"The Order appointing Mueller concerns election interference, not post-election political decisions of the winning candidate."

Mark Steyn writes,

Following Michael Flynn's guilty plea for "lying to the FBI", there seem likely to be further feverish developments in Robert Mueller's "Russia investigation". Professor William Jacobson asks the obvious question:

Why is Robert Mueller even investigating the presidential transition?

The Order appointing Mueller concerns election interference, not post-election political decisions of the winning candidate.

...Martha Stewart wound up behind bars for telling a lie in a matter for which there was no underlying crime. In the case of Flynn, I heard some bigshot in Congress argue that Flynn's lies were somehow "material" to the investigation. But, as Professor Jacobson points out, it's hard to see how Russia can "interfere" with the election after it's been held. Flynn's conversations occurred in his capacity as a senior figure in the incoming administration. That's the normal business of diplomatic relations - and it is most emphatically not the business of minor policemen within a leaky and insecure permanent bureaucracy.

So Flynn's "lies" are not material - unless the Deep State is "investigating" the winning side in the election for engaging in the usual business of government.

...The "transition" is part of the general institutional sclerosis of Washington, and certainly no friend to swamp-drainers: A year after Trump's election, key positions in every cabinet department - Deputy Secretaries, Assistant Secretaries, Under-Secretaries, Deputy Assistant Secretaries, Assistant Deputy Secretaries, Deputy Assistant Under-Secretaries - are still held by Obama appointees.

During the stupid and anachronistic two-and-a-half-month electoral "transition", the outgoing Administration worked round the clock to de-legitimize and cripple their successors.

Hence Susan Rice and Samantha Power frantically "unmasking" all the way up to inauguration day.

Obama's decision to pick a last-minute fight with Moscow and expel a bunch of Russian diplomats does not seem to me to be appropriate for a placeholder president on the way out the door. So it is not just that the incoming administration's attempts to ameliorate the damage were, pace Mueller, entirely legitimate, but that it is Obama's actions that are, in the sense of political decorum, wholly improper.

Since January 20th, the party that lost the election has been, supposedly, out of power. But its appointees remain in charge - to the point where the President has to go to court to evict the in effect self-appointed head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - a lawless and unaccountable body so beyond the much vaunted "checks and balances" of the US Constitution that it can shake down its targets (banks) and transfer the proceeds to its ideological allies (anti-capitalist activist groups). The permanent bureaucracy's argument re the CFPB is that elections don't matter. Primitive countries have coups against the president; subtler systems have a thousand below-the-radar coups in every rinky-dink bureau and agency.

Read more here.

Nunes announces that he has seen reports of surveillance of the Trump transition team!

"The NSA is going to comply. I don't know yet whether the FBI is going to comply!" It happened during the Trump Transition (November, December, and January). Normal incidental collection, not criminal. Normal foreign surveillance. All I was able to see was reports on what was collected. There was no mention of Russia. Legally collected under FISA. Wdely disseminated. Information is coming in to us.I am alarmed by this.It reminds me of what happened about a year and a half ago with surveillance of members of Congress. I am going to the White House. They need to see it!
From Sundance at The Last Refuge:

The House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Devin Nunes, held a brief press conference (video also included below) at approximately 1:00pm EDT and stated he has been provided intelligence reports brought to him by unnamed sources include ‘significant information’ about President-Elect Trump and his transition team.

1.) …”On numerous occasions the [Obama] intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.”

2.) “Details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration; details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.”

3.) “Third, I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition members were unmasked.”

4.) “Fourth and finally, I want to be clear; none of this surveillance was related to Russia, or the investigation of Russian activities, or of the Trump team.


“The House Intelligence Committee will thoroughly investigate surveillance and its subsequent dissemination, to determine a few things here that I want to read off:”

“Who was aware of it?”
“Why it was not disclosed to congress?”
“Who requested and authorized the additional unmasking?”
“Whether anyone directed the intelligence community to focus on Trump associates?”
“And whether any laws, regulations or procedures were violated?”
“I have asked the Directors of the FBI, NSA and CIA to expeditiously comply with my March 15th letter -that you all received a couple of weeks ago- and to provide a full account of these surveillance activities.