The Case Of The Meddlesome Meddler

Late Friday afternoon, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that 12 Russian nationals were indicted for hacking the DNC, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign officials in order to get emails.

The indictment alleges the Russians also stole information on approximately half a million U.S. voters by hacking a state board of election.

Rosenstein, however, made the point very clear: the indictment included no allegation that the hacking altered any votes nor affected the election result.

“There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime,” Rosenstein said Friday. “There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election result. The special counsel investigation is ongoing and there will be no comments on a special counsel at this time.”

The announcement came just three days before the President’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, exposing Rosenstein to charges of playing politics with international diplomacy.

Rosenstein said he briefed Trump about the upcoming criminal charges earlier this week and insisted the timing of the indictments was “a function of the collection of the facts, the evidence, and the law and a determination that it was sufficient to present the indictment at this time.”

“I’ll let the president speak for himself,” Rosenstein responded when asked whether Trump supported the latest step in the 14-month-old Mueller probe. “Obviously, it was important for the President to know what information we've uncovered because he’s got to make very important decisions for the country. So, he needs to understand what evidence we have for election interference.”

Earlier in the day, during a joint press conference with Prime Minister Theresa May, President Trump was asked about his visit with Putin scheduled for Monday.  He stated what he would discuss with Putin saying, “We’ll be talking about a number of things. Ukraine, we’ll be talking about Syria.  We’ll be talking about other parts of the Middle East.  I will be talking about nuclear proliferation because we are massively, you know, you know what we’ve been doing, we’ve been modernizing, fixing and buying; it’s just a devastating technology. And they, likewise are doing a lot.  And it’s a very, very bad policy.  We have no choice.  But we are massively big and they are big.  And I’ll be talking about nuclear proliferation.  It would be a great thing if we could do it.”

Trump went on to say, “It’s not only Russia and the United States, it’s other countries also.  We’re the two leaders.  I think it would be tremendous if we could do something on nuclear proliferation.  Will we be talking about meddling.  I will absolutely bring that up.  I don’t think you’ll have any ‘Gee, I did it, I did it, you got me.'  There won’t be a Perry Mason here I don’t think, but you never know what will happen.  But I will absolutely, firmly ask the question and hopefully we’ll have a good relationship.”

The President was referring to the 1957 to 1966 television series, where character Perry Mason (played by Raymond Burr) represents a series of clients in difficult circumstances and then usually manages to wring confessions from the real guilty party through skillful interrogation and every single case was solved in one hour.

To get to the truth about election meddling they need to interrogate The World’s Most Dangerous Community Organizer, Crooked Hillary and Slimeball Comey.

Barack Obama sold out our Eastern European allies on missile defense. He slow-walked aid to Ukraine and did little more than shrug when Crimea was annexed. He said "never mind" on his own "red line" in Syria and turned a blind eye to Putin’s intervention there, in large part because of his obsessions with getting the Iran deal. The Russian meddling in our elections started on Obama’s watch─and not just our elections but those of many of our allies. When Mitt Romney famously said Russia was our No. 1 geopolitical foe, Obama mocked him for it as did countless liberal journalists who are now converts to anti-Russia hawkery.

Throughout his presidency, Obama consistently underestimated the challenge posed by Putin’s regime. His foreign policy was firmly grounded in the premise that Russia was not a national security threat to the United States.

During a 2012 presidential debate, Obama disparaged his opponent, Mitt Romney for exaggerating the Russian threat, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Obama quipped. This breezy attitude prevailed even as Russia annexed Crimea, invaded eastern Ukraine, intervened in Syria, and hacked the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Obama’s response during these critical moments was cautious at best, and deeply misguided at worst. Even the imposition of sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by so much appeasement and restraint elsewhere that it didn’t deter Russia from subsequent aggression, including the risky 2016 influence operation in the United States. Obama, confident that history was on America’s side, for the duration of his time in office underestimated the damaging impact Russia could achieve through asymmetric means.

We should never let these facts slip into our collective amnesia despite the Democrat media complex’s constant attempts to rehabilitate Obama’s foreign policy failures.

UPDATE:  Welcome readers of Bad Blue Uncensored News.  We are honored again today by Doug Ross who linked to this post and we thank him.

Dragnet 2018: Not Your Grandfather’s FBI

The word “dragnet” was made famous in the mid-50s by the NBC TV show Dragnet, which featured Sergeant Joe Friday played by Jack Webb (pictured left).

A dragnet is a law enforcement term used to describe coordinated measures for apprehending criminals or suspects.

As a matter of principle, the law enforcement arm of the United States government must operate on a presumption of innocence.  A prosecutor should be assigned only if there is strong evidence that a crime has been committed.  In the absence of such evidence, a prosecutor should never be assigned to investigate whether an American may have committed some unknown crime.

