Some days there seems no percentage in taking time to write a commentary but possibly it is worthwhile to at least try to spread unassailable analysis of just how bad it is to everyone we can. We have reviewed some compelling expose’s of what ifs, the state of law and the deep state. Most of these imply a glimmer of comeuppance for the Trump haters in the Deep State. Each article is entirely worthwhile. We excerpt some favorite passages.
DLH and R Mall
If Only Hillary Had Won . . . By Victor Davis Hanson writing at National Review
The U.S. embassy would have stayed in Tel Aviv. “Strategic patience” would likely still govern the North Korea dilemma. Fracking would be curtailed. The — rather than “our” — miners really would be put out of work. Coal certainly would not have been “beautiful.” The economy probably would be slogging along at below 2 percent GDP growth.
China would be delighted, as would Iran. But most important, there would be no collusion narrative — neither one concerning a defeated Donald Trump nor another implicating a victorious Hillary Clinton. In triumph, progressives couldn’t have cared less whether Russians supposedly had tried to help a now irrelevant Trump; and they certainly would have prevented any investigation of the winning Clinton 2016 campaign.
. . .
Poor James Comey proved the careerist par excellence, always shape-shifting, usually a day late and a dollar short in calibrating his reinventions to meet the needs of perceived electoral politics. His disastrous 2016 series of press conferences exonerating Clinton, then sort of not exonerating her, then finally re-exonerating her reflected his self-created predicament of wanting soon to preen to President Clinton that he had stopped the email investigation and cleared her — but had adroitly paid lip service to legal niceties so as to enhance even more her viability as one who’d been fully investigated and exonerated. And Comey might well have pulled that contortion off, pointing out to a dubious President Clinton that she was, after all, President Clinton and her emails ancient history.
. . .
Under a President Clinton, we would still believe that FISA courts are unimpeachable bulwarks of democracy. No one would now know anything about past requests for unmasking and leaking to the press the names of surveilled American citizens. Rod Rosenstein or Sally Yates would remind Clinton aides of their key roles in ensuring that FISA court surveillance of Donald Trump accounted for the damaging leaks that had ensured his defeat. Samantha Power would have had no need to request over 250 unmaskings as she played secret agent from her perch as UN ambassador.
. . .
The coffers of the Clinton Foundation certainly would be expanding exponentially. Robert Mueller might have been brought back in now and then for his sober and judicious work in finding no wrongdoing in the Uranium One deal.
And Donald Trump? He would be mocked and ridiculed as he barked at the moon that his wires had been tapped in Trump Tower — as the truth became insanity, and insanity the truth.
Robin Ridless, an attorney practicing in New York, wrote this for The Federalist:
The Idea That James Comey’s Leaks Were Non-Criminal Is Falling Apart
Now that the memos have been perused, the theories of a number of legal commentators have unsurprisingly proved to be full of errors, irrelevancies, and overstatements.
When former FBI director James Comey disclosed at a congressional hearing last June that he had disseminated memos to a friend, his defenders scrambled to make excuses for him. The mainstream media launched either fake news or a series of legal justifications to whitewash his violations of a litany of federal rules and laws protecting his private conversations with the president.
. . .
Now that the memos have been perused, the theories of a number of legal commentators have unsurprisingly proved to be full of errors, irrelevancies, and overstatements. . . .
Comey anticipatorily structured his actions, as well as his writings, to frame Trump, at least with his enemies, while sanitizing his own role in the frame-up
. . .
As I’ve written before, moreover, this difference between secondhand information and the memos themselves, the memos that were government documents that Comey removed and disclosed without permission, was expressly affirmed this year by a DC district court judge. Now that the memos have been made public, the Left’s dismissal of the statutory basis for conversion has become untenable. Not coincidentally, the monetary value of the memos, which Vladeck also denied, has become perfectly obvious with the publication of Comey’s tell-all and the publicity surrounding it and the role of the memos as props in Comey’s histrionic disclosures.
It is for this reason that leftist legal academics are punching up the panegyrics for Comey The Whistleblower, implying Comey had an unselfish excuse for flouting rules and norms. But as the Morison court stated, “To use the first amendment for such a purpose would be to convert the first amendment into a warrant for thievery.”
And Conrad Black writing at National Review offers what, if there is any justice, will become the:
State of the Resistance
. . .
The evidence continues to accumulate that not just former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, but his boss James Comey, and the partisan intelligence directors James Clapper and John Brennan will all be facing perjury charges, and that those responsible for the phony surveillance warrant on Carter Page (including the former attorney general, Loretta Lynch, and her chief collaborators) and ultimately a considerable swath of the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration will all be responding to serious allegations. It is at that point that the Resistance will have to show whether it has any backbone, and not just an ability to orchestrate the bigotry of the media and the stunned, dethroned solidarity of the OBushinton joint-incumbency under which the political confidence of the country largely eroded. Like officers on a sinking vessel directing passengers toward an insufficient number of lifeboats, Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi are now urging Democrats to be more subtle and restrained in calling for the impeachment of the president. As some of the leaders of the Resistance are arraigned for serious misdeeds, the impeachment of a president whose only misdemeanors are in areas of style and etiquette (though those are sometimes jarring) will increasingly seem esoteric.
. . .
There has never been any excuse for any of it, and it has accomplished nothing except to drag Trump’s accusers into a quagmire of their own making. At some point in James Comey’s tortuous book tour, as he twists and turns to square irreconcilably conflicting assertions and actions of his recent past, there will be a moment that will recall Joseph Welch’s counter-attack on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy: “Have you no decency, sir?”
. . .
There is now little to do but watch the collapse of the proud façade of the corrupt prosecutocracy that Mueller, Comey, and Fitzgerald personify, corroded and bloated by a 99 percent conviction rate, 97 percent without a trial, because of the hideous mutation of the plea-bargain system. They are all very self-righteous: “Great will be the fall of it.” The next installment of the inspector general’s report should send Comey for likely indictment as the last one did McCabe. The question then will be whether this hyper-combative president will temper justice with mercy and take the lead in deescalating this appalling state of conflict. In a civilized society, it is not necessary to kill your enemies to defeat them. And the country needs the intellectual Right that has just walked the plank on the Trump issue. Journalists are never long accountable for the drivel they say; if his perceptions return, no one will goad David Brooks for saying of Senator Obama, “I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant . . . and I’m thinking . . . he’ll be a very good president,” and of President-elect Trump, “He will resign or be impeached within a year.”
