Swampcrats v. Trump: fight for survival
You’d expect the mouthy Trump to say nasty things about Bob Mueller, the guy who hopes to display Trump’s head on a pike.
But a through-and-through Democrat like Mark Penn bad-mouting the Mueller probe? Now that’s man-bites-dog stuff. Real news.
Penn is Bill Clinton’s one-time political consultant. He was Hillary’s pollster and top political strategist for her 2008 presidential campaign. Hard to get more Democrat than that. Yet here’s what Penn says about Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s quest to be the savior who stops Trump from committing ecological disaster in the Swampcrats’ Swamp:
The Mueller probe is “ludicrous” and “corrupt.” It is “without foundation.” It is “nonsense.”
It is compromised by self-serving and partisan investigative agendas, and by flagrant conflicts of interest.
Penn’s assessment makes Trump’s comments that the probe is a “witch hunt” seem mild in the comparison.
But wait. Penn has more to say. The Mueller probe
— on which the Democratic Party is betting the ranch and the dog — is “irretrievably tainted” by unethical and unconstitutional conduct, he adds. The evidentiary basis of the case, such as it is, is
— legally speaking — ”the fruit of a poisonous tree,” adds Penn, who by the way has a law degree (Columbia).
So then, at last, here’s somebody, in the person of Penn, who’s willing to acknowledge the obvious. Who’s willing to play the role of the boy in the Hans Christian Andersen yarn who observes that the emperor in his supposedly splendid new threads is actually strutting down the street buck naked.
Penn’s observations aren’t offered here in defense of Trump’s style of flattening facts beneath the steamroller of his stream-of-consciousness blithering, nor in defense of any of the rest of his bombastic Queens, N.Y., shtick. His remarks are cited here merely to illustrate the no-turning-back, crossed-the-Rubicon nature of the anti-Trump “Resistance.” The Resistance is undergirded by a coalition of Antifa Blackshirts, Occupy Wall Street leftovers, Black Lives Matter rabble-rousers and MoveOn.org agitators. Such riffraff are increasingly the vanguard of the Democratic Party — the birds that turn the whole flock in wacky directions, leading it off in erratic flights of fantasy.
The Resistance is now Mueller’s most vocal political base — most obstreperous, most vituperative, most lunatic. And he is politically obligated to accommodate this base. He must — absolutely must — cobble together a case against Trump. If not a Russia-collusion case, then something else. Anything else. He’s near the desperation point.
Mueller’s scorched-earth probe so far has brought forth more interesting revelations about the probe itself than about any wrongdoing by Trump. Contemplate this strange truth, for example: One of the possible offenses Mueller is investigating — obstruction of justice — is based on Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey. Yet the guy who recommended that Trump fire Comey was the Justice Department’s No. 2 career bureaucrat, who’s in charge of supervising the Mueller probe. This would be Deputy Attorney Gen. Rod Rosenstein.
Rosenstein wrote a memo declaring that Comey had acted improperly by publicly detailing evidence against Hillary Clinton after an investigation in which no charges were brought against her — the email case. So the upshot is that Rosenstein is supervising a probe of obstruction of justice based on the firing of Comey, a firing he — Rosenstein — recommended himself! Hard to fictionalize a plot twist more bizarre than that.
Then there’s Paul Manafort, Mueller’s trophy indictment, one of the few he’s managed to bag so far. Manafort was briefly (July-August 2016) Trump’s campaign manager, long known around Washington as a lobbyist for shady foreign interests. Soon after being anointed Special Counsel, tasked to collar Trump, Mueller served up a bill of particulars citing Manafort’s conspicuous, egregious offenses. The indictment reads like a case of shooting fish in a barrel. It cites flagrant schemes to launder tens of millions of dollars through easily discovered offshore accounts. It cites clumsy, inept maneuvers to evade taxes and to perpetrate bank fraud with easily tracked paper trails leading right to it. But it cites nothing at all about Kremlin collusion. What is otherwise striking about the allegations — aside from their glaring, apparently easy-to-uncover wrongdoing — are the dates. The alleged of--
fenses occurred, according to the indictment, way back pre-Trump, as far back as 2006. I.e., on the watch of an FBI director named. . .Robert Swan Mueller III! (Reminder: Mueller was FBI Director, 2001-2013.)
