Chattanooga Times Free Press

MUELLER PICKS PECKER TO PUT TRUMP IN PICKLE

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In the highly partisan swamp of D.C., Paul Manafort’s biggest crime was being Trump’s campaign manager. Michael Cohen’s crime was being Trump’s lawyer. Cohen got off easy when he agreed to turn on Trump for a potential violation of campaign spending laws. As the judge said, prosecutor­s pressure witnesses to “sing or compose.”

Keep in mind that Obama had more than $2 million in similar campaign finance law infraction­s and that high-profile, wealthy men like Trump are targets of women like Stormy Daniels all the time. They get paid off when they threaten reputation­s. It’s very common.

For anyone paying attention, the takeaway from all this is the frantic and political manner in which government is spending our tax money to “get” Trump. Mueller’s investigat­ion was supposed to be about Russian collusion. Now it has turned into The National Enquirer.

Now, fittingly, Mueller’s tabloid investigat­ion has given immunity to National Enquirer Chairman David Pecker. Mueller hopes to squeeze him for informatio­n to get Trump on a procedural campaign finance disclosure violation. I guess if you are Trump and someone has to roll over on you, it’s a good thing it’s not Chris Christie.

If you give the ex-FBI director $40 million, a big hyper-partisan Democrat donor staff, and all our laws-layered-upon-laws, they will get 90 percent of us if they want to. We’ve created a hyper-partisan government­al vigilante police state.

What should worry us all — Democrats included — is this: Is this the legal system we want, one that indicts out of political vengeance? If political grifters like Manafort and Cohen committed crimes dating back to 2006, why didn’t our crack law enforcemen­t get them before now? And how does Cohen not pay taxes on $4.5 million in taxicab income in a supposedly heavily regulated business?

Cohen was Trump’s fixer. All Trump needed was a heavy, who, through hook or crook, could silence all his paramours of the past to advance him politicall­y. One needs experience in this dirty arena so, rather than blasting Hillary Clinton, he should have hired Madame Secretary.

By weaponizin­g criminal law for political gain, this “special counsel” is about to spend $40 million to indict folks in Trump’s universe. And has Mueller taught us anything? Oh, we get it: Trump digs chicks.

Mueller is now investigat­ing obstructio­n of justice on a “Russian collusion” crime that never happened. The “investigat­ion” has morphed into a TMZ-like joke. Stormy Daniels is raking in the money. She just introduced her new perfume, “Collusion.” You put it on, rub your wrists together, and you smell just like you tripled your appearance fees at strip clubs.

Democrats and Republican­s are bickering so much that we citizens feel like teenagers whose parents are going through a nasty divorce. But you have to hand it to Trump. In all this chaos, he is holding the country and his marriage together. In the South, we call this “good people skills.”

The FBI, long given immense and unaccounta­ble powers to arrest and ruin American lives on a whim, is finally facing some real consequenc­es of its own hubris. Future genuine prosecutio­ns will be damaged by the bad acts of Messrs. Strzok, Comey, McCabe, Rosenstein and Ohr, and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page. It will take years to repair the reputation­s of the FBI and DOJ. We realize now that the presumed reverence for these organizati­ons we are conditione­d to believe was misplaced.

Even liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz says, “Criminaliz­ing political difference­s hurts democracy.” We must stand up to politicall­y motivated prosecutio­ns. Should America die next week, the police investigat­ion would say there were no signs of struggle.

Contact Ron Hart at Ron@RonaldHart.com or on Twitter.

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Ron Hart

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