http://bleacherreport.com/arti
cover
My kind of creep!
I find the logic of the above overwhelming.
Have Quakers become quacks? Are they "ducking" their principles?(See 1 below.)
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Unless I am missing something ,Tillerson's foreign policy initiatives appear too weak,
I am not as concerned about reports Putin flattered Trump. Yes, Trump has a 'uge' ego but he also is not dumb. He has to work with leaders of all varieties and what is done is done regarding meddling in our campaigns. We do the same but maybe not as effective because our mass media is willing to believe anything negative about Trump and and our intelligence agencies may not be swift..(See 2 below.)
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This author is concerned about the pace of the new Saudi Prince. Time will tell. Changing habits is always fraught with risks. (See 3 below.)
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Double standards persist and , one has to assume, always will. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) How the Quakers Became Champions of BDS
by Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander Joffe
In a not-so-earth-shattering move, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) hasappointed a Palestinian-American, Joyce Ajlouny, as its new Secretary General. Ajlouny is a native of Ramallah and formerly the head of the Quaker school there, a "passionate" advocate for Palestinians and for "evenhandedness."
Ajlouny may be the perfect candidate to run the AFSC, the leading American Quaker organization, which over the years has cultivated its image as peaceful and supremely benign. Few suspect, much less know, that one of their central missions these days is promoting the BDS movement that opposes Israel's existence.
How did a century-old religiously based pacifist organization transform itself into one of the leading engines for the Palestinian cause? Part of the answer lies in the AFSC's evolution, which has gone from trying to save Jews to vilifying them. Its Quaker theology has similarly gone from emphasis on the "Inner Light" that guides individual conscience to something like old-fashioned Christian supersessionism, where Jews deserve to be hated. The result is that the organization is now effectively captive to progressive Israel-hatred.
Founded during World War I to provide alternative forms of "service" to pacifist Quakers, the AFSC quickly became one of the foremost refugee relief organizations of the early 20th century, with operations around the world. A favorite of Eleanor Roosevelt's, the AFSC was also active within the US during the Depression, teaching skills across Appalachia and the South.
With the rise of Nazism, AFSC became involved with what would be the greatest refugee crisis in history. But the experience also demonstrated the organization's approach to religious diplomacy and relief efforts, where naïve idealism alternated with practicality. Shortly after Kristallnacht in November 1938, AFSC leaders traveled to Germany to personally investigate the suffering of the Jews and pled their case with Reichsführer-SS Reinhard Heydrich to bring relief aid. They were unsuccessful.
But the AFSC's post-war record in refugee relief was so exceptional that along with a British Quaker group, it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. By the late 1940s, the AFSC had a distinctive place in American and international society, a well-established Christian NGO with global reach. But it was also a universalist organization that went against the grain to unpopular causes. Its humanitarian ethic and pacifist ideology were radical both in the American and Protestant contexts. These tensions would ultimately undo the AFSC.
The shift began when the AFSC was invited by the United Nations to run Palestinian refugee relief in Gaza in late 1948. Quakers had been in the Holy Land for over a century, running schools and hospitals for local Christians. But the refugee program was a turning point. Relief workers had never encountered refugees who did not want to be taught new skills or to be resettled elsewhere, only to be maintained at someone else's expense until Israel disappeared.
So traumatic was this for the AFSC that after 18 months it refused to be part of any future Palestinian refugee program, citing among other things the "moral degeneration" of the refugees brought on by becoming welfare recipients. This view was prescient—almost seventy years later, the Palestinians remain the world's largest recipients of international welfare through UNRWA and the UN system.
The Gaza experience—where in fact the AFSC excelled at providing relief and creating infrastructure, despite resistance from the refugees themselves—was enough to convince the leadership to get out of the relief business altogether. At the same time, a faction of the organization's leadership advocated a radical pacifist, and anti-American, agenda, aimed at nuclear disarmament and elevating the status of the Soviet Union and Communist China. By the 1960s, the AFSC became a liberal pressure group, one that openly supported North Vietnam. Support for Saddam Hussein and North Korea quickly followed.
