It is the most common Democrat/ Liberal/ Seedier Media defense of the Mueller Witch Hunt: “What ‘witch hunt’? Look at all the indictments and convictions! Flynn pleaded guilty. Cohen pleaded guilty. Manafort was convicted on eight counts.”
You can set it to music, with lyrics in perfect rhythm (but only occasionally):
On the twelfth month of FISA’s Chris [Steele] Miss, Bob Mueller gave to me:
12 Russians hacking
One swiper swiping [Richard Pinedo: identity theft]
Ten hordes a-tweeting [Russians on social media]
Shady enhancing [perjury traps: false statements to FBI]
Manafort a-skimming [failed to file taxes five times; failed to tell bank that vacation home was not primary residence]
[Alex van der] Zwaan a-swimming [London lawyer who lied about contacts with Rick Gates]
[One] Greece a-lying [George Papadopoulos perjury trap: false statements to FBI]
Cohen a-recording
Women a-hushing
Witnesses a-tampering [Konstantin Kilimnik]
Rick Gates’s golden sings
Four Trump advisors
Three Russian companies
Two Manafort trials
Some taxi medallions
And an ostrich in a pear tree (jacket with zipper: $15,000)
And still — despite a year of $20 million and 17 attorneys — none of it has anything to do with the Trump campaign and Russian collusion, the whole pseudo premise underlying why Jeff Sessions, who had been involved quite courageously from the outset in the Trump campaign, suddenly recused himself when the Democrats fabricated their collusion charges. So Sessions handed it off to Rod Rosenstein, who handed it over to Mueller. (Yes, another song: “I know an old Sessions who swallowed a lie. I don’t know why he swallowed a lie. Perhaps he’ll say good-bye.”)
While Mueller’s team still has not consulted Arthur Miller’s The Crucible nor the Bard of Avon’s Macbeth, nor yet subpoenaed Elphaba Thropp, Samantha Stephens, nor even Endora or Tabatha, their search continues for elusive witches. And yet the Democrats and their Seedier Media insist: Look at all those indictments, convictions, and guilty pleas. How can you question the validity of the investigation? Look at what Mueller has uncovered!
That kind of reasoning seems akin to a Secretary of Transportation announcing at a press conference the day after a two-seat turbo-prop crashes into a cemetery: “I promise a thorough investigation. We will stop at nothing to determine the cause of this disaster. Our team already have uncovered 1,834 dead bodies at the accident site.”
So let us get serious about two things: Grand Juries and Mother Teresa.
- Grand Juries
New York State former Chief Judge Sol Wachtler first coined the expression that even a ham sandwich can be indicted by a grand jury. A grand jury is nothing like the trials you have seen in the movies or on television. There is no judge in the room. The nearly two-dozen grand jurors (typically, but not always 23 in number) are not confined to a jury box but instead comfortably occupy most of the room, like students in a classroom. The only performer in the room is the prosecutor. He or she dominates the room, with no one present to object to anything unfair or unjust. It is the prosecutor’s stage and show, like a late-night TV host. And it all is conducted in secrecy.
During the days, weeks, months of the grand jury, the prosecutor becomes chummy with the grand jurors, jokes and pals with them. They become kind-of friends. There is no judge to say “Cut that out!” No defense attorney to object. In time, the grand jury is happy to give their pal whatever is sought.
As each witness enters the grand jury room, he or she is denied access to counsel. No attorney is at the secret hearing to object that a question is compound, overbroad, assumes facts not in evidence, fails to lay a foundation, is vague and ambiguous, was asked and answered, is oppressive, or badgers the witness. The witness is utterly defenseless and often becomes confused. Indeed, some grand jury witnesses misspeak while befuddled under the barrage and stress — and soon find themselves indicted for perjury. If the witness asks to speak to an attorney, the prosecutor may mock the witness, asking what the witness is hiding, why he or she cannot answer the simple question. If the witness invokes the Fifth Amendment privilege not to answer a question, the prosecutor very often will mock in such a way as to suggest to the grand jury that the witness obviously is a crook because no innocent person would refuse to respond to a question. The only check on how deeply nasty the prosecutor’s mocking and badgering can descend is the prosecutor’s commonsense realization that the grand jury’s affection and loyalty may shift to an obviously persecuted witness.
Such prosecutorial misconduct could never happen at trial. At a trial, as you may recall from My Cousin Vinny, the prosecution must disclose exculpatory evidence suggesting that the accused may be innocent. No such disclosure obligation exists at a grand jury. A defense attorney at trial would be objecting vigorously to prosecutorial shenanigans. A judge at trial might impose monetary sanctions on a deviant prosecutor, may report the prosecutor to the state bar, may even throw out the case (“terminating sanctions”) for misconduct. Similarly, it is absolutely forbidden at trial to suggest to a jury that a person who invokes Fifth Amendment Constitutional rights not to testify may be hiding something incriminating. It is a right that dates back centuries in Western society to the time of the Babylonian Talmud and the Codes of Maimonides.
