Mueller's a clown show

Mueller's parting shot trying to re-ignite ambiguity about his report was an amateur hour clown show. It proves he was not the right choice for the job.  Don't take my word for it, listen to these experts.

Alan Dershowitz, no fan of president Trump had this to say about Mueller's parting shot at the president:

The statement by special counsel Robert Mueller in a Wednesday press conference that “if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that” is worse than the statement made by then-FBI Director James Comey regarding Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. Comey declared in a July 2016 press conference that “although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

Comey was universally criticized for going beyond his responsibility to state whether there was sufficient evidence to indict Clinton. Mueller, however, did even more. He went beyond the conclusion of his report and gave a political gift to Democrats in Congress who are seeking to institute impeachment proceedings against President Trump. By implying that President Trump might have committed obstruction of justice, Mueller effectively invited Democrats to institute impeachment proceedings.

...No prosecutor should ever say or do anything for the purpose of helping one party or the other. I cannot imagine a plausible reason why Mueller went beyond his report and gratuitously suggested that President Trump might be guilty, except to help Democrats in Congress and to encourage impeachment talk and action. Shame on Mueller for abusing his position of trust and for allowing himself to be used for such partisan advantage.

Joseph diGenova had this to say at Fox News:

While he made it clear that his investigation is closed, the main takeaway from outgoing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s surprise farewell statement to the media Wednesday is that he desperately wanted to take down President Trump, but simply couldn’t find a way to do it.

In a parting shot to cap off two years of outrages, Mueller tried to convince the American people that their duly elected president is a criminal who couldn’t be charged due to a technicality, and therefore it’s up to Congress to impeach him.

If not for a flimsy piece of paper that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) compiled long ago, Mueller suggested, the president of the United States would be in the dock for “obstructing” an investigation into a conspiracy theory about his campaign and the Russian government.

This is so ridiculous that Mueller didn’t even dare to say it plainly. Instead, he fell back on the convoluted language in his report, hoping to obfuscate an issue that Attorney General William Barr had previously clarified by determining that the special counsel’s investigation did not produce sufficient evidence to justify charging President Trump with obstructing justice.

And American Greatness reminds us of the close friendship between Comey and Mueller:

Most Americans are unaware of the long history of comradeship and chicanery between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey. For nearly two decades, the pair have held the same jobs, earned the same foes, and swaggered in the same rarified sphere of political prestige and privilege.

This week, the country has been treated to another reminder of how often the twosome operates in tandem.

In fact, their prior relationship should have disqualified Mueller from overseeing an investigation into one of Comey’s fiercest critics and the man who fired him, President Donald Trump. Without Comey helping to fabricate the Trump-Russia collusion narrative in 2016, there wouldn’t have been a Mueller investigation into fabricated Trump-Russia election collusion.

You have to wonder if Mueller's parting shot was strictly a defensive play, given that the investigators are being investigated.

Issues and Insights asks the questions that need to be asked regarding Mueller, and it makes it seem all the more self-serving and defensive.

...This starkly politicizes presidential investigations going forward and indicts, if we may say so, the already-dubious system of weaponizing a lawyer with a blank check, no deadline, and an open-ended mandate for him to fish where he likes with minimal oversight.

“If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime,” Mueller said. “We concluded that we would not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime.”

What kind of strange new standard is Mueller setting here?

Mueller had all the time and money he could want, recorded countless hours of testimony, compiled a mountain of documents, got multiple plea deals, chased down out every conceivable lead, and then says he couldn’t prove the president didn’t commit a crime.

Since when is the job of prosecutors to determine innocence beyond a reasonable doubt? And, short of that, feel free to dump all the evidence that didn’t lead to a criminal charge, but that makes the defendant look a suspect nonetheless.

How would the average American citizen like this said of him or her after a couple of years of 18 prosecutors scrutinizing his or her affairs? After reviewing all the evidence, we don’t have enough evidence to say that John Doe robbed that store. But we can’t say definitively that he didn’t rob that store, so here’s a bunch of embarrassing revelations about him that we uncovered along the way. Have fun.

Exactly.  Mueller does not deserve anyone's respect after this.  He didn't beforehand either, but this third-rate, amateur hour clown show of his, cements it - he's no more than a self-serving con man.

George Will, useful idiot or political genius?

