Free Republic

Some Trump supporters are making that claim. The president can disclose warrant applications proving whether it’s true. Will he or won’t he? Will President Trump order the disclosure of any warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (the FISA Court) in which the Justice Department and FBI presented any information derived from the Steele dossier? We don’t need to imperil national security. There is no need to disclose the entirety of any application. There is no need to expose intelligence sources or methods of gathering information — they can be redacted. We don’t even need to see any actual...

The president may not be prosecuted in a criminal judicial proceeding for exercising his discretion, however objectionably, in executive matters over which the courts have no power of review. If Mueller tried to indict him, Trump would have unfettered discretion to fire Mueller and to direct the Justice Department to drop the case. You may not like that, but that’s the way it is. It is not, however, the end of the matter. Any powers can be abused. When executive powers are abused, Congress retains the constitutional authority to impeach and remove the president. Obstruction of an FBI investigation may...

For all practical purposes, the collusion probe is over. While the “counterintelligence” cover will continue to be exploited so that no jurisdictional limits are placed on Special Counsel Robert Mueller, this is now an obstruction investigation

There’s less to the news than meets the eye. Former Trump-administration national-security adviser Michael Flynn is expected to plead guilty today to lying to the FBI regarding his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Flynn, who is reportedly cooperating with the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller, is pleading guilty in federal district court in Washington, D.C., to a one-count criminal information (which is filed by a prosecutor in cases when a defendant waives his right to be indicted by a grand jury).

The end game is the removal of Trump, either by impeachment or by publicly discrediting him and making his reelection politically impossible. Here’s what I’d be tempted to do if I were President Trump: I’d direct the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, including any Obama-administration collusion in that enterprise. I would make sure to call it a “counterintelligence investigation,” putting no limitations on the special counsel — just as with the investigation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been unleashed to conduct into Trump “collusion” with Russia. That is, I...

In July 2016, the Obama administration announced its decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felony mishandling of classified information and destruction of government files. In the aftermath, I observed that there is a very aggressive way that the Justice Department and the FBI go about their business when they are trying to make a case — one profoundly different from the way they went about the Clinton emails investigation. There, they tried not to make the case. That observation bears repeating today, as we watch Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of any possible Trump-campaign collusion in Russia’s alleged interference...

RUSH: In leading into all of this today, I want to focus on what the media is focusing on. The media is slowly and reluctantly — not all of them — but slowly and reluctantly realizing that the indictment of Manafort doesn’t even get them close to where they want to be, and certainly it doesn’t get them close to where they thought they would be on Friday when it was leaked that there had been sealed indictments. Over the weekend they all had convinced themselves that whatever this indictment, ’cause prosecutors come out with the big gun first. And...

The Paul Manafort indictment is much ado about nothing . . . except as a vehicle to squeeze Manafort, which is special counsel Robert Mueller’s objective — as we have been arguing for three months (see here, here, and here). Do not be fooled by the “Conspiracy against the United States” heading on Count One (page 23 of the indictment). This case has nothing to do with what Democrats and the media call “the attack on our democracy” (i.e., the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 election, supposedly in “collusion” with the Trump campaign). Essentially, Manafort and his associate, Richard W....

The Paul Manafort indictment is much ado about nothing . . . except as a vehicle to squeeze Manafort, which is special counsel Robert Mueller’s objective — as we have been arguing for three months....Do not be fooled by the “Conspiracy against the United States” heading on Count One (page 23 of the indictment). This case has nothing to do with what Democrats and the media call “the attack on our democracy” (i.e., the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 election, supposedly in “collusion” with the Trump campaign). Essentially, Manafort and his associate, Richard W. Gates, are charged with (a) conspiring...

Here, the Clinton campaign and the DNC retained the law firm of Perkins Coie; in turn, one of its partners, Marc E. Elias, retained Fusion GPS. We don’t know how much Fusion GPS was paid, but the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid $9.1 million to Perkins Coie during the 2016 campaign (i.e., between mid-2015 and late 2016). [Snip] In its capacity as attorney for the DNC, Perkins Coie – through another of its partners, Michael Sussman – is also the law firm that retained CrowdStrike, the cyber security outfit, upon learning in April 2016 that the DNC’s servers had...

