Obstruction of Justice - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Obstruction of Justice
by

I am a rabbi, a law professor, and an opinion writer. I have never held up a bank. Not even a savings and loan. Not even a credit union.

Let us imagine that some crumb — we’ll give her an imaginary name, Kristy Fersteel — assembles a dossier that provides all kinds of information linking me to the big holdup of Last National Bank of Fargo Wells. The dossier, based on reports and other asseverations, presents me as the mastermind and ringleader. When I learn of the dossier, two thoughts immediately rush to my mind:

  1. For once and for all, will someone please — finally — tell me what a “dossier” is… and why is the term used only when it comes to one thing in the whole world?
  2. Oh, for goodness sakes, I never held up a bank, planned a hold up, or had anything to do with such a thing.

I soon learn that there is a massive $25 million investigation underway to determine my role in the bank holdup. I learn that the investigation will run for two years and will entail more than 230 orders for communication records, almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviews with approximately 500 witnesses. Of course this perturbs me. Lots of my friends will be inconvenienced. If any of my friends, colleagues, or associates ever have broken unrelated laws, those prior defalcations may emerge and get them in trouble. But here’s the thing:

Question: Inasmuch as I know with certainty that, no matter what they come up with, I never have had anything to do with any bank holdupever… why in the world would I obstruct the investigation, obstruct justice, and risk actually getting myself into trouble over something for which I am completely clean?

Answer: I wouldn’t. Not in a million years.

Just as it is obvious that there was no Trump collusion with Russia and that I never was involved in a bank hold up, so it is obvious that President Trump did not “obstruct justice” during the Mueller Investigation into the Collusion That Never Happened. Why, then, did Mueller end up with an enigmatic conundrum as to whether there was obstruction of justice — not enough to charge, but not sure whether to exonerate?

Here is my hunch — and I look forward, as much as do the Cowardly Lyin’ Democrats, to the release of as much of the report as legally may be disclosed: My hunch is that Mr. Trump’s doggone incessant tweets are at the core of the “obstruction of justice” conundrum. For two years he tweeted attacks against Mueller, against Rod Rosenstein, against Jeff Sessions, against Comey-McCabe-Strzok-Page-Ohr, and against Michael “Cash Cab” Cohen. The tweets constantly attacked the Collusion Hoax, the Witch Hunt. So, if one wants to stre-e-e-e-e-tch the meaning of “obstruction of justice” to include possibly a situation where a probe target seeks to exert public pressure on someone to back down from investigating, or to pressure others publicly via Twitter not to testify, is that “obstruction of justice”?

My guess is that, at bottom, Mueller is ticked off. There never has been a President like Trump, and ’tis a shame that there may not be again after six years. Mueller is not used to this stuff. In proper society, a Special Counsel like Leon Jaworski or a Ken Starr does not wake up every day for two years to read tweets attacking him. It is supposed to be a great-paying job, great prominence and influence, five-star restaurants and hotels on the public’s tab, a guaranteed book deal at the end of the pot-of-gold rainbow with six-figure speaking honoraria and lots of standing ovations. A Special Counsel’s kids and grandkids get into UCLA and Harvard and USC without the parents having to shmear the de rigueur $500,000 cash payola to get them into a group picture of crew scullers or to teach their moron kid to spell “coxswain.” (And, no, the big Supreme Court abortion case was not a disagreement over the best way to get across a lake: row v. wade.)

Rather, Mueller was supposed to have an easy time of it. And yet there was darned Trump tweeting. Mueller goes after Cash Cab Cohen, and Trump tweets about Cash Cab. Mueller goes after Manafort, and Trump is tweeting about Manafort. Wherever Mueller goes, Trump is tweeting. It had to drive Mueller crazy: those danged tweets!

But was that “obstruction of justice”? Hardly. Why would Trump try to obstruct an investigation into something he did not do? Would you obstruct an investigation into a bank holdup with which you were not involved? I wouldn’t. And yet. And yet.

It is my hunch — just a hunch because, unlike Adam Schiff and CNN, I do not “know” that there was collusion, and I do not know what tomorrow will bring — but it is my hunch that the incessant tweeting is a component of the “obstruction of justice” conundrum that Mueller presented to Attorney General William Barr, essentially conveying:

“Mr. A-G, I’m gonna leave this call to you. The guy got totally under my skin for two years — and, in the end, I didn’t even say he should be indicted, and I cleared him a hundred percent anyway. Geez. But I dunno. Was that ‘obstruction of justice’? I just dunno. And I am so personally invested in this thing that I think it only fair that an objective outsider make a fair-minded call. So I’m not saying he did obstruct justice, and I’m not saying he didn’t. I’m saying it’s a call that needs to be made, and it should not be made by me. So, ‘tag — you’re it!’”

