Andrew C. McCarthy isn’t in favor of appointing a new special counsel
Excerpt:
Why do we have guidelines and manuals? Because we want our law-enforcement officers to operate within clearly legitimate boundaries, not constantly to test the margins of their lawful authority. Having guidelines encourages this. It provides a standard for internal discipline when excessive or abusive conduct occurs. But if deviations from guidelines were to become a basis for legal action, including criminal prosecution, one of two things would happen: The guidelines would be repealed, or they would be rewritten in a broadly permissive manner, endorsing investigative behavior that might be justifiable in exigent circumstances but would be grossly inappropriate the rest of the time. If we want to have meaningful guidelines, the trade-off is that guidelines departures cannot lead to lawsuits ”” although they must lead to administrative discipline, including termination if the misconduct is serious enough.
Finally, it is a serious dereliction for the FBI and Justice Department to provide the FISA court with unverified information, such as the allegations in the Steele dossier (which, based on what is publicly known at present, were essentially uncorroborated). As explained in a letter Chairman Nunes sent to Attorney General Sessions last week, it is a violation of the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide to include anything other than “documented and verified information” in FBI applications for FISA-court surveillance warrants.
All that said, there is a big difference between (a) giving a court information that is unverified because it has not been adequately corroborated and (b) knowingly giving a court information that is false. The former is abusive; the latter is felony obstruction of justice.
You (or I) may not always like what McCarthy has to say, but I have found him to be consistently logical and fair—to both sides. That’s an unusual characteristic.
Disagree with Andy here. A first for me.
Strzok was shaving points on the Hillary email investigation. That’s obstruction of justice. On the FISA warrants they knew Steele was a paid shill for the Dems.
If we don’t get to the bottom of this massive corruption, it will never stop.
My analogy is how the Clintons cleverly skirted the bribery laws to make millions. That’s what the Clinton Foundation was all about.
I don’t really disagree with McCarthy, but I suspect Mueller’s top cop Weissmann will not judge or operate with anything like the discretion that Andrew McCarthy wields.
The Arthur Anderson corp. was put out of business and thousands of jobs lost over a Weissmann conviction that was later overturned. Weissmann’s selection by Mueller reflects extremely badly on Mueller.
It feels to me like we are now living in an era of double standard politics and justice.
To Cornhead’s point, I believe that if no one does jail time for Fast & Furious, or Hillary’s email server (highly likely hacked email server), or IRS manipulation, or the Steele dossier, mayors ratting out ICE agents, etc., etc.; then the criminality inside government will escalate rapidly. Why wouldn’t it?
Gov. Jerry Brown laughed that AG Session’s law suite against CA won’t hit the Supreme Court until after Trump leaves office. Perfect.
As I read McCarthy, he’s opposed to special counsels in principle, but not against investigating the current … peculiarities.
Chairmen Goodlatte and Gowdy are right: The investigators need to be investigated. But we do not need a special counsel to do it. There is no reason that Attorney General Sessions cannot structure a probe that can be credibly conducted by the Justice Department’s standard investigative arrangement: the FBI, in conjunction with a U.S. Attorney’s office.
Then there’s this LifeZette story: “Here’s Why Jeff Sessions May Be Washington’s Slyest Fox” to the effect that there is a serious ongoing investigation already. Is this the IG report we keep hearing about it?
https://www.lifezette.com/polizette/heres-why-jeff-sessions-may-be-washingtons-slyest-fox/
There’s a lot of detail and inside baseball. I’m not sure what’s going on.
McCarthy: “If a court has been given faulty information in a criminal case, the remedy is that evidence derived from the warrant is suppressed. … The point, nevertheless, is that the remedy of suppression is preferable to subjecting officials to punishment because, in the vast majority of instances where wrong is done, the wrong involves an overzealous error made in good-faith belief that incriminating evidence would be found. Thankfully, intentional frauds on the court are unusual – although, as my friend Kevin Williamson has chronicled (e.g., here) they do happen. (I’ve noted the same on occasion.)”
Follow his link to the case cited (New Orleans police operating during Hurricane Katrina, convicted of various crimes for mistakenly killing suspected dangerous persons, whose convictions were overturned due to egregious prosecutorial conduct reaching into main DOJ offices).
His conclusion there kind of undercuts his position here.
