…to blogger Gerard Vanderleun on the loss of his beloved and wonderful mother, aged 104 and a half. Please see this.
RIP.
Training horses for the film “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken”: the horse has to want to jump
Remember those extraordinary diving horses we talked about a while back? If not, refresh your memory here.
In that thread and in other online discussions, one of the big questions is: how are the horses trained to do that? There are plenty of animal rights activists who are against the practice and assume it represents (or represented; I don’t think there are any venues left where it’s done for entertainment) cruelty to the animals. Even if a person doesn’t assume it’s cruel, the wonder is how it’s done at all.
Here’s an explanation of how the horses were trained for the movie “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken,” a film based on the life of one of the women who rode these horses [emphasis mine]:
There are three horse diving scenes in the picture. In this picture as in all other pictures, there were doubles trained for the picture. Six horses in all were in “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken.” Four were trained to dive. While the real Sonora’s horses dove forty feet, the horses that made the picture never dove over ten feet, which is the maximum that American Humane Association’s Guildelines will allow.
American Humane was on the compound for the full training period. Corky Randall, one of the most cautious horse wranglers in Hollywood, was hired by Pegusus Productions to train the horses. The horses were chosen very carefully and only horses that liked the water were used. Training was done very slowly by first seeing if the horses liked to swim. They were allowed initially to swim in the tank made for the picture.
As training progressed, they were allowed to step off one foot into water, then two feet and so on until they had reached the ten foot maximum. The horses always jumped on their own. In order to achieve the forty foot height, a lot of Hollywood magic was used. The ten foot ramp was made to expand to thirty feet. A cage was designed to place at the top of the ramp so when the horses climbed thirty feet, they just walked into the cage. Footage of the assent was run back to back to make the assent appear long. Then a mechanical person on a mechanical horse, with the footage of the real audience all set against drawings of buildings in the background, made the jump appear to be forty feet. The jump is shown in cuts with only leaving the board and entering the water being the real horse jumps. The lead horse playing Lightning always made beautiful dives. However, the horse playing Redlips always twisted to the side when he jumped making it easy to fake a bad dive in the story.
But my very favorite part of the description of the training of the horses for the movie is this:
The tank at the compound had to be blocked off when not in use because the horses and dogs on the ranch would run up and jump off on their own when there was no training being done.
They apparently enjoyed it.
All this was for the movie, of course. We don’t know if the horses for the earlier dives at amusement parks were chosen and trained in the same manner (progressing to greater heights, however). But it makes sense that they were. As one of the riders said (quoted in my previous post on the subject):
Some people say they must have forced the horses to do what they did. Sonora told me many times the last thing anyone would want was to be up on a tower with a horse that did not want to be there.
[NOTE: The title of this post is a play on the old joke: Q—How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? A—One, but the lightbulb has to want to change.]
Oberlin’s insurer is unlikely to cover the Gibson lawsuit award
Oberlin’s insurer is highly unlikely to cover Oberlin’s liabilities against Gibson’s Bakery.
It makes sense; why should an insurer be liable for the willful and knowing wrongdoing of the insured? Here’s a more technical statement of the situation, written by the insurance company’s lawyers prior to the verdict:
While the Lexington policy potentially provides coverage in relation to “personal and advertising injury,” defined to include defamation and/or disparagement in certain circumstances, the Lexington policy excludes any such coverage if “personal and advertising injury” is caused “with the knowledge that the act would violate the rights of another … ,” or if the insured published material it knew to be false. Further, the Lexington policy provides coverage for punitive damages insurable by law, but only where the corresponding award of compensatory damages is also covered by the Lexington policy. In this action, plaintiffs Gibson Bros., Inc., Allyn Gibson, and David Gibson allege that defendants Oberlin and Ms. Raimondo published material that falsely characterized the bakery owned by plaintiffs (“Gibson’s”) as being a racist establishment. While such allegations potentially implicate “personal and advertising injury,” plaintiffs also alleged that the statements were published with malice, were intended to injure plaintiffs’ business reputation, and were part of a purported campaign to harm plaintiffs. If it is established that the defendants knew the alleged statements were false, or if the defendants knew their alleged acts would violate plaintiffs’ rights, the Lexington policy would exclude coverage for any resultant damage.
Of course, to many universities 11 million dollars is just chump change. Even if the award climbs to 33 million when punitive damages are included, a lot of elite universities would find this relatively easy to pay. My sense, though, is that Oberlin has had some financial difficulties even before this, and that it therefore could be a significant hit for the school.