But anything goes in a grand jury. The prosecutor runs wild, all secretly behind closed doors outside public scrutiny. Therefore, it almost is impossible not to obtain an indictment from a grand jury. Indeed, this points to a purpose of a grand jury: If the Government cannot get an indictment out of a grand jury, even though the system makes it so simple to indict (typically requiring a bare majority of only 12 of the 23 to find that there is “probable cause” to prosecute the case), then the Government may not subject its target to the intense further cost, risk, and deep aggravation of a full-blown trial. Thus, a grand jury indictment means virtually nothing. By contrast, a grand jury’s vote not to indict is a remarkable statement of ostensible innocence, as happened when the Missouri grand jury refused to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown — the thug who held up a convenience store in Ferguson and who assuredly never raised his hands to say “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” when he was wrestling the cop for his gun in the officer’s police car.
No one applying for a job ever has to answer the question: “Have you ever been indicted by a grand jury?” Indictments mean virtually nothing. No matter how many the Mueller investigation chalks up.
- Mother Teresa
Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 Presidential election after rigging as much as she could to assure her win. She and Bill the Rapist rigged the Democrats’ primary system to give inordinate weight to “superdelegates” who would tilt the people’s votes at state primaries and caucuses to the Clintons if needed. The only thing that went wrong with her plan is that she lost to Donald Trump. Over time we have heard from her — and from her Echo Chamber… chamber… amber… mber — that she lost, interalia, because: (i) the media were unfair to her by reporting the email-server-deleting story; (ii) she was blamed unfairly for Benghazi when it really was caused by a brief YouTube video that was seen by few people; (iii) James Comey cost her when he announced that she had broken all these laws but he would let her off anyway; (iv) James Comey ruined it for her when he briefly reopened the investigation after the Anthony Weiner sexting to minors found their way to Huma Abedin’s computer that also illegally stored confidential emails; (v) married women were too stupid to vote based on their own minds because, as a lifelong feminist who has joked about how easily she got a child rapist freed, Hillary knows that married women vote exclusively as their husbands tell them to; (vi) the Electoral College, which gives Democrats a huge head start with scores of assured electors from high-population New York, California, and Illinois (as opposed to Republicans’ advantages in elector-light states like North Dakota, West Virginia, and Alabama) was rigged against her; (vii) she won the popular vote by three million (because she campaigned heavily and returned repeatedly to California, while Trump and his supporters blew off California because its electors were lost anyway, and instead campaigned in the Midwest Rust Belt that Hillary took for granted but that Trump took for Election Night); etc.
As each Hillary excuse wafted to the middle of the nearest forest, where it combined with falling trees as a sound heard least among the protected spotted owls thriving amid the rotted and diseased trees and deadwood forest-fire-fuels that liberals have barred from safe removal, the Democrats concocted the “insurance policy” that Hillary lost because the Trump campaign had colluded with Vladimir Putin to corrupt and undermine the democratic American election process. Towards that end, the Mueller probe came to be.
Robert Mueller’s investigation, including a team of seventeen lawyers, already had cost $6.7 million in its first four and a half months. By May 2018, it had cost $16.7 million before reaching its eleventh month. The tab now has reached approximately $20 million.
If you pay $20 million to a team of 17 lawyers, and you assure them unlimited funds for as long as they “need” to continue, and you give them carte blanche to “follow the evidence wherever it leads,” you will get as many or more guilty pleas, indictments, and convictions as Mueller’s team has gotten — no matter whom and what you ostensibly are investigating. Once you allow the probe to go off the stated target — in Mueller’s case, the supposed collusion between the Trump campaign and “the Russians” — how can you not end up indicting and convicting oodles of bystanders?
The name Mother Teresa is associated with kindness, self-sacrifice, and more. But if Mueller had sent 17 lawyers and $20 million investigating whether she had colluded with “The Russians” — and with clear authority to follow wherever the evidence leads — he easily would have ended up detouring and finding a connection between Mother Teresa and the late crooked Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. And that search would have led to five United States Senators. In no time, Mueller’s Seventeen would be indicting and convicting the most hallowed names in the American Senatorial pantheon — names including John Glenn. Facing a life sentence behind bars, stemming from an unrelated bogus charge that Mother Teresa had colluded with The Russians, the last words Senator Glenn might have heard as he entered the federal penitentiary may well have been: “G-dspeed, John Glenn.” So, it begins with investigating whether Mother Teresa colluded with Brezhnev or Gorbachev, and it results with Glenn orbiting Leavenworth.
