And here's a new Dershowitz column, "Trump doesn't need to fire Mueller - here's why."
[A]ttacking Mueller may appear to be a win-win tactic for the [Trump legal] team – certainly a lot better than firing Mueller. Fortunately for the Trump team, Mueller has played into their hands by his sloppiness in conducting the investigation. He has been incautious with his choice of personnel – too many of them seem biased against Trump, not only by their backgrounds, but by their tweets and messages.... Moreover, the manner by which he acquired emails and other documents from the Trump transition team may raise some legal questions. The same may be true if he used the questionable dossier against Trump as a basis for securing warrants....
Mueller can improve his situation in several ways. First, he should appoint an ethics expert to advise him – a former judge who is beyond reproach. Names like George Mitchell, Louie Freeh, and Justice David Souter come to mind....
As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51 “Perhaps everyone will agree that if we were all angels, no state would be necessary, and if angels were the governors, they would require neither internal nor external constraints to ensure that they governed justly.” Neither the Trump team nor the Mueller team are angels. They are human beings with human limitations. But an investigation of a president must be as close to angelic as any human endeavor can be. Otherwise the public will not have confidence in the results.
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56 comments:
Obama/Clinton's Water Closet is the real Watergate, including foreign collusion, domestic spying, bullhorn prosecutions, witch hunts, witch trials, baby hunts (probably baby trials, too), intrigue, and conspiracy. I wonder if Wisconsin was a proving ground for the national effort. Followed by the well-timed so-called "reckoning".
The same may be true if he used the questionable dossier against Trump as a basis for securing warrants....
This may be true, although I think the real concern about using the dossier to get warrants pre-dates Mueller's involvement.
Althouse is way more popular than Tribe.
Larry has a bad case of TDS.
This has become one more cover up of major Clinton and Obama crimes again being run by career Clinton minions posing as FBI angels with Elliott Ness reputations. And again it turns out to be a huge hoax .
That damn Trump has turned the world upside down. All that's left now is for the Soros paid scum batallions to start riots in the streets.
The disappointment with the other guy pose is worthless.
Just restate your argument.
Principles before principals. Dershowitz is yesterday's "progressive", today's conservative.
That said, what is the period of rebellion? One generation, two, three?
Heh. My 14 year old daughter was studying that quote from Madison just a couple weeks ago. I think I'll send her this post.
It's different when the LibCong do it.
Dershowitz is consistent
A conservative has to appreciate that. And as a Jew, he has a certain realism on National Security issues.
Dershowitz is a serious principled person, Tribe has always been a political partisan. Tribe gives off that skeezy Paul Krugman vibe.
Hiring an ethics expert ain't going to cut it. It would just be window dressing.
We were told Mueller's reputation was beyond reproach when they chose him. What happened to that?
These top FBI people can't even tell right from wrong? Horse shit.
The problem isn't ethical confusion. It's a lack of accountability.
"Althouse is way more popular than Tribe.
Larry has a bad case of TDS."
Maybe it's ADS.
Imagine all of the grief Al is taking from his Lib friends. Good grief, he is a regular on Fox News and they love him.
Libs just can’t deal with honesty and character. It is tribe politics 24/7 and anyone who dares to wander off the plantation must be shot or shamed. Expelled, at the least.
Dershowitz is consistent
Internally, externally, and mutually consistent. Well, he's not God, but like the rest of us, he strives.
Do the students at the public schools in Madison study the writings and presidency of James Madison? Serious question. It would be a good idea.
Trump should not fire Mueller. What he should do is appoint a special prosecutor to investigate wrongdoing in the special prosecutor's office.
Put another way. Principals may fall, but principles are forever.
Dershowitz may be motivated by his entanglement with the Lolita Express. He was named, you know, as one of Epstein’s playboys. He vehemently denied any sexual thing but it was a lawyerly denial. Not sure how stumping for Trump helps him here but I am a cynic about the purity of his stance here and his sudden love for Fox News. Tribe needs no such cynicism; he’s a partisan and everyone knows it.
Dershowitz 34, Tribe 0
I harken back to the Gore-Bush 2000 Supreme Court battles, where Tribe was Gore's first lawyer - and got totally shellacked. Tribe's SCOTUS brief was totally incomprehensible. He lost and was then replaced by David Boies, who was much tougher.
I would have much preferred that Trump appoint Louie Freeh as an interim FBI Director to drain that particular swamp.
Bill Clinton fired him because he would not back down from investigating people Clinton wanted to protect.
Freeh was Director when my daughter went through the FBI Academy and used to come down and run with the trainees.
They all loved him.
What he should do is appoint a special prosecutor to investigate wrongdoing in the special prosecutor's office.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail end titles:
We apologize again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
George Mitchell, Louie Freeh, and Justice David Souter
LOL. yeah - more Clintons investigating Clintons. Good Lord no.
NO Alan, No.
The FBI let Hillary, who committed several crimes revolving around her PRIVATE SERVER, in addition to a lifetime of ethical lapses and extremely poor moral judgement, off the hook. They did so knowingly by switching the words around. These same hacks are now in charge of investigating Trump.
