I am assuming the authenticity of the questions that Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly wants to ask President Trump. The questions indicate that, after a year of his own investigation and two years of FBI investigation, the prosecutor lacks evidence of a crime. Yet he seeks to probe the chief executive’s motives and thought processes regarding exercises of presidential power that were lawful, regardless of one’s view of their wisdom.
If Bob Mueller wants that kind of control over the executive branch, he should run for president. Otherwise, he is an inferior executive official who has been given a limited license — ultimately, by the chief executive — to investigate crime. If he doesn’t have an obvious crime, he has no business inventing one, much less probing his superior’s judgment. He should stand down.
The questions, reported by the New York Times, underscore that the special counsel is a pernicious institution. Trump should decline the interview. More to the point, the Justice Department should not permit Mueller to seek to interrogate the president on so paltry and presumptuous a showing.
When should a president be subject to criminal investigation?
It is a bedrock principle that no one is above the law. The Framers made clear that this includes the president. But, like everything else, bedrock principles do not exist in a vacuum. They vie with other principles.
Two competing considerations are especially significant here. First, our law-enforcement system is based on prosecutorial discretion. Under this principle, the desirability of prosecuting even a palpable violation of law must be balanced against other societal needs and desires. We trust prosecutors to perform this cost-benefit analysis with modesty about their mission and sensitivity to the disruption their investigations cause.
Second, the president is the most essential official in the world’s most consequential government. That government’s effectiveness is necessarily compromised if the president is under the cloud of an investigation. Not only are the president’s personal credibility and capability diminished; such an investigation discourages talented people from serving in an administration, further undermining good governance. The country is inexorably harmed because a suspect administration’s capacity to execute the laws and pursue the interests of the United States is undermined. Naturally, this is of little moment to rabid partisans who opposed the president’s election and object to his policy preferences. By and large, however, Americans are not rabid partisans; they want the elected president to be able to govern, regardless of which party is in charge.
Still, the president cannot be above the law. Executive powers are too awesome to abide presidential immunity from the laws and the limits on those powers. So how do we police the president while minimizing the damage that an investigation of the president can do to the country? We acknowledge that we are willing to endure this damage, but only if there is strong evidence that the president is guilty of a serious crime or abuse of power.
A president should not be subjected to prosecutorial scrutiny over poor judgment, venality, bad taste, or policy disputes. Absent concrete evidence that the president has committed a serious crime, the checks on the president should be Congress and the ballot box — and the civil courts, to the extent that individuals are harmed by abusive executive action. Otherwise, a special-counsel investigation — especially one staffed by the president’s political opponents — is apt to become a thinly veiled political scheme, enabling the losers to relitigate the election and obstruct the president from pursuing the agenda on which he ran.
That is what we are now witnessing.
Pretextual appointment of the special counsel
Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel for two reasons: (1) ostensibly to take over a counterintelligence probe; (2) in reality, as a cave-in to (mostly) Democratic caviling over Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey — which was lawful but incompetently executed. Democrats contended that Comey’s dismissal, in conjunction with Comey’s leak of Trump’s alleged pressure to drop the FBI’s investigation of Michael Flynn, warranted a criminal-obstruction probe. That is, the pretext of obstruction was added to “Russia-gate,” the already-existing pretext for carping about the purported need for a special counsel.
Neither of these reasons was a valid basis for a special-counsel investigation.
As we have repeatedly noted, a counterintelligenceinvestigation is not a criminal investigation. To the extent it has a “subject,” it is a foreign power that threatens the United States, not an American believed to have violated the law. A counterintelligence investigation aims to gather information about America’s adversaries, not build a courtroom prosecution. For these (and other reasons), such investigations are classified and the Justice Department does not assign prosecutors to them, as it does to criminal cases. Counterintelligence is not lawyer work; it is the work of trained intelligence officers and analysts. It is not enough to say that Justice Department regulations do not authorize the appointment of a special counsel for a counterintelligence probe. The point is that counterintelligence is not prosecution and is therefore not a mission for a prosecutor.
Foreign efforts to meddle in our elections are nothing new, but they are not to be taken lightly. Russia’s effort plainly warranted a counterintelligence investigation. But reliance on that necessity as a rationale to appoint a special counsel — a lawyer independent of the executive branch, who uses the president’s executive power to investigate the president — was a subterfuge. (Because of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s passivity, Mueller is de facto independent, even though he is technically Rosenstein’s subordinate.)
edly political. Even if one accepts the dubious premise that Trump materially benefited from Kremlin interference in the election, there was no known credible evidence that he or his campaign committed a crime in that connection. If there had been such evidence, no one would ever have mentioned a counterintelligence investigation; they would have said a special counsel was being appointed to investigate, say, a hacking conspiracy — an actual violation of federal criminal law.
The Democrats did not want a special counsel in order to investigate a crime; they wanted a special counsel (a) to promote a political narrative that Hillary Clinton lost because of something other than her lack of appeal and (b) to frustrate Trump’s ability to govern — to mollify their “Resist!” base, to stop Trump from implementing policies they oppose, and to enhance their electoral hopes in the 2018 and 2020 cycles.
