Russiagate - Not Too Much, and Nothing Juicy

At least IMHO. Chuck Ross at Da Caller reports that Twitter Hires Ex-FBI Lawyer Who Played Key Role In Probe Of Trump Campaign (James Baker). As Ace puts it, Twitter Hires Disgraced FBI Lawyer James Baker, Key Actor in Coup Attempt

This broke yesterday, but I missed it.

Isn't it terribly odd that those who lost their jobs due to abuse of office and crimes such as obstruction of justice all very soon get hired by media and now social media companies, assuredly for more than they were previously making?

Why, it's almost as if leftwing media corporations are handing out barely-disguised bribes to the coup plotters.

WaPoo, Justice Department asks court to order Bolton to stop the release of his book

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit Tuesday asking a federal judge to order former White House national security adviser John Bolton to stop the release of his book, asserting that his much-anticipated memoir contains classified material.

The move sets up a legal showdown between President Trump and the longtime conservative foreign policy hand, who alleges in his book that the president committed “Ukraine-like transgressions” in a number of foreign policy decisions, according to his publisher.

But the Trump administration stopped short of seeking a court order against Bolton’s publisher to stop the distribution of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” which is due to go on sale June 23 and has already been shipped across the country.

Instead, the civil suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, accuses Bolton of breach of contract by violating his nondisclosure agreement and asks the court to order him “to instruct or request his publisher, insofar as he has the authority to do so, to further delay the release date.”

Or if you actually want to go there without a subscription, Fox, DOJ sues John Bolton in federal court to block publication of upcoming book. Full of Hot Air, AllahPundit whines DOJ Sues John Bolton For Breach Of Contract Over His Book — But Won’t Try To Stop It From Being Published, Probably

at some point between May 7 and now, Bolton and Simon & Schuster concluded that the review process was over and sent the book for printing. The DOJ saw a news report on June 7 that the book was now set to come out on June 23; the NSC’s legal advisor promptly contacted Bolton’s lawyer the next day to warn him not to do that, to no avail. Now here we are. Who wins? According to Mark Zaid, a lawyer well-known for representing whistleblowers against the government, this one’s a slam dunk — for the DOJ.

“This is a routine civil action for breach of contract for (Bolton) violating his non-disclosure agreement, which his own lawyer has admitted he did,” Zaid said. “Absent something extraordinary happening, Bolton should be prepared to take out his check book and may never see a dime in profit. The lawsuit also asserts Bolton has released classified information which potentially subjects him to criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act.”…
“Bolton is in serious trouble with at least a breach of contract, which is literally a hands down winner for the government,” Zaid said. “Bolton has an obligation before publication to receive approval from the government — a lack of approval breaches his contractual obligation and that has nothing to do with whether or not there’s one word of classified information in the book.”

If the review process wasn’t over, the review process wasn’t over. Bolton and Cooper are presumably going to argue that the government breached the contract first by failing to vet his manuscript in good faith, pointing to the evidence that they were slowing down the review to protect Trump from “embarrassment.” Lawyer Brad Moss has an answer to that, though:

Sundance has the text in DOJ Sues Former NSA John Bolton Over Book Release….

…”On June 7, 2020, without Defendant giving any prior notice to the NSC, press reports revealed that Defendant and his publisher had resolved to release the book on June 23, without completing the pre-publication review process. Subsequent correspondence with Defendant’s attorney confirmed that public reporting.

Simply put, Defendant struck a bargain with the United States as a condition of his employment in one of the most sensitive and important national security positions in the United States Government and now wants to renege on that bargain by unilaterally deciding that the prepublication review process is complete and deciding for himself whether classified information should be made public.”… (pdf)

Mueller hack to testify about politicization of case that he politicized.  Chuck Ross at Da Caller, Top Mueller Prosecutor To Testify As Whistleblower Against Attorney General Barr and at WaPoo, Democrats subpoena ex-Mueller prosecutor, antitrust official in probe of Barr’s Justice Dept.

The House Judiciary Committee issued subpoenas Tuesday for the testimony of two Justice Department officials, including one of former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s top prosecutors, in its probe of what panel Democrats call the agency’s “unprecedented politicization” under President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr.