[ADDENDUM: One possible or even probable consequence is that Oberlin sues the insurer and tries to force it to cough up the money.]
Biden: just doing what he thinks he has to do
There’s been a great deal of discussion about Biden and his reversal on the Hyde Amendment. But I haven’t gone into it much, because I already find Biden such a loathsome character.
Maybe “loathsome” isn’t the right word. But I have long found him to be an opportunistic mediocrity who seems well-suited to politics (that’s not a compliment) and who doesn’t appear to have a deeply-held set of values. Of course, that doesn’t distinguish him from most politicians, but I didn’t say he was distinguished, although he’s got staying power and has held many many offices, including having been VP. That’s why the Democrats are pushing him; he’s their only elder statesman at the moment, or at least their most “likeable” one.
That word “likeable” often puzzles me when applied to politicians, and it’s applied often. I find Biden sort of sleazy, and he seems rather doddering lately. But apparently he has a lot of likeability to which I’m blind (as did Obama). At any rate, “likeability” isn’t one of my top criteria for voting. It’s Biden’s political stances I’m against.
But I think his political stances actually involve doing and saying whatever he thinks will get him where he wants to go, politically. Right now he wants the Democratic nomination. If he gets it, he will be a few weeks shy of his 78th birthday. That doesn’t seem to be a selling point, does it? But I see his reversal on the Hyde Amendment as his effort to keep up with the youngsters in the Democratic Party rather than anything to do with principle.
If you want to get up to speed on Biden and the Hyde Amendment, see this. It’s not just a change of mind or even a supposed change of mind (such as Obama’s on gay marriage, for example), it’s a change and a change and a change:
For starters, “abortion rights in crisis” doesn’t explain why Biden has flipped three times on this issue in the span of a month, including twice in the span of 24 hours. If he’s worried about Brett Kavanaugh and fetal-heartbeat laws, he should have switched to a no on Hyde months ago and stuck to it. I’d add that if Biden’s view of Hyde is dependent on the threat level to Roe, he should have flipped to no on Hyde decades ago, after Clarence Thomas was confirmed. The Supreme Court at the time had *eight* Republican appointees, five of whom had been appointed by Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush…
Why was the threat in the early 1990s insufficient to get him to reconsider his view of Hyde? Why is the threat now, when the Democratic Party is far more militantly pro-choice than it was then, sufficient to make him do so?
The “best” argument available to Team Biden that doesn’t admit the plain truth, which is that he’s afraid he can’t get nominated in 2019 by remaining pro-Hyde, is that he … just hasn’t thought very deeply about this issue. He remained blithely pro-Hyde for the better part of 50 flippin’ years only to have his new campaign staffers convince him literally overnight that poorer areas of the country deserve some federal sugar to keep the abortion mills running. It was the first time he devoted more than eight seconds of thought to the subject, his aides might say, and a lightbulb went off over his head.
That’s not a very good campaign pitch either, though, for obvious reasons. And it would cut the heart out of Biden’s longstanding defense of his pro-Hyde position, that this is supposedly “deeply personal” for him and a matter of considered moral deliberation.
I agree. I think it reveals Biden as what he’s been all the time. Now, maybe that’s what people want. But I don’t think it plays well with either side.
It occurs to me that…
…if Trump manages to drain any portion of the swamp, it will be because he represents an irresistible target to the swamp denizens, and in the extremity of their zeal to get him they reveal themselves in ways that are especially noticeable and outrageous.
And then, because Trump himself isn’t afraid to say things that other more polite politicians would never be caught uttering, he sets a tone that is more combative toward his critics, spurring them on to greater heights of frenzy.
Remember, for example, the furious eruptions of the Trump opposition—the ridicule, the outrage—when Trump declared that the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump Tower? The media focused on the word “wiretapped,” which Trump later said wasn’t meant literally but as a shorthand for spied on or used surveillance on. But at this point, his statement seems rather pedestrian, doesn’t it? That’s true for so many of the things Trump said that originally seemed way off-base even to some of his supporters.
I was curious to see what I wrote at the time about that original wiretapping tweet of Trump’s, so I went back and found this post from March of 2017. It was very early in his presidency. Looking back on it now, I see that I had a bit of a beef with him saying what he said through a tweet, but otherwise thought it not unlikely that he would end up being vindicated in some way. It’s interesting to look at the comments there, too, for example this comment of mine
I think I indicated in my post that I wish he hadn’t tweeted this this way, but had instead presented a case.
