[Home]  [Headlines]  [Latest Articles]  [Latest Comments]  [Post]  [Mail]  [Sign-in]  [Setup]  [Help]  [Register] 

Utopian Visionaries Who Won’t Leave People Alone

No - no - no Ain'T going To get away with iT

Pete Buttplug's Butt Plugger Trying to Turn Kids into Faggots

Mark Levin: I'm sick and tired of these attacks

Questioning the Big Bang

James Webb Data Contradicts the Big Bang

Pssst! Don't tell the creationists, but scientists don't have a clue how life began

A fine romance: how humans and chimps just couldn't let go

Early humans had sex with chimps

O’Keefe dons bulletproof vest to extract undercover journalist from NGO camp.

Biblical Contradictions (Alleged)

Catholic Church Praising Lucifer

Raising the Knife

One Of The HARDEST Videos I Had To Make..

Houthi rebels' attack severely damages a Belize-flagged ship in key strait leading to the Red Sea (British Ship)

Chinese Illegal Alien. I'm here for the moneuy

Red Tides Plague Gulf Beaches

Tucker Carlson calls out Nikki Haley, Ben Shapiro, and every other person calling for war:

{Are there 7 Deadly Sins?} I’ve heard people refer to the “7 Deadly Sins,” but I haven’t been able to find that sort of list in Scripture.

Abomination of Desolation | THEORY, BIBLE STUDY

Bible Help

Libertysflame Database Updated

Crush EVERYONE with the Alien Gambit!

Vladimir Putin tells Tucker Carlson US should stop arming Ukraine to end war

Putin hints Moscow and Washington in back-channel talks in revealing Tucker Carlson interview

Trump accuses Fulton County DA Fani Willis of lying in court response to Roman's motion

Mandatory anti-white racism at Disney.

Iceland Volcano Erupts For Third Time In 2 Months, State Of Emergency Declared

Tucker Carlson Interview with Vladamir Putin

How will Ar Mageddon / WW III End?

What on EARTH is going on in Acts 16:11? New Discovery!

2023 Hottest in over 120 Million Years

2024 and beyond in prophecy

Questions

This Speech Just Broke the Internet

This AMAZING Math Formula Will Teach You About God!

The GOSPEL of the ALIENS | Fallen Angels | Giants | Anunnaki

The IMAGE of the BEAST Revealed (REV 13) - WARNING: Not for Everyone

WEF Calls for AI to Replace Voters: ‘Why Do We Need Elections?’

The OCCULT Burger king EXPOSED

PANERA BREAD Antichrist message EXPOSED

The OCCULT Cheesecake Factory EXPOSED

Satanist And Witches Encounter The Cross

History and Beliefs of the Waldensians

Rome’s Persecution of the Bible

Evolutionists, You’ve Been Caught Lying About Fossils

Raw Streets of NYC Migrant Crisis that they don't show on Tv

Meet DarkBERT - AI Model Trained On DARK WEB

[NEW!] Jaw-dropping 666 Discovery Utterly Proves the King James Bible is God's Preserved Word

ALERT!!! THE MOST IMPORTANT INFORMATION WILL SOON BE POSTED HERE


Status: Not Logged In; Sign In

Corrupt Government
See other Corrupt Government Articles

Title: Special Counsel Mueller is building a report, not a case.
Source: National Review
URL Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018 ... investigation-report-not-case/
Published: Dec 4, 2018
Author: Andrew C. McCarthy
Post Date: 2018-12-04 10:48:33 by nolu chan
Keywords: None
Views: 642
Comments: 6

Special Counsel Mueller is building a report, not a case.

Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review
December 4, 2018

Right after Special Counsel Robert Mueller racked up yet another guilty plea to a false-statements charge on Thursday, a friend asked me, “Doesn’t this destroy Michael Cohen’s credibility as a witness?”

Easier to destroy Satan’s conscience, I thought. Cohen would have to have some credibility before it could be destroyed, and how much could reside in a self-described “fixer” who openly compared himself to Tom Hagen, the lawyer-gangster in The Godfather? (I’ll stipulate that he has a law degree, but Cohen has always struck me as the Fredo of Trump World.)

Nevertheless, the flaw in my friend’s question was not the assumption that Cohen had some smidgeon of value as a witness until it was extirpated by his plea of guilty to lying to Congress (after he had already, in August, pled guilty lying to a financial institution, among other fraudulence). The real flaw was the assumption that Special Counsel Mueller is lining up witnesses and building a criminal case, as prosecutors do.

He is not.

