President Trump believes he has the authority to remove special counsel Robert Mueller”, reports Sarah Westwood for the Washington Examiner. He does and he should, because the time has to come for president to go to war. Not in some distant and godforsaken desert, but in his own backyard against renegade Praetorians.
The FBI on Monday raided the office of Trump’s lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, “seizing records related to several topics including payments to a pornographic-film actress,” Matt Apuzzo reports in the New York Times. The story continues:
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan obtained the search warrant after receiving a referral from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, according to Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, who called the search “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.”
What began as an investigation into nonexistent collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and the Kremlin quickly devolved into a witch hunt and become overt character assassination of the president of the United States. It’s calumny, pure and simple.
Enough is enough. The carte blanche Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein provided Robert Mueller to go beyond investigating collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign, extending to “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation,” is a license to kill. Trump needs to punch back, because Mueller will not stop.
Former counterterrorism specialist and CIA intelligence officer Philip M. Giraldi argues the Mueller probe is an attempt “to discredit and ultimately delegitimize Trump,” a continuation of the war intelligence agencies have waged against the president with the complicity of corporate media since the night of the 2016 election.
Manafort’s Crimes Aren’t Trump’s
To date, the most substantial indictment has been levied against Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. Yet Manafort’s indictment illustrates what a farce this investigation has been from the outset.
Manafort is charged with tax fraud for activities he engaged in alongside the Podesta Group on behalf of the Ukrainian government, all of which occurred before Manafort acted as Trump’s campaign chairman. Further, Podesta received $180,000 from Uranium One, a subsidiary of the Russian State Corporation for Nuclear Energy.
Why haven’t Podesta’s offices been raided in broad daylight by the FBI? Mueller’s team has feebly probed Podesta Group, giving the lobbying firm ample time to conduct damage control and shutter with dignity, all while raiding parties are deployed for a smash and grab at the office of Trump’s personal lawyer. Why? Because this investigation is fundamentally partisan and there is no collusion, so Mueller must either undermine the credibility of the president through smears or find any other means to oust him. If the establishment cannot peg the president as an conspiring with an enemy state, then they might as well air out his dirty laundry.
The only entities that have attempted to undermine the 2016 election, then, are the state intelligence assets beholden to the interests of the political establishment, “pursuing selfish agendas that actually endanger what remains of American democracy,” as Giraldi writes.
If Giraldi is right, are we truly free to elect our leaders? What remains of our vaunted “democratic institutions” when corporate media works with operatives to build up public scorn against a president who doesn’t fit their mold? Kirkpatrick Sale had it right:
It might be better to call our system—a system in which some of the people select between two candidates who are already beholden to other interests and are in no way bound to listen to these voters—an oligarchy of the elite, which we have had the good fortune to experience as essentially benign during most of its duration.
But that doesn’t have to be an indictment, not as much as it should be a clarion call for restoration. Thus, the president shouldn’t entertain the rules of the game Mueller and his handlers are playing because the game is rigged—the establishment is supposed to win.
The New Praetorians
Syria can wait. It’s time for the president to bang hammers and stop hoping for this investigation to conclude with his exoneration, because neither Mueller nor his handlers will entertain exoneration as a possibility. Be it the commissioning of a President’s Intelligence Advisory Board like the one Dwight Eisenhower convened in the 1950s, the appointment of loyalists throughout government, or cracking down on agents leaking information to an invariably hostile press—whatever it takes, Trump needs to hit back.
The Praetorian Guard in ancient Rome, not unlike our rogue state assets, had the job of safeguarding the head of state. But they also posed the most significant threat to the emperor’s life because of their proximity to power, and at one point they auctioned off the Roman Empire to the highest bidder. In the end, it took Constantine the Great marching on Rome to defeat and disband the rogue Praetorians.
Trump needs to make a decision soon, because this investigation will end only when he kills it or after Mueller has routed him from the White House—and returning Rome to the highest bidder.
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