By John
Hinderaker I POWERLINE
Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images
Scott wrote this morning about the extraordinary email
that National Security Advisor Susan Rice wrote to herself at 12:15 on January
20, 2017, within minutes of when President Trump was inaugurated.
It must have
been her last act, more or less, before she vacated the White House. So
obviously the email was important to her. But why would it be important to send
an email to herself (the only person copied was one of her aides)?
If you read the email, which Scott
posted along with Senator Grassley’s letter to Rice, it is obvious that it
is a CYA memo. But the question is, whose A is being C’d?
Most attention, so far, has focused
on the first two paragraphs of the email, which describe a meeting that
occurred around two weeks earlier.
The participants included Barack Obama, Joe
Biden, James Comey, Sally Yates–who turns up like a bad penny whenever
skulduggery is afoot–and Rice:
President Obama began the
conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every
aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement
communities “by the book”. The President stressed that he is not asking about,
initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He
reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would
by the book.
This is pure boilerplate. It
represents, obviously, the company line.
But Rice did not write her email to
cover Barack Obama’s rear end. If she or anyone else had wanted to document the
claim that Obama said to proceed “by the book,” the appropriate course would
have been an official memo that copied others who were present and would have
gone into the file. (My guess is that such a memo was written, but we haven’t
seen it.)
In my opinion, the important part of the email is not the paragraph
that purports to exonerate Obama, but the paragraphs that follow:
From a national security
perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we
engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any
reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.
The next paragraph of the email
remains classified and has been redacted. The email concludes:
The President asked Comey to inform
him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share
classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.
Why did Susan Rice send herself an
email purporting to document this part of the meeting? Because she was C’ing
her own A.
Rice was nervous about the fact that, at the president’s
direction, she had failed to “share information fully as it relates to Russia”
with President Trump’s incoming national security team. This violated longstanding
American tradition.
Outgoing administrations have always cooperated in the
transition to a new administration, whether of the same or the opposing party,
especially on matters relating to national security.
Susan Rice is far from the brightest
bulb on the tree, but she was well aware that by
concealing facts ostensibly relating to national security from her counterpart
in the new administration–General Michael Flynn–she was, at a minimum,
violating longstanding civic norms.
If she actually lied to Flynn, she
could have been accused of much worse.
So Rice wanted to be able to retrieve
her email, if she found herself in a sticky situation, and tell the world that
she hid relevant facts about Russia from the new administration on Barack
Obama’s orders.
What were the secrets that Obama
wanted to keep from the new administration?
We can easily surmise that the
fact that the Steele memo was paid for by the Democratic Party; that the FBI
had to some degree collaborated with Steele; that the Clinton campaign had fed
some of the fake news in the dossier to Steele; and that Comey’s FBI had used
Steele’s fabrications as the basis for FISA warrants to spy on the Trump
campaign were among the facts that Obama and his minions didn’t want Michael
Flynn and Donald Trump to know.
Susan Rice, we can infer, was told to keep
these secrets, and if anyone ever asked why she had failed to disclose them to
Michael Flynn and others on Trump’s team, or even lied to those people, she
would have the defense that President Obama ordered her to do it.
There may be more to it than this.
The redacted paragraph likely contains more information about what it was that
Rice wasn’t supposed to tell the Trump team. One of these days, we will learn
what was blacked out.
The fact that Michael Flynn was
Susan Rice’s counterpart in the incoming administration may also be
significant.
We know that the FBI agents who interviewed General Flynn–even
Peter Strocz!–reported that they didn’t think he had lied about anything.
And
yet, Obama’s DOJ and Bob Mueller’s “investigation”–basically a continuation of
Obama’s corrupt Department of Justice under another, less accountable
name–persecuted Flynn to the point where he finally pled guilty to a single
count of lying to the FBI in order, as he says, to end the madness and the
financial drain.
Why were the Democrats so determined
to discredit General Flynn?
Perhaps because they wanted to pre-empt any outrage
that may otherwise have followed on revelations that the Obama administration’s
National Security Advisor hid important facts from her successor during the
transition, and may have lied to him about those facts, in violation of all
American tradition.
CYA memos are rarely a good idea.
Most often, they reveal what the author was trying to conceal. I think that is
the case with regard to Susan Rice’s now-infamous email to herself.
