The Mueller Investigation

[sgt.null]

BS.

Hes a conservative judge ... he has issue with Barrs obvious bias and misinformation campaign. Fair call I say.

Lots of conservatives are never Trumpers.
Hashi is correct.
The report was properly redacted. This nudge will lose.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

He hasn't lost yet--an appeals court sided with his decision. The only tactic left for the Dept. of Justice is to appeal to the SCOTUS.

What do they think they will find, anyway? The smoking gun? Exceedingly unlikely. Are they hoping to use it to impeach again? Now, in March (or it will be April by then)? Of an election year? I think not.

No, they are just hoping for one little win. Any win, regardless of the cost.

Mueller is so 2019--everyone has moved on.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

In the midst of corona, Trump is seriously considering issuing a pardon to Michael Flynn; that would make him the highest-profile person negatively impacted by Mueller to have his record cleared.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Newly-declassified documents show that the FBI knew that Steele was part of a general Russian disinformation campaign and yet used his now-discredited dossier anyway to obtain that warrent against Carter Page, about whom they withheld information from the FISA Court to guarantee the warrant would be issued. From the article:

"It's ironic that the Russian collusion narrative was fatally flawed because of Russian disinformation," Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who had pushed for the declassification, said in a statement to Fox News on Friday. "These footnotes confirm that there was a direct Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, and there were ties between Russian intelligence and a presidential campaign--the Clinton campaign, not Trump's."

While impeachment was happening and while corona has been happening, Attorney General Barr's Dept. of Justice has been working quietly but inexorably to investigate the investigators.

I wonder what distraction Democrats are going to try and blow up in the media to distract us all from this news story which simply never dies. Probably "we need oversight over corona money" which is just another pretext for impeachment. The problem with impeachment is that at this point they would not even be able to get enough Democrat votes in the House to move forward with it. Besides, they cannot use Federal courts to enforce subpoenas so anyone from the Trump Administration can just say "no, I don't think so".

Democrats lose again.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Even more newly-declassified documents have provided exculpatory evidence for Michael Flynn, which means that he should soon be released from prison and have his conviction overturned, the end result of which will be that he was never guilty in the first place.

Ah, Mueller--the gift which keeps on giving...to Republicans.

[Savor Dam]

So, he told Mike Pence and the interviewing agents the truth about his interactions with the Russian Ambassador? There was no undercutting of the legally-imposed sanctions against Russia?

Or have the goalposts been moved by Barr (et al), knowing few people -- and especially few of those who get their news from the source from which your link originates -- are paying enough attention to remember what this was about?

[Skyweir]

I dont buy it. Lets wait and see.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

SOr have the goalposts been moved by Barr (et al), knowing few people -- and especially few of those who get their news from the source from which your link originates -- are paying enough attention to remember what this was about?

We have 46 pages of what this was all about: The DNC hired Fusion GPS to investigate the Trump Campaign, as part of normal operations which all campaigns do, but Fusion subcontracted Steele, a former British intelligence operative, who got a lot of misinformation from contacts in both Ukraine and Russia. Steele believed everything his contacts told him, so he reported it up the chain; the intelligence agencies here didn't really believe Steele because of the dubious nature of his sources, but enough anti-Trump people in the FBI managed to convince the FISA Court--after altering evidence--to get warrants against Carter Page, whom they did not tell the court that he was also working with/for the CIA, information which would have caused the warrant to be denied. Ultimately, enough dubious information purported to link the Trump Campaign with Russia as a way to explain how/why Hillary's campaign failed to win her the election.

I don't deny that Barr might be moving the goalposts a little, but since the foundation was based on dubious and unverified information the entire structure upon which is was built is also not credible.

As far as Flynn is concerned...."lying to investigators" is a crime only because the investigation was happening--when an investigation convicts someone on a procedural crime which exists only because the investigation is happening that says a lot about the illegitimate nature of the investigation.

Bottom line: the DNC and the Clinton Campaign weaponized the FBI against a political opponent and tried to rely on foreign operatives to bring down said political opponent. Those are the crimes which need to be investigated.

edit/add: Those FBI documents? They show how FBI officials planned to get him to lie or to admit violating the Logan Act because of his meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. They didn't really care about the meeting with Kislyak, in and of itself, only about how they could take down Flynn.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Anyway, those new documents--check comments in previous post--will likely result in a Flynn exoneration and/or pardon in the very near future. The score now stands at something in the neighborhood of Trump 17 Democrats 3.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Strzok ordered the investigation into Flynn to go forward even though it was scheduled to be closed because there was no derogatory information to be found.

The FBI was weaponized against Trump.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Brandon Van Grack, a Justice Department prosecutor and former member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Team, has so far failed to comply with Brady requirements to provide favorable evidence, some of which may also be exculpatory, to the court. In other words, Mueller investigators compiled two boxes of evidence, one good and one bad, then reported only on the bad one.

Recall that the investigation into Flynn was going to be closed when Strzok, with the approval of FBI leadership, ordered it to remain open while they tried to figure out how they were going to nail Flynn to the wall.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

The Justice Department has dropped all charges against Michael Flynn, meaning that he is free to go.

You lose again, Adam Schiff. You lose again, Gerrold Nadler. You lose again Nancy Pelosi. You lose again Democrats. You all just lost again.

Mueller is still the gift which keeps on giving...to Republicans, as well to anyone who actually cares about justice.

The weaponized FBI is still a very dangerous thing which needs to be brought under control soon

[Skyweir]

I find this all shades of disturbing.