However, that doesn’t mean that a case won’t be presented. Trump likes to get his opponents all riled up and then surprise them by being more sober and grounded than they expected.
But implying [any spying that was done on him] was okay because it was legal misses the point almost entirely. The point is that it might have represented a case of using the justice system to get a political opponent. That’s a no-no, even if legal. A president [in this case I was talking about Obama and the departments under him] is given enormous powers. He or she should not abuse them, even in ways that are legal.
Interesting. If you read the post, it seems there was a lot of information out there already about the FISA warrants on Trump associates. It’s astounding that so far it’s taken two years and change for a lot of related information to come out more fully.
And apparently, we’re not finished yet.
A done Deal
“I am pleased to inform you that The United States of America has reached a signed agreement with Mexico,” President Trump tweeted Friday night.
“The Tariffs scheduled to be implemented by the U.S. on Monday, against Mexico, are hereby indefinitely suspended,” he added.
“Mexico, in turn, has agreed to take strong measures to stem the tide of Migration through Mexico, and to our Southern Border,” he said.
“This is being done to greatly reduce, or eliminate, Illegal Immigration coming from Mexico and into the United States. Details of the agreement will be released shortly by the State Department. Thank you!”
Gibson’s Bakery wins lawsuit against Oberlin
If you read Legal Insurrection regularly, you’ve probably been following their in-depth coverage of the trial in which a long-time family-run business in the town of Oberlin, Ohio, sued the college. The verdict is now in, and the plaintiffs have won:
According to our reporter in the Courtroom, the jury awarded $11 million. Here are the details: Allyn W. Gibson was awarded $3 million, David Gibson $5.8 million, Gibson Bros. $2,274,500. Next Tuesday there will be a separate punitive damages which could be a double award (meaning tripling the $11 million to $33 million).
Go to the link for the details. Professor Jacobson writes:
The verdict sends a strong message that colleges and universities cannot simply wind up and set loose student social justice warriors and then wash their hands of the consequences. In this case, a wholly innocent 5th-generation bakery was falsely accused of being racist and having a history racial profiling after stopping three black Oberlin College students from shoplifting. The students eventually pleaded guilty, but not before large protests and boycotts intended to destroy the bakery and defame the owners. The jury appears to have accepted that Oberlin College facilitated the wrongful conduct against the bakery.
More from post-trial statements:
Lee Plakas, who handled much of the month-long trial and who gave the closing argument, said this case “is a national tipping point.”
“What the jury saw is that teaching students and having them learn how to be upstanding members of the community is what colleges are supposed to do, not appease some students who they are afraid of,” Plakas said. “People around the country should learn from this, that you can use the legal system to right the wrongs, even if the one doing the wrong is some huge institution who thinks they can do anything they want.”
Roger Copeland, a retired Oberlin College professor of theater and dance, was in the courtroom and seemed ecstatic after the jury came back with their verdict. Prof. Copeland is somewhat famous in the courtroom for getting this response on a Raimondo text to co-workers after a letter-to-the editor he wrote was critical of the school for their handling of the Gibson’ affair. “Fuck him,” Raimondo responded in a text message about Copeland. “I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.”
“I’m exhilarated by this verdict,” Copeland said, whose wife Michele worked at the school in food service and testified she was under orders by the school to cut the business off from the cafeteria bagels and pastries they provided because of the student unrest.
“What is most amazing about this trial is that the public was able to see what the process really was in how the school goes about its business,” Copeland said. “It’s almost like the mask has been ripped off the face and we can now see what the face really looks like.”
Much much more at the link.
Oberlin claims it was just defending students’ free speech rights (which is kind of funny, coming as it does from SJWs). That would, however, be a good defense—except that the plaintiffs proved to the jurors’ satisfaction that Oberlin’s participation in the campaign against Gibson’s (based on false accusations) went far beyond that.
Trump’s tariffs and Mexico: the Deal
I recently wrote this post about Trump’s proposed tariffs on Mexico, and the condemnation of them. In it I said:
Regarding those tariffs and all the criticism thereof—I’m not saying tariffs are a good idea to actually implement, but I was under the impression that at the moment they are a bargaining chip, an opening bid in a complex negotiation. Isn’t that how these things tend to work? The tariff proposal (or actual tariffs, if they are implemented) may not be successful, but so far isn’t this one of those Art of the Deal things? I thought that was glaringly obvious.
