https://tinyurl.com/ydebys4s
A snip:
Judge Ellis’s remarks also speak to a growing consensus that the Russia “collusion” or “meddling” story is a phantom, if not a fabrication of the FBI itself, and that Robert Mueller’s appointment to investigate it was illegitimate from the start. In any case, it seems, for now, to be going nowhere, except maybe ricocheting back at itself — because more and more it looks like Mueller is there only to defend the reputation of the agency. Also, for now, the FBI and DOJ are engaged in a war of wills with both houses of congress. Senator Charles Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and members of the House Intelligence Committee are battling Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for official documents that he refuses to produce. It only makes the FBI and DOJ look like rogue agencies.
Now Judge Ellis is asking to see unredacted memoranda spelling out Mueller’s exact commission as Special Counsel, to determine just where his authority begins and ends. Ellis is apparently familiar with the stratagems casually employed by overzealous federal prosecutors that can look like dirty pool — for instance, turning witnesses with janky charges, setting perjury traps, or, in the separate case of General Flynn, threatening to bankrupt a person for lawyers’ fees to defend himself against Mickey Mouse charges.
The Deep State — and when I use that term, I mean the swollen, entrenched, permanent federal bureaucracy and their water-carrier corps of lobbyists, policy wonks, contractors, and media mouthpieces — may not get away with this inquisition. It’s possible that Judge Ellis may, at least, send the Manafort case to a different jurisdiction, the US Attorney for the Eastern District Court of Virginia, if he doesn’t throw the case out altogether on the grounds of prosecutorial overreach. The latter would be a blow against Special Counsel Mueller. It ought to be grounds for his dismissal. And what’s left of the Russia case after that? General Flynn’s guilty plea for lying to FBI agents about whether he had a conversation with the Russian ambassador?
Behind the disintegrating RussiaGate campaign is a much deeper, darker swamp of official misconduct at the FBI and DOJ, for which there is already a ton of evidence that has been made public and which seems worthy of prosecution.
