Free Republic

Special Counsel Mueller is building a report, not a case. Right after Special Counsel Robert Mueller racked up yet another guilty plea to a false-statements charge on Thursday, a friend asked me, “Doesn’t this destroy Michael Cohen’s credibility as a witness?” Easier to destroy Satan’s conscience, I thought. Cohen would have to have some credibility before it could be destroyed, and how much could reside in a self-described “fixer” who openly compared himself to Tom Hagen, the lawyer-gangster in The Godfather? (I’ll stipulate that he has a law degree, but Cohen has always struck me as the Fredo of Trump...

Rest assured that if there’s a rumor that, in third grade, young Brett Kavanaugh yanked on the ponytails of the girl in the second row (war on women!), The New York Times, NBC News and phalanxes of their journalistic colleagues will be all over it. Meanwhile, Rep. Beto O’Rourke had a pair of felony arrests in his mid-to-late 20s, including a reckless drunk-driving incident in which he crashed into a car and allegedly tried to flee from the scene. The cases appear to have mysteriously disappeared without serious prosecution, notwithstanding that O’Rourke continues to deny basic facts outlined in at...

In my column yesterday, I contended that the unverifiable sexual-assault allegation against Judge Brett Kavanaugh bore “all the hallmarks of a set-up.” I based that assessment on the patently flimsy evidence, coupled with Senate Democrats’ duplicitous abuse of the confirmation-hearing process. To repeat myself: If the Democrats had raised the allegation in a timely manner, its weakness would have been palpable, it would have been used for what little it’s worth in examining Kavanagh during his days of testimony, it would be put to rest as unverifiable, and we’d be on to a confirmation vote. Instead, we’re on to a...

Rudy Giuliani appeared this morning on Meet the Press on behalf of President Trump. Host Chuck Todd asked why President Trump won’t just sit for a friendly interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and tell the truth. What’s so hard about that? Truth is truth; Trump can avoid any alleged “perjury trap” by sticking to it. But it’s not that simple. “Truth isn’t truth,” Giuliani responded. “Mr. Mayor,” Todd countered. “the truth is the truth. This is going to be a bad meme.” Andrew McCarthy refuted the seemingly self-evident position advocated by Todd in his NR column “Of Course There...

I do not share my friend David French’s theoretical constitutional concerns about the president’s revocation of security clearances — at least when it comes to former government officials who become media commentators and have no demonstrable need for a security clearance. Like David and many other analysts, though, I think it’s a big mistake to politicize the revocation of security clearances. Still, I am even less of a fan of the politicization of intelligence itself. And that justifies the revocation of former CIA director John Brennan’s clearance. As is often the case with President Trump, the right thing has been...

Watch here.

Here is former U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy today analyzing the redacted FISA documents released by the Justice Department last night. He is very strong in saying he is “shocked” to find that, indeed, the FBI used the unverified and discredited Steele Dossier to justify their need for a FISA Warrant to spy on Carter Page. McCarthy said he really didn’t think they would do that – that he didn’t think something like this could happen here. But it has. . . .

On his nationally syndicated radio talk show Wednesday, host Mark Levin interviewed former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy on the topic of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s threat to subpoena and interview President Donald J. Trump, McCarthy suggesting that Mueller should not be permitted to subpoena Trump, nor even ask for an interview. “Well, I don’t think, Mark, that not only should a prosecutor not be permitted to subpoena a president by a court, I don’t think the Justice Department should allow a president to be even asked voluntarily to submit to an interview in the absence of evidence that there’s a...

Did Robert Mueller’s office withhold other evidence in Michael Flynn’s prosecution, either from the FISA court or from Flynn’s attorneys? There is reason to believe so. -------------------------------------------------------- On Friday, Judge Emmet Sullivan issued an order in United States v. Flynn that, while widely unnoticed, reveals something fascinating: A motion by Michael Flynn to withdraw his guilty plea based on government misconduct is likely in the works. Just a week ago, and thus before Sullivan quietly directed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team to provide Flynn’s attorneys “any exculpatory evidence,” Washington Examiner columnist Byron York detailed the oddities of Flynn’s case. The...

