Monday, July 30, 2018

Old Prosecutors Speaking Frankly

Old Prosecutors Speaking Frankly
"About once a year the Society of Old Prosecutors meets in a private libation spot the name of which I am honor bound not to disclose. 
We met to discuss the week’s events and, as long as I don’t name the participants, I was given permission to share some of the talk. 
(Given the mad-dog operations of the Special Counsel some feared that to publicly state their views they’d be subject to midnight FBI raids with their nightgown-garbed wives rousted from bed and felt up by armed agents, or all their assets seized and their private correspondence unrelated to anything handed over to Democratic spinners like Lanny Davis to be megaphoned on CNN.)
Lawyer 1: The President is denying his former lawyer Cohen’s claim that he approved the meeting in Trump Tower. Funny that meeting, isn’t it? I mean, why did Loretta Lynch allow Natasha Veselnitskaya to have a special visa to enter the country and why did Natasha choose as her translator Anatoli Samochornov, who for over a decade was a U.S. State Department Translator?’ I’ve handled far weaker entrapment cases.
Lawyer 2: Funnier yet, the meeting was ostensibly to discuss Russian orphan adoption issues. But even if it had been to hear the dirt Russia had on Hillary, when and why and how would it be unusual or illegal for a campaign to want to hear dirt on a competitor? I mean, get real -- Hillary paid for the Dossier which was confected by an anti-Trump former UK spy whose sources were all Russian. Not since I read Alice in Wonderland as a kid, have I seen such an upside down universe.
Lawyer 3:  Now speaking of the Dossier, how much longer will the FISC continue in operation after having rubberstamped over and again widespread spying on a political campaign based on the most idiotic of warrants? I cannot imagine a regular court granting these and FISC was, we were told by most (but not the late Robert Bork) that it would provide greater protections for citizens against unwarranted privacy intrusions.
Lawyer 1: DOJ and the FBI did some audacious tap dancing in those applications, didn’t they? Didn’t tell the Court they were relying on an unverified piece of campaign dirt gathering; didn’t tell the court it didn’t even know who the sources were that the author of the Dossier relied on. Used newspaper articles to justify the warrant! And then didn’t note that the articles were themselves part of Christopher Steele’s propaganda effort for Hillary. I’d have been disbarred had I ever tried such stunts.
Lawyer 2: And that’s not all -- they twisted Carter Page’s history. For three years he acted as an informant and witness for the FBI and they reframed his history to make it seem he was “an agent of a foreign power who knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activity that may have involved criminal violations." 
Read all.

No comments: