Outrageous — the FBI raid on Michael Cohen (Update 2)

The FBI gave Hillary a free pass for national security violations; now it conducted an outrageous raid against Trump’s attorney right before the IG report.

This morning, the DOJ, based on allegations passed on by Bob Mueller, executed a warrant on Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, sweeping up a host of material covered by attorney client privilege.  Indications are that the information related to Stormy Daniels, something completely unrelated to a single thing about Trump-Russian collusion.

[Update 1:  By all accounts, Cohen was fully cooperating with the FBI and DOJ.  So why and how this warrant?  The procedure for issuing this particular warrant would have had to pass a high bar and involved multiple people at DOJ.  My suspicion, reinforced by the following from Liz Shields at PJM, is that it is the mother of all fishing expeditions:

One thing is curious: Mr. Cohen was cooperating with the authorities, so why were the jackboots brought in? A special team of agents will need to go through the material in order to identify communications that are protected under attorney-client relationship. If the New York agents just happen to find something relevant to Mueller’s investigation they can turn it over to the special counsel, The New York Times reports.

So just who made the decision to seek a warrant in this matter?  We’re still waiting to find out.  It is just being reported that the AG for the Southern District of New York, a Trump appointee, was recused from this matter and he, just like Jeff Sessions did with Rosenstein, turned the matter over to someone else in his office — all with the approval of Rosenstein.  Rosenstein also approved the warrant at issue here.]

[Update:  Andy McCarthy, writing at NRO, puts the investigation of Cohen in perspective:

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was caught hiding the sources of 1,300 large campaign donations, aggregating to nearly $2 million. The campaign also accepted more than $1.3 million in unlawful donations from contributors who had already given the legal maximum.

Under federal law, such campaign-finance violations, if they aggregate to just $25,000 in a calendar year, may be treated as felonies punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment . . .

The Obama campaign did not have a defense; it argued in mitigation that the unlawful donations constituted a negligible fraction of the monumental amount it had raised from millions of “grass-roots” donors. Compelling? Maybe not, but enough to convince the Obama Justice Department not to prosecute the Obama campaign — shocking, I know. During the Christmas holiday season right after the 2012 campaign, with Obama safely reelected and nobody paying much attention, the matter was quietly settled with the payment of a $375,000 fine.

Is the $130,000 in hush money Donald Trump’s personal lawyer paid to porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election a campaign-finance violation? Probably, although it’s a point of contention. Even if we stipulate that it is, though, we’re talking comparative chump change.

Yet, as that lawyer, Michael Cohen, has discovered, what was not a crime in the Obama days is the crime of the century now. . . .

This is a mockery of equal justice, which makes the execution of this warrant look like an utter abuse of our legal system, all in an effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election.]

This warrant is from the same bastards who have yet – two years after the fact – to execute a warrant to verify that the single most basic fact of the collusion story, that the DNC server was hacked by the Russians.  This from the same bastards that allowed Hillary to maintain her private server for months after it became known that she had run all State Dept. business through that server, all but certainly exposing thousands of confidential, secret and top secret documents and items of information in violation of our state secrets laws.  During that time, Hillary and her attorney wiped that server clean.  And now these bastards, seemingly having found nothing on which to charge Trump relating to Russian collusion, and having given Hillary and her team a pass on crystal clear felonies, go after Trump and/or his personal attorney on a technical violation of election law?  These worthless bastards are out of control.

It is hard to express just how outrageous this is [Update:  though Alan Dershowitz does a good job of it]:

The attorney–client privilege is one of the oldest recognized privileges for confidential communications.  The United States Supreme Court has stated that by assuring confidentiality, the privilege encourages clients to make “full and frank” disclosures to their attorneys, who are then better able to provide candid advice and effective representation.

Indeed, the Attorney Client privilege is not merely judge made law well over a century old, it is part of the Federal Rules of Evidence passed into law by Congress.  If a prosecutor is even thinking of violating it, he has a high bar to overcome.  That is doubly so in this case where the warrant was issued ex parte, without any chance for Trump or his attorney to object and be heard.

But that is hardly the only, or even most outrageous aspect, of all of this.  Let me reiterate something that I have been saying since shortly after Trump took the Presidency.  The single biggest mistake he has made to date has been to allow the utterly lawless prior administration and the related deep state to skate on all of their illegal actions.  Indeed, the acts of the prior administration threatened both the Constitution and made an utter mockery of equal application of justice.  And if the proggies think they can get away with that unscathed, then they will drive us into a civil war because they will walk away with the belief they can do anything without paying any penalty.  On day one, Trump should have fired Comey, every political appointees at the DOJ, and half the leadership of the FBI.

That said, let’s take a walk down all of the things wrong with the Mueller probe.

  • If Jeff Sessions could not exercise control over the deep state and the Russia probe, he should never have accepted Trump’s nomination to be the Attorney General.  He has done an unforgivable disservice to both the nation and to Trump by accepting the nomination then recusing himself.  He place the Russia investigation not into the hand of disinterested observers, but the worst of the deep state denizens. [Update 3:  Levin calls on Sessions to step down.]
  • Mueller himself is implicated in the Uranium One fiasco.  He was the head of the FBI when Congress approved the sale of 20% of our uranium, and with it, access to our technology on mining and processing, to the Russians, without informing the government body overseeing the sale of extensive Russian corruption relating to the handling of uranium in North America.
  • Rosenstein could not be more in the middle of the Uranium One fiasco.  He was overseeing the investigation when the decision was made to allow Russians to purchase 20% of our uranium assets without informing Congress of Russia’s corrupt activities.  Rosensteins corruption did not end there.  He drew up the charging documents in such a way as to hide FBI knowledge, prior to our government’s approval of the purchase, of Russian corruption.
  • Rosenstein is one of the DOJ officials who approved a FISA warrant for Carter Page when Rosenstein knew or should have known that the warrant was, without question, legally insufficient.  Indeed, by the time Rosenstein approved the third warrant, the legal insufficiency was open and notorious.  Rosenstein, one, should have recused himself from the Russia investigation on those grounds.  Two, Rosenstein should have been fired the day this came to light.
  • Comey is as corrupt and dirty as they come.  His exoneration of Hillary was not an act of discretion, it was an act of pure corruption.  The “investigation” he oversaw into the Hillary email scandal violated virtually every FBI protocol.  It was an exercise in banana republic level raw politics that made an utter travesty of equal application of the law.  Further, Comey manipulated Rosenstein, perhaps with premeditation dating back to a January, 2017 meeting with Obama and Rosenstein, into appointing a special counsel.
  • The special counsel regulations limit the appointment of a special counsel to investigate crimes wherein the DOJ has an apparent conflict of interest.   Rosenstein did not appoint Mueller to investigate a crime at issue — the only one of which was whether Trump interfered with justice in his discussions with Mueller regarding Flynn.  He appointed Mueller with an unlawful mandate to conduct the entire counterintelligence investigation of Russian interference in our 2016 election.  The appointment should have been terminated on that day by Sessions, the most worthless man in Washington.
  • Everything about Michael Flynn’s investigation, firing and subsequent indictment is outrageous.  He was the subject of a political hit by the FBI and DOJ as corrupt as anything one can imagine.  The DOJ opened up a Logan Act investigation of Flynn for which heads should have rolled, the Logan Act never having been the subject of a successful prosecution in its 200 + years of its existence.  The unmasking of Flynn was itself a violation of the law regarding FISA.  And now we find out that the FBI agents who intervewed Flynn found that he had told the truth.  And yet Mueller prosecuted him for lying under oath.  This should tell you all you need to know about the Mueller investigation.  It is aimed at toppling Trump at all costs.
  • If there is no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia, then where is the investigation into whether this entire canard was a creation of the DNC and the Hillary campaign to criminally misuse legal process as part and parcel of swinging the election to her.  It seems more and more each day that this was not a good faith but mistaken belief that Trump colluded with Russia, but rather a cynical and unlawful effort to paint such a false picture in the leadup to the election, and then afterward to overturn the result of the democratic election.  My only regret is that the penalty for sedition is not hanging.  Still, WHO THE HELL IS INVESTIGATING THIS????
  • The people Mueller has hired to form his investigatory team look like a who’s who of Hillary partisans.  Indeed, it is so over the top in its formulation that one has to wonder why Mueller was unable to locate anyone neutral.

I wonder whether this insane overreach of a warrant on Trump’s personal council is not an effort by Mueller et. al. to cause their own firing?  Doing so would ignite a firestorm in the media, hiding the fact that there is no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.  Under the circumstance of all of the above, Trump, in any sane world, would be justified a hundred times over in firing not just Rosenstein, but Mueller and his grossly partisan team as well.   But if he does it, the combined howling from CNN and MSNBC might well deafen the entire nation.

Given the complete lack of evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, this seems almost a last gasp effort by Mueller et. al. to shake something loose in the Russian collusion investigation.  I am torn between whether Trump would be wise to fire Mueller or not at this point – though not as to Rosenstien.  That worthless scumsucking weasel needs to go.  As to Mueller, given the proggie hold on the media, perhaps he best wait until day one after the midterms and then send Mueller packing.  Moreover, he needs to DIRECT Sessions to appoint a special counsel to investigate the deep state DOJ and FBI and their actions as regards Hillary.  We as a nation need that, and it is long overdue.

[Update 4:  From never-Trumper Jonah Goldberg at NRO, via Instapundit:

I’ve talked to several lawyers with DOJ experience. There are serious and strict guidelines against doing anything like this at the DOJ and FBI, particularly when the subject/target has been cooperating. They — and a judge — must have seen something significant to go ahead with this. Back on the first hand, I think Hugh Hewitt is right that this is a politically unprecedented move to go after the president’s lawyer and, by extension, the president’s private papers. Which means that whatever warranted this had better be big enough and clear enough to the public to justify such a move, or a lot of people are going to have egg on their faces.”

The problem is, many, many people won’t believe claims that nonpartisan officials using meticulous procedures are acting fairly. There’s been too much egg on too many faces already. But the potential consequences here go beyond embarrassment. There can’t even be a shadow of a possibility that someone is overturning an election via bureaucratic war, or there will be hell to pay, and I don’t just mean embarrassment for a few top bureaucrats.]

[Update:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGLd_Ukgz8M&w=560&h=315]

 

 

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