Postmortem

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

And so, with the midterm election in the rearview mirror, behold the rush into the next phase of Civil War 2. The Golden Golem of Greatness (aka, President Trump) finally requested the resignation of the feckless Attorney General, Mr. Sessions — a fine point as we shall see. The New York Times, of course, played it as an opportunity to litigate the constitution in their headline the day after:

Jeff Sessions Is Forced Out as Attorney
General as Trump Installs Loyalist

WASHINGTON — President Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday, replacing him with a loyalist who has echoed the president’s complaints about the special counsel investigation into Russia’s election interference and will now take charge of the inquiry.

Notice that in the headline and the lede The Times is trying to establish the legalistic meme that Sessions was fired rather than resigned, hoping to trigger an obscure DOJ rule that a fired AG cannot be replaced by a temporary appointment. (Well, Mr. Sessions did sign a letter of resignation stating that…uh… he resigned.) At the same time, The Times tries to establish that the incoming Acting AG, Matthew G. Whitaker, is too biased to serve, setting the table for a constitutional food fight.

Of course The New York Times is no longer a newspaper in the traditional sense, but an advocacy and propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. They’re pushing this desperate gambit because it’s clear that Mr. Trump is taking the gloves off now in this long-running battle. What’s at stake is whether the DOJ will prosecute the actual and obvious collusion that occurred during and after the 2016 election — namely, the misconduct of the highest DOJ and FBI officials in collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign to cook up the bogus Russia-gate case, and the subsequent scramble to cover up their activities when Mrs. Clinton lost the election and they realized the evidence trail of this felonious activity would not be shoved down the memory hole by Clinton appointees.

The result has been two years with no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion and two years of DOJ / FBI stonewalling over the release of pertinent documents in the matter. There is already an established and certified evidence trail indicating that James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Lisa Page, and others (including former CIA Director John Brennan and former DNI James Clapper) acted illegally in politicizing their offices. Some of these figures have been subject to criminal referrals by the DOJ Inspector General, Mr. Horowitz. Some of them are liable to further criminal investigation Many of them have been singing to grand juries out of the news spotlight.

Whether Mr. Whitaker remains in his new role, or is replaced soon by a permanent AG confirmed by the Senate, the momentum has clearly shifted. The Democrats, and especially the forces still aligned with Hillary, are running scared all of a sudden. Thus, all the bluster coming from party hacks such as Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY 10^th Dist), and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Mr. Nadler takes the gavel of the House Judiciary Committee in January and is promising a three-ring circus of investigations when he does. If the House moves to a quixotic impeachment effort, they will find that to be a dangerous two-way street, since Mr. Trump’s legal team can also introduce testimony in his defense that will embarrass and incriminate the Democrats. Anyway, the Senate is extremely unlikely to convict Mr. Trump in a trial.

Mr. Mueller is said to be writing his final report on Russia-gate. One might adduce that he did not turn up anything significant, since, if he had discovered treasonous collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it would have merited public action by now. You can’t uncover something like that and not act on it for more than a year. More mysterious, though, is whether Mr. Mueller even bothered to look into the well-documented misdeeds of the officials citied above. How could he not? If he failed to do so, would he not appear to be himself involved in the cover-up of their activities? The Inspector General‘s report would be sufficient to alert him.

There is a lot to get to the bottom of in all this: the mis-use of FISA court warrants, the outsourcing of US intel activities to Britain’s MI6 intel agency to spy on US citizens, the role of Hillary Clinton and her campaign with FBI and DOJ officials in providing so-called opposition research used to provoke spying operations on Mr. Trump and his associates, and to confound the performance of his duties in office. And much more.

Readers seem perplexed as to why I keep writing about Russia-gate. It should be self-evident that an attempt by the party then in power to use federal agencies to interfere in a presidential election is serious business in the highest degree. It is corrosive of the rule-of-law and the fate of the nation, and attention must be paid.