Tom Maguire:
The NY Times licks its lips and reports on the Mueller investigation into Trump associate Paul Manafort:
With a Picked Lock and a Threatened Indictment, Mueller’s Inquiry Sets a Tone
WASHINGTON — Paul J. Manafort was in bed early one morning in July when federal agents bearing a search warrant picked the lock on his front door and raided his Virginia home. They took binders stuffed with documents and copied his computer files, looking for evidence that Mr. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, set up secret offshore bank accounts. They even photographed the expensive suits in his closet.
The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, then followed the house search with a warning: His prosecutors told Mr. Manafort they planned to indict him, said two people close to the investigation.
Whether a pre-dawn raid was necessary is not clear but it certainly was aggressive. Intentionally:
“They are setting a tone. It’s important early on to strike terror in the hearts of people in Washington, or else you will be rolled,” said Solomon L. Wisenberg, who was deputy independent counsel in the investigation that led to the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in 1999. “You want people saying to themselves, ‘Man, I had better tell these guys the truth.’”
Ahh, terrific. Resist! With the full power of the government and arguably excessive use of force, but resist!
But the Times fails to note the extreme differences between the tone taken by Mueller and the tone presented by Comey in his desultory and deferential investigation of Hillary and her emails. Just for example, did Comey engage in shock and awe with a flurry of subpoenas? Quite the contrary – only recently did we learn that he had used subpoenas at all:
FBI reveals broader use of grand jury subpoenas in Clinton email probe
A court filing discloses the bureau employed a legal tool to seek emails from accounts of some she corresponded with.
The FBI revealed Wednesday that it used grand jury subpoenas more broadly than previously known in the course of the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email account and server.
A top FBI official disclosed in a court filing that grand jury subpoenas were used to try to obtain records not only from Clinton’s account but also from accounts belonging to people she was in contact with.
Any shock and awe effect had to have been pretty subtle, since few even knew about it: