We Have Said The Same Since The Appointment Of Mueller

Mueller’s Endgame: Impeachment of President Donald Trump

www.israel-commentary.org

(Redacted from an in-depth shocking exposure of the deep, very dirty Washington D.C.  swamp with a special council who is an integral part of it.)     jsk

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

December 2, 2017 4:00 AM

The end game is the removal of Trump, either by impeachment or by publicly discrediting him and making his re-election politically impossible.

Here’s what I’d be tempted to do if I were President Trump: I’d direct the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, including any Obama-administration collusion in that enterprise.

I would make sure to call it a “counterintelligence investigation,” putting no limitations on the special counsel — just as with the investigation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been unleashed to conduct into Trump “collusion” with Russia.

That is, I would not restrict the prosecutor and investigators to digging for specified criminal violations. Or, indeed, any criminal violations. I’d just tell the special counsel, “Have at it” — with unbound authority to scrutinize the negotiations surrounding the eventual Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).

Would I really expect the special counsel to find that Obama officials conspired with the mullahs to obtain nukes for Tehran? No . . . but hey, as the “Trump collusion with Russia” crowd says, “You never know.”

Meantime, under the guise of investigating this highly unlikely “collusion,” I’d want the special counsel to scrutinize closely any variances between what Obama-administration officials were telling Congress and the public about the negotiations and what they were telling the Iranians; to probe any side deals the administration agreed to but failed to disclose to Congress; and to consider whether any laws or policies were violated in such matters as President Obama’s payment of a cash ransom in exchange for American hostages held by Iran.

Why would I do this? Well, because I disagree with Obama administration foreign policy, of course.

Under the Mueller “collusion” precedent, it is evidently now American practice to criminalize foreign policy disputes under the pretext of conducting a counterintelligence investigation.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein disclosed no factual predicate calling for a criminal investigation from which Trump’s Justice Department would be ethically required to recuse itself.

Instead, Mueller’s investigation was rationalized by the need to conduct a counterintelligence inquiry into Russia’s “cyber-espionage” meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Mueller’s investigation was not a criminal investigation. It started out as a fishing expedition, under the vaporous heading of “collusion,” into “contacts” between Russian officials and Trump associates — notwithstanding that collusion is not conspiracy and that it was perfectly legal for Trump associates to have contacts with Russia (just like Clinton associates did).

See, we’re not following the normal rules, in which a prosecutor is assigned only after evidence of an actual crime has emerged. We’re in the wooly realm of counterintelligence, where anything goes. And in the event our aggressive prosecutor can’t find any crimes — which would be no surprise, since the investigation was not triggered by a crime — no matter:

The special counsel is encouraged to manufacture crimes through the investigative process. Misleading assertions by non-suspects made to investigators probing non-crimes can be charged as felony false statements.

The end game of the investigation is the removal of Donald Trump from the presidency, either by impeachment (which does not require proof of a court-prosecutable crime) or by publicly discrediting Trump to such a degree that his reelection becomes politically impossible.

Nevertheless, Trump’s victory caused consternation in the Obama administration for two reasons. First, and most obviously, Obama did not want his policies reversed. Second, neither Obama nor his party could abide a judgment of history holding that the election of Trump, the bane of their existence, was a result of the American people’s rejection of the Obama agenda and of Hillary Clinton, the hapless candidate nominated by Democrats to carry that agenda forward.
One major Obama-administration priority was to solidify the policy of blaming Israel for the enduring Israeli–Palestinian conflict — specifically, downplaying the ideological roots of Palestinian terrorism and framing as the real culprit Israeli settlement-building in disputed territories that Obama, like Israel’s enemies, regarded as illegally “occupied.”

Thus, in his administration’s coup de grace, Obama orchestrated a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity — a stark departure (as I wrote at the time) from America’s commitment to Israel’s security and policy of shielding Israel from such U.N. intrigues.
Flynn informed his counterparts that Trump opposed the resolution — which opposition, by the way, Trump was quite clear about publicly. Flynn encouraged them to vote against the resolution, or at least delay it until Trump would assume office in January. The Obama administration used the weeks following the election to protect Obama’s priorities from Trump and to promote a narrative that Clinton’s defeat was the result of collaboration between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin.

The FBI knew there was no suggestion, in any of the activities just described, that Flynn or Trump had anything to do with Russian espionage. There was no evidence that Flynn had committed a crime.. The ongoing Mueller probe is not a good-faith investigation of suspected espionage or other crime.

It is the exploitation of the executive’s intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement powers in order to (a) criminalize Trump political policies with which the Obama administration disagreed and (b) frame Clinton’s electoral defeat as the product of a traitorous scheme rather than a rejection of Democratic-party priorities …

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.