This isn't a "personnel problem" (what insulting BS leftist template language is that?)
This is a corruption problem. The FBI has one.
(not to mention sloppy entitled government work Hillary sponsored that ruined an entire nation.)
I love the left chasing their own tail.
Why was a special counsel required??? Because the DOJ and FBI were compromised.
Now President Trump is questioning the honesty of the DOJ and the FBI and the left is going all constitutional crisis on us because President Trump is expressing exactly the same opinions the left was screeching about to get a special counsel appointed.
If the DOJ and the FBI were pure, we would have an answer by now. The investigation has been ongoing for over 18 months. Nothing but process crimes, unrelated to the stated scope of the investigation.
Overall, tho, Dersh has the better argument. He usually does and it is sad he has to prove his progressive bonafides by saying "Oh I love Hillary, voted for her.. supported her..." before he begins his fair arguments.
It goes to show the leftwing bully effect is alive and well.. Careful dude, do not step off the hive mind plantation.
McCabe and Strozk are still employed by the FBI. Why?
If you read Dershowitz tweets, he's a very principled guy on civil liberties - the only blemish is when folks raise the "Lolita Express" stuff to personally attack him (he forcefully denies it).
If you read Tribe's tweets, he comes off as a teenage prom queen, breathlessly asking his followers to re-tweet, unsourced WaPost articles on Russian collusion.
OK, I can see rooting for AD, the principled liberal. But Tribe is the more representative prog creature. Every argument instrumental, everything focused on promoting prog power. And so on, and so forth.
Reset the default: assume prog bad faith in anything and everything, and save yourself a lot of wasted time and effort.
M Jordan said...
"Dershowitz may be motivated by his entanglement with the Lolita Express. He was named, you know, as one of Epstein’s playboys."
Or maybe, just maybe it was because Dershowitz was Epstein’s defense lawyer.
I am surprised Dershowitz has not been reckoned. The material is there. Maybe potential accusers are afraid he would fight back.
"I'm so enjoying rooting for Dershowitz in this ongoing Tribe vs. Dershowitz tweet fight."
Me too, but it feels a bit like watching bear-baiting. I need to mentally recast it as Darrow cross examining Bryan.
Dickin'Bimbos@Home said...
"McCabe and Strozk are still employed by the FBI. Why?"
I read somewhere that they couldn't fire McCabe because of his years of service and his senior status within the Civil Service System. He can't even be reassigned without his approval.
That maybe why they didn't fire Louis Lerner.
Super. We cannot fire entrenched leftwing bureaucrats.
Banana Republic is us.
Forget an Ethics expert for Mueller. The most important thing now is a food taster for Horowitz, the DOJ Inspector General...
Think of what an honest/angelic IG now knows about the way Holder was running things... How many crimes got downgraded to "matter" status?
People around a Clinton/Obama scandal have a funny way of dying....
Dershowitz is principled and consistent.
He has close ties to the Left and Academia, knows them personally...and yet he has thrown his civil liberty support to Fox and Conservatives.
Hmm.
What does that suggest his opinion is of who is the worse threat to civil liberties, or at least the most intellectually inconsistent?
As far as his moral failings
I have not heard that Dersh has a habit of tweaking every tweed covered bottom he can reach, as opposed to the LOOOONNNGGG history Clinton and Epstein have on that front.
However, I can see him getting his head turned by being invited to a 'cool kid' party where the women were not far past menopause and accelerating as one finds at most academic functions. One where the girls still have waists and the stockings are not for varicose veins.
So I think he had A moral failure. He is not a moral failure consistently.
I think it would be worthwhile to fire McCabe despite the Civil Service System protections and then invite him, and the CSS, to bring a lawsuit. Worst case, McCabe gets some damages after a lot of embarrassing evidence gets aired, and some serious legal bills get run up.
Works for me.
Trump needs to make sure McCabe and Strozk are fired from the FBI. Trump's popularity would soar.
The DOJ needs to be purged of all obama-era holdovers and a new investigation into Clinton Inc, started. Again - most Americans would be happy some amount of ethical restoration is possible.
A good first step
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-12-19/grassley-wants-fbi-director-wray-to-replace-mccabe-as-deputy#click=https://t.co/UY04pv5PLa
Then prietap and rybicki.
"People around a Clinton/Obama scandal have a funny way of dying...."
Yes, I just want Trump to keep his own security. I don't trust the USSS.
Too many drunk driving incidents. Plus hookers, of course.
James Clapper is a guy who admittedly lied under oath and he's still running around free.
Now listen to Tribe!
Clapper has a half-century of experience in U.S. intelligence. His words must be heeded.
He's a CIA spook who lies in public. He thinks it's his duty to lie under oath!
Since he's retired now, what's really spooky is not that Clapper is a liar--we all know he's a liar--but how deluded he is. The former Director of National Intelligence under Clinton and Obama is a nut. And we know this because what he's saying is this...
