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This is an amazing and astute analysis, Bigbob ... EXCEPT I think you left out the dimension of criminal conspiracies and treason ... possibly RICO.
I grant you that each "Individual" may have performed acts which, taken out of context, are scarcely prosecutable. But Barr, hopefully is looking at the big picture.
I am not a lawyer, and have no doubt that anyone who's been to law school could make better examples, but just to illustrate this point:
2. It's not illegal (perhaps) to negligently sign a FISA warrant with incomplete or even false "evidence," BUT, if this is part of an attempt to undermine federal elections, or to carry out a Coup d'etat, then such "minor" bad action may be part of a huge federal crime.
I would enjoy your perspective, Bigbob (and others) as to the possibility that Trey Gowdy was correct--USING THE SMALL PERSPECTIVE OF INDIVIDUAL ACTIONS--but that he missed seeing the forest for the trees.
"Forest" being a larger conspiracy, where ANY KNOWING AID AND ABETTING THEREOF is a major crime.
Thank you, I sure make no claim to astuteness ;-) Or legal knowledge, for that matter. The whole concept of RICO is something I know about one sentence worth about, but you could be exposing an added dimension to all this.
Of course a RICO case still has to meet the same basic test: is there sufficient evidence to prove a crime was committed? If my limited understanding of RICO is correct, then the task of developing such a case would be even more difficult and time-consuming, since the prosecutor would have to fully investigate each individuals actions, and then investigate the intersection of all these individual acts to see if they constitute a criminal conspiracy.
This sentence from wikipedia might be useful: “The RICO Act focuses specifically on racketeering and allows the leaders of a syndicate to be tried for the crimes they ordered others to do or assisted them in doing”.
What is a “racket” I kept wondering? Wikipedia:
“A racket, according to the current common and most general definition, is an organized criminal act or activity in which the criminal act or activity is some form of substantial business, or a way to earn illegal money either regularly, or briefly but repeatedly. A racket is therefore generally a repeated or continuous organized criminal operation or enterprise...However, the term “racket” has expanded in definition over time and may now be used less strictly to refer to any continuous or repeated illegal organized crime operation, including those that do not necessarily involve fraudulent practices or extortion.”
What is interesting (again according to that great source of legal information, wikipedia) is that in the list of “racketeering”, alongside dog-fighting, price-fixing, and people-smuggling is “political corruption”.
Looking over the list of RICO cases, it seems to me that a RICO case for political conspiracy would be a first. Not to say that it won’t or couldn’t happen, but it would probably cause prosecutors to move very slowly in such uncharted waters.
The main point of my post was that we can at least (IMHO) remove “lack of will” by the Attorney General as a factor. In contrast to Eric the Red, for example, if the legal foundation is there I’m certain that William Barr will not overlook any potential prosecution. Which, considering how awful some of our previous AGs have been, is a big deal.