On Sunday, Attorney General William Barr released a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his probe into alleged collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russia to steal the 2016 election. Barr says Mueller’s team found no evidence of such collusion.
First thing first: The “collusion,” theory, long ago exposed as a frame-up, has now been formally declared dead by even this partisan band of revenge-oriented attorneys. I will never again dignify another mendacious Russia hoax conspiracy theorist with a serious factual response. That part is over.
But, as I suspected, the Mueller revenge squad could not resist leaving a chunk of red meat for their constituency: “The Special Counsel’s decision to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime,” the new attorney general wrote.
Japanese soldiers on remote islands carrying on the fight long after the 1945 surrender have nothing on the never, NEVER Trumpers who see the attorney general’s March 24, 2019 summary as a “cover-up” or an invitation to proceed to a new chapter of the Russia hoax. Don’t forget, Barr is a close friend of Mueller. Their wives go to the same Bible study, and they attend the weddings of each other’s children. Saying Barr is covering up Mueller’s findings is ridiculous.
Barr wrote, “After reviewing the Special Counsel’s final report on these issues; consulting with Department officials, our charging decisions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to established that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” In making this determination, the attorney general noted that the president was “not involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference,” and that “the absence of such evidence bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction.”
Allow me to translate. The president is guilty of obstruction the way an innocent person is guilty of being outraged by an interminable and intrusive investigation that leaves the stench of accusation in the air for two years. Barr makes the salient point that when a person is innocent of the underlying crime, it’s pretty hard to make a case that his protestations against the investigation are an obstruction.
Barr seems to see the investigation for what it was. It was always intended to be an obstruction trap for the president. Mueller knew from very early on that the Russia collusion hoax was indeed a hoax, as I show here.
Mueller and his revenge squad trampled through the lives of innumerable people trying to draw the president into doing something that could be used to take him down, independent of the president’s innocence of the underlying charge. The numbers are mind-boggling. As noted by Barr’s summary, the special counsel used a jaw-dropping 500 search warrants, 230 orders for communication records, 50 pen registers, and interviewed 500 witnesses.
That’s 500 Americans who had their privacy invaded in this investigation. That’s 500 witnesses who got dragged into interrogations. That’s government monitoring of emails, text messages, and phone calls. On top of that, Americans had to respond to a staggering 2,800 subpoenas. Nineteen lawyers assisted by 40 FBI agents have run amok for two years “investigating” Russia collusion. What a monstrous abuse of power. May it never happen again.
After two years of leaks and trying the case in the press, Mueller took one last cheap shot. It appears from Barr’s letter that the report presented non-segregated grand jury testimony that Mueller knows the attorney general cannot release.
Barr wrote:
“Based on my discussions with the Special Counsel and my initial review, it is apparent that the report contains material that is or could be subject to the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e), which imposes restrictions on the use of disclosure of information relating to ‘matter[s] occurring before [a] grand jury.’”
Mueller would have known this. By salting the report with grand-jury information that required additional review and redaction, he guarantees that the president remains subject to the innuendo and suspicion that comes with unnecessary secrecy.
In spite of Mueller’s underhanded refusal to “exonerate” the president of the obstruction of justice, Barr found otherwise. In full consultation with the Department of Justice and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Barr concluded that Mueller did not present an obstruction of justice case.
The “next chapter” of the Russia collusion hoax should be the reckoning. It’s time to fire the hanger-on bureaucrats who knowingly advanced the hoax and yank the security clearances of all former government officials who use their clearances to credential their opposition to the elected president’s policies. Next, it’s time to prosecute the many violations of law that have been overlooked in our two-tiered justice system, provide basic constitutional law training to the self-important bureaucrats who claim to be defending the Constitution by subverting it, and take extreme measures against anyone found to have misled a court to spy on the Trump campaign.
Most of all, there needs to be reform of this unconstitutional stain on our republic—the political special counsel used to undermine the results of elections. The DOJ and intelligence agencies must never again be allowed to interfere in an American election.