As for the second purported basis for Mueller’s appointment, the crime of obstruction, it cannot be established by lawful exercises of executive prerogatives. A president, of course, may not subvert an investigation by unlawful actions — e.g., by conspiring to suborn perjury or bribe witnesses (cf. Clinton, Nixon). Illegal acts could amount to actionable obstruction. But the president’s dismissal of subordinate executive officials (such as the FBI director), and his exercise of prosecutorial discretion (by merely weighing in on whether a person — here, Flynn — deserves to be investigated), are constitutional acts that are not judicially reviewable. Executive prerogatives that are not subject to judicial review may not be subjected to judicial review by indirection, under the guise of a prosecution.
Though I was not an Obama supporter, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. However, by the first few months, i had given up any thoughts that Obama was objective, moderate or reasonable. However, NEVER did I wish for his term to be artificially ended. In fact, due to the limited Republican ability to hold back the Democrat agenda, I wanted them to allow the full agenda to move forward and show America the true glory of liberal genius.
Democrats, however, don’t have any such faith in their own ideology. They want to rule by mob rule and brute force.
There is no investigation into a crime; it is a forlorn search FOR a crime. The offence committed by Trump is that he was present when the Democrats hosted the worst candidate in American history.
Check this out!!
Mueller and Comey Guy-Pal History
Posted on May 3, 2018 by Helena
The Mueller/Comey man-pal association dates back to some very interesting case history and vendettas of ruinous nature.
Martha Stewart: Mueller was Director of the FBI and chose Comey to go after poor little Martha Stewart who made a a killing off insider trading by ‘avoiding losses of roughly $45,000 at a time when her net worth was estimated to be about $700 million. But Comey and Mueller wanted to make an example of her and brow beat her to helter-skelter before her indictment charge was simply “lying”. For that heinous crime she was sentenced to five months in jail, five months house arrest, and two years probation.
Hillary? Huma? Podesta? Obama?
Talk about going after the Big Ones!
Then there was the case they leveled against banker, Frank Quattrone whose charge was described as ‘allegedly incriminating emails’. A long drawnout series of trials, a hung jury, a conviction, an appeal that overturned the conviction, and ultimately a deferred prosecution that was labeled an ‘exoneration’. His FBI charge? Attempting to hinder an investigation.
Scooter Libby. Remember him? He was Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney and Assistant to the President under Bush. He was convicted by the Mueller/Comey pact for lying about the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Wilson. Ms. Wilson, not only worked for the CIA, but she apparently wrote spy novels… After the FBI investigation, Ms. Wilson wrote her ‘memoir’ which also became a film. Again, the ultimate charge imposed on Libby was – lying.
But by far the worst, was the bungling duo in their defamatory case against Steven Hatfill for the 2002 Anthrax attacks. Two Democrat Senators supposedly bullied the Mueller/Comey team into attacking Hatfill; Senator Patrick Leahy, and Senator Tom Daschle. It is notable that John McCain was a one for all against Hatfill, lauding to excess, the team of Comey and Mueller.
The judge ruled that : “The prosecution’s dog handler “as biased as any witness that this court has ever seen.”
While Hatfill was eventually exonerated and paid a settlement for his harassment to the tune of over $5 million, Comey and Mueller still collaborated, colluded, and plotted their next victim.
Despite Comey taking a ‘substantial pay cut’ to work for the government, surprisingly his net worth didn’t which is estimated to be $11 million and counting, depending on what the Offshore Accounts might be hiding.
Robert Mueller’s net worth has also seen a recent spike despite his ‘government pay’ rising at least 64% to roughly $18 million.
Of course these estimates are conjectures, and are most likely far lower than the actual net worth given the tax havens, offshore accounts, foundations, and subversive trails of ‘follow the money’.
What this does reveal is an inept team prosecuting people that are innocent for crimes that are nominal, and not targeting the real criminal activity that defines – THE SWAMP.
This is the same – Laurel and Hardy – team that is attempting to justify a comedy skit against Trump while leaving the criminals at large to languish in Jamaican hideaways drinking purple Mai-Tai’s and ….
They have a history of ineptitude, a conviction history of ineptitude, and an nearly comedic if not sad resume of – ineptitude. This is the guy-pal team going after Trump and Russia as our Legal Representatives. If they weren’t comical, they might be taken seriously, but given their performance history – one must wonder who, how and why they are even representative of our government?
They are seen as the “Bunglers”. Their profile is the “Laurel and Hardy bunglers”. And somehow, Comey felt his book might exonerate his reputation only to find that he was further ostracized by those he desperately sought to affirm his goodness. Denounced by the Hillary cabal, hated by the Trump cabal, he really has no one and nothing but his ego from which he can draw any semblance of integrity.
Their legacy, their accomplishments, their life, have been a stage of inexcusable failures. And this may certainly go down in history as his most defamatory and corrupt.