George Will, perennial NeverTrumper, might be a useful idiot. Or... he might be a political genius set to doom Democrats to non-contender status for decades. American Greatness surmised this of the NeverTrumpers:

...That leaves NeverTrump Republicans with a set of very painful choices. They cannot retake their party without accommodating the views of voters who they so far have denounced from their pulpits. But they are not strong enough to beat the pro-Trump coalition on their own, nor are they numerous enough to win with a new party, as Juleanna Glover suggested in the New York Times earlier this year. To win without Trump backers, they would need either permanently to join the Democrats, strengthening the moderate Left in their perennial battle with progressives for party control, or join independents and dissident center-left Democrats to form a new, aggressively centrist third party. Either course would require compromise on issues that many have championed for the majority of their adult lives.

The American Greatness essay argues Trump supporters need these people to win. Currently, perhaps yes. But a third party of centrists who need to fight a two front war with both progressives and Populist Republicans will eat away from Democrat support far more than it does from Republicans. For a demonstration, see Canada. Instead of needing 50%+1 support to win a state, 40% becomes pretty safe. For president at least that's true. 

 The Senate and Congress are another story.  In some districts that are far left the remnant Democrat would not be a serious contender and vice versa.  But it's hard to see a close Republican/Democrat district having a third party not help the Republican candidate.  The real danger is a potential coalition in Congress having the seats to override a Republican seat plurality.  That might come down to the Republicans having to run stronger candidates and with the Republican Establishment believing that means RINOs, perhaps a Republican civil war could follow resulting in 4 parties, not 3.  At that point it becomes a crap shoot as to who wins seats.  And there's always the possibility that the Democrats would (erroneously) be seen as the centrist party and take enough voters from both the Republicans and socialists to become a dominant party.  Just like in Canada they would then ally with the socialists and conservatives could end up in the wilderness for decades.

Back to George Will.  He's left the GOP.  Really; it happened when no Republicans were bothering to care anymore.  Now if he's just an anti-Trump #NeverTrumper then he's effectively a useful idiot for the Democrats.  That's especially true if he believes there's no potential split on the Democrat side.  But if he believes that the Democrats might break apart into socialists and center-left Democrats, then he's either a useful idiot for Republicans, or a political genius trying to ferment a Democrat split by looking for fellow 'moderates' to form a centrist party, thereby splitting up the Not Trump vote and effectively ensuring that Trump not only wins a second term but is benefited by midterm results as well.

While I'd like to think that George Will is the latter political genius, evidence has me sticking with the useful idiot theory.  My hope is that he is either wildly successful as a useful idiot for the GOP, but my expectation is that he just goes away, or ends up on CNN, which is basically the same thing.

Quote of the week - runner up

CNN is busy covering up Antifa violence*

Another great take on the recent Antifa vs. neo-Nazi brouhaha comes from American Greatness, and Robert Kimball's take is equally brilliant;

Trump was correct when he suggested that the alt-Left is just as much a problem as the alt-Right. Indeed, if we needed to compare the degree of iniquity of the neo-nazis, “white supremacists,” and Ku Kluxers, on the one hand, and Antifa and its fellow travelers, on the other, I am not at all sure which would come out the worse. Real Nazis—the kind that popped up like mushrooms in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s—are scary. But American “neo-nazis”? They are tiny bunch of pathetic losers. The Ku Klux Klan was a murderous Democratic terrorist group in its earlier incarnations. Now it too is a tiny bunch (the Anti-Defamation League says it has 5,000-8,000 members) of impotent malcontents.

Antifa has brought its racialist brand of violent protest to campuses and demonstrations around the country: smashing heads as well as property. I suspect that paid-up, full-time members of the group are few, but the ideology of identity politics that they feed upon is a gruesome specialité de la maison of the higher education establishment today.

I also thought that Trump was right to ask where the erasure of history would end. This week it was a statue of Robert E. Lee. But why stop there? Why not pronounce a damnatio memoriae on the entire history of the Confederacy? There are apparently some 1,500 monuments and memorials to the Confederacy in public spaces across the United States. Some of them were erected during the Jim Crow era, something else that was brought to you courtesy of the Democratic Party.

A few quick points - Nazis are socialists, not capitalists. All of the original African American congressmen after reconstruction were Republicans. Maybe we should ask the conniving Democrats if they'd rather erect statues to those men. I can guess what their answer would be.

*Via Daily Wire