When Robert Mueller tried to create a crime when none
existed should be a crime worthy of investigation. When Mueller tried to
Europeanize the American legal system by insisting President Trump prove he is
not guilty rather than innocent until proven guilty, is worthy of an
investigation.
Investigate Mueller and his 13 angry Democrat Prosecutors.
JRH 6/2/19 (Hat Tip: CONSERVATIVE,
RIGHT WING NEWS)
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Mueller and Obstruction of Justice
June 1, 2019
The irony was that Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn was charged with and
plead guilty to making false statements to the FBI.
By his own standards Robert Mueller was guilty of making
“false statements” in his parting gift to Democrat impeachment seekers. He was
not, however, under legal oath, which is maybe why Democrats did not want
him to be questioned by Congress in a hearing beforehand.
Mueller has had to walk back his lie about Office of Legal
Counsel policy keeping him from indicting a sitting president. In his
alleged “farewell” address, former Special Counsel Mueller managed to channel
former FBI Director James Comey. Where is it written that former FBI directors
get to recite a litany of possible charges against someone they are not going
to charge? If, as Mueller had said, you could indict a sitting President,
and that is why he was not indicted, then why did he spend some $40
million the past two years pursuing an indictment? Just what happened to the
presumption of innocence?
Mueller told AG Barr that it was not DOJ policy on not
indicting sitting presidents that guided his decisions. Then, knowing the
lamestream media would run with his lie, said the opposite. Elizabeth
Vaughan noted at Red State:
In his statement this morning,
Robert Mueller said “if we had confidence
that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” He
also said that, because of Office of Legal Counsel guidance, his team did not
have the option of charging a sitting president with a crime.
This is the opposite of what he
told Attorney General William Barr and several other DOJ officials at a meeting
which took place on March 5th.
Barr was asked about why Mueller
had failed to come to a conclusion on the question of obstruction of justice
during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 1st. He said, “We were frankly
surprised that they were not going to reach a decision on obstruction and we
asked them a lot about the reasoning behind this. Mueller stated three times to
us in that meeting, in response to our questioning, that he emphatically was
not saying that but for the OLC opinion he would have found obstruction.”
Barr made a similar remark at the
press conference he held prior to the public release of the redacted Mueller
Report. He told reporters, “We
specifically asked him about the OLC opinion and whether or not he was taking a
position that he would have found a crime but for the existence of the OLC
opinion. And he made it very clear several times that was not his
position.”
It is not his or any prosecutor's job to
"exonerate" anyone. They are presumed innocent, are they not? It was
not a matter of whether you can indict a sitting president. The fact is that no
president can be indicted for doing what he is constitutionally empowered and
entitled to do. That is not obstruction of justice. Trump could have fired
Mueller just as he did Comey and closed his entire investigation at any time
and it would not have been obstruction of justice. So noted legal scholar
Alan Dershowitz in an interview with Leandra Bernstein of the Sinclair
Broadcast Group on ABC7/WJLA Thursday:
Constitutional lawyer and Harvard
law professor Alan Dershowitz said the special counsel had a legally flawed
approach to investigating alleged obstruction of justice by President Donald
Trump.
"What jumps out at me is that the Mueller people got the law all wrong
on obstruction of justice," Dershowitz told Sinclair Broadcast Group in a
Thursday interview. "They came to the conclusion that a president could
obstruct justice by simply exercising his constitutional authority under
Article 2."…
According to Dershowitz, the
president was within his authority to fire the FBI director and would have been
justified, under the unified executive theory, to shut down the investigation.
"The position I've taken from
day one is for the president to obstruct justice, he has to go beyond his own
permissible constitutional authority and engage in conduct that would be a
crime for anyone else, like tampering with witnesses, obstructing a witness,
paying witnesses, telling them to lie. None of that is charged against
President Trump," Dershowitz said.
Trump also could have fired Mueller and closed the Office of
Special Counsel at any time. If he couldn’t, Democrats and some Republicans
wouldn’t have tried to pass laws preventing just
that event. They are creatures of the executive. Trump can
fire any of his executive branch employees at any time for any reason. Agreeing
with that assessment, Andrew C. McCarthy writes at National Review:
In our system, we have a unitary
executive. All executive power is vested in a single official, the president of
the United States. That means subordinate executive officers do not have their
own power; they are delegated to exercise the president’s power. When they act,
they are, in effect, the president acting. …
Prosecutorial power is executive in
nature. Federal prosecutors therefore exercise the president’s power. Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Special Counsel Robert Mueller have no
power of their own; they exercise President Trump’s prosecutorial power for as
long as that arrangement suits President Trump. The president does not need
cause to fire them. He does not need to explain any dismissal to Congress --
“Gee, it’s Thursday and I feel like firing someone” is good enough….
If lawmakers believe the president
is abusing his power by firing good public servants arbitrarily, they can
impeach the president. Or they can try to bend the president into better
behavior by cutting off funding, refusing to confirm nominees, or holding oversight
hearings that embarrass the administration. Congress has these powerful
political tools. But it does not have legal means to usurp the president’s
constitutional power.
But exercising presidential powers is not a crime. Of
course, Robert Mueller didn’t need a crime. In the best traditions of Josef Stalin,
Mueller with Flynn and others needed only the man. He would find the crime, As
Dershowitz writes in the Washington Examiner:
Special counsel Robert Mueller was
commissioned to investigate not only crime but the entire Russian
"matter." That is an ominous development that endangers the civil
liberties of all Americans.
Federal prosecutors generally begin
by identifying specific crimes that may have been committed -- in this case,
violation of federal statutes. But no one has yet identified the specific
statute or statutes that constrain Mueller's investigation of the Russian
matter. It is not a violation of any federal law for a campaign to have
collaborated with a foreign government to help elect their candidate…
One does not have to go back to the
Soviet Union and Lavrentiy Beria's infamous boast to Stalin, "Show me the
man and I will show you the crime," in order to be concerned about the
expansion of elastic criminal statutes. There are enough examples of abuse in
our own history.
From McCarthyism to the failed
prosecutions of Sen. Ted Stevens, Rep. Thomas DeLay, Gov. Rick Perry and
others, we have seen vague criminal statutes stretched in an effort to
criminalize political differences.
Obstruction of what? An investigation fraudulently spawned
by James Comey's felonious leaking of a private conversation with President
Trump and a fake dossier put together by a British spy from Russian sources and
paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC? Funny, but Mueller never said his
investigation was obstructed or impeded in any way. Nor was anything else.
How can you obstruct justice on social media in front of 300
million people anyway? Mueller is now free to run and hide from testifying
before Congress and answering embarrassing questions like when did he know
there was no collusion and why did he keep going anyway, why he hired a team of
Democratic lawyers, including one from the Clinton Foundation, and had as his
chief deputy someone who was at Hillary’s victory party?
By refusing to go after the real colluders with Russia who
committed real crimes, it is Robert Mueller who was obstructing justice.
________________________
Daniel
John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s
Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
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