I think this past weekend is illustrative of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that's what he's doing with the president
Are you suggesting that Donald Trump is a Russian spy? Or do you mean "handle an asset" in some sort of generic, non-CIA vernacular way?
Of course CNN is a joke now. But look what you're doing to Harvard Law! Get off Twitter, Tribe, you're embarrassing yourself.
While we can't know for sure until he is out of office it is starting to appear that Trump might be the luckiest SOB who ever inhabited the White House. At the rate Mueller is going the Democrats are going to start demanding he resign before this train wreck blows back further on them. With Clapper beclowning himself, The Obama- Hezbollah scandal and the rest of this multistory Obama Administration crime story Trump would be a fool to fire Mueller now.
If we grant that Trump is a con artist, which I think is a fair assumption, then his cleverest con is convincing so many people he's an idiot. Their misunderestimation one of his most useful assets.
The basic problem, I think, with Mueller, is that he spent too much of his life in the DC swamp. As did Comey. Sure, they are tokenly Republicans, but their sympathies are with the liberal federal employees that they worked with. I don’t think that Mueller went out of his way to hire a bunch of Clinton sycophants, but rather, they came on the open market at a time he needed them, and had reputations for being aggressive prosecutors and investigators. Everyone there supported and voted for Crooked Hillary, so no one thought that it was odd thay they would hire her partisans to investigate the guy who beat her in the election. And Mueller probably knew a lot of his team from when he was FBI Director, and didn’t see their partisanship, because everyone there shared it.
I think that a lot of this was indeed sloppy on the part of Mueller, and sloppy on the part of his team. Which says to me that there is a decent likelihood that Mueller ran the FBI in a similar way. Slight ethical lapses were initially probably ignored, and ultimately not even noticed. After all, they were the good guys, and if a couple eggs were broken, their intent was good. Judge Napalitano, on FNC, seemed to be suggesting yesterday that they had a grand jury subpoena for the transition team emails. Maybe, but if they did, they never seemed to bother informing the owners of the emails (the transition team) that the emails had been seized. Or, maybe, they just flashed their FBI badges for the GSA clerk in charge of securing the email and the electronic devices. After all, their intent was good, so breaking a couple eggs is acceptable. Except, of course, that it is not, because, in particular here, the investigation is purely political. They are using the corner cutting that they have been accustomed to, the sloppiness and borderline illegalities, to attack their duly elected boss, the person from whom all their power is delegated.
Why do the alleged experts [Louis Freeh,etc] always seem to be creatures from The Swamp? Can't we find a qualified investigator from outside the Imperial City?
Ken Starr had Sam Dash as his ethics advisor, unbeknownst to everyone, until Dash turned on him at the last minute when it became useful to Clinton.
Is it possible that the 73 year old Mueller simply doesn't have a good grip on the actions and motives of the prosecutors working under him? And, like Andy McCarthy, is so firmly convinced of their honesty and professionalism that he can't see that personal animus toward Trump is driving them to bend or break any rules that might interfere in their mission to get Trump by any means necessary?
I'm reading about how Mueller is to be trusted because he was a Marine from people who never would have accepted that about Oliver North.
Dershowitz is a principal with principles. Everyone is a principal (e.g. individual dignity). He is also a principal of note in our society. While his principles may not be internally, externally, and mutually consistent, he, as most people, at least strives to reconcile principles and choices. Of course, as with other mortal principals, he falls short along one or more vectors. Anyway, he's Pro-Choice. He can do better.
“Perhaps everyone will agree that if we were all angels, no state would be necessary, and if angels were the governors, they would require neither internal nor external constraints to ensure that they governed justly.”
Lucifer was an angel. So no, I don't even trust them.
"a former judge who is beyond reproach. Names like George Mitchell, Louie Freeh, and Justice David Souter"
Any "ethics expert" Mueller hires should be as strongly pro-Republican as his current staff is pro-Democrat. A raving left-wing loony like Souter or Mitchell, or a former FBI person like Freeh (who's going to care more about making the FBI look good, than about justice), isn't going to cut it
When Clapper was the Director of National Intelligence, Hillary Clinton made a big issue about Donald Trump ignoring the finding of "all 17 intelligence agencies" that the Russians were meddling in our election.
Clapper knew that Clinton's argument was bullshit -- that the finding had been made by a few selected analysts from three agencies.
Clapper could and should have clarified the issue for the electorate.
However, Clapper remained silent because he knew that Clinton's argument was working well for her.
That's all you need to know about Clapper's integrity, bipartisanship and fairness.
Bruce Hayden,
Spot on. I would add that when you are used to Obama's DOJ prosecutors and justices ignoring these cut corners, it becomes...unremarkable. When suddenly shown the black letter law by the opposition, it is a bit stunning to wake up to legal and ethical reality.
Those three Democrat flacks? No thank. Robert Bork? Now you’re talking. I have been curious why he didn’t hire some Republican lawyers (Jeb, Marco, John supporters).
Their misunderestimation one of his most useful assets.
Is that you, W?
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