But the AFSC never lost entirely lost interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict. After 1967, the AFSC escalated its involvement, beginning with quasi-theological criticism of Israel, acting as PLO's legal representatives in Jerusalem during the 1970s, and conducting 'interfaith' events in which American Jews were shamed for supporting Israel. The Quaker tradition of even-handedness and political neutrality was long gone; by the late 1970s the AFSC had effectively enshrined Palestinians as the "new Jews." Support for Palestinian terror as "resistance" against Israel's "structural violence" and against sanctions on Iran's nuclear program is now standard.
These policies are reflected in the educational curriculum of Quaker schools across the country, but most of all in the AFSC's leading role in the BDS movement. Today, the AFSC runs several offices dedicated to supporting the BDS movement, partners with the odious Jewish Voice for Peace and with the Muslim Brotherhood backed Students for Justice in Palestine to train BDS activists and run campus events at which Israel is vilified and its supporters are harassed, and endorses the Palestinian right of return, which would destroy Israel as a sovereign Jewish state.
Joyce Ajlouny's appointment epitomizes the transformation of the AFSC. Quaker schools and education have long been hijacked by Palestinian advocacy, as was recently seen at Friends' Central School in Wynnewood, PA, where BDS supporter Sa'ed Atshan was scheduled to speak to students. Ajlouny, who served for 13 years as the Director of the Ramallah Friends School, will undoubtedly increase that kind of education, given her stated desire to, "bring educational programming on Israeli-Palestinian issues into Quaker schools, where many of the students are Jewish."
Many Jewish parents are attracted to Quaker schools, which seek to instill values mistakenly believed to be analogous to those of Judaism, especially since the Quakers and their schools have enshrined "social justice" as a guiding principle. This is misleading. The AFSC's concept of "justice" is one-sided, and Jewish parents must decide whether Jewish values and Quaker values, as they exist today, are really the same. Ajlouny's appointment makes this more pressing.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Asaf Romirowsky is Executive Director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. Alexander Joffe is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow of the Middle East Forum. Their book on the AFSC in Gaza, 'Religion, Politics and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief,' was published in 2013.
2)
Putin’s Syria Play
Trump and Tillerson are ceding the advantage to Russia and Iran.
The Editorial Board
The press corps spent the weekend obsessing about what Donald Trump thinks about what Vladimir Putin believes about Russian meddling in the U.S. election. #evergreentweets. The real news is Mr. Trump’s deal announced in Vietnam with the Russian strongman for the “deconfliction” of Syria. This is ceding the regional advantage to Russia and Iran.
That’s the take-away of the joint statement issued Saturday by the U.S. and Russia that “builds on months of fairly intense discussions” and “behind-the-scenes diplomacy,” according to State Department officials. The three-part strategy aims to achieve an “enduring defeat” of Islamic State, “de-escalate the civil war” and hold “U.N.-supervised and organized parliamentary and presidential elections.”
ISIS is nearly ousted from its caliphate, not that the Russians helped much. The dirty work was done by Arab and Kurdish fighters backed by U.S. air power and special forces on the ground. As Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis told NATO in Brussels last week, 95% of the territory that Islamic State held in Iraq and Syria has now been reclaimed.
The question is what comes next. In July President Trump agreed with the Russians to enforce a deconfliction zone in southwestern Syria near the Israeli and Jordanian borders. The point was to stop the fighting, address the humanitarian crisis, and allow U.S.-backed forces to crush the Islamic State in the north and eastern parts of Syria.
Instead, the cease-fire solidified the gains that Bashar Assad’s Syrian government forces had already made in western Syria. And it freed up the Russians and Iranian-backed fighters to divert resources eastward, where the Syrian Democratic Forces allied with the U.S. had made progress against Islamic State. The Institute for the Study of War’s Christopher Kozak noted Saturday that the compact also “has preserved—rather than limited—the freedom of movement of Iran and Hezbollah along the Golan Heights and Syrian-Jordanian border.”
