April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire. So T.S. Elliot reminds us of the juxtaposition of rot and rebirth in April as the Spring thaws accelerate decomposition to make way for new life.
April 2019 will mark the third anniversary of the Clinton team hiring Fusion GPS to spin a story that was never intended to withstand this much scrutiny. Only the barest outlines of the original fable remain intact: It’s confirmed, as the dossier alleges, that a country called Russia exists and it’s led currently by a man named Vladimir Putin. Much of the rest has decomposed into a dead land.
Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign manager, did not oversee “collusion” between the campaign and the Kremlin. Trump’s erstwhile lawyer Michael Cohen did not travel to Prague to pay Russian hackers. No video has emerged of Trump in a hotel room with micturating prostitutes. Carter Page denied (without contradiction) striking a deal to exchange Trump’s foreign policy stance for a vast stake in the Russian oil company.
Now the new chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who repeatedly has claimed to have seen secret evidence of Russia’s collusion with Trump, now demands that Mueller’s final report be made public. Schiff, a “Costanza” hoax-booster of the highest order, normally opposes Russia collusion transparency—unless the release is properly curated by fellow Trump haters. Schiff has made huge promises about secret evidence of collusion, saying, “I can tell you that the case is more than that and I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now.” That was in March 2017. Note the subtle shift in Schiff’s position last year: “I’ve never said that there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s for Bob Mueller to decide.”
Really? I thought it was for the Senate to decide after a trial in which the president has the opportunity to defend himself. But, of course, I date myself in my naïve attachment to the Constitution as was before Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Three Years of Innuendo and Leaks
Schiff has reason to be optimistic that the team assembled under Mueller will indeed properly curate the rotting fruit of his sprawling and aggressive investigation. The special counsel is a Clinton-aligned revenge squad with badges and search warrants that seamlessly accepted the handoff from Fusion GPS to champion Team Clinton’s thirst to punish Trump’s election victory.
It has been three years of innuendo and leaks, leaks, leaks, leaks, and uncountably more examples of leaks dripping poison into the poison-addicted pens of the partisan media. The Mueller team has never had to prove anything involving Trump-Russian collusion to anyone because the special counsel needs no proof to function as a potent political weapon.
“There’s a knee-jerk reaction to suggest that we should be transparent about what we do in government,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in February. “But there are a lot of reasons not to be transparent about what we do in government.”
Rosenstein added: “The guidance I always gave my prosecutors and the agents I worked with during my tenure on the front lines of law enforcement were if we aren’t prepared to prove our case beyond a reasonable doubt in court, then we have no business making allegations against American citizens.”
If Rosenstein guided the Mueller team to abstain from unprovable leaks that trashed the president, Mueller obviously ignored it and followed the exact opposite course. Remember, Rosenstein was supposed to have been supervising the unguided Mueller probe.
Evidence Points to a Hoax
Nothing would delight the Costanza hoax-booster more than to keep the Mueller report secret as a never-ending source of Area-51-style speculation and conspiracy. So bring it on.
Mueller is not a judge and his people are not impartial. His report will be the subject of a constitutional process that affords the president a long-overdue opportunity to confront and rebut the smears. Give the skeptical public the opportunity to comb through Mueller’s best shot. We will read every sentence of the report and hold Mueller to account for the multi-million dollar “investigation” into a collusion hoax that Mueller people likely knew to be bogus from the outset.
The mountain of existing evidence in the public domain clearly demonstrates how the hoax started and why. If Mueller cannot or will not explain away the evidence of a concerted effort to frame the president, we’ll know he can’t. If the report fails to follow the money as it left Team Clinton to be laundered and wind up in the pockets of journalists, the spouse of a senior Justice Department lawyer, and the political campaign of the spouse of a senior FBI official, it would confirm appearances.
We’ve had enough with the stories of secret evidence, the innuendo, the leaks, and the breathless reporting on the progress of the effort to reverse the 2016 election. Mueller should give the public a fair shot at the evidence and stop trying the case in the press.
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