Not only the Clintons are implicated in a uranium deal with the Russians that compromised national-security interests.

Not only the Clintons are implicated in a uranium deal with the Russians that compromised national-security interests. Let’s put the Uranium One scandal in perspective: The cool half-million bucks the Putin regime funneled to Bill Clinton was five times the amount it spent on those Facebook ads — the ones the media-Democrat complex ludicrously suggests swung the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.

Interestingly, as the plea agreement shows, the Obama DOJ’s Fraud Section was then run by Andrew Weissmann, who is now one of the top prosecutors in Robert Mueller’s ongoing special-counsel investigation of suspected Trump collusion with Russia. There was still one other problem to tamp down. That was the informant — the lobbyist who alerted the FBI to the Russian racketeering enterprise back in 2009. He wanted to talk. Specifically, as his attorney, Ms. Toensing, explains, the informant wanted to tell Congress what he knows — about what the FBI and the Justice Department could already have proved in 2010...

Not only the Clintons are implicated in a uranium deal with the Russians that compromised national-security interests. Let’s put the Uranium One scandal in perspective: The cool half-million bucks the Putin regime funneled to Bill Clinton was five times the amount it spent on those Facebook ads — the ones the media-Democrat complex ludicrously suggests swung the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump. The Facebook-ad buy, which started in June 2015 — before Donald Trump entered the race — was more left-wing agitprop (ads pushing hysteria on racism, immigration, guns, etc.) than electioneering. The Clintons’ own long-time political strategist Mark...

Not only the Clintons are implicated in a uranium deal with the Russians that compromised national-security interests. Let’s put the Uranium One scandal in perspective: The cool half-million bucks the Putin regime funneled to Bill Clinton was five times the amount it spent on those Facebook ads — the ones the media-Democrat complex ludicrously suggests swung the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.

Andrew McCarthy devotes his weekly NRO column to the unlimited mandate and prosecutorial tactics of Robert Mueller. The column is “Mueller scorches the earth.” Reviewing the proceedings to date, McCarthy writes: You are forgiven if you can recall only vaguely that supposition about Trump-campaign collusion in Russian espionage against the 2016 election was the actual explanation for Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. To the extent there was any explanation, that is. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Trump appointee, did not comply with the regulations requiring a description of the crimes Trump’s Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate, purportedly...

Robert Mueller’s sprawling special-counsel investigation is playing hardball. It was not enough to get a search warrant to ransack the Virginia home of Paul Manafort, even as the former Trump campaign chairman was cooperating with congressional investigators. Mueller’s bad-asses persuaded a judge to give them permission to pick the door lock. That way, they could break into the premises in the wee hours, while Manafort and his wife were in bed sleeping. They proceeded to secure the premises — of a man they are reportedly investigating for tax and financial crimes, not gang murders and Mafia hits — by drawing...

We already knew that Paul Manafort was in a heap of trouble. It was almost two months ago — July 26, to be precise — that his Virginia residence was raided by the FBI in the predawn hours. As I said at the time, prosecutors do not obtain warrants to toss the homes of people they regard as cooperating witnesses. When they are dealing with cooperators, prosecutors politely request that documents be produced, expecting the witness (and his lawyers) to comply. If some coercion is thought necessary, they will issue a grand-jury subpoena — an enforceable directive to produce documents,...

One of the great ironies of the 2016 campaign is that Donald Trump, who has run as the immigration scourge, is actually the amnesty candidate.Trump has expressly vowed to give legal status to millions of illegal aliens. For any other candidate, such a promise would have been the campaign death knell. To compare, John Kasich -- who is openly pro-amnesty -- has lost 38 of 39 primaries (the sole exception being his own state) and has never been a plausible contestant. When it comes to Trump, however, it seems that the all-important amnesty fine-print of his immigration position has been...

The president signals his enthusiasm for amnesty. Why would immigration activists give an inch? This was supposed to be about how all of yesterday’s heated rhetoric, all the defiant “Stand by Your Dreamer” talk from Harvard and from tech CEOs, was just so much theater. In truth, no one — at least no one law-abiding — is going to be much inconvenienced, let alone deported, over President Trump’s supposed “rescission” of President Obama’s unconstitutional Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program. As I explained yesterday, a proper application of prosecutorial discretion would place young aliens who were brought to this...