Glaringly obvious that was the intent and the plan, anyway, to not have to actually implement the tariffs but to use them to change Mexico’s defiance into cooperation on illegal immigrants, particularly those using Mexico as transit from other areas. Not all plans are successful, but people should at least give Trump credit for using a certain tactic in furtherance of a strategy—although “giving Trump credit” does not compute with a lot of people.
The jury’s still out, but it looks as though so far this tactic has borne fruit. Remember, the idea was not actually to have to put the tariffs into effect; it was to get Mexico to take certain steps regarding illegal immigrants passing through that country on the way here.
Most people can’t admit errors, so that’s why this tweet is unsual:
Holy crap! If true, Trump was 100% right and I was 100% wrong. Good on him. https://t.co/KbFVWl9qT5
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 6, 2019
The Mexican government is reportedly offering a slate of immigration-related concessions to appease the Trump administration as it seeks to prevent the imposition of tariffs on exports to the U.S.
Mexican negotiators are offering to deploy thousands of National Guard troops to its border with Guatemala and enact sweeping changes to its asylum laws, moves that are expected to prevent a significant number of Central Americans from illegally entering the U.S., The Washington Post reported Thursday.
President Donald Trump set a June 10 deadline for the Mexican government to demonstrate it would do more to stem illegal immigration from its country, or else face a 5% tariff on all its goods. The threat sparked immediate negotiations between U.S. and Mexican delegations in Washington, D.C. — which are expected to continue for the rest of the week.
Mexico, according to two officials who spoke with The Post, agreed to send up to 6,000 National Guard troops to its southern border with Guatemala, a major chokepoint for Central American migrants in their northbound journey to the U.S. That move is expected to immediately yield results in squashing the number of illegal immigrants.
Additionally, Mexican negotiators are prepared to revamp their asylum rules in the region. Under the proposal, Central Americans seeking asylum would have to remain in the first country they entered after leaving their homeland.
Now, it remains to be seen if this will actually be enforced. But so far those are very promising developments. Trump’s threats have extra power because other countries believe he’s just bold enough (or ballsy enough or reckless enough) to actually do what he threatens, if things don’t work out.
If this entire tariff-threatening approach is successful, I would like to see every single pundit who excoriated Trump for it eat crow.
A person can hope.
Ilhan Omar scandals—or should-be scandals
Ilhan Omar is in a pack of trouble. Or she would be, if she weren’t a member of several intersectional groups generally protected by the MSM, the Democrats, and the left (that’s redundant, I know): Democrat, leftist, woman, Somalian, immigrant, Muslim:
BREAKING — Important Ilhan Omar thread on just-released campaign finance investigation conclusions:
The report’s finding that @IlhanMN committed SIX campaign finance violations is, amazingly, not the report’s key takeaway.
(1/x)
— David Steinberg ?? (@realDSteinberg) June 6, 2019
The report states that @IlhanMN and Ahmed Hirsi filed joint tax returns in 2014 and 2015.
Yet they were not married. @IlhanMN was married to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi from 2009-2017.
According to both federal and MN law, this is illegal. (3/x)
— David Steinberg ?? (@realDSteinberg) June 6, 2019
Also please see this article from Scott Johnson at Powerline, entitled “Ilhan Omar’s Blizzard of Lies.”
More, more, and more on Mueller
It appears that the elusive Christopher Steele will be testifying:
Former British spy Christopher Steele has agreed to meet in London with U.S. officials regarding the dossier, The Times of London is reporting.
A source close to Steele told the newspaper he plans to meet with American authorities within the next several weeks, but only about his interactions with the FBI and only with the approval of the British government.
Of course, this is only a report from “a source close to Steele.” Who knows who that is, and whether the source is reliable?
More here:
We don’t yet know which investigators will be interviewing Steele in the coming weeks, but it’s a pretty safe bet that they’ve offered him some form of immunity in exchange for his candor. That should terrify the Democrats who enlisted him in their attempts to execute a Deep State coup against Trump.
If Steele spills the beans on his former handlers, the resulting prosecutions of former high-level federal officials would make Watergate seem trivial by comparison.
I’m not as optimistic as the author of that quote, Joe diGenova.
In addition, this latest from John Solomon was a big story yesterday:
In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence.
But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
Why Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny.
Turns out there were a lot of things omitted from Mueller’s report.
