Rule of Law — Once an American Value
It is an American pride that we are a nation of law, that the law applies (should apply, rather) to all equally. So it has long been an embarrassment that many guilty people have escaped the reach of the law through unscrupulous means. But at least those people had enough consideration for the rest of us to do the dirty deed in private, to concoct some fig leaf of legality to conceal the corruption. More and more lately, that concealment has fallen away, and the powerful or well connected guilty openly walk away from prosecution. They rub our noses in the fact that there is nothing we can do about it. The law applies to we little people, but not to them, and they flaunt it.
Examples are maddeningly commonplace. Fast&Furious was simply ignored by the Obama Administration DOJ. They didn’t defend it; they didn’t formally investigate it; they simply ignored it until it became old news, an effort aided by a media quite ready to cooperate.
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The 2011–13 abuse of IRS power was too serious and obvious to simply ignore. A vastly smaller IRS abuse of the same kind by the Nixon Administration was written up into Articles of Impeachment by the Democrats; that is how serious Democrats believe IRS abuse to be (at least, when done by a Republican Administration). Democrats could hardly ignore that Obama’s IRS had done much worse than Nixon’s. Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS Department which most abused its power, was allowed to plead the Fifth and retire with full benefits; but they were not going to get away with simply ignoring the whole thing. More problematic was how to avoid an independent investigation into the felonies by the IRS. Obama’s DOJ danced away from that problem by declaring that a civilian lawyer, a major donor to the Obama campaign and without a shred of investigative credentials, would be in charge of an investigation. From that time forward, no questions were answered, using the ploy “The matter is under investigation”. And again the media was entirely willing to let the matter drop.
Has anyone heard of how that investigation is proceeding? It is now five years ongoing; has any interim report been published? Any leaks to news media concerning anyone deposed? Any conclusions reached; any guilty parties named? Anything at all? Can anyone even remember the “investigator’s” name?
Only a complete fool would deny that there has been no investigation. A major abuse of IRS authority, an impeachable offense according to Democrats, a clear violation of felony law, has simply been allowed to disappear.
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Since 2009 and before, many people have been prosecuted for minor incidents of mishandling classified documents, some of which documents were only declared classified after the fact, and none of those people had any intention to commit that crime. Yet they were all prosecuted, most convicted, some imprisoned.
* A young sub sailor took a selfie of himself at his workstation and sent it home to his folks. The picture was later declared classified. He was prosecuted.
* An officer on the Afghan battlefield sent an email about an imminent threat to his men to his superiors. That email was later declared to be classified, and the email server it was sent on was not cleared for classified email. He was prosecuted.
* An intelligence agent went home without first clearing his desk of all classified documents. For that carelessness, he was prosecuted.
There are plenty more cases, but you get the point. The law that was applied to these men and many more like them was NOT applied to Hillary Clinton or Huma Abedin, whose transgressions were vastly greater in number and seriousness. Abedin transferred thousands of State Department documents to her husband’s computer; he had no clearance to see those documents and his computer was completely unprotected. She was not prosecuted. Neither was Clinton prosecuted for using a private home server for State Department documents. Huma and Hillary are too well connected.
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The evidence that the Clinton Foundation engaged in money laundering and influence peddling is so self-evident and so numerous that it is detailed in at least two books on the subject. Yet somehow the FBI is completely uninterested in investigating any of that evidence. But the FBI did investigate the gossip that Donald Trump hired prostitutes in Russia to pee on his bed. Of course, FBI agents do have to be mindful of all the people who crossed the Clintons and then committed suicide with two bullets to the back of the head; one has to weigh the pursuit of justice against going home to the family at night.
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That brings us now to the Mueller Independent Investigation. The NYT reported this, “The deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, appointed former F.B.I. Director Robert S. Mueller III as the special counsel to oversee the investigation into Russian tampering in the 2016 presidential election.” Russian tampering is equally wrong regardless of the politics of the US person or campaign that colludes with it. The scope of this mandate includes any US person or campaign colluding with Russia in tampering with the 2016 investigation. The mandate does not limit the investigation to Trump’s people only. It does NOT exempt all US persons or campaigns except Trump’s people from investigation. It does not limit the investigation to only collusion and exclude all other forms of “tampering”. Most of all, it does not direct Mueller to search for evidence to support impeaching President Trump. Mueller, the Democrats and the media behave as if the mandate DOES mean all those things.
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Mueller is investigating the one meeting Don Jr. had with a Russian lawyer in hopes of receiving documentation of wrongdoing by the Clinton campaign. That is within Mueller’s mandate. But that makes it also within his mandate to investigate the many meetings and the coordination and the documents the Hillary campaign received from Ukraine and Russia concerning allegations of wrongdoing by the Trump campaign, including the infamous “Russian Dossier” and the accusations against Manafort. Mueller is not investigating those.
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Mueller is investigating Trump’s real estate dealings with Russian citizens a decade or more ago. That is an expansion of his mandate well beyond Russian campaign tampering, but if he does so, then that brings the Clintons’ dealings and the Podesta brothers’ dealings with Russian citizens also into the scope of the investigation. Except Mueller is not investigating those.
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Mueller is investigating Manafort’s business dealings with Russian citizens in a search for any evidence of money laundering, as reported by Reuters . That is an expansion of his mandate completely beyond campaign tampering, but if he does so, then that brings the evidence of Clinton Foundation money laundering related to Russian donations into the scope of the investigation. Except Mueller is not investigating those.
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Mueller’s entire investigation is being twisted into helping the Democrats impeach or depose President Trump, and Mueller is exempting Democrats from investigation; so much for “equal before the law”. The American Left is just fine with this biased corruption of justice, as long as it accomplishes their political aim to nullify the election. Democrats aren’t even embarrassed in the least that this is all being done in full view of everyone.