No prosecutor builds a case the way Mueller is going about it. What prosecutor says, “Here’s our witness lineup:

Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Alex van der Zwaan, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen.

And what is it that they have in common, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? Bingo! They’re all convicted liars.”?

For a prosecutor, like any trial lawyer, what the jury thinks is at least as important as what the law says. If the most memorable thing the jury takes into the deliberation room is that no one should believe a word your witnesses say, you are not going to convict the lowliest grifter, much less the president of the United States of America.

As a prosecutor, you build a case by having your cooperating accomplice witnesses plead guilty to the big scheme you are trying to pin on the main culprit. After all, what makes these witnesses accomplices, literally, is that they were participants in the main culprit’s crime. That’s the scheme you’re trying to prove. So, on guilty-plea day, the cooperator comes into court and admits guilt to the same conspiracy on which you are trying to nail the lead defendant.

That gets you 90 percent of the way home. “Yes, I am guilty of the conspiracy charged in Count One. I was a member of the drug cartel. A was the boss. B and C were the distributors. D organized the couriers and kept an arsenal to protect the drugs and the money, and to make sure we got paid. My job was to keep the books and supervise the money-laundering operation.”

This kind of guilty plea signals to the world, including to all the other suspects, that the accomplice is ready to testify that the criminal scheme existed — it is not a figment of the prosecutor’s fevered imagination. The accomplice is ready to describe what he did and what everybody else did. Virtually every appellate opinion reviewing conspiracy convictions notes the principle that once a conspiracy is shown to exist, only slight evidence is needed to tie a conspirator to it.

In short, you build a case by first establishing the foundational criminal offense. Juries do not convict people because they like or trust the prosecution’s witnesses. They convict because they are persuaded that justice demands redress for a real crime.

Note that word: crime. There are many wrongs that are not crimes, activities that are immoral, mendacious, unseemly. If we are talking about cosmic justice, all these wrongs should be made right. But prosecutors do not operate in a cosmic-justice system. They are in the criminal-justice system. The only wrongs they are authorized to address — the only wrongs it is appropriate for them to address — are crimes.

This is why, from the beginning of the Trump-Russia investigation, and certainly since Mueller’s appointment on May 17, 2017, we have stressed that the probe is a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation. The idea was not to dizzy you with Justice Department esoterica. The point is that we don’t want prosecutors involved until it has been established that a crime was probably committed, warranting use of their awesome, intimidating investigative powers. Our main interest is in the crime we authorize prosecutors to investigate; we are not looking to have prosecutors manufacture crimes through the process of investigating — even if we agree that people should not be permitted to lie to investigators with impunity.

With respect to the president and “collusion,” Mueller does not have a crime he is investigating. He is investigating in hopes of finding a crime, which is a day-and-night different thing.

The lack of a crime means the “accomplices” are not really accomplices. To take a couple of stark examples, collusion pours off every page of the narrative statements Mueller submitted to the courts in the cases of Papadopoulos and Cohen. They consult with Russian operatives, plan meetings for themselves and Trump with Russian officials, and — in Papadopoulos’s case — discuss the possibility of obtaining campaign dirt against Hillary Clinton from Russians. Yet, though these activities are the laser focus of his investigation, Mueller did not charge them as crimes because they are not crimes. Papadopoulos, Cohen, and the rest got jammed up, not for what they did, but for lying about what they did.

That brings us to the “where there’s smoke, there must be fire” talking-point Mueller fans have been trying out: If all these people are lying to cover something up, that something must involve some egregious criminality. That’s ridiculous. We know from our own daily lives that crimes account for only a very small percentage of the things people lie about. Indeed, throughout the 1990s, Democrats insisted that prosecutors should leave Bill Clinton alone because everybody lies about sex. People lie about things that they are embarrassed or ashamed about.

Politics is a seamy business. Pols want to think of themselves as public servants, but they spend lots of time with their hands out, either pleading for money or collecting information that might compromise an opponent.

Successful politics requires horse-trading and compromise, so pols are forever explaining how they could actually be against something they voted for. A lot of this is embarrassing stuff. Consequently, when people in and around politics get caught practicing politics, they often lie about what they’ve done.

Politics is not a crime, of course. Consequently, if you criminalize politics — if you turn a prosecutor loose to investigate political campaign activities — you are apt to find unsavory conduct that is not criminal but that some people will lie about.

Mueller is turning such lies into guilty pleas, for three reasons.

