Rolling Around in Russiagate

John Huber, who will investigate the FBI, is a special counsel in every way but name

John W. Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, can convene a grand jury, issue subpoenas, collect evidence and order witnesses to testify — all the usual powers a federal prosecutor has — as he delves into whether the FBI abused its powers when it sought permission and then carried out wiretapping of a Trump campaign figure, or whether it trod too lightly in pursuing questions about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Sessions said the facts of the FBI situation don’t yet rise to the level of demanding a special counsel, but Mr. Huber is as close as can be. . . .

Wow, a grand jury in Utah investigating the Clintons, the DOJ, and the FBI? This could get interesting.

From the WaPo, of course: Why Robert Mueller could be considering bribery charges. Because, like many lawyers, words have certain elasticity in his care.

Federal bribery requires that a public official agree to receive and accept something of value in exchange for being influenced in the performance of an official act. In this scenario, the official act would be granting a pardon. While the Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in the case of former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell dramatically narrowed the definition of “official act,” there’s no question that a president granting a pardon would be an exercise of government power under the McDonnell v. United States standard.

“Thing of value” is also fairly easily met: It would be the agreement not to cooperate against the president. The thing of value in bribery law is not limited to envelopes stuffed with cash. It can include anything of subjective value to the public official, whether tangible or intangible. Such intangibles as offers of future employment and personal companionship have been found to be things of value for purposes of bribery. A promise not to cooperate in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe could readily serve as the quid in this quid pro quo.

The public official, of course, is the president. Dowd is not a public official and cannot be bribed himself, but he could conspire with a public official to arrange bribes on the official’s behalf. The theory would be that Dowd and the president engaged in a conspiracy to accept bribes by agreeing that Dowd would make the offer. This, of course, would require proof that Dowd was acting with the president’s approval and not merely freelancing.

Neither bribery nor conspiracy requires that the underlying scheme be successful. The crime is the agreement itself, coupled with at least some steps to carry it out. If Dowd and the president agreed Dowd would offer an exchange of pardons for silence and he did so, that is a conspiracy to commit bribery. Whether the offer was accepted would not matter.
. . .
In other words, even scholars who think that merely granting a pardon could never amount to obstruction agree that a president who took a bribe in exchange for granting a pardon could be charged with bribery. Of course no pardons have actually been granted — at least not yet. But regardless, the bribery theory avoids all of the legal uncertainty swirling around obstruction-of-justice charges and pardons. Nobody argues that bribery is constitutionally authorized.

If we're going to play that game, let's go back and look at the Clintons some more. Oh, wait, we are.

Why President Trump Should Play Hardball With Robert Mueller

In the Philadelphia Inquirer I have time and again warned against cooperating with Mueller. If Trump were my client, I wouldn’t give the special counsel the time of day without a court order. I would make him crawl over hot coals all the way to the Supreme Court and back before I would give up a single scrap of paper. When he wanted the next scrap, I would make him do it all over again. Under no circumstances would my client voluntarily submit to questioning.
. . .
If Mueller had any ethical sense, he would have declined to serve. But not only did he take the job, he proceeded to staff his operation with lawyers who have represented Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and the IT specialist who set up Clinton’s private email server and destroyed Clinton’s Blackberrys with a hammer.
. . .
If Trump declined to voluntarily submit to questioning, Mueller would have to issue a subpoena to compel him to appear before the grand jury. That would afford Trump’s lawyers the perfect opportunity to move to quash the subpoena based on, among other things: Rosenstein’s illegal appointment of Mueller to conduct a counterintelligence operation with no jurisdictional limits, Team Mueller’s glaring conflicts of interest, Trump’s overwhelmingly justified firing of Comey, the legal impossibility of a president facing criminal charges for discharging a member of the executive branch, and, as appears increasingly likely, the special counsel’s furtherance of the plot hatched during the presidential campaign to destroy Trump by any means necessary.

Christie: If Trump uses ‘hyperbolic’ style with Mueller it could send him to jail

"One of the things that makes the president who he is is that he's a salesman, and salesmen at times tend to be hyperbolic," Christie said during a panel on ABC's "This Week."

"That’s OK when you’re working on Congress. It is not OK when you’re sitting talking to federal agents because, 18 U.S.C. 1001 is false statements to federal agents, that's a crime, that can send you to jail."

Christie also said he doesn't think Trump should ever "walk into that room with" Mueller.

Nobody promises more and delivers less than the usual politician. I still say Trump should put Mueller under oath, and interrogate him about his motives (more like let Sessions frame the questions, though, so he can't escape too easily).

Comey's book tour is a colossal mistake

But should Comey — a central witness in special counsel Robert Muellerprobe — be making public his version of events which will certainly differ significantly with what President Trump, the central target in the special prosecutor’s probe, has repeatedly stated?

Comey was humiliatingly removed by the president last May and enjoyed a brief period of bipartisan sympathy for the disgraceful manner in which he was dispatched. The FBI’s seventh director learned of his termination via televised news reports while appearing before an FBI audience in Los Angeles. This is not the manner with which career public servants should ever be separated from service. Yet, with the current president, it has become de rigueur.

Initially taking the high road, remaining silent, professional and above the fray, Comey has now resorted to directly confronting the president at his own game. He shed his original anonymous Twitter nom de plume, “Reinhold Niebuhr,” and directly waded in to criticize and taunt his tormentor. In the immediate wake of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s firing and Trump’s Twitter gloating, Comey ominously warned, “Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.”

And, just like that, Comey conceded the tiny sliver of moral high ground he precariously clung to and reduced his position as an advocate of the pursuit of facts into a narcissistic quest to sell books. He unwittingly joined Trump in the pig-wallow that currently serves as civil discourse.

He continues to diminish himself and the cherished office he once held.

He revealed himself to be the dirty politician in the guise of a clean, straight-laced lawman. It's pretty clear by now, that whatever his initial motives, justice was served in getting rid of Jim Comey.

What’s Behind the Trump Facebook Election Conspiracy Theories

The political elites on both sides of the ocean have been talking themselves into the idea that free referendums and elections are a bad idea because the ordinary person is too easily manipulated.

Behind the rush to lock down Facebook, purge “fake news” from social media and push “fact checks” everywhere is a deep distrust of the individual. The utopian idealism of the elites conceals the cynical conviction that democracy is a hoax and most people are sheep who will do whatever they’re told.

That’s why the news media and the entertainment industry constantly tell us what to think.

All the assorted Facebook conspiracy theories converge around the paranoid notion that the only reason the elites badly lost with Trump and Brexit is that someone else did a better job of brainwashing their voters. The conspiracy theories range from Macedonian fake news sites to Russian trolls to a British data analytics company, but they all agree that there was an informational coup against their propaganda.

Projecting the source of the informational coup outward cloaks the lefty crackdowns in the garb of national security instead of domestic repression. Fighting foreign election interference sounds better than censoring the political opposition. Even if most dictatorships use the former to justify the latter.

Fake statistics and involved technical explanations give the conspiracy theories an air of credibility. But underneath them is the conviction that the only way to protect democracy, a frequent election conspiracy talking point, is to rig it by denying the voters their choice of information sources.

No one who thinks that voters can’t be trusted to make their own decisions believes in democracy. They only see the illusion of democracy as a useful tool for consensus building. The real thing frightens them.

Damned deplorable didn't vote they way they were told to by their so-called betters. It must be Russia's fault!