And then Barr looks at it, and we now see how genius Barr was to keep Rod Rosenstein around for a few more weeks. Because Barr knew that, if he says anything that exonerates an innocent Trump, the Democrats will yell: “You’re playing favorites! Trump picked you; that’s why you’re exonerating him. The fix was in from the start. It’s like Nixon picking Ford to be Vice President, and then Ford pardoning Nixon.”

So Barr, who is a smart guy, kept Rosenstein around so that Rosenstein could make the call. We all know that Rosenstein hates Trump, wants to invoke the 25th Amendment on him and call him insane, even maybe asked Michael Cohen for tips on how to audio-record people surreptitiously. And we know that Trump hates Rosenstein every bit as much. And Rosenstein knows how much Trump hates him. And Trump knows how much Rosenstein hates him. And Rosenstein knows that Trump knows.…Etc.

So the genius thing was for Barr to keep Rosenstein around just long enough to make the call on obstruction of justice. Obviously, there was no obstruction of justice. That was just Trump being Trump. One day it is Stormy Horseface. One day it is a tweet about Ted Cruz’s wife. One day it is that Maxine Waters is either an idiot (IQ 0-25), imbecile (26-50), or moron (51-70). Every fifth day it is a tweet savaging Jeff Sessions. In between, tweets about Strzok, Page, McCabe, even tweets about Obama’s CIA head who voted for the Communist candidate for President.

But that’s not obstruction of justice. That’s just Trump.

Now that Trump has been 100 percent exonerated on charges of collusion with the Russians — and what a shame that it took two years and $25 million of our money to report the obvious — the Democrats have little left for the 2020 Presidential race. On the “Ideas Front,” they need a 29-year-old ignoramus to keep generating new thoughts. So now they are proffering this selection:

  1. Reparations to Blacks like LeBron James, Louis Farrakhan, and Beyoncé to be paid by people whose ancestors arrived here after the Civil War.
  2. Extend the vote to 16-year-olds, and reward each new voter with a colorful Tide pod that he or she can swallow in the voting booth.
  3. End the Electoral College except for wealthy parents who can pay $500,000 a kid to get their dolts in on athletic scholarships.
  4. End private health insurance and replace with a government-run health system based on principles of government-run agencies like the DMV and Post Office.
  5. Open the borders altogether, and dismember ICE.
  6. Tear down any border walls that have been built.
  7. Legalize prostitution.
  8. Ban all cow meat and replace with new directives to eat dirt from New Mexico for its regenerative qualities.
  9. Instead of Romney’s “Binders of Women,” now have women throw binders at men, and make men clean women’s combs after they use them to eat salads.
  10. Pack the Supreme Court and all other courts except the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
  11. Climate Change — The Apocalypse less than a decade away unless we spend $93 trillion, thereby ecologically converting this nation overnight from the world’s greatest and most successful country every formulated by human beings into a “s—hole country” that needs to borrow money from Afghanistan.

Not a pretty package of proposals for the 2020 Presidential election cycle. So the Democrats need something that might actually get votes from people eligible to vote. Now that the Collusion Hoax/Witch Hunt is over, all they have left is “Obstruction of Justice.” On the one hand, not enough to charge. But — hey! — not enough to exonerate on first blush either!

And so it shall go. More House investigations for two more years. More tens of millions of dollars of our money to be thrown away and wasted on nonsense and lies. And all we can hope and wait for is that someone in Washington, like Mr. Barr, now will turn around and name a Special Counsel to investigate:

  1. The players involved in obtaining the FISA warrant, how they colluded to get it, and whether they lied to the FISA court.
  2. The lawfulness of the unmaskings of Michael Flynn and others.
  3. The plotting within the Comey FBI and the Obama-Lynch Department of Justice in relation to laying a groundwork for the collusion accusations, the interrelationship of those connivings with the FBI-DOJ handling of the Clinton E-Mail investigation, and whether blind justice was compromised at the highest levels of the Obama Justice Department and the Comey FBI in the interest of raw and ruthless politics.
  4. The Clinton Foundation and the “Pay-to-Play” access to the Secretary of State.
  5. The weaponizing of the IRS for political purposes to protect the Obama reelection campaign.

That is where we now are heading. Those are the next steps we await — those and the declassification of the FISA warrant documents.

Because, really, anything less would be an obstruction of justice.

Dov Fischer
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Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., is Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values (comprising over 2,000 Orthodox rabbis), was adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools for nearly 20 years, and is Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit before practicing complex civil litigation for a decade at three of America’s most prominent law firms: Jones Day, Akin Gump, and Baker & Hostetler. He likewise has held leadership roles in several national Jewish organizations, including Zionist Organization of America, Rabbinical Council of America, and regional boards of the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. His writings have appeared in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Federalist, National Review, the Jerusalem Post, and Israel Hayom. A winner of an American Jurisprudence Award in Professional Legal Ethics, Rabbi Fischer also is the author of two books, including General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, which covered the Israeli General’s 1980s landmark libel suit. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com.
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