Yet the U.S. State Department claims the deconfliction experiment, “while not perfect,” has been a success because “violence in the area has been significantly reduced, and thousands of Syrian families have returned to their homes.” The U.S., Russia and Jordan have now signed a Memorandum of Principles that calls for the “reduction and ultimate elimination of foreign forces” in Syria, especially in the south. But there’s no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah are leaving the area.
The Trump Administration is also hoping Mr. Putin will help broker a United Nations-supervised peace process pursuant to U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254 that passed in December 2015. The Russians have since convened separate meetings with the Iranians and Turks to carve up the country as they see fit, which the Trump Administration has legitimized by sending an official observer to witness the talks.
State officials explained Saturday that they “started to see signs that the Russians and the regime wanted to draw the political process away from Geneva,” and so “Secretary Tillerson felt it was quite important to get President Putin on the record” to support the U.N.-led process. As if the Russian’s words are his bond. If six years of fighting in Syria have taught anything, it’s that military facts on the ground will determine the parameters of any peace.
President Trump, meanwhile, tweeted that the United States needs “a good relationship with Russia” to solve crises like Syria, despite zero evidence Mr. Putin shares America’s strategic interests. The Russians, like the Iranians, want to prop up the Assad regime and establish military bases in Syria to threaten NATO and Israel. Their immediate near-term goal is to retake the energy-rich eastern regions of Syria from the Syrian Democratic Forces because they realize that “seizing the oil,” to borrow a phrase, is in their interests.
The big picture is that Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson seem to be using the diplomacy of deconfliction to justify a retreat from post-ISIS Syria. Where that leaves America’s Kurdish and Syrian allies isn’t clear, though perhaps they’re on their own. Mr. Putin is winning in Syria no matter his deceptions about election meddling.
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3) Saudi crown prince blazes reckless regional trail
By BEN LYNFIELD
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Muhammad bin Salman is taking an activist approach that is in sharp contrast to the behind the scenes, nonconfrontational style that had hitherto prevailed in Riyadh. Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman is certainly leaving his mark as chief policy architect in the desert kingdom.
In the process, however, he is raising concerns that Israel’s de facto ally in the battle to contain Iranian influence in the region is being steered by a reckless driver.
The 32-year-old prince, known as MBS, has set off waves throughout the region, from Lebanon, whose prime minister he appears to be holding against his will, to Yemen, where he started a war as defense minister in 2015 that has turned into a Saudi Vietnam, to Qatar, where he has spearheaded a boycott that failed to intimidate it into toeing the Saudi line.
In all these cases, MBS is taking an activist approach that is in sharp contrast to the behind the scenes, nonconfrontational style that had hitherto prevailed in Riyadh. Domestically he has also used shock tactics, with sweeping arrests 10 days ago of princes, cabinet ministers and businessmen in a consolidation of power touted as an anti-corruption drive.
It was only in June that MBS was named crown prince, setting the stage for him to inherit the throne from King Salman, 81. Since then he has projected an image of a modernizing reformer, making extremely ambitious economic plans and evoking praise in the West for vowing to return the kingdom to a “moderate Islam.”
But analysts say there is a common thread in MBS’s policies, which failed or which now threaten to backfire: rashness.
“They seem to not be considering their policies well and looking down the road a bit before they go out on a limb,” says Joshua Teitelbaum, a Saudi specialist at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies of Bar-Ilan University.
In the view of Bruce Maddy- Weitzman, a specialist on Arab politics at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies, “you can call it inexperience or a strong headed youth at work. He’s identified multiple problems and Saudi Arabia is in a different environment and there is the idea that the strategy it used over the years is not working.
But this kind of rash reaction is leaving everyone shaking their heads. The question is where does he hit the wall.”
Those arrested included internationally prominent businessmen such as Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Prince Mitab bin Abdullah, the son of the previous king and head of the National Guard.
“There’s certainly a lot of overreach going on,” Maddy- Weitzman says. “The crackdown on all other members of the elite and branches of the royal family could certainly blow up in his face. Does he really have the power to fundamentally change the way the Saudis have run their country for decades in one swoop? I doubt it. There has to be pushback.”
