Monday, December 24, 2018

" the nature of the crime matters not at all while the politics of the purported criminal is everything."

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,
...We know that Comey’s and McCabe’s testimonies about leaks and the importance of the Steele dossier for FISA warrants cannot be reconciled. The inspector general seems to think McCabe is lying. Comey himself in still other areas involving sworn testimonies and leaking of government documents may face legal exposure. Most shockingly, Comey at least in his public and private sworn statements has mixed up his stories when he keeps denying that he once testified under oath to Congress that his agents initially found Flynn truthful. On 245 occasions in sworn congressional testimony, Comey claimed he did not remember or know the answer to questions answered. Had Flynn answered like that when not under oath to Peter Strzok would he have been indicted or exonerated?

Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills likely gave false testimonies about their knowledge of the private Clinton email server to at least one of the same agents who interviewed Michael Flynn. The nation’s two top intelligence officers, Brennan and Clapper, knowingly gave false testimony and have admitted to such, while under oath to Congress on matters of grave national importance, respectively concerning drone attacks abroad, surveillance of U.S. Senate staff computers, and NSA intercepts. So far none has been charged by any federal prosecutor.

In our Orwellian era, just as some hush monies are not campaign violations and others are, so too some lying to federal officials is classified as inadvertent misremembering and others as proof of felonious intent. In a Washington world, where Hillary Clinton can pay Christopher Steele with her campaign funds to find dirt on rival Donald Trump, and then list such secret payments as “legal expenses,” and be met not just with exoneration, but an absolute lack of interest in her skullduggery, the only guiding principle is that the nature of the crime matters not at all while the politics of the purported criminal is everything.

Mueller is not interested in whether hiding the spending of campaign money to find dirt on a rival through the intervention of British and Russian nationals is a campaign violation; instead, he is focused on whether using one’s own money to obtain silence from a past liaison violated campaign laws.

...It turns out that those who sought to indict Michael Flynn are more likely to be guilty of unethical behavior than the target of their zeal.
Read more here.

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