn please.