The Latest on Trump and Mueller’s Questions (+ More)

Sean Hannity had guests Sydney Powell, author of “Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice,” and the author of the forth coming book, “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump,” Greg Jarrett to discuss the recent leaking of the questions leaked to the press that Trump received from the Mueller team. Alan Dershowitz also discusses the “open-ended” questions as a way to “catch” Trump.

A good listing of the botched and crooked dealings of the FBI under Mueller (and Mueller himself) is available, as well as an excellent article of the politicization of the FBI under Muller is worth reading.

Alan Dershowitz and Joe DiGenova Discuss Mueller Investigation

(Via the LAST REFUGE) Alan Dershowitz and Joe diGenova appeared tonight on Sean Hannity to discuss the ramifications to the political FBI raid on Michael Cohen’s office and residence along with the ongoing Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigation. Additionally, they discussed fired FBI Director James Comey and current Asst. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

LEGAL INSURRECTION uses the NYT commentary to note what is being given up:

There isn’t much of a pretense anymore that the Mueller investigation is about alleged Russian campaign collusion.

Maybe it started out about collusion, but it veered off course within a couple of months, when Mueller decided that Paul Manafort needed to be investigated for conduct many years ago having nothing to do with the campaign, or even Russia. Rod Rosenstein created the paperwork in early August 2017 to retroactively expand Mueller’s investigation and justify Mueller conduct that already had taken place.

The raid on Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen’s law office by the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, was at the referral of Mueller, and signed off by Rosenstein. That raid was a frontal assault on Trump’s business and personal history.

If reporting is accurate, the records seized concerned not just payments to Stormy Daniels, but also the Access Hollywood tape revealed during the campaign. It’s fair to assume that a wide range of records going beyond those salacious topics were grabbed by the FBI, including Trump’s other personal and business dealings over a long period of time.

The seizure of Cohen’s records surely goes more directly to taking down Trump for conduct unrelated to the campaign much less Russian collusion.

The NY Times Editorial Board is honest about the goal, The Law Is Coming, Mr. Trump:

Mr. Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks. He cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most part, he’s gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush money and his own bravado. Those methods may be proving to have their limits when they are applied from the Oval Office. Though Republican leaders in Congress still keep a cowardly silence, Mr. Trump now has real reason to be afraid. A raid on a lawyer’s office doesn’t happen every day; it means that multiple government officials, and a federal judge, had reason to believe they’d find evidence of a crime there and that they didn’t trust the lawyer not to destroy that evidence….

Mr. Trump also railed against the authorities who, he said, “broke into” Mr. Cohen’s office. “Attorney-client privilege is dead!” the president tweeted early Tuesday morning, during what was presumably his executive time. He was wrong. The privilege is one of the most sacrosanct in the American legal system, but it does not protect communications in furtherance of a crime. Anyway, one might ask, if this is all a big witch hunt and Mr. Trump has nothing illegal or untoward to hide, why does he care about the privilege in the first place?

That last highlighted sentence is very instructive. Would the NY Times Editorial Board be willing to give up its attorney-client privilege in litigation against the NY Times? If the NY Times has  nothing illegal or untoward to hide, why would it care about the privilege in the first place?……..

Alan Dershowitz On Trump’s Lawyers Home & Office Being Raided

The DAILY MAIL has a good piece on all this, here is the headline with their bullet points:

Justice Department violated Michael Cohen’s constitutional rights just by seizing his records, Alan Dershowitz tells DailyMail.com – hours before Harvard law professor has dinner with Trump

  • Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz will have dinner Tuesday at the White House with President Donald Trump
  • He tells DailyMail.com that the Department of Justice violated Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s rights when it seized his documents on Monday
  • The government will set up a team of agents and lawyers to review the material to make sure prosecutors don’t see anything ‘privileged’
  • That could include documents covered by the sanctity of an attorney-client relationship, whose mere presence in prosecutors’ hands could ‘taint’ a case
  • But since those ‘taint teams’ are made up of government agents, Dershowitz says the DOJ already has them – which is unconstitutional
  • UCLA Law School professor Harry Litman says the system works well and there’s ‘absolutely no cheating’ because the stakes are so high
  • Dershowitz also claimed Monday that if Trump were a Democrat, the American Civil Liberties Union would be protesting the search of his lawyer’s office 

