Shhh! Civil libertarians at rest

On CNN Thursday night (05-07-2020) Erin Burnett got around to the exoneration of former U.S. national security adviser Michael Flynn only in the last minute of the program. Her guest was predictably outraged. Over on MSNBC (or MS-DNC as Hannity calls it), Pajama Boy let Adam Schiff, of all people, spin the story. Schiff is the hoaxer who said he had proof that Trump colluded with Russia to throw the 2016 election. At long last, Mr. Schiff, have you no decency?

⇒ The Werkes has been sensitized to runaway prosecutors ever since Wisconsin John Doe 2 speech police raided the homes of private citizens in the wee hours for the non-crime of “colluding” with other citizens on issues of their common governance. Otherwise known as exercising their First Amendment rights. About which, Wisconsin’s civil libertarians and “watchdog press” were somnolent.

CNN’s reliable guest functionary sputtered that Flynn had twice pled guilty. (You would, too, if it happened to you. — Leslie Gore.) See how soon you cry “uncle” when the federal government drops its full police powers until you are financially ruined and have to hock your own home. As a coup de grace, the government threatened to prosecute Flynn’s son.

Flynn’s alleged sin: that as newly named national security adviser he spoke with the Russian ambassador a month before Trump took office, thus violating the 1799 Logan Act, which has been prosecuted only twice — both times well before the Civil War — and never successfully. In any event, why wouldn’t the new national security adviser talk to the Russian ambassador?

“The prosecutor on the case,” the Wall Street Journal reports, was part of Mueller’s team and consistently denied there was relevant material the government had not turned over to the defense.” Until last week, that is. (More here.)

Where are the civil libertarians?

The Resistance press is playing the Justice Department’s withdrawal from prosecuting Flynn as stage-managed by the Orange Meanie in the White House even though Attorney General Barr appointed an independent, career prosecutor to review the case. Thanks to new evidence long withheld, that prosecutor determined Flynn had been entrapped in a politically motivated prosecution. James Comey (we haven’t heard the last of him!) even boasted that he sent his FBI agents into the White House, circumventing proper channels, amid the chaos of a new administration trying to find its footing.

But we are burying the lede, as we used to say in the daily newspaper biz. That being (boldface type required!)

The entire Mueller investigation was nothing more than a cover-up
for the FBI and Justice Department’s dirty dealing.

Kimberley Strassel breaks that story in the Wall Street Journal:  

Mr. Mueller was named not to get to the bottom of Russia-related crimes but to legitimize the illegitimate decisions the FBI and Justice had made to that point, to squeeze “something” out of its disastrous escapade.

Known to be bunk

The Justice Dept’s Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller in May 2017 to conduct an unrestrained, kitchen-sink probe into “already debunked theories and non-crimes” committed by anyone connected to the President, no matter how unrelated. For instance:

Every “collusion” allegation the FBI had about [Carter Page and Paul Manafort] came directly from the Steele dossier, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. By August 2017, the FBI knew that dossier was bunk.  

According to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, the FBI knew by January 2017 that:

• the dossier’s primary Russian source had disavowed the allegations and the FBI had failed to validate a single claim.
• Colleagues of author Christopher Steele had warned the FBI of his poor judgment.
• As was revealed only last month, the FBI had also been warned several times that the dossier might itself be Russian disinformation.

They weren’t getting any Russia “collusion” charges. That was clear by the spring of 2017, and former FBI Director Comey knew it would soon emerge that his bureau had made egregious errors. So he leaked his memo of conversations with Mr. Trump with the specific goal of getting a special counsel appointed. The Mueller probe — led by the very people who’d made those errors — then spent more than two years “investigating” bogus or derivative claims, keeping secrets, and giving the escapade a fiction of legitimacy.

Wow. Just WOW! In other words, Hillary Clinton and the DNC and — very likely, Barack Obama himself — weaponized Russian disinformation and put it into the hands of this nation’s own Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit).

On Hannity Thursday night, U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham vowed to hold public hearings to expose the how’s and why’s of this scandal. 

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Mirandize James Comey, Priestap, Strzok, Page, McCabe, and the rest. Read them their rights but don’t cut corners like they did. We are still a nation of laws. Someone tell the civil libertarians nap time is over.

Who else should be prosecuted?