What former FBI Director James Comey described in his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in March of 2017 and what Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein later adopted to define Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s jurisdiction was not a criminal investigation or a prosecution nor did it provide a factual basis for either action.

The Obama Administration seized on, perhaps even created, the Russian probe in order to paralyze President Trump─to strangle his capacity to govern─and Obama holdovers in the Justice Department, for more than a year now, have been outrageously public about the existence of a “counterintelligence probe” and the Trump campaign investigation.

When Comey leaked his memos to the press, he knew it would instigate the appointment of a special counsel.

The collusion narrative was spawned by an unverifiable dossier bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton─a fact that was deliberately kept secret from the FISA court when the DOJ and FBI wanted warrants issued.

So far, four former Trump campaign associates─Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Richard Gates and George Papadopoulos─have been charged in Mueller’s inquiry into alleged Russian interference, though none of the charges are directly related to any misconduct by the President's campaign.

Alex van der Zwaan, an attorney, pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators during the investigation, and was sentenced to 30 days in prison in April. He was the first to be sentenced in the probe. 

Regarding Papadopoulos, there’s something fishy about the charge filed by Mueller against him according to former top federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy.

“While much that has gone on in the Mueller investigation is curious, I have assumed the candor of the special counsel’s portrayal of the Papadopoulos case:  The young man was approached by an agent of Russia [Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud], who eventually informed him the Kremlin had ‘dirt’ on the Democratic Party’s nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the form of ‘thousands of emails of Clinton’.  To my mind, then, the only questions involved (a) the nature of Mifsud’s relationship to the Putin regime and (b) whether the emails in question were the hacked DNC emails or the thousands of emails Clinton deleted from her homebrew server.”

[SKIP]

“Remember, there is no allegation that Mifsud actually knew the Russians had Clinton emails, let alone that he ever showed Papadopoulos any such emails.  The claim is that Mifsud was told by unidentified Russian officials that the Kremlin had the emails.”

“So, what happens after Mifsud, allegedly, told Papadopoulos the Russians had these emails?  According to Mueller’s statement of the offence, the following day Papadopoulos sends two emails to high-ranking Trump campaign officials about his meeting with Mifsud and neither one of them says anything about emails.  It appears Papadopoulos was myopically focused on the possibility─farfetched, but apparently real to Papadopoulos─that Mifsud could help arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin.”

McCarthy is no hack.  He is a member of the Federalist Society and a former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York, best known for leading the prosecution against the Blind Sheik (Omar Abdel Rahman) and eleven other jihadists for waging a terrorist war against the United States – including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. After the 9/11 attacks, he supervised the U.S. attorney’s command-post near Ground Zero. He later served as an advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

The mainstream media has weaponized the storyline of Papadopoulos’ meeting with Mifsud as the exchange of information about emails that were hacked from the DNC and published during the 2016 presidential campaign.

McCarthy’s take is:  A very low-level, inexperienced Trump campaign adviser was interacting with a Maltese academic who had no real Kremlin ties and no inside information about whether Russia actually possessed damaging information about Clinton in the form of emails or otherwise.  This young campaign adviser then made a vague claim to an Australian diplomat, who did not hear him say anything about emails and did not report the conversation to his government through regular channels.

McCarthy adamantly asserts that after nearly two years of collusion banter, Congress needs to find the truth regarding whether Mueller’s contention that Mifsud and his associates were authentic agents of Russia or merely that Papadopoulos just thought they were.

NBC’s police drama, Dragnet, depicted law enforcement working methodically to investigate and apprehend criminals.  A gumshoe cop named Sergeant Joe Friday always insisted on “Just the facts, ma’am.”

Until just recently, the FBI’s credo of fidelity, bravery and integrity symbolized the world’s greatest law enforcement agency.  Now, the FBI [Comey, McCabe, Ohr, Strzok, Page] has damaged the constitutional values Americans embrace by picking a front-page fight with Donald J. Trump.

Dragnet 2018, what I prefer to call the Mueller probe, is an out of control investigation that was supposed to be about Russia has been more about money laundering in rug stores and porn stars than about the Kremlin’s meddling in the election.

Partisan forces (Obama holdovers) eager to feed the resistance inside the DOJ and FBI freely crusaded against a legitimately elected President and a lopsided team of Democrat lawyers working with Mueller have turned a mole hill into a mountain. Every conceivable angle has been probed; many of them far removed from Red Square.

Even with all the tools of spy craft, they’ve found nothing.  Nothing.

SEE ALSO:  “The Maltese Phantom of Russiagate” by Lee Smith (Real Clear Investigations)

“The Curious Case of Mr. Downer” by Kim Strassel (The Wall Street Journal)

“FBI Spy Stefan Halper’s Media Contacts Could Pose a Problem, Retired FBI Officials Say” by Chuck Ross (The Daily Caller)