Here is Dershowitz again on today’s Michael Medved Show:

Michael Medved interviews Professor Alan Dershowitz about the raid on Michael Cohen’s home and office. Alan in another interview said that if,

“…this were Hillary Clinton [having her lawyer’s office raided], the ACLU would be on every TV station in America jumping up and down,” he said. “The deafening silence of the ACLU and civil libertarians about the intrusion into the lawyer-client confidentiality is really appalling.” (FOX)

Yep. The silence is deafening. How bout if Ken Starr referred Lanny Davis’s home and office to be raided? Wow… we would still be talking about that till this day.

Former U.S. Attorney: Shoes Will Drop! (+ Article Dump)

“We Are Going to See Several Criminal Charges Against a Number of DOJ-FBI”

Here are the recent articles I have been reading….


 

 

 

 

Where Is The Dangerous Irresponsibility Jeopardizing National Security

HOT AIR pulls out an excellent point/quote by Jonathan Turley:

….However, he points out another problem which isn’t getting nearly as much attention. What happened to the dire threats to national security we were told were contained in this memo?

My greatest concern is what is not in the [memo]: classified information “jeopardizing national security.” Leaders like Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declared that the committee had moved beyond “dangerous irresponsibility and disregard for our national security” and “disregarded the warnings of the Justice Department and the FBI.”

Now we can read the memo. There is a sharp and alarming disconnect between the descriptions of Pelosi and the House Intelligence Committee’s Ranking Minority Member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and the actual document. It clearly does not contain information that would reveal sources or methods.

The memo reaffirms concerns over the lower standards that apply to FISA applications as well as the misuse of classification authority. Most of this memo references what was already known about the use of the dossier. What was added was testimonial evidence and details to the publicly known information. Yet, the FBI vehemently objected to the release of the memo as threatening “grave” consequences to national security…

The FBI opposition to declassification of this memo should be a focus of both Congress and the public. The memo is clearly designed to avoid revealing classified information. For civil libertarians, this is a rare opportunity to show how classified rules are misused for strategic purposes by these agencies. The same concern can be directed toward members who read this memo and represented to the public that the release would clearly damage national security.

In that first paragraph above, Turley is quoting the statement Pelosi put out about the memo on Tuesday. However, she made a similar claim on CNN during that contentious interview with Chris Cuomo. “Putting this aside in terms of tit for tat, which you seem to—well, with all due respect to you—trying to make it look like Democrats vs. [Republicans]. It isn’t about that,” Pelosi said. She added, “It’s about our national security.” In the same interview, she said, “We’re not talking about some issue that we’re having a fight about, we’re talking about our national security.”

The point is, this was raised many times this week by Democrats eager to prevent the release of the memo. In retrospect, it’s difficult to see how anyone could have thought it represented a grave threat to national security. Maybe the subsequent release of the Democrats’ own memo will shed some additional light on whatever threat they see in it, but at the moment it looks as if those warnings were overblown. As Turley puts it, “it proved to be an empty ‘grave’ after weeks of overheated hyperbole.”

“She’s Crying Wolf” ~ Dershowitz on Maxine Waters

“Waters Throws the term racist around so loosely and so inappropriately that it weakens her credibility.” ~ Dershowitz

NEWSMAX:

…But Dershowitz on Monday strongly disagreed.

“Look, every criminal lawyer I know, prosecutor, defense attorney, would agree with me that when you take a case from Virginia and put it in the District of Columbia, you are gaining a tactical advantage for the prosecution in a case in which the defendants are likely to come from the Trump administration,” he said.

“Politics matters. Race matters. Ethnicity matters. Every lawyer know that. I learned it from Johnnie Cochran who Maxine Waters praised to the hilt when he died and wanted to have Congress pass a resolution recognizing his greatness. Would she have called Johnnie Cochran a racist?