In Teitelbaum’s view, the arrests undermine Saudi Arabia’s ability to project an image of stability. “It looks like he hasn’t thought through how it looks in the Arab world and internally. It looks like he’s lashing out, that he hasn’t considered things and that makes people jumpy. Maybe he could have arrested a smaller number of people, had discussions with some of these people and come to an agreement with some.”
Regarding Lebanon, forcing Hariri to resign and the reports he is being held against his will point up a “very heavy-handed and clumsy” approach, Teitelbaum says.
“Usually countries are more circumspect about the way they intervene in another country. This has a way of uniting the Lebanese against the Saudis.
“Instead of the traditional way of mediating, pouring money and taking a soft power approach to things that was nearly always successful, they’ve moved to a different way of doing business which hasn’t worked out as well,” Teitelbaum says.
In Yemen, where MBS orchestrated the Saudi involvement right after he became defense minister, Riyadh faced a real problem with the rise of pro-Iranian Houthi rebels, Teitelbaum notes. “But was an all-out military confrontation with no exit strategy and maybe beyond the capability of Saudi and United Arab Emirates armed forces the answer? Yemen is a difficult nut to crack. Now there is no way for them to have a decisive victory.”
Policy toward Qatar was also ill conceived, with MBS setting conditions for lifting the embargo against Doha that were “absurd,” according to Maddy-Weitzman, such as closing its Al Jazeera satellite channel and cutting ties with Iran. In sharp contrast to the traditional way of solving things quietly through mediation, MBS opted for a public confrontation but was unable to isolate Qatar, resulting in an ongoing standoff.
Maddy-Weitzman says it is not clear where MBS is going with his Lebanon moves.
“The main thing Israel needs to be careful about is not to get dragged in to someone else’s agenda and not to be hostage to behavior that can lead to a new crisis,” he says.
In the process, however, he is raising concerns that Israel’s de facto ally in the battle to contain Iranian influence in the region is being steered by a reckless driver.
The 32-year-old prince, known as MBS, has set off waves throughout the region, from Lebanon, whose prime minister he appears to be holding against his will, to Yemen, where he started a war as defense minister in 2015 that has turned into a Saudi Vietnam, to Qatar, where he has spearheaded a boycott that failed to intimidate it into toeing the Saudi line.
In all these cases, MBS is taking an activist approach that is in sharp contrast to the behind the scenes, nonconfrontational style that had hitherto prevailed in Riyadh. Domestically he has also used shock tactics, with sweeping arrests 10 days ago of princes, cabinet ministers and businessmen in a consolidation of power touted as an anti-corruption drive.
It was only in June that MBS was named crown prince, setting the stage for him to inherit the throne from King Salman, 81. Since then he has projected an image of a modernizing reformer, making extremely ambitious economic plans and evoking praise in the West for vowing to return the kingdom to a “moderate Islam.”
But analysts say there is a common thread in MBS’s policies, which failed or which now threaten to backfire: rashness.
“They seem to not be considering their policies well and looking down the road a bit before they go out on a limb,” says Joshua Teitelbaum, a Saudi specialist at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies of Bar-Ilan University.
In the view of Bruce Maddy- Weitzman, a specialist on Arab politics at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies, “you can call it inexperience or a strong headed youth at work. He’s identified multiple problems and Saudi Arabia is in a different environment and there is the idea that the strategy it used over the years is not working.
But this kind of rash reaction is leaving everyone shaking their heads. The question is where does he hit the wall.”
Those arrested included internationally prominent businessmen such as Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Prince Mitab bin Abdullah, the son of the previous king and head of the National Guard.
“There’s certainly a lot of overreach going on,” Maddy- Weitzman says. “The crackdown on all other members of the elite and branches of the royal family could certainly blow up in his face. Does he really have the power to fundamentally change the way the Saudis have run their country for decades in one swoop? I doubt it. There has to be pushback.”
