[JonathanTurley] I recently wrote a column discussing how Democratic leaders, including Vice President Joe Biden, have argued against continuing the investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham despite growing evidence of misconduct by Justice Department officials and now the first guilty plea by former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. Now, Andrew Weissmann, one of the top prosecutors with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has derided the Clinesmith plea while actually calling on Justice Department attorneys to refuse to help on ongoing investigations that could implicate aspects of his own prior work.
What an idiot.
I was among those who expressed concern when Mueller selected Weissmann due to his history of controversial prosecutorial decisions, including a pattern of prosecutorial overreach in the Enron litigation.
Weissmann’s recent statements (made before the release of his new book on the Russian investigation) have only served to reaffirm those concerns.
Recently, Weissmann wrote an extraordinary and disturbing New York Times op-ed (with former Defense Department special counsel Ryan Goodman). In the column, he appeared to call on Justice Department lawyers to undermine the Durham investigation as well as the investigation by U.S. Attorney John Bash’s investigation into the "unmasking" requests by Obama administration officials. They wrote "Justice Department employees in meeting their ethical and legal obligations, should be well advised not to participate in any such effort."
Consider that line for a moment. Weissmann is openly calling on attorneys to refuse to help on investigations that could raise questions about his own decisions. Durham is looking at a pattern errors, false statements, bias, and now criminal conduct in the Russian investigation. There is obviously overlap with the Mueller investigation which discussed many of the same underlying documents and relied on work by some of the same individuals. The failure to address misconduct, bias, or criminal conduct by such individuals would be embarrassing to both Weissmann and Mueller. Despite that obvious conflict of interest, Weissmann is calling on attorneys to stand down.
It is the same troubling position that was once taken by Sally Yates, who told an entire federal agency not to assist the President in his travel ban.
After Weissmann called on Justice Department attorneys not to assist investigations by the Justice Department, Durham disclosed that the first guilty plea would be entered by Clinesmith. That would ordinarily cause embarrassment for someone who was calling for DOJ lawyers to effectively hinder the investigation. Not Weissmann. He has now attacked the criminal plea.
Weissmann mocked Attorney General Bill Barr to explain the difference between the Flynn plea and the Clinesmith plea....
....Weissmann's public effort to derail the Durham investigation and his distortion of the Clinesmith guilty plea only reinforces the view of many of us that the Durham investigation must be completed and made public. Despite saying that I did not believe that Mueller would find crimes of collusion or conspiracy with the Russians, I supported the Special Counsel investigation. I also supported the Horowitz investigation and the Durham investigation. The reason is the same. I believe that the public needs to have a full and transparent account of what happened in the Russian investigation on both sides. Like many, Weissmann would like transparency on only one side and to shutdown the Durham investigation despite Horowitz referring matters for criminal investigation and finding a host of false statements, errs, and professional misconduct. Even the addition of a criminal plea has not stopped Weissmann from denouncing this investigation.
For years, I have criticized Weissmann's record of dubious prosecutorial judgment, bias, and overreach. However, that case against Weissmann is not nearly as powerful as the case he is making against himself.
#11
Imagine if we had a Republican-controlled Senate that would confirm Trump replacements for all the dug-in Obama leftovers that Weismann is signalling.
#12
So, a sworn officer of the court is publicly recomending that other sworn officers ignore lawful court orders.
We've stopped pretending, haven't we?
Posted by: ed in texas ||
08/17/2020 15:28 Comments ||
Top||
It's Kurt
[Townhall] All across America, little girls of alternatively Tamil and Afro-Caribbean descent, depending on which is most politically useful at the moment, who have been endlessly told by unspecified haters that they can never be nominated to be vice president, were inspired at Kamala Harris' selection by whoever selected her on behalf of Grandpa Badfinger. Yes, if they hook up with a powerful married Democrat man, that initial connection can fuel their rise to power too.
Take that, all you modern-day Bull Connors (Connor was a Democrat, but shhhhhhh)! "I won't cotton to them little girls of alternatively Tamil and Afro-Caribbean descent, depending on which is most politically useful at the moment, thinkin' they can be vice president someday," they drawl as they twirl their mustaches. Well, Kamala showed all the haters. Girls of that oddly specific demographic can be nominated to be vice president, and let's take it one step further — they don't even have to hook up with a powerful married Democrat man and fuel their rise to power via that initial connection to do it! Well, sure Kamala did, and so did the ethnically uninteresting Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, but those little girls can do it themselves. Well, maybe if they are Republicans.
[Breitbart] Former Oakland Raiders Superbowl Champion and Utah’s fourth congressional district candidate Burgess Owens told Breitbart News Saturday that America will have a "renaissance" under a second term of President Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress.
Owens hopes to unseat Rep. Ben McAdams (D-UT) during the 2020 congressional elections.
Owens said that Joe Biden’s vice presidential nominee, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), has been "horrendous" to the black community.
"The more we know about Kamala Harris, the more we know that she has been horrendous, that she is totally not the person that any of us want to be leading our country," Owens told Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle.
[Free Beacon] Democratic Senate hopefuls are remaining silent about the Trump administration’s Thursday announcement that it had brokered a historic peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, an indication of the manner in which the issue has split progressive and mainstream Democrats. Netanyahu-Trump bad. Endless wars-MIC good.
