Special Counsel John Durham
Barr makes it harder for a Biden AG to bury the truth about FBI abuses. The Editorial Board
Democrats have tried to draw a curtain over the FBI’s
Russia-collusion investigation since their party’s role in that politicized
probe came to light. A Biden Administration will have a harder time burying the
truth now that Attorney General Bill Barr has made U.S. Attorney John Durham a
special counsel.
Mr. Barr on Tuesday alerted Congress
to his Oct. 19 decision, two weeks before the election, to grant Mr. Durham the
status of a special counsel. Mr. Durham has been investigating the decision by
the FBI and intelligence agencies to target Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Mr.
Durham had planned to wrap up this summer, but the pandemic and new discoveries
intervened. So Mr. Barr wanted to “provide him and his team with the assurance
that they could complete their work, without regard to the outcome of the
election,” according to Mr. Barr’s letter to Congress.
In other words, he wants to make it harder for the next AG to
sack Mr. Durham. Under DOJ regulations, special counsels aren’t subject to
“day-to-day supervision” and can only be removed for “misconduct, dereliction
of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause, including
violation of department policies.”
Democrats were prime movers of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe,
handing the bureau a fictitious dossier that became the basis for secret
surveillance warrants, years of media speculation, and special counsel Robert
Mueller. Obama officials and Congressional Democrats were part of the
spectacle—including some who may want to serve in a Biden Administration. Mr.
Biden’s AG will be under pressure to protect reputations by shutting down Mr.
Durham before he can issue indictments or an embarrassing report.
As President, Mr. Biden could still direct his Attorney General
to fire Mr. Durham—but at a high political price. Democrats defended Mr.
Mueller’s special-counsel status as crucial to finding the truth. and Mr. Barr
said this week that Mr. Durham should be provided the protections of “the same
regulation.”
Mr. Durham’s decision to accept special-counsel status suggests
he wants to see his probe through to the end. He has received much criticism,
not least from Mr. Trump, for not issuing indictments before the election. But
that decision followed Justice guidelines. And he deserves the chance to tell
the public what he’s learned and whether laws were broken in the worst FBI
scandal since J. Edgar Hoover.
We dislike special counsels because they are typically insulated
from political accountability, though we advised Mr. Trump not to fire Mr.
Mueller. In this case we’d advise Mr. Biden not to dismiss Mr. Durham for
similar reasons since he is the only chance Americans will get of holding
people accountable. Ending his probe will smack of a coverup.
Mr. Durham plays it by the book, as he and Mr. Barr showed by
not issuing indictments close to the election. There’s no reason to think Mr.
Durham will abuse his special-counsel authority or even that he has any political
motivation—in contrast to Mr. Mueller’s team of partisan prosecutors led by
Andrew Weissmann.
Democrats are criticizing Mr. Barr’s decision, with House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler saying Mr. Barr wants to “settle old scores.” No, he wants the American people to know the truth so there is less chance that this will happen again. Mr. Durham is investigating to restore integrity to the FBI and Justice Department.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Is Biden about to make first blunder?
How will Biden respond to Iran’s ‘no’ to a new deal?
Tehran has already
signaled that it won’t renegotiate Obama’s pact. How will a new president
change that if he’s already given up all of his leverage?
By Jonathan Tobin
We
didn’t have to wait until after Jan. 20 for the first exchange of positions
between the next American administration and the Iranian regime. In an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, President-elect Joe Biden erased
any doubt that the United States will re-enter the nuclear deal with Tehran.
And rather than waiting to give their response, the Iranians shot back
immediately that they would accept no changes to that deal, as Biden said he would seek
after putting it back in place.
Biden’s
stand was not surprising. Friedman is a shameless self-promoter and poseur as a
deep thinker on foreign policy. He’s also a longtime critic of Israel and a
member in good standing of the media “echo chamber” that led the cheerleading
for the 2015 nuclear pact during the Obama administration. Nevertheless, he
tried to steer Biden towards a more rational position than the one we’ve been
hearing from Democrats during the election, as well as one rooted in the
contemporary strategic situation rather than the assumptions that guided his
old boss.
Friedman tried to persuade Biden to
shift the focus of his approach to Iran and seek to curtail Iran’s illegal and
highly dangerous missile production as part of any return to diplomacy with
Tehran rather than an exclusive focus on the nuclear issue. He also tried to
indicate that holding onto the leverage over the Iranians that Biden would
inherit from President Donald Trump in the form of tough sanctions, rather than
merely turn back the clock to January 2017, was not necessarily a bad idea.
But Biden was having none of it.
Responding with his characteristic impatience with any ideas that deviate from
whatever piece of conventional wisdom he has lazily attached himself to, he
dismissed Friedman’s suggestion.
As Friedman related in his column, Biden
responded by saying, “Look, there’s a lot of talk about precision missiles and
all range of other things that are destabilizing the region,” said Biden. But
the fact is that “the best way to achieve getting some stability in the region”
is to deal “with the nuclear program.”