First, he is not going to indict the president, which would precipitate a trial at some point. The convicted liars are not going to be jury-trial witnesses, so Mueller is not concerned about their lack of credibility. The report will detail disturbing — and thus politically damaging — connections between Trump associates and Kremlin cronies. But there will be no collusion crime, and thus no charges and no need for witnesses.

Second, with the media as his biggest cheerleader (other than Jeff Flake), the false-statements pleas create the illusion of a collusion crime, and thus appear to vindicate Mueller’s sprawling investigation. As I’ve previously explained, the game works this way: The media reports that Mueller is investigating Trump–Russia collusion and that dozens of people have been charged or convicted; but the media omits that no one has been charged, much less convicted, of any crime involving collusion between Trump and Russia. The great mass of people who do not follow the news closely come away thinking a Trump–Russia collusion crime is an established fact; by now, Mueller must be tightening the noose around Trump because he’s already rolled up a bunch of the apparent accomplices.

Third, defendants convicted of making false statements are very useful because Mueller is writing a report, not preparing for a jury trial. Convicted liars never get cross-examined in a report. Nor do they give the bumpy, inconsistent testimony you hear in a courtroom. Instead, their version of events is outlined by a skilled prosecutor, who writes well and knows how to make their stories sing in perfect harmony. They will sound far better in the report than they would on the witness stand. We’ve already gotten a taste of this in the offense narratives Mueller has incorporated in each guilty plea. Read the criminal information in Cohen’s case and ask yourself whether Mr. Fixer could have recited matters with such clarity.

Here, moreover, there is a bonus for the special prosecutor. He knows that the legitimacy of his investigation is under attack, allegedly driven by politics rather than evidence of crime. But the convictions he has amassed, even if they are only for false statements or are otherwise unrelated to the Trump-Russia rationale for the investigation, prove that many people Trump brought into his campaign were corruptible and of low character.

Mueller, the career Justice Department and FBI man, will deftly use this fact to argue that suspicions about these people, and hence the investigation, were fully justified even if — thankfully — there was no prosecutable Trump–Russia conspiracy.

Trump’s Republican and conservative critics will cheer, figuring the president and his rogues’ gallery had it coming. Democrats will cheer, knowing this would never happen to Democrats.

Post Comment   Private Reply   Ignore Thread  


TopPage UpFull ThreadPage DownBottom/Latest

Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 2.

#1. To: nolu chan (#0)

Democrats will cheer, knowing this would never happen to Democrats.

Which is truly sad when there has been overwhelming evidence that the demoncrats are guilty of doing exactly what they claim repugs are being investigated for.

Either we clean out the GOP, demoncrats collapse or America will die a horrible death! I just do not see America going another 5 years the way its going and surviving.

Justified  posted on  2018-12-04   11:10:30 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: Justified (#1)

Either we clean out the GOP, demoncrats collapse or America will die a horrible death! I just do not see America going another 5 years the way its going and surviving.

We will do none of those things. We will not clean out the GOP. The Democrats will continue to grow in power until they rule the country, because the Republicans will not close that Mexican Border, and America will limp along largely as it is now. Maybe we will have marginally higher taxes on the rich, marginally better health insurance coverage for some, and more gun control laws. That's the next 25 years in a nutshell.

Vicomte13  posted on  2018-12-04   14:01:51 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


Replies to Comment # 2.

#4. To: Vicomte13 (#2)

Will not last that long. Once the dems own all 3 branches it will collapse the economy and bring in the worst corruption in history of the world. Family unit will be gone. Either you kiss the demoncrats ring to work or starve.

I give it 5 maybe 10 years before a great depression hits. No food not money no work. Gold would be worthless. The more corrupt and violent you are the better off you will be. Godly people will be squashed because they will not do what needs to be done and the more the family is broken more crime and violence. Its a self feeding virus.

Health insurance is worthless if it cost more than the cost of a house. How did we ever get along with out health insurance and why is it such a big deal now? Health insurance has only been around 40 or so years for most people. If not for lawyers, corruption and mega-hospitals health cost would be affordable.

As for gun control how much more do we need? Every place that is overburdened by gun control is overwelled by crime. No guns equal no protection which begets overwelled crime.

Justified  posted on  2018-12-04 16:38:52 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


End Trace Mode for Comment # 2.

TopPage UpFull ThreadPage DownBottom/Latest

[Home]  [Headlines]  [Latest Articles]  [Latest Comments]  [Post]  [Mail]  [Sign-in]  [Setup]  [Help]  [Register] 

Please report web page problems, questions and comments to webmaster@libertysflame.com