Because there was no punishment of the corrupt officials, as Cornhead and TommyJay warn, we got more of it.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/08/justice-departments-grotesque-misconduct-against-new-orleans-cops-andrew-c-mccarthy/
“So what has become of the prosecutors at the center of this sordid affair – at least the few who have been identified? Perricone resigned shortly after he was found out. Letten, having indignantly told the court and the public that the sole culprit was Perricone, later stepped down. The Fifth Circuit tartly observes that “both Jan Mann and her husband Jim retired with their panoply of federal benefits intact” – and, evidently, with no prospect of being prosecuted for obstruction of justice.
And what of “Dipsos” herself, Karla Dobinski, the Justice Department lawyer at the center of the corrupt scheme to gut the civil rights of police officers? She is still merrily on the job in the Civil Rights Division, having received nothing but a lip-service reprimand. She perseveres in the fundamental transformation mission, schooling America’s cops in the Obama administration’s rather different practice of “law enforcement.””
huxley Says:
March 10th, 2018 at 4:39 pm
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Lifezette is quoting from a much more complete article at Conservative Treehouse.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/03/08/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-confirms-prior-appointment-of-doj-prosecutor-to-parallel-ig-horowitz-not-a-special-counsel/
AesopFan: I looked at the Treehouse article too but having a lot more detail wasn’t helping.
I linked Lifezette because it got to the point quicker and stronger, and I hope correctly.
huxley: Lifezette gave a fair summary; I like the details in Treehouse — they tread older ground each time around, but it keeps thing straight in my mind.
The question I’m most interested in is how much in cahoots Trump and Sessions are, if at all.
I don’t buy into the idea that the very astute and principled Senator instantly became a helpless ethically-challenged buffoon as AG, but I don’t know if the two of them are working together, or if Sessions is deliberately keeping Trump out of the loop.
J. E. Dyer was pondering the question of cahoots earlier this year (first bolded section is from January).
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/03/09/cryptic-jeff-sessions-ive-appointed-person-outside-washington-investigate-fisa-abuses/
“I wrote at the time about Sessions’ probable thinking:
[I]f investigators are looking into the use of funds by the Clinton Foundation, they may find other prosecutable irregularities from more recent years. ….
And if they are looking into it all via district staffs, as in Arkansas, and not as an “HQ special” — with top officials seeking ways to suppress indictable information rather than deal with it — the outcome may be a different one from what James Comey and Loretta Lynch came up with in 2016.
…
The main things Sessions needs for an effective investigation of any of these very hot potatoes are a quiet, unobstructed atmosphere for the probe, and top-cover from Trump.
Twitter is one of Trump’s chief methods of providing such cover. It’s a world-class distractor, reliably resetting the news cycle and rocking the media on their heels. Trump’s flaming tweet from 28 February, followed by Sessions’ statement that he has already appointed an investigator for FISA abuses, makes me wonder if an announcement of something substantial is being prepared – or if, simply, Sessions needs a running start on something the mainstream media, or other actors inside Washington, will want to sabotage. As with so many things in this strange time, we’ll have to wait and see.”
He keeps talking about good faith….
Great discussion. I think a key point is that I have a hard time believing that Sessions is a nincompoop. I don’t know how much a president can collude with his AG to pull the wool over the eyes of an opposition that is prepared to believe anything except that they lost the election but I felt when he called Sessions up to the podium on election night that a special relationship existed between the two. Sessions was a very early Trump supporter, and I don’t believe any well established senator backs a disruptive outsider unless he believes some serious disrupting is called for. Rubio and Cruz are perfectly acceptable choices for any merely conservative senator to back. I also notice that Trump bad mouths both Sessions and Tillerson, and even some of his generals on occasion. Because presidents just don’t do that it is the perfect chum to distract the chumps. Finally while I share the reservations expressed above with McCarthy’s piece, I remember my disgust with both Fitzgerald’s and Ken Starr’s excesses. But where I really disagree with McCarthy is that I don’t believe that prosecutorial misconduct is nearly as rare as he says. This conversation between Conrad Black and Mark Steyn implies it is endemic. Think also Martha Stewart or Ruby Ridge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjuzjvwVqOU&t=65s
Are there really “both sides?”
Lorenz.
Or Ted Stevens. Or Steven Hatfill. The feebs in Atlanta tried to frame Richard Jewell for the bombing but Bubba Rent-a-Cop outsmarted them. It was a good try and might have saved them getting all sweaty looking for the real perp. Can’t win them all.
But the information WAS false.
And so absurd on its face that a two-year old could figure that much out.
Red vs Blue. It keeps the masses distracted until they are Harvested.