The committee’s chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), issued a summons to Aaron Zelinsky, who worked on the team prosecuting Trump’s friend Roger Stone and resigned from the case in protest after being forced to seek a lesser prison sentence following the president’s complaints.

 Ace takes note of the report of Burisma bribes, Ukranian Officials Discover Six Million Dollar Bribe, Intended to Buy an End to an Investigation Into Burisma Holdings

Ah, Burisma. It seems like a different, more innocent age when we had such trivial concerns as Joe Biden shaking down foreign governments for bribe money.

Finally, not really Russiagate, Lloyd Billingsley at Front Page remembers the last apolitical FBI director William Sessions "Tried to prevent politicization of FBI, fired by President Clinton."

William Sessions, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, died on June 12 in San Antonio, Texas, at the age of 90. Appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Sessions served until 1993, when President Clinton fired him, charging poor leadership and use of his position to leverage perks. The more likely cause was Sessions’ effort to prevent the politicization of the FBI, then gearing up under the new administration.

President Clinton fired Sessions on July 19, 1993. The next day at approximately 1 p.m. Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster came out of his office with his suit jacket in hand. He told Linda Tripp, an aide to White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, that he left some M&Ms on a tray if she happened to want any. Foster didn’t say where he was going, but as he headed out the door, he told Tripp “I’ll be back.” As it turned out, he wouldn’t be back.

At approximately 6 p.m. that day, Foster’s body was found in Fort Marcy Park in Virginia, on the George Washington Parkway. Foster had suffered a gunshot wound to the head, but in one account he was found on a berm near a Civil War cannon in a straight coffin-like position, with the gun still in his hand. That seldom if ever happens in a suicide, the default explanation for Foster’s fate.

Accounts also differed on where, exactly Foster’s body had been found, which raised the possibility that it may have been moved. A point-blank gunshot wound to the head leaves an enormous amount of blood, bone and tissue but accounts of the body, and photos of the scene, do not reflect that reality. The bullet was never found, and accounts also differed on the type of gun found in Foster’s hand.

The discharge of a .38, 9mm, or .45 pistol would made a loud noise, but the report of a firearm had not prompted a police report or search of the park. The body had been accidentally found by a visitor to the park, who had not heard a gunshot. Accounts also differed on the identity of people in the park that day, and what, exactly they were doing. These were far from casual matters.

Death by gunshot is necessarily a violent death, and police normally treat a violent death as a homicide. As Christopher Ruddy noted in The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, if he perished by the hand of another, Foster would have been the highest-ranking White House official to be killed since President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Since Foster was a government employee, his death was a public matter.

No suicide note was found at the scene but as Ruddy notes, the Park Police, the FBI, and the Clinton White House concluded that Foster’s death was a suicide, before all the facts were in. The FBI also downplayed any evidence that contradicted official claims, and as Ruddy shows, plenty of evidence ran against the official claims.

“The American public has not been told the complete facts of this case,” wrote William Sessions in his cover endorsement of The Strange Death of Vincent Foster. According to Sessions, the book raised “serious concerns about the handling of the Foster case,” and “it is legitimate to question the process employed by authorities to make their conclusions.”

The Clintons’ point man for the Foster case was White House security boss Craig Livingston, a former nightclub bouncer. On his watch the White House obtained FBI files on some 800 people, including hundreds of officials from Republican administrations. That was the sort of politicization that Sessions, a former judge and U.S. Attorney, was trying to prevent.

The president from 2008-2016 would deploy the upper reaches of the FBI and DOJ to aid his chosen successor, Hillary Clinton, and harm candidate and President Trump. He fired James Comey, who in 2016 refused to recommend Hillary Clinton for prosecution on a number of serious crimes, including destruction of evidence.
. . .
The first FBI director to be fired might not have been the greatest leader, but he never launched an operation like Midyear Exam or Crossfire Hurricane. Sessions never publicly weighed in on Comey or the FBI’s Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith, or Bill Priestap, likely author of a memo wondering if his task was to get Gen. Michael Flynn to lie or “get him fired.”