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Robert Mueller and the Sorcerer's Apprentice, Rod Rosenstein
 [American Thinker] Did President Trump have a right to be annoyed with Jeff Sessions for recusing himself? A plausible case can be made that Sessions didn’t have to do it, but then there’s an equally plausible case that he did. The real grounds for criticizing Sessions lie elsewhere: once he decided that he would need to recuse himself, Sessions had a duty to make sure that a replacement was on hand who was up to the task that Sessions had sidestepped. That he did not do. Rod Rosenstein has made one grievous mistake after another, with no end in sight.Rosenstein’s most important error was the complete incoherence of his statement of the scope of the investigation in his order of May 17 appointing Robert Mueller as Special Counsel: "...any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump." Here he specified no particular actor (there are scores that this might refer to) nor particular actions, times or places, nor even crimes, because "links" and "coordination" are not in themselves criminal. Think about what Special Counsel was being asked to do. Absent any specific allegations, he would need to do something akin to proving a negative. Proving that a specific event actually happened is possible because the details of that event tell us where to look, but proving that something never happened is impossible because it could have happened at any time or place and by action of any person. We could never exhaust all the possibilities. Similarly, for Special Counsel to reach the conclusion that no coordination ever took place is a logical impossibility: it would require that he retroactively monitor every moment of the life of every person involved in the Trump campaign, and that he seize every conceivable record of all such people. If he only asked for phone records, he would miss evidence in emails, but if he also asked for emails, he would miss evidence in written correspondence. And if he asked only for all of these, he would miss what diaries can tell him. And then there are text messages... But even all of this would not be enough: he would need to look into what other people’s records might tell him about each person’s activities. (But which other people? How many?) Mueller would have to do this for every single one of Trump’s campaign staff. Posted by: Besoeker 2017-09-04 |
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