____________________________
Scandal, Corruption, Lawbreaking —
And So What?
By
Victor Davis Hanson I National Review
What is the endgame to never-ending wrongdoing?
The FISA-gate, Clinton emails, and Uranium One scandals are
sort of reaching a consensus.
Many things quite wrong and illegal were done by
both Hillary Clinton and her entourage and members of the Obama agencies and
administration — both the acts themselves and the cover-ups and omissions that
ensued.
Remember, in the FISA-gate scandal
such likely widespread criminal behavior was predicated on two premises:
1)
certainty of an easy Clinton victory, after which the miscreants would be not
only excused but probably rewarded for their zeal;
2) progressive hubris in
which our supposedly moral betters felt it their right, indeed their duty, to
use unethical and even unlawful means for the “greater good” — to achieve their
self-described moral ends of stopping the crude and reactionary Trump.
The wrongdoing probably includes
attempting to warp a U.S. election, Russian collusion, repeatedly misleading
and lying before the FISA courts, improperly surveilling American citizens,
unmasking the names of citizens swept up in unlawful surveillance and then
illegally leaking them to the press, disseminating and authenticating opposition
smears during a political campaign, lying under oath to Congress, obstructing
ongoing investigations, using federal funds to purchase ad hominem gossip
against a presidential candidate, blatant conflicts of interests, weaponizing
federal investigations, trafficking in and leaking classified information . . .
The list goes on and on.
The State Department is now
involved. Apparently anyone who was a former Clinton smear artist can pass
fantasies to a sympathetic or known political appointee at State. And if the
“dossier” fits the proper narrative and shared agenda, it gains credence enough
to ensure that it is passed up to senior State officials and on to the FBI.
Perhaps a private citizen with a grudge against a rival should try that as
well.
These scandals will grow even
greater before various congressional investigations expire.
But then what?
In some sense, we are in uncharted
territory — given the misadventure of appointing Robert Mueller as special
counsel. His team is now replaying the role of Patrick Fitzgerald in the
Scooter Libby case: investigating a crime that did not exist and that even
if it did was committed by someone else.
The Mueller team’s likely parachute
will have little if anything to do with the Russian collusion that it
originally and chiefly was appointed to investigate. Instead, it’s likely to
settle for perjury and obstruction charges against peripheral Trump officials
(if the cases are not thrown out by possible reliance on tainted FISA
transcripts).
The indictments may gain a little traction
if they are timed to be released before the midterm elections, hyped in the
mainstream media, and calibrated to be tried before liberal D.C. juries.
The
investigation may seek some redemption or justification if it criminalizes the
secretly taped bombast of a Trump family member, catching him in some sort of
perjury trap or business misdeed.
Yet Mueller’s appointment makes
resolution of FISA-gate and its associated scandals more difficult to resolve.
His value for the Left is not in what he will find but that his mere
presence will become an argument ipso facto for never again appointing
anyone like him.
After all, has the U.S. government ever had two special
counsels working at cross-purposes, each investigating one of the two
candidates in the prior presidential election?
Once a special counsel is appointed,
can he be superseded by a really special or special-special
counsel, an attorney who might have to investigate the other special counsel
(who was in charge of the botched Clinton Uranium One scandal, who was
appointed through a clear and constructed conflict of interest, and whose own
team is largely composed of proud partisans and campaign donors, and who may
have been involved in using poisoned FISA surveillance data to leverage
confessions or indictments)?
It is unlikely that Rod Rosenstein
will demand to see whether Mueller, after almost nine months, has actually
found much evidence of collusion.
Nor is Rosenstein apt to order Mueller to
cease a mostly dead-end investigation and redirect it along a freeway of
Clinton-Obama-connected collusion, obstruction, and fraud. (Read the
Page-Strzok text archive to see why the present weaponized bureaucratic culture
in D.C. is utterly incapable of disinterested inquiry.)
Still, Democrats at some point will
see that what they thought was the formerly defensible is now becoming
absolutely indefensible.
Adam Schiff, after months of leaking, making grandiose
false statements on cable TV, and getting punked by Russian comedians, is now a
caricature. He became the sad legislative bookend to the neurotic James Comey.