The FBI and Justice Department hyped Trump–Russia collusion. Rod Rosenstein can right that wrong. The most bitter dispute over the Nunes memo involves Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. This might seem odd since the memo, published last week by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Devin Nunes (R. Calif.), does not address the Mueller investigation. Rather, it homes in on potential abuses of foreign-intelligence-collection authorities by Obama-era Justice Department and FBI officials, said to have occurred many months before Mueller was appointed. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456185/nunes-memo-rod-rosenstein-can-clean-mess

...the Justice Department has improperly assigned a prosecutor in the absence of grounds to believe a crime has been committed. “Collusion with Russia” is not a crime, and there are presently no grounds to believe the president conspired with Putin’s regime to violate any American law. And again, it is not criminal obstruction for a president to weigh in on whether a subordinate...should be investigated, or to fire a subordinate....Whether we think these are foolish things for the president to have done is beside the point. We are talking here about whether they are criminal actions, and they are not.......

There is no way to evaluate the trustworthiness of anonymous sources and unpublished documents, so why try?At this point, it’s safe to say the publicly available reports muddle the Mueller investigation so much that the only thing we “know” is all sides have more than enough circumstantial evidence to justify their pre-existing hopes and dreams. Left-wing partisans would have you believe that Mueller has the goods on Trump, and that conservative critiques of Mueller’s team or the Clinton campaign’s role in creating the so-called Steele dossier are nothing more than bad-faith attempts to discredit the investigation and undermine faith in...

Despite the antiwar Left's favorite mantra about how Bush lied regarding WMDs in Iraq, the evidence now proves there were WMDs after all. According to recent announcement made by Senator Rick Santorum and Rep. Peter Hoekstra , approximately 500 weapons munitions, containing degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent, have been discovered in Iraq since 2003. Saddam, therefore, had the means to put WMDs into terrorists' hands. So what is the primary significance of these revelations? And why are these developments not front page news in our media? Where are all of Bush's critics who called him a liar? Where are...

RUSH: I also have Nikki Haley, a couple of bites of Nikki Haley just ripping it at the United Nations earlier. Here’s take one… HALEY: It could be that Russia is knowingly allowing chemical weapons to remain in Syria. It could be that Russia has been incompetent in its efforts to remove the chemical weapons. Or it could be that the Assad Regime is playing the Russians for fools, telling them there are no chemical weapons, all the while stockpiling them on their bases. The world is waiting for the Russian government to act responsibly in Syria. The world is...

: A senior Justice Department official demoted last week for concealing his meetings with the men behind the anti-Trump “dossier” had even closer ties to Fusion GPS, the firm responsible for the incendiary document, than has been disclosed, Fox News has confirmed: The official’s wife worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 election.

The rationale for Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel is that Russia conducted a cyberespionage attack — hacking — to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign, and that the Trump campaign may somehow have “colluded” in this offense. Mueller has been at this for six months, and the FBI for a year before that. So isn’t it about time we asked: Could Mueller prove that Russia did it? Forget Trump. What about Russia? We have paid too much attention to the so-called collusion component of the probe — speculation about Trump-campaign coordination in Russia’s perfidy. There appears to be no proof...

The fact that an FBI agent involved in the Clinton emails investigation was reportedly a partisan Democrat is not in itself damning. I’m taking a “wait and see” attitude on FBI agent Peter Strzok, who is now enmeshed in a political storm involving both the Clinton and the Trump investigations. You know why? Well . . . it’s because I can’t stand the Clintons. What difference does that make? Well, because I didn’t like them any better in 2001. That was when I used to run the satellite U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York — the office based in White...

The thing to understand, what has always been the most important thing to understand, is that Jim Comey was out in front, but he was not calling the shots. On the right, the commentariat is in full-throttle outrage over the revelation that former FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference. The news appears in a letter written to new FBI Director Christopher Wray by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey...

What he said was probably true, but what he didn’t say was more revealing. In Monday’s Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty usefully outlined some intriguing statements made by former Obama national intelligence director James Clapper regarding the FISA surveillance controversy. Clapper’s remarks, in an interview by NBC’s Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on Sunday, are being taken as a blanket denial of the allegations that the Obama administration used the Justice Department and FBI to investigate Trump-campaign figures, potentially including Trump himself. But what Clapper said is far from a wholesale rejection of the allegations. To be sure, General Clapper’s...

In the overwrought, partisan allegations that Attorney General Jeff Sessions committed perjury in his confirmation-hearing testimony, let’s cut to the chase: There is a good deal of political hay to be made because Sessions made a statement that was inaccurate — or at least incomplete — especially when mined out of its context....... Prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the speaker knowingly, voluntarily, and intentionally — not by accident, misunderstanding, or confusion — said something that was untrue, with a specific purpose to disobey or disregard the law. Therefore, when there is an allegation of perjury, the alleged...