Could a Special Counsel Work in Trump’s Favor?
Prof. Turley: Without credible non-political investigation, Russia issue never will go away.
George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley is often a voice of reason in a sea of media hysteria. Last night he spoke with Martha MacCallum of FOX News about the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel in the FBI Russia investigation.
Turley suggested this could work out well for Trump.
From the FOX News Insider:
Prof. Turley: Special Counsel Mueller ‘Healthy Dose of Tylenol’ For US
Turley said that until Muller was named, President Trump could not fully clear his name in the face of ongoing leaks and allegations.
The appointment of a special counsel was “almost inevitable when the Comey memo hit,” Turley said.
Mueller, who served under President George W. Bush, was named special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
“This may be the price of [White House] hubris,” he said. “The deputy attorney general gave the country a healthy dose of Tylenol.”
Turley said he didn’t think a special counsel was needed in the case until Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.
Here’s the video:
John Podhoretz of the New York Post made a similar point on Twitter:
This is good for Trump in short term. Mueller won’t leak. Investigation will go silent. Will take a few years.
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) May 17, 2017
Professor Turley is also skeptical about the Comey memo. He wrote recently at The Hill:
The Comey memo offers no proof for impeachment of Trump
With the scandal du jour of the Comey memo, President Donald Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia looks less like a diplomatic flight as fleeing the jurisdiction. For the first time, the Comey memo pushes the litany of controversies surrounding Trump into the scope of the United States criminal code.
However, if this is food for obstruction of justice, it is still an awfully thin soup. Some commentators seem to be alleging criminal conduct in office or calling for impeachment before Trump completed the words of his inaugural oath of office. Not surprising, within minutes of the New York Times report, the response was a chorus of breathless “gotcha” announcements. But this memo is neither the Pentagon Papers nor the Watergate tapes. Indeed, it raises as many questions for Comey as it does Trump in terms of the alleged underlying conduct.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
I’ll say it again…
“Trump better start using his brain. He should go in full attack against Rosenstein, who appointed a Special Persecutor with no evidence…”
Your first statement is right. The second is 180 degrees wrong.
First, the appointment was for a special counsel.
Second, what T-rump should do is STFU and stop tweeting. He needs to let his people deal with this, and the prime message he needs to put out via his people is that he will support the work of the Special COUNSEL in getting to the facts of Russian meddling in the past election, what forms it took, and how to prevent it in the future.
THAT would be a winning message. “Sure we support the work of the Special Counsel. We need to understand completely the role of any foreign actor attempting to distort our elections. The administration has nothing to fear from that process.”
Attacking Rosenstein is the LAST thing T-rump should do. Remember that he just very publicly pretended to rely on his assessment as justification for firing Comey.
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I’ll add that T-rump has someone who is really good at this kind of messaging in VP Pence. This is right up his alley.
rags,
Good post (except for the T-rump’s).
Trump needs to let things cool off and get his new FBI dir, judges, etc. in place. Let Pence be the front man on this while he moves the agenda.
And he shouldn’t invite Mueller to dinner.
Exactly. If there’s nothing to this, then sit back, cooperate with the Special Counsel and let him issue his report saying nothing is wrong–or perhaps he’ll say that her thighness’ dealings with Russia were corrupt sales of her office–and then we can hear upchuck Schumer squeal like the traif pig he is!
I believe that’s naive to assume that in today’s climate in Washington D.C., any special prosecutor wouldn’t find (or most likely invent) dirt on Trump, enough dirt for whatever it is special prosecutors do.
If the investigation is done right, it will investigate where the “Russian connection” stories came from. This will lead back to the Democrats.
The problem with Turley’s argument that a special counsel could be good for Trump:
Them media and Democrats are going to full time whine about something regardless of what he does. They hate his supporters that much. So, why not let them whine about this transparently false conspiracy theory?
I’ll also just note that if T-rump can be made to STFU as he did just pre-election…
he can get up off his back and try to get some things done. Like hire the 3000 or so Federal employees he STILL hasn’t touched.
It will also give the Congress the ability to say, “Oh, yeah, THAT whole thing is being taken care of …very capable hands. Now we need to get to the business of the people.:.”
You don’t need 3000 extra Government employees…unless of course thats 3000 extra men in uniform in which case you and I are probably in rare agreement.
