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Message started by raydawg on 06/02/19 at 08:22:15

Title: We must impeach.........
Post by raydawg on 06/02/19 at 08:22:15

This seems to explain a lot of what transpired in a way that the pieces to the puzzle fit.

Either way, this Genie is out of the bottle, and Nancy Pelosi needs to call for impeachment, as well as Barr needs to keep his investigations going into finding out how all of this got started, that caused 2 years of investigation of what proved false, and to only produce lots of questions about conduct in dealing with a false claim to begin with.....

Remember Jerry Nadler's remark last week, nobody is above the law...indeed, that reads that we need to investigate all the folk, agencies, etc, that played into this story. Let the chips fall where they may.

The Mueller Investigation Was Always an Impeachment Probe
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

The special counsel abdicated on obstruction to avoid a confrontation with the Justice Department and get his evidence to Congress.
Why mention the OLC guidance at all?

That is the question for Bob Mueller, left hanging by the statement his office jointly issued with Justice Department flacks on Wednesday, clarifying (as it were) remarks he had made hours earlier at his parting-shot press conference.

At issue is Mueller’s decision to punt on the question of whether President Trump should be indicted for obstruction of justice. In his startling remarks, Mueller sought to justify himself by citing instruction from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The longstanding OLC opinion, an outgrowth of Nixon- and Clinton-era scandals, holds that a sitting president may not be indicted. The two press offices were struggling to reconcile (a) Mueller’s pointed reliance on this OLC guidance at the presser with (b) his prior disclaimers of such reliance.

According to Attorney General Bill Barr, in a meeting over two weeks before Mueller submitted his final report, the special counsel emphatically denied that his refusal to render a prosecutorial judgment on obstruction hinged on the OLC guidance. Naturally, in their continuing quest to frame Barr as the most diabolical villain since Lex Luthor, the media-Democrat complex insisted that the AG must be lying.

This is what derangement will do to you. I do not think Mueller’s contradictory assertions are that hard to figure out. But if you were inclined to blame sleight of hand, the culprit would be Mueller. You’ll notice that when we finally heard from him on Wednesday, he lauded Barr’s good faith, never claiming that the AG had misrepresented him. Moreover, the conversation between them on the OLC guidance was not a one-on-one affair. There were other people in the room when Mueller denied that the OLC guidance was his rationale for abdicating.

Nevertheless, with the media howling that somebody — Barr — had to be fibbing, the press offices got busy. By early evening, DOJ and Mueller’s shuttering shop put out this joint statement:

The Attorney General has previously stated that the Special Counsel repeatedly affirmed that he was not saying that, but for the OLC opinion, he would have found the President obstructed justice. The Special Counsel’s report and his statement made clear that [his] office concluded it would not reach a determination — one way or the other — about whether the President committed a crime. There is no conflict between these statements.

Well, okay, that’s fine as far as it goes. If you (somewhat selectively) read the carefully crafted lines of Mueller’s report, he said he would not reach a determination on obstruction. And he did not reach one. Therefore, the reasoning goes, it cannot be said that the OLC guidance was determinative: Since Mueller technically did not make a recommendation one way or the other, the OLC guidance was never actually triggered.

But if that’s the case, then the obvious question — to go back to where we started — is: Why mention the OLC guidance at all?

Answer: Because Mueller’s brief speech on Wednesday was not a matter of reading the lines of his report; it was about reading between the lines.

Remember, Mueller’s report is 448 pages long. His press-conference remarks took less than ten minutes, and the substantive discussion of obstruction was but a fraction of that. In those fleeting moments, what were the precious few highlights from the report that Mueller wanted Americans to grasp? They were, first, that the OLC guidance dictated that the president could not be charged; and second, that if Mueller were convinced that the president had not committed a crime, he would have said so . . . but he did not say so — in Mueller’s constitutionally offensive, hyperpolitical articulation, he would not “exonerate” the president.

There is only one rational explanation for this performance. Mueller wants Congress and the public to presume that if it were not for the OLC guidance, it is very likely that he would have charged the president with obstruction — maybe not an absolute certainty, but nearly so.

And then, just in case we were too dense to understand the nods and winks, Mueller took pains to emphasize that, in our constitutional system, it is up to Congress, not federal prosecutors, to address alleged misconduct by a sitting president.

Simple as 1 + 1 + 1 = 3. Likely felony obstruction, plus inability of prosecutors to indict, plus duty of Congress to deal with presidential criminality, equals: Impeachment is the only remedy, unless congressional Democrats are saying that Donald Trump is above the law. (Good luck, Speaker Pelosi, trying to pipe down your AOC wing, to say nothing of the 2020 primary contestants, after that one.)

This should not be a surprise. We have been saying since shortly after Mueller was appointed that his investigation was not a collusion probe but an obstruction probe, and that this necessarily made it an impeachment probe.

The rest of the article: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/robert-mueller-investigation-was-always-impeachment-probe/