District Judge Exposes, Derides Robert Mueller’s “Operation Fascism” Special Counsel against President Trump

MUELLER’S GOT A SECRET

by Scott Johnson  at PowerLine:

“Senior United States District Judge T.S. Ellis III has been assigned one of the pending criminal cases — the one transferred to the Eastern District of Virginia — brought by the Special Counsel against Paul Manafort. In a hearing on the motion brought by Manafort to dismiss the charges as beyond the authority of the Special Counsel, Judge Ellis unloaded. As James Freeman puts it in his Best of the Web column this afternoon, Judge Ellis “is old enough to remember when Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was about alleged Russian collusion. Now the judge wants to know why Mr. Mueller’s signature prosecution doesn’t appear to have anything to do with it.” FOX News reports on the hearing here, Reuters here, Bloomberg here, Politico here, CNN here.

The case before Judge Ellis consists of tax and bank fraud charges that not only have nothing to do with alleged Russian collusion, but also predate the 2016 presidential campaign by a decade. It turns they have also previously been under investigation by the United States Attorney for the District, though not brought until they turned out to be of use to Mueller.

“I don’t see what relationship this indictment has with anything the special counsel is authorized to investigate,” Judge Ellis said. He decried Mueller’s apparently “unfettered power.” He did not find the power to prosecute Mueller in the May 2017 appointment order, which directed him to pursue links between Russia and the Trump campaign, as well as “any matter that arose or may arise directly” from the investigation. He said that Mueller improperly took over existing Justice Department investigations into Manafort without adequately explaining what connection it had to the Russia probe.

Freeman derives this observation from the news reports” “The judge is not just searching for an explanation as to how the Manafort prosecution relates to Russia and the 2016 election. He also wants to know just how far the special counsel’s authority extends. Team Mueller doesn’t want to tell him.”

Judge Ellis doesn’t find what he’s looking for in the May 2017 memo by Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein. Team Mueller was represented at the hearing by former deputy solicitor general Michael Dreeben. At the hearing Dreeben took a drubbing. Asserting that Mueller’s authority is even broader than the mandate given 2017 memo, Dreeben claimed that national security precluded a full accounting of Mueller’s authority.

Dreeben cited Rosenstein’s August 2017 memo — covered by Andrew McCarthy in this NR column — explicitly granting Mueller the authority to investigate Manafort’s Ukraine dealings years before the 2016 election.

Mueller must have given Judge Ellis the same highly redacted copy of the August 2017 memo that is linked above. Judge Ellis wanted to see the whole thing. He gave Mueller two weeks to consult with intelligence agencies to determine whether they can confide a sealed, unredacted version of the memo with him.

Dreeben told him the redacted portions did not pertain to the Manafort case. “I’ll be the judge,” Ellis said.

CNN quotes Judge Ellis: “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud.” Judge Ellis demonstrated his grasp of what I’ve been calling the Mueller Switch Project. He said prosecutors were interested in Manafort only because of his potential to provide material that would lead to President Trump’s “prosecution or impeachment.”

I don’t know where we’re going here, but I’m enjoying the ride. I am immensely gratified to find a responsible judge giving voice to his revulsion over the production engineered by James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, and Robert Mueller.

Judge Ellis was appointed to the bench by President Reagan in 1987. He reminds us in his own way of the importance of President Trump appointing judges to current judicial vacancies and gutting out the Democrats’ obstruction of judicial appointees as quickly as possible.”

 

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/05/muellers-got-a-secret.php

President Trump Attends National Day of Prayer Gathering

 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/05/03/watch_live_president_trump_attends_national_day_of_prayer_event.html

THE MUELLER “QUESTIONS” FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP

Mueller’s questions prove Trump shouldn’t talk

by Seth Lipsky at the New York Post:

“The questions special counsel Robert Mueller supposedly wants to put to President Trump make one thing clear — it would be folly for the president to sit for an interview with these jumped-up G-men.

It’s not just that the questions badly undercut the claims that Mueller is not targeting the president. If, as the saying goes, a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich, Mueller appears to be building out of Trump a Dagwood special.

It’s also that for the president to sit down for an interview would be to acknowledge Mueller’s authority to begin with. Yet the more Mueller shows his hand, the more illogical his authority starts to look.

That’s because the only authority the Constitution clearly grants to investigate a sitting president is the impeachment process. Before this fight is over, Trump may yet want to use that argument.

Mueller’s questions for the president were reported Tuesday by The New York Times. It says it obtained four dozen of the posers, without saying whether they came from Mueller’s camp or Trump’s (or elsewhere).

No matter, really (Mueller is not disputing the questions). They include kind of verbal traps a prosecutor would set if he wanted to make his ham sandwich using, say, obstruction of justice.

Mueller’s questions start with Gen. Michael Flynn, whom Trump fired as national security adviser. Mueller wants to know what efforts were made to “reach out” to Flynn about a “possible pardon.”

When Flynn started cooperating with the FBI, the Times claims, “Trump’s lawyers floated the idea of a pardon.” It says Mueller wants to know why.

That suggests Mueller’s team is fishing for a charge that Trump tried to obstruct justice by using the pardon power. Never mind that the pardon is the least-fettered power any president has.

Where are the liberal papers on this outrage? Even the Times objected when, in 2014, a grand jury in Texas indicted then-Gov. Rick Perry for using his constitutional veto power.

Perry had threatened to veto funding for a public-integrity prosecutor. Liberal foghorns (among them the Times, USA Today, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times) warned that prosecuting a veto was out of line. Superlawyer Alan Dershowitz likened it to the Soviet Union.

Texas courts tossed out the case against Perry on the grounds that using a constitutional power like the veto isn’t a crime. Yet Mueller appears to be doing a similar thing with the pardon power.

Same with the constitutional power a president has to fire his officers. This shows up in questions about whether Trump was toying with the idea of firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Could that have been obstruction of justice? Mueller seems to think so. He has a raft of queries about the AG, starting with what Trump thought of Sessions recusing himself from the Russia probe.

We already know the answer to that. Trump thought he deserved an attorney general who doesn’t feel the need to recuse himself from the most important investigation on his watch. Is that a crime?

Mueller is also looking for an angle on Russia collusion, which was part of his actual assignment. This is suggested by a host of questions the Times reports Mueller has posed.

The first is when Trump “became aware” of the meeting with the Russian lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. Don Jr., the Times notes, has said he didn’t tell his father of the meeting when it happened.

Clearly, Mueller is trying to trip up one of them. The long and the short of it, though, is that it looks like Mueller’s aim is to put the president in the dock.

Meaning, indict him on obstruction or other crimes — which he probably doesn’t have the authority to do anyway — or, more likely, fish up something for Congress to use as the basis for impeachment.

To prosecute a president, the Constitution suggests, first he must be removed through impeachment. Then, it says, he shall be “subject to Indictment, trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to law.”

Why do Robert Mueller and the Democrats seem to be itching instead for an indictment? Well, Dem leaders are signaling there’s not enough to impeach — yet. Maybe it just doesn’t have a taste for ham sandwiches.

 

 

 

 

https://nypost.com/2018/05/01/muellers-questions-prove-trump-shouldnt-talk/