You don’t get it. We’re not talking “extra”. We’re talking pretty much essential, just behind those that require confirmation hearings and a vote. Hell, some of them, I think.
If T-rump wants to put his stamp on various agencies, PERSONNEL is how you do it.
I don’t like the scale of government this represents, but nobody asked me…
you don’t get it…there are already TENS, HUNDREDS if not MILLIONS of public servants. If you cannot run a country efficiently with the wealth of human resources you already have another 3k won’t do a damn thing apart from grow Government bloat.
Never mind. You are really too stupid to grasp the concept of filling management and specialized positions.
Given they have NOTHING after 6 months since the election Id wager Rags left flap that in a year from now there will still be NOTHING to pin against Trump.
They got away with starting an investigation into this ‘nothing’. I’m sure they won’t have much trouble inventing all sorts of horrible crimes and this fall, the media will be asking Trump when he stopped beating on his wife and eating babies.
There *will* be prosecutions (e.g. “Scooter” Libby) regardless of whether Trump broke the law or not because there has to be a tangible result for the time & money put in by the “Special Counsel”.
They will try. BUT … Thanks to Comey v Hillary, there is a new legal and political standard – provable intent. Wouldn’t that be ironic?
That new ‘intent’ standard only applies to Democrats, silly.
This is the dumbest thing ever, there is not a shred of evidence of any crimes being committed. Whoever believes in this kooky conspiracy theory of Russians “hacking” our election needs to get off the crack cocaine. The entire story line was created by the Clinton team within 24 hours of her losing the election.
Why aren’t republicans fighting against this more? Why aren’t republicans standing up for the president we elected?
This is getting seriously bad.
Because the reality is that Republicans and Democrats are one and the same these days! In fact, Id go so far as to say ALL main political parties (regardless of country) are essentially the same as each other. Their only objective is to protect their empire.
OK, several of you are (typically) squirting off into la-la land.
The Special COUNSEL is tasked with the Russian influence in the last election.
NOT pinning anything on Der Donald (unless there IS something there). He could just as easily find stuff against Hellary.
It IS NOT about T-rump, and messaging it as I suggest above…”We support the work of the Special COUNSEL (you say it that way EVERY time) and his efforts to expose the influence of foreign actors in trying to distort our elections”…takes all that crap away from them.
Is Nanny Pelosi STILL going to bitch and moan? OF COURSE. Ignore her.
“He could just as easily find stuff against Hellary.”
You’re a fool if you believe any special counsel/prosecutor/whatever would find dirt on any democrat.
Huh.
Comey did. Congress has. Even the press has (especially the rightist press).
We all know the dirt on the Barracula administration. Is this news to you, or are you so busy virtue signalling that you’re just willing to lie about it?
We don’t lack, and pretty much never have lacked, dirt. What we did lack is a functioning DOJ during the Obamic Era. That and a even nominally unbiased Mushroom Media.
Turley said that until Muller was named, President Trump could not fully clear his name in the face of ongoing leaks and allegations.
Ridiculous.
Since the accusations are irrational—that is, mere Democratic fever-dreams, not anything inspired by real events or facts—they cannot be dispelled by any rational process.
Translation: the D’rats will still be hyperventillating about this no matter what Mueller—or anybody else—may do or say. They’ll continue the circus until they think of something they think is even juicier to harp about instead.
And, because this is so, Trump has no need to “clear his name”—short of any intellectually respectable accusation of criminal wrongdoing or even clumsy political maneuvering, it’s already as clear as it can possibly be. And this “clearing” would do nothing to impede the next imaginary D’rat accusation.
If he attempts to chase after every ridiculous Dem charge, the Dems will have accomplished their first mission—to suck up all of Trump’s time and resources and prevent him from doing anything useful.