And if you want a review of Mueller’s past prosecutorial history, here’s your opportunity.
Yesterday I discussed this article about what Mueller’s team did to his targets in the Russiagate probe. Today I want to add a few more quotes.
Jerome Corsi’s story:
.[Corsi] said Mueller’s investigators engaged in “Gestapo tactics,” including harassing his friends and family — as well as his sources. “They got abusive when they didn’t get what they wanted,” he said, “and they got nasty.”
…“They just keep thinking they could find something,” Corsi said.
He said the stress caused him to have “a nervous breakdown.”…
In the end, Corsi was drilled by Mueller’s team for more than 40 hours, and in the process, racked up more than $100,000 in legal bills.
“I still haven’t recovered physically or financially,” he told RCI, though he has received donations from a legal defense fund. “We’re just now putting our lives back together.”
He maintained that his “Kafkaesque” nightmare at the hands of Mueller was “nothing more than punishment for the crime of being a vocal supporter of Donald Trump.”
“It was a completely fraudulent way to conduct an investigation,” he said. “Usually you start with a crime and find the criminals. But in this case, they started with the ‘criminal’ and looked for the crime.”
In a $300 million lawsuit filed earlier this year against Mueller and the Justice Department, which oversaw Mueller’s office, Corsi alleged that Mueller’s team subjected him to warrantless surveillance, illegally leaked details about grand jury and other secret proceedings to reporters, and threatened to sabotage his “business and contractual relationships” unless he perjured himself in the Russia “collusion” probe.
“Mueller had been doing everything in his power to try to threaten and coerce Corsi into testifying falsely, through both illegal surveillance and defamation, in order to take down President Trump and have him removed from office,” the complaint states…
Corsi was never indicted and is no longer under investigation.
Many of Mueller’s targets have incurred enormous legal fees. This is one of the tools of an independent counsel, working for a government with very deep pockets and arrayed against witnesses whose pockets are considerably more shallow. One of the most upsetting things is that the government has inexhaustible resources and private people they target have to pay their own legal fees, not to mention the stress involved, which acts as pressure to lie to get the whole thing over with.
You might also want to refresh your memory on Roger Stone:
Like Corsi, Stone slammed Mueller’s “gestapo” tactics. Some former agents agree the raid was excessive.
“The charges are lying and obstruction, so they dress out like this was a Waco assault? C’mon,” retired FBI special agent Michael Biasello said, adding that Mueller clearly was trying to intimidate Stone.
Stone says Mueller’s agents have also probed into his emails, text messages, phone calls and bank records. He claims they sifted through his garbage cans and went so far as to interview his maid to ask if he was meeting with Russians at his home.
“For months, Mueller’s Russian investigation has tried to implicate me by saying I had direct knowledge of plans by WikiLeaks to release information damaging to Clinton’s campaign,” Stone said. “There is no evidence whatsoever to support this claim, even after at least 12 of my current and former associates have been browbeaten by the FBI and at least six of them were dragged before Mueller’s grand jury.”
He says he’s racked up more than $1 million in legal bills, and he fears his defense could wind up costing him double that sum and force him into bankruptcy.
There’s that money thing again. It’s a very powerful and effective form of political intimidation.
Papadopoulos:
At one point, Papadopoulos said Mueller’s team even “threatened me with a Logan Act violation for helping Trump meet [foreign] leaders.”
Only two people have been charged with violating the Logan Act since it was passed in 1799. Both cases occurred before the Civil War; both defendants were acquitted.
“Even thinking about charging someone with a Logan Act violation is obscene and in my view profoundly corrupt,” former independent counsel Wisenberg said.
Papadopoulos said the piling on of charges convinced him to take a plea deal in which he copped to lying to investigators in exchange for minimal jail time. “I pled guilty when they came after me with FARA violations,” he told RCI.
But that didn’t stop the threats and intimidation. Led by Clinton supporter Rhee and Obama donor Andrew Goldstein, Papadopoulos said, Mueller’s prosecutors threatened to rip up the plea agreement to get him to confess that he shared what the so-called Russian agent allegedly told him in London about Clinton’s emails with higher-ups in the Trump campaign. Only, he never told anyone on the campaign about the yarn — and emails, texts and other evidence backed him up.
Still, during one interview at the FBI’s Chicago office, Mueller’s lawyers grilled him for seven hours on the subject, relentlessly asking, name by name, if he told various officials on the campaign. Without this critical piece of information, Mueller had no conspiracy. “I got the sense that I was the linchpin of their conspiracy case,” Papadopoulos said.