In other words, he was sticking like
glue to the same position that President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of
State John Kerry adopted during their negotiations with Iran. They ignored
Iran’s missiles, its status as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism
and its open boasts of achieving regional hegemony by having its surrogates and
auxiliaries take control of countries around the region. They focused solely on
the nuclear issue, which, to be fair, is an existential threat to both the
region and the West.
But in doing so—and by resolving to get
a deal no matter how high a price they had to pay or how little the Islamist
regime would give in return—Obama and Kerry set the stage for the diplomatic
disaster that ensued. Instead of negotiating a deal that would fulfill his 2012
campaign promise to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, he wound up accepting one
that left it in place and would, via sunset provisions that the Iranians
insisted on, end up giving the ayatollahs a path to a nuclear weapon with
Western approval.
That allowed Obama to pretend that he
had solved the problem of the Iranian nuclear threat. But all he had actually
accomplished was to leave his successors a ticking time bomb that, sooner or
later, they would be forced to deal with.
Rather than kicking the can down the
road as his predecessor had done, Trump seized the nettle, withdrew from
Obama’s sham and implemented a “maximum pressure” policy of sanctions designed
to eventually force the Iranians to renegotiate. Taking the advice of their
former negotiating partner Kerry, the Iranians decided to wait Trump out and
hope for a softer touch to replace him in 2021.
Unfortunately, if Biden sticks to what
he told Friedman, that’s exactly what they will get.
By pledging to return to the deal first
and to drop sanctions—and only then attempt to renegotiate the pact in order to
eliminate the sunset provisions, as well as maintain the free pass Obama
granted Iran for its missiles, terrorism and adventurism—Biden is setting
himself up for failure. If restoring the weak deal, which Iran will be only to
happen to pretend to comply with, the clock will resume ticking towards an
Iranian bomb.
You don’t have to accept Trump’s
self-evaluation as a great dealmaker to understand that his proposed path to a
better nuclear deal made more sense. If the United States gives up all its
leverage first and only then seeks to improve the nuclear pact, as Biden
appears bent on doing, the chances of success are slim and none.
The Iranians had their way with Obama
and Kerry because they sensed their desperation. Every time Iran said “no” to
their demands, the United States responded by agreeing to drop the issue.
Now they’re hoping to repeat that
pattern with Biden—a president who will likely have other priorities once in
office. Moreover, with a foreign-policy team composed entirely of Obama alumni
who have spent the last four years claiming that everything they did was right
despite all evidence to the contrary, coupled with a left-wing Democratic Party
activist base that will regard a tough stand on Iran as unacceptable, Biden will
have a lot of reasons to accept the Iranians’ rebuff and move on to other
issues.
The question here is not one about
Biden’s sympathy for Israel or even whether he has a sufficient grasp of the
threat that Iran poses. Even if he has no desire to endanger Israel—or its Arab
allies, who are equally incensed at the idea of Biden reversing Trump’s stands
on Iran—and genuinely wants to reduce the danger Tehran poses, it’s impossible
to view this first exchange between the next president and the Islamist regime
with anything but dismay.
If Biden really wants to reduce the
danger to the world from Iran, then he has to wake up and realize that the
situation has changed since Obama and Kerry were squandering their leverage
with Iran back in 2013.
The idea that unless the nuclear deal is
restored, Iran will quickly acquire a bomb is false. The danger is not that it
will tempt fate and the possibility of uniting the West (including reluctant
European nations that would rather profit from trade with Tehran than to stop it
from attacking its neighbors) by building a weapon now. The problem is what
happens if the West does nothing and sticks to the false belief that Obama’s
deal protected anyone.
As a new president, Biden still has the
opportunity to begin negotiating in a manner that has a chance of advancing
American interests. But if he sticks to what he told Friedman, it’s likely that
the Iranians will think he is as easy a mark as Obama and Kerry turned out to
be. That would be disastrous for the United States and those who still look to
it for leadership.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News
Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Is it possible Trump actually won by so many votes, in critical key swing states, Democrats had to work hard to overcome his plurality and thus exposed hemselves to so many innumerable cover ups it became easier to uncover their questionable actions?
Breaking: HUGE: Sidney Powell Drops HARD EVIDENCE – Pictures of Check Stubs Paid to People to Ballot Harvest
And: You can dispute evidence but at least there is evidence:
And this evidence has caused Gov. Kemp to rethink:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/
And:
Breaking: THE MOST IMPORTANT SPEECH OF TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY
And:
Melanie Phillips delves into concerns about the wide gulf between Obama/Biden's and Trump's attitude regarding Israel:
https://www.israelhayom.com/
Finally:
How Biden will resolve potential dispute(s) with Kamala:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The tactic may be dirty but it is generally effective.
First, attack Giuliani and make him appear foolish then everything he does and says afterwards is besmirched and less believable:
| ‘They stole an election:’ Giuliani makes Trump ballot fraud case to Michigan legislature |
| Trump attorney led a group of witnesses at Michigan hearing. | |
| |
will Biden respond to Iran’s ‘no’ to a new deal
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