What if Mueller investigated the John Kerry presidential campaign for “colluding with the Russians,” with authority to follow the evidence wherever it leads? In no time, they would be questioning John Edwards. That would bring them to Rielle Hunter. He denies the relationship; she is pregnant with his child, and suddenly Mueller has Edwards on perjury. Or what if Congress allocated $20 million and 17 lawyers to investigate Barack Obama’s campaign for allegedly colluding with the Russians, with “Vladimir”? Assuming (again with no basis to expect equal justice when a Democrat like Obama is the target) that Mueller’s Seventeen are authorized to follow wherever the evidence leads, with no restriction, in time they are investigating Tony Rezko and the Obama land deal. Then, when that scam is uncovered, the “Russian collusion investigation” suddenly turns into an impeachment trial to remove Obama from office for high crimes and misdemeanors that arise from that land deal’s crookedness, utterly unrelated to Russians.
Oh, did someone just say “land deals”? What if Congress allocated $20 million and 17 lawyers to investigate Hillary’s campaign and their “Russian collusion” that actually did happen? In no time, Mueller’s Seventeen are peering into Whitewater land deals, the McDougals en route to prison, cattle futures, Vince Foster found dead in Fort Marcy Park, Paula Jones testifying about being dragged by Arkansas state troopers to a hotel room where a governor is dropping a zipper, Juanita Broaddrick swearing to a rape, Kathleen Willey testifying under oath about being groped when vulnerable and needing employment, Monica Lewinsky.
Most of these things were uncovered without the $20 million and the 17 lawyers. Imagine if those assets had been allocated to investigate Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, Loretta Lynch and Bill at the tarmac, the $225,000 fifteen-minute closed-door “speeches” on Wall Street, the sale of American uranium to Putin’s people? Imagine if those same Mueller-like assets were allocated to investigate Jimmy Carter and Russian collusion. Remember Bert Lance? Hamilton Jerdin/Jordan? Brother Billy?
What if they allocated $20 million and 17 lawyers, with no limit on following the evidence wherever it leads, and investigated John F. Kennedy for “Russian collusion”? How long until they would have looked into JFK appointing his brother to be the Attorney General? And then looking into Judith Exner? And calling in Marilyn Monroe for questioning? And the other women vying with the First Lady for the President’s attention and intimate affections? In time, JFK gets subpoenaed and is questioned under oath about Exner and the candle in the wind. Imagine Khrushchev and Castro installing Soviet missiles in Havana and Soviet warships sailing to Castro, but the President too busy preparing for his Mueller testimony about Judith Exner and Bobby and Norma Jean to focus on the Cuban missile crisis. And then Mueller’s seventeen stars investigating whether JFK really wrote Profiles in Courage.
If most of these scandals were uncovered without a $20 million, 17-lawyer unrestricted strike force on the loose, imagine what could turn up on anyone. On Abraham Lincoln. On George Washington. On Billy Graham. On your neighbor, your parents, you. Is that America? Even if the target is pure as snow, what famous person has not forged scores of contacts with people in the arts, entertainment, the sciences, and the business worlds? How many billionaires and multi-millionaires investigated by a Mueller-like probe into a target could emerge from a $20 million, 17-lawyer shakedown without being found exposed criminally to some charge? The bigger they are, the greater the chance that some associate somewhere stole money from them, advised them wrongly on a tax matter, perpetrated bank or tax fraud, that someone along the chain got into trouble somewhere entailing a “hush money” extortion shakedown.
In the end, it is absolutely impossible (not “improbable,” not “impracticable,” but impossible) that a $20 million, 17-lawyer, year-plus international investigation that extends from the United States to London to Ukraine, with the investigatory team working on a blank check and unlimited authorization to follow any evidence or hunch anywhere it leads, will fail to uncover all 1,834 dead bodies at the cemetery site of the crashed two-seater aircraft. They cannot fail to rack up guilty pleas and convictions while indicting dozens of ham sandwiches. Ultimately, if they ever get a black-and-white television to watch old TV reruns, the Mueller team finally will find their witches — Samantha, Tabatha, Endora. In color, they will find Elphaba, the three in Macbeth, the others alleged in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible— and can indict them, too, leaving it to the jury to decipher which witch is which.
But — unless Mueller’s Seventeen and his $20 million ever demonstrate knowing collusion between the Trump campaign and the Putin Government jointly to corrupt an American Presidential election — no litany of guilty pleas, indictments, and convictions ever will justify the Mueller investigation as anything other than a brazenly despotic witch hunt implemented to reverse the will of the American people expressed in a free and fair national presidential election.