In Teitelbaum’s view, the arrests undermine Saudi Arabia’s ability to project an image of stability. “It looks like he hasn’t thought through how it looks in the Arab world and internally. It looks like he’s lashing out, that he hasn’t considered things and that makes people jumpy. Maybe he could have arrested a smaller number of people, had discussions with some of these people and come to an agreement with some.”
Regarding Lebanon, forcing Hariri to resign and the reports he is being held against his will point up a “very heavy-handed and clumsy” approach, Teitelbaum says.
“Usually countries are more circumspect about the way they intervene in another country. This has a way of uniting the Lebanese against the Saudis.
“Instead of the traditional way of mediating, pouring money and taking a soft power approach to things that was nearly always successful, they’ve moved to a different way of doing business which hasn’t worked out as well,” Teitelbaum says.
In Yemen, where MBS orchestrated the Saudi involvement right after he became defense minister, Riyadh faced a real problem with the rise of pro-Iranian Houthi rebels, Teitelbaum notes. “But was an all-out military confrontation with no exit strategy and maybe beyond the capability of Saudi and United Arab Emirates armed forces the answer? Yemen is a difficult nut to crack. Now there is no way for them to have a decisive victory.”
Policy toward Qatar was also ill conceived, with MBS setting conditions for lifting the embargo against Doha that were “absurd,” according to Maddy-Weitzman, such as closing its Al Jazeera satellite channel and cutting ties with Iran. In sharp contrast to the traditional way of solving things quietly through mediation, MBS opted for a public confrontation but was unable to isolate Qatar, resulting in an ongoing standoff.
Maddy-Weitzman says it is not clear where MBS is going with his Lebanon moves.
“The main thing Israel needs to be careful about is not to get dragged in to someone else’s agenda and not to be hostage to behavior that can lead to a new crisis,” he says.
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4)
4)
The Trump Collusion Case Is Not Getting the Clinton Emails Treatment If the Justice Department is hell-bent on making a case, it plays an intimidating game of hardball. By Andrew C. McCarthy
Posted by Ruth King
In July 2016, the Obama administration announced its decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felony mishandling of classified information and destruction of government files. In the aftermath, I observed that there is a very aggressive way that the Justice Department and the FBI go about their business when they are trying to make a case — one profoundly different from the way they went about the Clinton emails investigation. There, they tried not to make the case.
That observation bears repeating today, as we watch Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of any possible Trump-campaign collusion in Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Mueller is a former FBI director and top Justice Department prosecutor. To say he is going about the collusion caper aggressively would be an understatement. The earth is being scorched by the stunningly large team he has assembled, which includes 16 other prosecutors (among them, Democratic party donors and activists) along with dozens of investigators (mostly from the FBI and IRS).
At the end of October, Mueller announced the first charges in the case. In the intensive commentary that followed, another investigative development attracted almost no attention. But in terms of Mueller’s seriousness of purpose, it speaks just as loudly as the George Papadopoulos guilty plea and the indictment of Paul Manafort and Richard Gates.
Mueller succeeded in convincing a federal judge to force an attorney for Manafort and Gates to provide grand-jury testimony against them. As Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports, just as the charges against these defendants were announced with great fanfare, the U.S. district court in Washington, D.C., quietly unsealed a ruling compelling the testimony of the lawyer — who, though not referred to by name in the decision, has been identified by CNN as Melissa Laurenza, a partner at the Akin Gump law firm.
Interestingly, the jurist who rendered the 37-page memorandum opinion is Beryl A. Howell, who served for years as a senior Judiciary Committee adviser to the fiercely partisan Democratic Senator Pat Leahy (of Vermont) before being appointed to the bench by President Obama. Howell is now the district court’s chief judge. Why do I think that, in choosing to set up shop in Washington, Mueller and his team noted the district court’s local rule that vests the chief judge with responsibility to “hear and determine all matters relating to proceedings before the grand jury”? (See here, Rule 57.14 at p. 168.)
And why do I think that the Trump collusion case is not getting the kid-glove Clinton emails treatment?
Lest we forget, President Obama had endorsed Mrs. Clinton, his former secretary of state and his party’s nominee, to be president. Moreover, Obama had knowingly participated in the conduct for which Clinton was under investigation — using a pseudonym in communicating with her about classified government business over an unsecure private communication system.
