Author: Conrad Black
The views of the Authors are not necessarily the views of Enigmose
The President was perfectly accurate, and for once insusceptible to questions about his good faith, when he expressed surprise at Attorney General Barr’s comment last week that former president Obama and former vice president Biden, “based on the information that I have,” would not become subjects of a criminal investigation, “whatever their level of involvement” revealed in the examination by special counsel John Durham of the origins of the spurious Trump-Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.
The attorney general elaborated that he did not wish to continue or aggravate the mixing of politics with the law and suggested that the best method of adjudicating Mr. Biden’s role in these matters would be by the electorate. As a number of eminent commentators, including Lou Dobbs and Frank Miele, have pointed out, this is not an acceptable treatment of the subject.
The attorney general’s desire to separate politics and legal matters is entirely admirable, and since the Watergate trivialities were amplified to consume the Nixon presidency in 1974, the temptation of the party out of the White House to criminalize policy differences has produced a series of dangerous assaults on the constitutional process.
But the attorney general knows perfectly well that the public, when acting as an electoral jury, is not able to judge the legal implications of controversial behavior as they tumble out in the press without some legal context and evaluation of evidence. A political campaign does not facilitate a fair judgment of the issues, and few people could be more aware of that fact than Mr. Barr.
All thoughtful observers of American politics applaud the desire that legal questions not be addressed in political and electoral campaigns. Yet the course Mr. Barr outlined last week, of leaving the judgment of President Obama’s and Vice President Biden’s behavior in the Trump-Russia canard and related outrages to the voters (although Mr. Obama will not be facing the voters again), is precisely what he reluctantly returned to public office to discourage.
Either the attorney general spoke without prejudice as to whether the Durham investigation moves on to examine the conduct of Messrs. Obama and Biden, or he was just throwing the Democrats off guard, in the manner that former FBI director James Comey employed when he assured President Trump that he was not a target of the FBI counterintelligence investigation (one of his many total falsehoods).
A criminal investigation into former holders of national office would be a momentous and disturbing development. As one who disputed at every stage (and has continued ever since its sorry completion) the judicial persecution of President Nixon, objected to the Walsh investigation of Iran-Contra and President Reagan and its unjust findings, and opposed the impeachment of President Clinton for the reasons that caused it to end in acquittal, I feel particularly strongly that there should be no criminal investigation and certainly no publicity of such an investigation of President Obama or Vice President Biden if there is any other less disruptive and less potentially abusive method of determining the facts that Mr. Barr has many times rightly stated must be ascertained. Full Article @ New York Sun
Obamagate: Of Course It Comes Back to Obama’s Narcissism
How the Obama administration stole the Trump presidency
At the bottom of the Russian hoax story is a tale of narcissism: Hillary Clinton’s shock at losing the election, the media’s shock at being wrong and less capable of manipulation that they thought, and, importantly, Barack Obama’s shock that his priorities — all of them, but most of all the Iran Deal — would be swept away as so much ideological detritus. Like Saruman watching the Ents loose the dams and flood Isengard, the Obama administration knew that Michael Flynn would ruin their edifice, so they had to ruin him. Please do go read Smith’s piece.
The obvious reaction to the article is, Of course. Of course, this had to all come back to Obama’s inflated self-view. Of course, the administration was in a pure panic because Michael Flynn could deftly navigate the intelligence community backwaters and could point President Trump in the right direction to … drain the swamp.
What’s so distressing is that President Obama and his enablers have succeeded. The torment continues. They effectively obstructed the Trump administration, and Congress helped them. Read More
The Hunting of the President
Scores of bad actors first want to take out the attorney general.
There was no predicate for charging Mr. Flynn with a crime back in 2017. Yet if [The] Jensen report cleared Mr. Flynn, why are the Democrats and the press so eager to castigate the attorney general and not Mr. Jensen? All we read in the press is that the country’s best legal minds are outraged at the attorney general. Almost 2,000 former employees for the Justice Department signed an open letter protesting Mr. Barr’s action. (Thousands of other former Justice Department employees apparently abstained.) The answer is because the attorney general oversees the entire cleanup of “Spygate” with all its working parts. The surest way to close down this enormous undertaking is to take out Attorney General Barr. Read More
The Firehose of Falsehood Hits Flynn, Gorka, and King
The firehose of falsehood campaigns against Flynn, Gorka, and King have a number of things in common.
First they came for General Mike Flynn, and I did not speak out— - Because I was not a truth-telling military officer who contradicted the worldview of Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin and David Ignatius and others on the Washington Post payroll. Read More