Schiff will probably soon be forced to pivot back to his former incarnation as
a loud critic of FISA-court abuse.
Those who still persist in denying
the extent of clear wrongdoing will suffer the tragicomic fate of Watergate-era
Representative Charles Sandman (an authentic World War II hero) and Rabbi
Baruch Korff (who as a child fled Ukrainian pogroms). The last diehard
supporters of Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment, they both ended up widely discredited
because of their political inability or personal unwillingness to see what was
right before their eyes.
After all, professed civil
libertarians, hard-hitting investigative reporters, and skeptics of
nontransparent and overreaching federal agencies are now insidiously defending
not the just the indefensible, but what they have claimed to have fought
against their entire lives. Woodward and Bernstein in their sunset years
have missed the far greater scandal and in their dotage will likely nullify what
they once did in their salad days.
If the economy keeps improving, if
Trump’s popularity nears 50 percent, and if polls show the midterm elections
still tightening, we should see the politics of Democratic equivocation sooner
rather than later.
So what would be their terms to call
it all off?
I think the Democratic fallback
position will be to point to the career carnage at the FBI and DOJ as
punishment enough.
Director Comey was fired. Deputy
Director Andrew McCabe was forcibly retired. FBI lawyer Lisa Page was
reassigned and demoted.
FBI general counsel James Baker resigned. Senior agent
Peter Strzok was reassigned and demoted.
The former FBI director’s chief of
staff, James Rybicki, resigned.
Mike Kortan, FBI assistant director for public
affairs, took retirement.
Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr was reassigned and
demoted.
Justice Department’s counterintelligence head, David Laufman,
resigned.
A cadre of others “unexpectedly” have left, allegedly (or
conveniently) for private-sector jobs.
Such career implosions do not happen
without cause.
And if that is not enough, Democrats
may further tsk-tsk that if there were perhaps zealotry and excesses, they were
in the distant past.
An out-of-office Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power,
James Clapper, John Brennan — and Barack Obama — may have stepped over the line
a bit in matters of surveillance, unmasking, and leaking. But do we really wish
to go back and put another administration on trial, politicizing governmental
transitions?
And if that is not enough, Democrats
will also shrug that the collusion mess was analogous to another Republican
Benghazi hearing: lots of embarrassing smoke of “what difference does it make”
admissions, but little fire in proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the main
players engaged in prosecutable crimes.
And if that is still not enough,
Democrats in extremis may concede that Mueller could retire with his minor
scalps, and both sides then could call it quits, even-steven.
Who knows,
perhaps they will say that Christopher Steele had a history with Russian
oligarchs and was using his paymaster Hillary Clinton as well as being used by
her?
Accepting any of these obfuscations
would be a grave mistake.
Despite a nonstop media assault on
Trump’s administration, Representative Devin Nunes, and the congressional
investigative committees, more than 50 percent of the public already
believes that the Trump campaign was illegally surveilled and smeared through
the confluence of the Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and the FBI.
Voters would only grow more cynical
if some Americans were allowed to abuse constitutionally protected civil
liberties, and to lie to the Congress, the FBI, and the courts, while the less
connected others go to jail for much less. Without a judicial accounting, it
will be impossible to clean up the hierarchies of the FBI and the DOJ.
Indeed, absent accountability and
punishment, the new modus operandi would be for any lame- duck incumbent
administration to use federal agencies to enhance the campaign of its own
party’s nominee. It would be only logical to conclude that criminal acts used
to help a successor would be forgotten or rewarded under the victor’s tenure.
What is needed?
Attorney General Sessions must find
muscular, ambitious, and combative prosecutors (preferably from outside
Washington, D.C., and preferably existing federal attorneys), direct them to
call a Grand Jury, and begin collating information from congressional investigations
to get to the bottom of what is likely one of gravest scandals in post-war
American history: the effort to use the federal government to thwart the
candidacy of an unpopular presidential candidate and then to smear and ruin his
early tenure as president.
Only another prosecutorial
investigation, one way or another, will lead to resolution, take the entire
mess out of the partisan arena, and keep the anemic Mueller investigation
honest — with the full knowledge that if its own investigators have violated
laws or used tainted evidence or in the past obstructed justice, then they too
will be held to account.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis
Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and
Won, released in October from Basic
Books.
