And these revelations are so profound, this corruption so deep, it is so obvious that the Special Counsel needs to be shut down immediately and that’s not even taking into account Mueller’s massive conflicts of interest himself and how his team is filled with big Democratic donors and people like Andrew Weissmann ..
.. Mueller’s investigation is and has been a witch-hunt from the very beginning. It’s built on a house of cards, and tonight it is crashing down. Look, if we as a country, if we care about the Constitution, if we believe in civil liberties, if we believe in those protections, then the special counsel must be disbanded immediately. And by the way, nobody else will say this, all charges against Paul Manafort and General Michael Flynn need to be dropped. It’s that simple.
Loudest GOP voices ignore Ryan’s lead on Nunes memo, attacking FBI and Justice Dept.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan tried to walk an impossibly narrow tightrope
.. The memo was merely about the oversight of a very few potentially bad actors in the FBI and Justice Department, the Wisconsin Republican assured reporters Thursday, before its release. “It does not impugn the Mueller investigation or the deputy attorney general.”
.. Less than 24 hours later, the memo was out, and many rank-and-file Republicans disregarded Ryan’s narrow approach. Instead, they directly assailed the reputations of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III along with the overall direction of the federal investigative agencies.
.. “My heart sank,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said in a statement alleging a sweeping conspiracy against President Trump. “Not only did it lay bare a systemic pattern of abuse within the FBI and the DOJ, it confirmed my worst fear: America’s free and fair elections were being threatened from within.”
.. A super PAC with ties to the president launched online advertising calling for Rosenstein’s ouster. One Republican suggested that the deputy attorney general should be prosecuted as a traitor.
.. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the committee chairman, declined to say whether Rosenstein should be fired and instead accused top FBI and Justice officials of sweeping violations of the law
.. “That’s the type of stuff that happens in banana republics,” Nunes said.
.. To hear Meadows and Jordan, that decision undermined every aspect of the FBI investigation into Trump’s ties to Moscow. “When you look at the facts, everything revolves around a single source. A single source that continued to put it out with multiple people to appear that there were multiple sources,” Meadows told Todd.
.. “This memo is not an indictment of the FBI, of the Department of Justice,” Ryan said.
.. Ryan’s much more narrow approach to the memo stands at odds with how it is viewed by many Republicans. They very much see the memo as a bid to undermine Rosenstein — who signed off on later warrant requests after Trump appointed him last year — and, by extension, to undermine Mueller.
.. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) took an entirely different approach, suggesting the existence of a vast conspiracy because the FBI was trying to thwart the release of the Nunes memo.
“The FBI is right to have ‘grave concerns’ — as it will shake the organization down to its core — showing Americans just how the agency was weaponized by the Obama officials/DNC/HRC to target political adversaries,” Duncan said in a tweet.
In Trump vs. the F.B.I., Trump Will Lose
And yet Mr. Trump has signaled his desire to see it made public, unredacted. He clearly sees the memo as a weapon of political warfare — a way to rid himself of Mr. Rosenstein, who oversees both the F.B.I. and the special prosecutor investigating the White House, Robert Mueller. Mr. Rosenstein has made it clear that he will not fire Mr. Mueller at the president’s whim — which, to the president, means he needs to go.
.. Mr. Trump has been transparent in his antagonism. It is not a disinterested belief that the bureau is corrupt and in need of reform. He’d been in office for only four days when F.B.I. agents came to the White House to interview the national security adviser, Mike Flynn, who’d engaged in skulduggery with Russia. Mr. Flynn lied to the F.B.I.
.. Nixon’s willing executioner back in the October 1973 was the No. 3 man at Justice, the solicitor general Robert Bork. At the end of that fateful night, Nixon promised him the next seat on the Supreme Court
.. As the bloodhounds close in on the Oval Office, he may sharpen his blade and place the prosecutor’s head on a pike. If so, he’ll have to confront the Constitution. And he’ll lose again.
Rep. Nunes’s memo crosses a dangerous line
On Monday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) moved to release a memo written by his staff that cherry-picks facts, ignores others and smears the FBI and the Justice Department — all while potentially revealing intelligence sources and methods. He did so even though he had not read the classified documents that the memo characterizes and refused to allow the FBI to brief the committee on the risks of publication and what it has described as “material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” The party-line vote to release the Republican memo but not a Democratic response was a violent break from the committee’s nonpartisan tradition and the latest troubling sign that House Republicans are willing to put the president’s political dictates ahead of the national interest.