Obama prejudiced the emails investigation. Long before it was formally ended, he publicly pronounced Clinton innocent. He theorized that she had not intended to harm the United States. Even if true, that fact would be irrelevant — it is not an element of the statutory offenses at issue, under which several military officials, who also had no intent to harm our country, have nevertheless been prosecuted. (It also had nothing to do with her quite intentional destruction of thousands of emails, many relating to government business — also a serious crime.)
As night follows day, the FBI and the Justice Department relied on Obama’s errant and self-interested rationale in dropping the case against Clinton and her accomplices. What did Obama’s subordinates do after he patently interfered in the investigation? Well, then-FBI director James Comey began drafting a statement exonerating Clinton months before the investigation ended — i.e., before over a dozen key witnesses, including Clinton herself, had been interviewed. Indeed, it has now been reported that Comey’s draft initially declaimed that Clinton had been “grossly negligent” in handling classified information — an assertion that tracked the language of one of the statutes Clinton violated. Later, in the statement he made publicly on July 5, 2016, Director Comey instead used the term “extremely careless” — substantively indistinguishable from “grossly negligent,” but the semantic shift appeared less tantamount to a finding of guilt.
In the aftermath, we extensively examined the Clinton investigation’s hyper-sensitivity to the attorney-client privilege.
Note that the lawyer for Manafort and Gates was forced to testify against her clients based on the theory that she had participated — however unwittingly — in their scheme to cover up their lobbying efforts on behalf a Ukrainian political party. Aggressively, Mueller’s team contended that even if the lawyer had not intended to help her clients mislead the government, their use of her services was intended to dupe the government. That, Mueller argued, brought their communications with the lawyer under the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege. Chief Judge Howell agreed. As a result, the lawyer’s communications with Manafort and Gates lost their confidentiality protection, such that Mueller could compel her to reveal them to the grand jury.
Compare that with the Justice Department’s treatment of the lawyers representing Mrs. Clinton and her accomplices. Actually, I shouldn’t really put it that way because . . . Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers were her accomplices.
As we’ve previously explained, the Justice Department refused to invoke the crime-fraud exception to explore what advice Clinton lawyers gave her information technology contractor before he supposedly took it on himself to delete and destroy her emails.
Furthermore, the Justice Department and the FBI tolerated unlawful arrangements whereby subjects of the investigation were permitted to act as private lawyers in the probe regarding matters in which they had been involved as government officials. Perhaps more astonishingly, subjects of the investigation — such as Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, who participated directly in the process by which Clinton decided which emails to surrender to the State Department and which to withhold as “private” — were permitted to act as attorneys for the principal subject of the investigation, Clinton herself.
This arrangement was not merely unethical; it would have badly compromised the case if there had been any real intention to prosecute. As the highly experienced government investigators and attorneys involved had to know, if there had been an indictment, prosecutors would have been accused both of bringing the witnesses together to get their story straight, and of undermining Clinton’s right to prepare a defense by having government witnesses participate in the formulation of her legal strategy.
While Mueller’s prosecutors subpoenaed Manafort’s lawyer to the grand jury to testify against him, the Obama Justice Department largely shunned the grand jury while colluding with lawyers representing the Clinton emails subjects. The FBI, for example, was foreclosed from pursuing obvious lines of inquiry in an interview of Cheryl Mills.
Even though Manafort was cooperating with congressional investigators, providing them with hundreds of pages of documents, Mueller did not request documents from him and his lawyers. Instead, his prosecutors and investigators obtained a search warrant to rifle through Manafort’s Virginia home, which they executed in a predawn raid, reportedly breaking in with guns drawn while the Manaforts were sleeping and not allowing Mrs. Manafort to get out of bed before checking her for weapons.