“Or does she revere it only for people that are not of her race? It absurdly throws around a word that should be reserved for true racists. When she calls a real racist a racist, nobody is going to believe her. She’s crying wolf and it dilutes the meaning of the word ‘racism.’ So shame on Maxine Waters.”

The renowned Harvard Law professor emeritus also called out Richard Painter, an ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, who demanded in a tweet that Dershowitz “stop the racist B.S.”

“He’s just dead wrong. And he’s been wrong about so many things. He is so determined to find criminal conduct on the part of Trump that he’s prepared to make up crimes that don’t exist. How he served as an ethics lawyer for any administration is unclear to me,” Dershowitz told Cosby.

“I think he has to look in the mirror and question his own ethics using the word ‘racism’ to describe what he understands because he’s a lawyer. He understands that what I’m saying is factually, absolutely correct.

Alan Dershowitz – The Only Sane Democrat Left?

Mind you, he is a Democrat, through-n-through… and I love that most other Democrats embrace the “Alt-Left” and ignore Dershowitz’ views:

  • Let’s acknowledge Alan Dershowitz. Here he is, asking Democrats to repudiate the Alt Left for their violent opposition to free speech. (GAY PATRIOT). 

The DOJ Cannot Indict a Sitting President

Mark Levin is the master at this stuff. He takes his legal knowledge to his radio show:

On his Monday radio program, Levin cited a DOJ memorandum from 2000 affirming the department’s position in 1973 that the Constitution does not allow the president to be criminally indicted. In 1973, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum stating that indictment proceedings would “unduly interfere in a direct or formal sense with the conduct of the Presidency,” as criminal proceedings would severely handicap the president from performing his “onerous” and “unique” duties under the Constitution, thereby short-circuiting the entire executive branch.

“A criminal proceeding against the president is in some respects necessarily political in a way that criminal proceedings against other civil officers would not be,” Levin read from the memorandum. “In this respect, it would be incongruous for a jury of only 12 to undertake the unavoidably political task of rendering judgment in a criminal proceeding against a sitting president.”

Levin explained that the memorandum is arguing that it is incredibly difficult for 12 people on a jury and a judge to leave politics out of a verdict on a legal matter involving the president.

(DAILY WIRE)

Soon after, Alan Dershowitz got the cue and he explained on FOX (http://tinyurl.com/y72l2ozl):

✦ “The Justice Department has twice ruled in a long extensive memo, which I just read this morning, for the second or third time, stating clearly that the president cannot be indicted, prosecuted, and tried while serving in office. The only mechanism the Constitution provides is that he could be impeached, and once impeached and removed from office, he can then be charged with a criminal trial. But a sitting president cannot — according to the Justice Department, be tried.” ~ Dershowitz (BREITBART)

It looks as though the Democrats are stuck in the mud a bit. But they will continue to hurl mud… it’s what they do:

 

“One Of The Worst Foreign-Policy Presidents Ever” ~ Dershowitz

 

HOTAIR h-t

DERSHOWITZ: What he did was so nasty, he pulled a bait and switch. He told the American public this is all about the settlements deep in the West Bank. And yet, he allowed he representative to the U.N. to abstain –which is really a vote for– a resolution that says the Jews can’t pray at the Western Wall, Jews can’t live in the Jewish Quarter [of Jerusalem] where they have lived for thousands of years. And he’s going to say, ‘Whoops! I didn’t mean that!’ Well read the resolution! You’re a lawyer, you went to Harvard Law School.

It’s nothing more than a petulant swipe at Benjamin Netanyahu, and as Dershowitz explains, it’s going to backfire — badly:

DERSHOWITZ: This will make peace much more difficult to achieve because the Palestinians will now say ‘we can get a state through the UN, we can get a state through the BDS movement,’ because this will encourage that. ‘We can get a state through the International Criminal Court,’ because this will encourage that. ‘We don’t have to negotiate, we don’t have to make painful compromises.’ He will go down in history, President Obama, as one of the worst foreign-policy presidents ever.