“Unfortunately, the truth was not what they wanted to hear,” he said. “No matter how much Mueller and his team wished I had told campaign members, I hadn’t.”
A frustrated Rhee (one of the lawyers on Mueller’s team) threatened to charge Papadopoulos with obstruction and throw him in prison for 25 years. She cited the fact he deleted his Facebook account, something his lawyer said he could do…
Looking back on his ordeal, Papadopoulos said he was railroaded. “Of course, they knew there was no collusion crime, especially in my case,” he said, adding that investigators just wanted “to use me for their war against Trump.”
There’s plenty more. Oh, just read the whole thing.
It’s almost impossible to adequately cover or even keep track of the revelations that are coming out now; there’s just so much. As I’ve said many times in the past, every single American should be deeply deeply disturbed by these activities. But plenty are not, or even applaud what they did in their Ahab-like effort to get at the root of all evil, Moby Trump.
Trump’s full D-Day remarks
I am struck by the advanced age of all and the seeming physical frailty of some of the veterans, which is a reminder that in a few years there will be none left. “You are among the very greatest of Americans who will ever live.”
Mueller’s targets speak
RealClearInvestigations interviewed 10 targets of the Mueller probe who are now out of danger of prosecution (for now, anyway) and have decided to speak up:
They include several people who became household names during the two-year probe – including George Papadopoulos, Carter Page and Roger Stone – as well as lesser-known figures whose lives were also upended and finances imperiled when they came into Mueller’s crosshairs. Only three of the 10, Papadopoulos, Stone and a political consultant named Sam Patten, were charged with a crime. Patten received three years probation but no jail time for failing to register as a foreign agent; Papadopoulos served 12 days for lying to federal agents; and Stone awaits trial on false statements, witness-tampering and obstruction charges…
Although they interacted with Mueller’s team at different times and in different places, the witnesses and targets often echoed each other. Almost all decried what they called Mueller’s “scorched earth” methods that affected their physical, mental and financial health. Most said they were forced to retain high-priced Washington lawyers to protect them from falling into “perjury traps” for alleged lying, which became the special counsel’s charge of last resort. In the end, Mueller convicted four Trump associates for this so-called process crime, and investigated an additional five individuals for allegedly making false statements – including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Some subjects of investigation said Mueller’s agents and prosecutors tried to pressure them into admitting things to give the appearance of collusion. They demanded to know if they had spoken to anyone with a “Russian accent.” They threatened to jail them “for life” and to drag their wives or girlfriends into the investigation.
Former special prosecutors say the tactics used by Mueller’s team appear excessive.
No surprise there, although it’s outrageous.
Some have formally complained to the Justice Department that their privacy was violated. Others have filed legal complaints, maintaining the Special Counsel’s Office abused its authority. Corsi, for one, is suing Mueller personally for millions of dollars for unconstitutionally spying on him and harassing him and his family, as well as allegedly leaking secret grand jury information about him to the press in violation of his privacy rights. Still others want to see Mueller’s office criminally investigated for prosecutorial misconduct.
“Leaking grand jury hearing information to the press is a crime,” said former Independent Counsel Sol Wisenberg. “It can never be justified.”
But they will try to justify it.
These 10 witnesses find it beyond ironic that some partisans are now faulting Mueller for not doing enough to find incriminating evidence against Trump and his associates – “He blew it!” liberal HBO political talk show host Bill Maher said. They find it chilling that, equally unsatisfied, congressional Democrats seek to re-interview Mueller’s witnesses. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has sent letters to some of the peripheral witnesses interviewed for this story, demanding they produce more documents and testify before his panel, forcing them to relive their nightmare.
These witnesses complain that Democrats are simply retreading old ground. They note that Mueller sent agents hopscotching across the country as well as overseas to look for evidence that Donald Trump and his men were tools of the Kremlin.
His witness list, which grew to more than 500, targeted conservative journalists and authors, conservative think tank analysts and Republican congressional staffers. Witnesses were compelled to comply with more than 2,800 grand jury subpoenas and nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants. Casting an even wider net, Mueller also issued 230 orders for communications records and almost 50 orders authorizing use of “pen registers” – devices that record dialed numbers — to collect phone records on individuals, most of whom turned out to be innocent.
Please read the whole thing.
The question is the same one I’ve asked over and over: will there ever be payback?