In stark contrast, the Clinton Justice Department would not even issue grand-jury subpoenas to compel the production of physical evidence — such as the private laptop computers used by Clinton’s subordinates to store her emails (a number of which contained classified information). Instead, investigators politely asked lawyers to turn over pertinent items, and they made extraordinary agreements to restrict the information they would be permitted to look at (such as an agreement that prevented agents from looking at information on the Mills and Samuelson computers during the time frame when attempts to obstruct congressional investigations may have occurred).
It is worth noting that, very similarly, the Obama Justice Department and the FBI did not seize the servers of the Democratic National Committee, even though much of the collusion case hinges on the conclusion that these servers were hacked by Russian operatives. Instead, the FBI politely requested that the servers be surrendered so the Bureau’s own renowned forensic investigators could examine them. When the DNC refused, the Justice Department did not issue a subpoena or obtain a search warrant; to the contrary, the FBI and DOJ agreed to accept the findings of CrowdStrike, a private investigative firm retained by the DNC’s (and the Clinton campaign’s) attorneys.
Manafort has been charged with multiple felonies for failure to register as a foreign agent, an offense the government almost never prosecutes — the Justice Department’s practice is to encourage foreign agents to comply with the law rather than indict them for failing to do so. By contrast, the FBI and Justice Department rationalized their failure to charge Clinton for mishandling classified information by claiming that her offense was so rarely prosecuted that it would be unfair — it would smack of invidious selective prosecution — to charge her with even a single offense. Clinton’s homebrew server system stored well over 2,000 emails that contained classified information, including over 100 that were undeniably classified at the time they were sent. Eight of those involved chains of communications classified as top secret, the classification the government assigns to information the mishandling of which could be expected to cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security (and seven of these were designated as “special access program,” meaning mishandling could be expected to expose critical intelligence programs and endanger the lives of intelligence sources).
George Papadopoulos is a low-level subject of the collusion investigation who did not commit any crimes in his many contacts with Russia-connected sources. Yet Mueller induced him to plead guilty to a felony count of lying to investigators about the timing of his first meeting with such a source. In stark contrast, while a number of Clinton subordinates asserted their Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions on the ground that truthful answers could incriminate them, none of them was prosecuted. Instead, the Obama Justice Department gave them immunity.
Mueller alleges that Manafort lied to the Justice Department when he finally (in late 2016 and early 2017) filed paperwork under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). Although Congress has made the making of false statements in FARA submissions a misdemeanor, Mueller charged Manafort with both this misdemeanor offense and a separate felony (under the statute that generally makes lying to government investigators a crime). Thus, he turned a single offense into two crimes and drastically inflated the potential penalty — well beyond what Congress intended for the offense.
By contrast, several subjects of the Clinton emails investigation made blatant misrepresentations in FBI interviews. For example, Secretary Clinton’s former top aides, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, claimed not to have known about Clinton’s private server system when they were working for her at the State Department — even though there is an email exchange in which they discussed it (and Abedin had an email address on the system).
For her part, Mrs. Clinton claimed not to know what the designation “[C]” means in classified documents. As a longtime consumer of classified information, Clinton obviously knew it means “confidential.” Upon becoming secretary of state, Clinton signed an acknowledgment that she had been indoctrinated in the rules and procedures governing the secure handling of classified information. In it, she represented that she had read and understood an executive order — signed by her husband when he was president — that describes the levels of classification, including confidential. Yet, Clinton ludicrously told interviewing agents she thought “[C]” might have something to do with putting information in alphabetical order.
Clinton further claimed that she could not recall the indoctrination in the handling of classified information. Not only had she signed the acknowledgment; she had also written in her memoir, Hard Choices, about the extraordinary measures national-security officials are required to take when reviewing and storing classified information.
In addition, Mrs. Clinton also testified under oath at a congressional hearing that she had provided the State Department with “all my work-related e-mails.” She knew she had done this, she explained, because her lawyers carefully “went through every single e-mail.” Both of these statements were patently false.
But that’s the way it goes. Often, the Justice Department is so hell-bent on making the case, it will play an intimidating game of hardball if that’s what it takes. On rare occasions, though, it works just as hard to not make the case — to see no evil. We can all be thankful, I’m sure, that politics has nothing to do with it.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.
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