So Bob Mueller — now in the role of Dick Tracy, the crackerjack crimebusting Special Counsel — was able to ferret out within months glaringly obvious crimes that the other Bob Mueller — in his previous role of bumbling Fearless Fosdick, head of
the FBI — was apparently unable to detect in all his many previous years as Top G-man.
One of the more interesting features of the Manafort indictment is not who was indicted but who wasn’t. Manafort was indicted for failing to register as a foreign agent for Viktor Yanukovych, former Ukrainian president and alleged puppet of Vladimir Putin. In all his years as FBI Director, Mueller never happened to notice that Manafort had failed to register as a lobbyist for this foreign politician and others? Yet he happened to notice it almost immediately upon his appointment as anti-Trump Special
Counsel? Please. A Manafort business partner also neglected to register but was not indicted, and was in fact permitted to register retroactively. The indictment identifies this partner only as “Company B.”
Brace yourself for another improbable plot twist. Company B was the Podesta Group — lobbying firm founded and coowned by John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
According to the Mueller indictment, Manafort hired the Podesta Group, a well-wired Washington lobbying firm prominent in Democratic politics, to help him lobby on Capitol Hill for Putin’s pal Yanukovych. And according to the indictment, Company B., i.e., Podesta’s firm, was paid out of Manafort’s allegedly illegal “offshore accounts.”
Yet, no Podesta indictment. Meanwhile, Podesta has shut down his lobbying firm and seems to have quietly slinked off into the oblivion of apparent prosecutorial immunity, Mueller having dealt him off the bottom of the deck a stayoutta-jail card. Mueller apparently would have us believe that the savvy Podesta never grasped that the Manafort-assigned client he was lobbying for, under Manafort’s direction, was identified by a fictional title. Mueller apparently would have us believe that it never occurred to Podesta that the paychecks from foreign accounts he was cashing as Manafort’s subcontractor were maybe just a little bit dodgy. C’mon.
CNN, MSNBC and other squawking media parrots cry out, “Russia collusion! Russia collusion!” But there’s scant evidence of it so far. Exceedingly scant, you might say. Except for — get ready for another plot twist — HILLARY CLINTON AND HER CAMPAIGN!
While Mueller beats the bushes and kicks over rocks trying to sniff out Trump-Russia collusion, collusion by the Podestaheaded Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee has long been
laid bare beyond any dispute. The Clinton campaign and DNC, through a law firm intermediary, hired a British snoop to concoct a campaign “dossier” on Trump alleging Kremlin shenanigans on his part, including having cavorted with Moscow prostitutes. The dossier, lacking a single piece of corroborated information, was based solely on RUSSIAN sources and anonymous ones at that. Does that sound just a tad like maybe, uh, um, RUSSIA COLLUSION?
James Comey, while FBI Director, himself labelled the dossier “salacious and unverified.” Yet this much is now known beyond dispute: Politicized denizens of the Swamp — the careerist bureaucrats of the Deep State, as it’s been dubbed — used the “salacious and unverified,” RUSSIAN-sourced document, paid for by the Clinton campaign and DNC, to hornswoggle a warrant from a super-secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court. That warrant gave Swamp apparatchiki the go-ahead to gumshoe Trump associates.
The Hillary Clinton whose campaign helped fund this RUSSIA-sourced screed is, of course, the very Hillary Clinton who
was Secretary of State when a State Department-chaired panel signed off on a deal that handed over to RUSSIA 20 percent of America’s national-security-sensitive uranium-production capacity. And this while tens of millions of dollars from parties with a financial stake in the deal flowed in torrents into the Clinton Foundation as supposed charitable donations. All while a RUSSIAN investment bank paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a single Moscow speech. You want RUSSIA COLLUSION? Just open your eyes.
Yet Bob Mueller thrusts out his Fearless Fosdick chin and ploughs onward, his blinkered probe determined to track down Trump associations with sinister Boris Badinoffs and Natasha Fatales.
The story, then, is not really about Trump at all. It’s about corrupting the institutions of law enforcement and national security to serve the scuzzy ends of partisan politics.
Due to their FISA and other overplays, the Swampcrats have now come to a pass where they see the situation with stark clarity: “It’s now his ass — or ours.”
It’s now a game of raw survival.