Normally this plan would fail. It’s designed to work against the sort of President the D’rats usually send to the White House—anal micromanagers like Johnson, or Carter, or Barry (who quite bizarrely considered himself a universal expert). Since there are only 24 hours in the day, if they can occupy Trump with rubbish for all 24, he’ll never manage to do anything else: Q.E.D. I wouldn’t expect it to work against a man with some actual managerial aptitude, because he can delegate almost everything to others while he does the Presidential stuff like give soundbite responses to frivolous Democratic attacks, kiss babies, give speeches, and con Congresscritters into thinking that he’s someone they can “work with”. But in this case, there aren’t that many people Trump can delegate things to, since they’re all—all the professional Washington career animals of both parties—his enemies. So there is some danger that the Dem plot could succeed, if Trump lets them distract him from keeping his eye on all the various balls. He has been handling this—and rather brilliantly—with tweets; superficially frivolous, but they keep things in play, give the Press the talking points he (rather than the D’rats) want, help him define the battlefield, and consume almost no time or effort (and, if they start to become burdensome, he can have a speechwriter become a tweetwriter—and for all we know, he’s already done so).
The Dem’s second mission, the bigger one, is to undo the last election. This would be America’s 1933 redux, the Weimar moment when the American experiment dies, if the filthy bastards can pull it off.
FBI Director Lieberman will get to the bottom of this.
If I recall correctly, Mueller will have a broad range to look into whatever comes up.
Such as did obama obstruct Comey?
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/18/flashback-report-obama-administration-shut-down-comey-request-on-russia-probe/
Fast forward to March, when Newsweek reported that Comey wanted to first go public as early as the summer of 2016 about the agency’s information on alleged Russian interference in the presidential campaign. However, Obama administration officials blocked Comey from making public statements, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter speaking to Newsweek.
“The White House shut it down,” one source told the magazine, explaining that Comey had pitched the idea of writing an oped about the subject during a White House Situation Room meeting in June or July.
Already is.
You know how you reel in a big, wild-eyed fish don’t you?
You just give it all the rope it needs to hang itself.
Er…you give it lots of line, as long as is needed until the fish is deathly tired.
Unless the investigation shows that Trump and/or members of his administration were acting to the advantage of Russia and that the Russians were responsible for obtaining the DNC and Podesta emails, the libs, Dems and anti-Trump forces will never accept the findings of the Special Counsel. They simply have too much invested in this fairytale, to acknowledge that they were wrong. They will scream “whitewash” and the media will follow in lockstep.
This investigation is going to be very expensive and take a lot of time, during which the anti-Trumpers will be pushing the trump/Russia collusion theory 24/7. Also, there is a good chance that there is not enough solid evidence out there to prove this theory wrong. The FBI does not have the DNC server and we have no idea what condition it is in. While it may be possible to show that Seth Rich was in continuous contact with Wikileaks, prior to the release of the DNC and Podesta documents, there may be no way to determine exactly what information he was providing to that organization. As many members of the Trump administration and campaign were involved in international business, many probably have previous contacts with Russians, including the Russian government [Rex Tillerson, for one]. Even if such contacts are shown to be innocuous, the anti-Trumpers will scoff and maintain that these contacts are prima facia evidence that these people were working for Russia and against the US.
In other words, barring some earth shaking revelation, this manufactured scandal will never be resolved or go away.
The Special Counsel’s investigation will likely reduce the amount of leakage. And, it might give this country an opportunity to investigate the amount and type of domestic spying which took place under the Obama administration as well as identify those who violated the law by releasing the identities of US citizens caught up in this surveillance and other classified material. It might also give the FBI the impetus to finally resolve the Clinton Foundation investigation, which has dragged on for years.
For all we know, they Russians may have done nothing. First, we have the DNC staffer who sent 44k emails to Wikileaks. Even if the Russowere involved, for all we know Tony Podesta, John’s brother and unregistered agent for a Russian bank, may have passed the password to the Russians.
In the meanwhile, I suggest that Trumpers stick to the “can’t comment on an ongoing investigation” line in easy reach.
But now we know that Comey testified under oath that he’d “never” been pressured to end an investigation for political purposes, on May 3rd… nearly three months after his meeting with the president on February 14th.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/05/smoking-gun-comey-testified-oathtrump-never-pressured-fbi-halt-investigations/
You need to read MUCH more carefully, and not the part Dim Jim Hoft highlighted.
Comey has never said that T-rump instructed he drop an inquiry.
What he did say…and it’s totally true…is that “oftimes” he’s had someone opine that an investigation should be dropped or the equivalent.
We know this occurred on at least four occasions with Barracula, and mostly very publicly in speeches or other public forums.
Two words: John Podesta. From there, it’s not too hard to connect the dot to Hillary Clinton.