Nearly all of 2020's top Democratic Senate challengers avoided making public statements about the agreement, which formally normalizes relations between the Arab nation and Israel. The U.A.E. is the first Gulf Arab nation to increase its relations with Israel, a move that sent shockwaves through the region and sparked anger from Palestinian leaders.
[Washington Examiner] Veteran Fox News journalist Chris Wallace expressed befuddlement over Joe Biden's absence from the Sunday morning news show circuit ahead of this week's national convention.
"So I've been doing Sunday shows with conventions. I started on Meet the Press in 1988. I've been doing it on and off. For what? What is that? Thirty-two years. And it always happens that the Sunday before the convention," Wallace said this week on Fox News Radio. "The campaign puts out top officials to preview the convention and to say this is what we're gonna try to get accomplished. So, you know, we put counting all week on, you know, having a top official from the Biden campaign, the campaign manager, the top pollster, the chief strategist, to talk about what they're going to talk about during this next week. They are not putting anybody out."
Wallace said he at first thought, "Well, maybe it's because it's Fox News, and they're boycotting us."
"No, they're not putting anybody out on any of the Sunday shows point," Wallace said. "I don't understand what's going on here. This is the damnedest thing I've ever seen that you would you know, you're basically giving a campaign. And as I say, it's a traditional thing. We're gonna do it for the Republicans a week from Sunday. What are you trying to accomplish this week? And they, the Biden campaign, isn't putting anybody out."
President Trump and his Republican allies have attacked Biden for not conducting what they view as a sufficient amount of television interviews or holding any public events.
The Biden campaign has cited the coronavirus pandemic concerns as one of the reasons many of the former vice president's events and fundraisers have been virtual.
#1
Is Chris Wallace really this stupid to not recognize what is going on? I am sure Dems internal polling have an empty box polling higher than Biden when matched up against Trump.
#4
This the first sign of deflation in Wallaces anti-Trump bubble. I suspect he'll be in a fetal position within a flaccid bubble before he's willing to step out and see the light.
#8
This election is between Trump and not-Trump. The campaign issue will be 'are you better off than you were 4 years ago?' - blaming Trump for all the effects of the virus, the response to the virus, and the racial protests ginned up from a publicized police 'abuse' in the bluest of blue places.
[American Thinker] When Stacey Abrams was running for Georgia governor, she had an impressive list of social changes she wanted to make. People paying their bills didn’t make the cut.
Abrams was $228,000 in debt during her 2017 campaign for Georgia governor, including $50,000 to I.R.S. Despite that, she managed to loan her campaign $50,000. She also owed $76,000 in credit card debt and $96,000 for Yale Law School.
Abrams claimed that family obligations and a misunderstanding of how credit cards worked as the reason for her financial mess. This from a woman who is a tax attorney who wanted to be the vice president of the United States.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/17/2020 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[3 views]
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#1
In a continuing effort to blame others for her failings....
She’s also said a previous federal income tax lien of nearly $30,000 was filed erroneously in 2010 when she was trying to claim her parents as dependents as they faced mounting medical issues.
So, this broad is (unbelievably) a tax attorney (stifle the laughter, Raj!) with a poor understanding of monetary theory and practice (mostly practice) but knew enough to try and claim her parents as dependents, then jacked up the Schedule A medical deductions and never considered the DIF score on that return. Pure genius!
BLUF:
[American Greatness] The object of hate is so often a remarkably beautiful woman or man. It is as if the aim is to forever obliterate perceived beauty considered unattainable.
On the Dark Continent, the same dynamic was in play when "Hutus picked up machetes to slash to bits nearly a million of their Tutsi neighbors in the 1994 Rwandan genocide." There,
. . . tribal allegiance trumps political persuasion and envy carries the day. The Tutsi—an alien, Nilotic African people, who formed a minority in Rwanda and Burundi—had always been resented by the Hutus. The tall, imposing Tutsis, whose facial features the lovely supermodel Iman instantiates, had dominated them on-and-off since the 15th Century. On a deeper level, contends Keith Richburg, an African-American journalist, the Hutus were "slashing at their own perceived ugliness, as if destroying this thing of beauty, this thing they could never really attain, removing it from the earth forever.
For America to have incorporated and assimilated the unreason of "racism" on such a self-immolating scale, as American society has done, is to be mired in self-contradiction. To the Greek philosophers, to be mired in self-contradiction was to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.
This is where American society finds itself: less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.
Patriots, please quit the "rest in peace" platitudes. Cannon Hinnant and all the rest rage, rage from the grave.
#2
The Rwanda episode led to the creation of R2P (responsibility to protect) religion among liberals in the USGOV. It's like neocon religion but makes a lame effort to wear a morality fig leaf.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/17/2020 8:04 Comments ||
Top||
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[JonathanTurley] I recently wrote a column discussing how Democratic leaders, including Vice President Joe Biden, have argued against continuing the investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham despite growing evidence of misconduct by Justice Department officials and now the first guilty plea by former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. Now, Andrew Weissmann, one of the top prosecutors with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has derided the Clinesmith plea while actually calling on Justice Department attorneys to refuse to help on ongoing investigations that could implicate aspects of his own prior work.
Sometimes events need no additional looking into or investigation. 
[American Thinker] When Stacey Abrams was running for Georgia governor, she had an impressive list of social changes she wanted to make. People paying their bills didn’t make the cut.