And I question the political agenda and independence of the DOJ under yet another politically driven religious fanatic.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

What is disturbing is that the FBI was going to close the case against Flynn when Strzok ordered it to stay open because he hated Trump. The other disturbing thing was that FBI investigators were wondering how they were going to nail Flynn, settling on "let's get him to lie".

Of course, now we have the portion of the transcript where McCabe admitted, back in December 2017, that the FBI could not verify the information in the Steele dossier, the foundation of the entire Trump/Russia thing.

In other words, it should be disturbing to everyone that the FBI was weaponized against Hillary's political opponents. That converted them from the FBI into the Gestapo.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Speaking of those transcripts, they also show that neither Obama Administration officials nor intelligence operatives had any "empirical evidence" of collusion between the Trump Campaign and Russian officials.

We told there was never any collusion, that the whole narrative was fabricated solely to damage the Trump Administration after Hillary lost. Now it has been proven beyond reasonable doubt, which is hell of a lot better than Mueller and his team managed to do.

Now everyone who was connected to the collusion disaster needs to answer for their actions. Adam Schiff needs to resign from Congress, or at the very least be removed as Chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Remember: Schiff had "proof" of collusion....which would make him the only person on the planet to have that, because no one else could find it.

*********

Incidentally, Democrats lose yet again re: Mueller because the Supreme Court just ruled in favor of the Dept. of Justice, overturning the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit which would have allowed the House Judiciary Committee to review the redacted grand jury portions of the testimony. In other words, the grand jury testimony is still sealed and the House cannot see it. The Committee has until 18 May to once more make its case as to why it should be allowed to view the unredacted testimony, but they will once again be denied...and there is no appeal after the Supreme Court--Nadler will simply have to learn to live with disappointment.

[Skyweir]

Yeah but then I read this

https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.ny ... e.amp.html

And that raises all kinds of red flags with this DOJ decision.

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department's decision to drop the criminal case against Michael T. Flynn, President Trump's former national security adviser, even though he had twice pleaded guilty to lying to investigators, was extraordinary and had no obvious precedent, a range of criminal law specialists said on Thursday.

A range of former prosecutors struggled to point to any previous instance in which the Justice Department had abandoned its own case after obtaining a guilty plea.

[Skyweir]

And this

Soon after, in an extraordinary move, four prosecutors in the office abruptly quit the case against Mr. Trump's longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr. They did so after senior Justice Department officials intervened to recommend a more lenient prison term than standard sentencing guidelines called for in the crimes Mr. Stone was convicted of committing - including witness intimidation and perjury - to conceal Trump campaign interactions with WikiLeaks.

It soon emerged that Mr. Barr had also appointed an outside prosecutor, Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney in St. Louis, to review the Flynn case files. The department then began turning over F.B.I. documents showing internal deliberations about questioning Mr. Flynn, like what warnings to give - even though such files are usually not provided to the defense.

Mr. Flynn's defense team has mined such files for ammunition to portray the F.B.I. as running amok in its decision to question Mr. Flynn in the first place. The questioning focused on his conversations during the transition after the 2016 election with the Russian ambassador about the Obama administration's imposition of sanctions on Russia for its interference in the American election.

[Skyweir]

Then theres this

https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.vo ... -trump-doj

The DOJ is saying, implicitly, that they can't prove that Flynn committed the crime he already confessed to, or that it's simply not worth prosecuting even though he already pled guilty. Either scenario is, well, odd.

Odd is right.

"Bill Barr has sacrificed the integrity of the Justice Department and undercut the rule of law for political ends," Lisa Kern Griffin, a law professor at Duke

Under US law - though not necessarily that of some other countries - it is within the prosecutor's discretion to drop a case for almost any reason. In that sense, the decision appears to be legal. To do so after a federal judge has accepted the defendant's under-oath guilty plea is highly unusual, however, and in this instance the surrounding circumstances truly are extraordinary.

Renato Mariotti, former federal prosecutor, 2007 to 2016

It is highly unusual for the government to dismiss a defendant's case after he has pleaded guilty, and the DOJ's motion contains arguments that are inconsistent with long-standing DOJ policy and practice.

So yeah very disturbing.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

It doesn't matter if there is no precedent for it or if it seems odd, the fact remains that the DoJ made its decision and that settles it. Flynn is a free man so all the supporters of the fake Mueller prosecutions lose again.

If Barr's decision is legal, then arguments against it are all irrelevant. The guilty plea againt Flynn was originally procured under disturbing circumstances because the FBI was punishing people for belonging to the wrong political party.

[Zarathustra]

It's unprecedented because we've never caught the FBI red-handed trying to destroy a political opponent with absolutely no evidence like we have now. There is no doubt that this is what the FBI tried to do.

Sky, are you saying that Flynn should have been prosecuted? What's the case against him? Do you have any idea? No. Quick! Google someone else's opinion so that you'll know what to say!

Flynn was investigated for 4 months by the FBI prior to becoming Trump's National Security Advisor. They cleared him. The investigation was over. Then, Trump's uber-enemy in the FBI, discredited agent Peter Strzok, ordered the investigation reopened. Remember, he's the guy we caught texting his lover saying, "We'll stop him," about Trump.

The documents released by the FBI now show that they KNEW the Steele dossier--which was the basis of all this--was worthless Russian disinformation all the way back in 2017, in the earliest days of the Mueller investigation. In Senate testimony now released, official after official is quoted as saying that they knew there was no evidence of Russian collusion. This list includes former AG Loretta Lynch and James Clapper, Obama's director of national intelligence.

The documents also reveal the FBI strategy to catch Flynn in a lie, in order to put pressure on him. It was a groundless fishing expedition. They were trying to entrap him. In other words, weaponizing the FBI against their political opponent, just as Hashi says.