One's Name Is Mud

by

Gadfly

            The title of this essay is an idiom that can be traced to several sources.  The one most common to Americans relates to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth.  After shooting the President, Boothe jumped from Lincoln’s box seat onto the stage at Ford Theater, breaking his leg.   Doctor Samuel Mudd provided medical aid and was later accused of being a co-conspirator in the crime.  To this day, individuals receive the moniker, “one’s name is Mud,” when determined to be “in disgrace or embroiled in scandal.”

            Today, at a no Q & A nine-minute speech, Robert Mueller may have earned the “one’s name is Mud” moniker as his legacy.

            No doubt, in the short-term, Mueller is a hero to the impeachment-obsessed Democrats.  His speech did not put his 400+ page report to rest.  He sent a clear signal (“dog whistle”?) to House Democrats that he failed to complete a legal assassination but that his report was deliberately worded to fuel a political assassination.

            In the longer term, Mueller’s tactic will be trampled by clear and overwhelming evidence (contrary to his “insufficient evidence” distraction) that members of the Administrative State actually conspired to remove a duly elected President.  As some of the evidence becomes public, it is inevitable that “the law” will prevail over politics.  The challenge will be organizing the abundance of evidence along a timeline that tells the real story.  And as Democrat-led, House committee chairs issue their abusive subpoenas, they might soon be surprised when the DOJ investigating net reaches into Congress, where Congressmen and staff members may also receive subpoenas to testify as to what they knew and when they knew it.  Democrats will quickly learn that, as they love to say, “No one, even the President, is above the law,” the same maxim applies to members of Congress and the Administrative State.

            Two very well-researched articles provide a lot of the emerging evidence.  One of the major strawmen in the political assassination attempt is the notion that Russia hacked into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server.  After the Wikileaks release, Russia was blamed for providing this information after allegedly hacking into the DNC server.  Hillary Clinton and the DNC refused to give FBI forensic experts access to their server to verify the Russia hacking.  Rather, Clinton and the DNC hired a private company called Crowdstrike to do the analysis.  So, when you hear Brennan, Comey, and Clapper say Russia hacked into the DNC server, they are repeating what the DNC and Crowdstrike want the public to believe.  For a very credible analysis that debunks this claim, read “A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack,” The Nation, August 9, 2017.  Drawing upon technical analysis provided by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), their conclusion was that “the theft of the DNC e-mails was not a hack, but some kind of inside leak that did not involve Russia.” Here is a lengthy excerpt for the article:

In the meantime, VIPS has assembled a chronology that imposes a persuasive logic on the complex succession of events just reviewed. It is this:

·        On June 12 last year, Julian Assange announced that WikiLeaks had and would publish documents pertinent to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

·        On June 14, CrowdStrike, a cyber-security firm hired by the DNC, announced, without providing evidence, that it had found malware on DNC servers and had evidence that Russians were responsible for planting it.

·        On June 15, Guccifer 2.0 first appeared, took responsibility for the “hack” reported on June 14 and claimed to be a WikiLeaks source. It then posted the adulterated documents just described.

·        On July 5, Guccifer again claimed he had remotely hacked DNC servers, and the operation was instantly described as another intrusion attributable to Russia. Virtually no media questioned this account.

It does not require too much thought to read into this sequence. With his June 12 announcement, Assange effectively put the DNC on notice that it had a little time, probably not much, to act preemptively against the imminent publication of damaging documents. Did the DNC quickly conjure Guccifer from thin air to create a cyber-saboteur whose fingers point to Russia? There is no evidence of this one way or the other, but emphatically it is legitimate to pose the question in the context of the VIPS chronology. WikiLeaks began publishing on July 22. By that time, the case alleging Russian interference in the 2016 elections process was taking firm root. In short order Assange would be written down as a “Russian agent.”

Note: DNC staffer Seth Rich was assassinated on July 12, 2019.  He was a Bernie Sanders supporter and apparently not happy about how the DNC rigged the primary.

Excerpt continued:

But its certain results so far are two, simply stated, and freighted with implications:

·        There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.

Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them, they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language. Guccifer took responsibility on June 15 for an intrusion the DNC reported on June 14 and professed to be a WikiLeaks source—claims essential to the official narrative implicating Russia in what was soon cast as an extensive hacking operation. To put the point simply, forensic science now devastates this narrative.

            The second major article with abundant evidence is far more recent:  “Joe diGenova Discusses Declassification and Origin of Obama Political Surveillance Operation…,” The Last Refuge, May 27, 2019.  It is a lengthy article with links to sources/evidence.  It implicates the usual suspects, to include Robert Mueller.

            What the left continues to count on is a complicit media that is doubling down on the removal of President Trump and an unwitting public that remains somewhat content in learning only part of the story.

 

The left’s tortured logic can only last so long.  When someone does something dishonest, lying about it is not counterintuitive behavior.  Of course, it helps to be so corrupted by power that being unscrupulous is a necessary trait.  Here are just two examples of the left’s tortured logic.

            First, on Mueller’s obstruction logic, he says that, because the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel claims a sitting president cannot be indicted, he chose not to decide on the obstruction evidence, which is an insult to jurisprudence because intent to commit a crime is an antecedent to an actual crime. If there is no crime, intent is irrelevant.  No evidence that a crime was not committed is something to be found only in Alice and Wonderland.  The legal standard is sufficient evidence to support a crime, which is consistent with the legal standard that one is presumed innocent until and only when sufficient evidence determines a crime has been committed.  To say that he could not exonerate the President because there was no evidence to prove his innocence is not the way jurisprudence is supposed to take place in America.  Even the President is entitled to due process, despite his real crime of getting elected.

Mueller claimed that because there could be no court conviction from an indictment against the President, he would not decide on obstruction; yet, he still indicted Russian players who will never see a day in court.  Is this an example of Orwellian Doublespeak?

 

Part II of Mueller’s report consists of over 200 pages of text, citing many news articles based on anonymous government leaks (and manufactured evidence) as their source.  Mueller established a compelling picture that there “appeared” to be obstruction, so he clearly signaled to the Democratic House that even though there was insufficient evidence to support a charge of obstruction, he was passing the baton to Congress for a political trial, called impeachment.  On the notion of colluding with Russia, he did decide, based on “insufficient evidence,” that there was no collusion.  In other words, although there was some evidence, it did not rise to an indictable threshold.  To even the most casual observer, there is blatant incongruity in the decisions for Parts I and II of the Mueller report.  In pursuing this path, Mueller is demonstrating that in today’s America, politics can trump the law.

            The second example of tortured logic is the reminiscing about past impeachment experiences such as Nixon and Clinton.  The only thing these two experiments had in common was an intent to impeach by the U.S. House of Representatives.

 

In the Nixon case, he had just won a landslide reelection, both in the popular vote (60.7% to 37.5%) and Electoral College (520 to 17).  Against this backdrop, some who were associated with this apparent wave of political power engaged in tremendously stupid stunts, the most egregious of which were orchestrated by John Dean (an older media darling on the scale of today’s Michael Avenatti).  There was no crime by Nixon as the predicate for impeachment proceedings.  While the House made a strong case for a cover-up by Nixon of crimes committed by others, Nixon was essentially tried in the court of public opinion thanks to “show trial” hearings (something Congressman Nadler has already teed up) and strategic releases of information to the media.

 

There is a far more accurate story about the Watergate scandal, revealed by others who, unlike anonymous sources cited by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, interviewed actual people and mentioned them by name.  Len Colodny, among other reputable investigative reporters, published incriminating details in his book, Silent Coup:  The Removal of a President.  Dean, Woodward, and The Washington Post sued Colodny and St. Martin’s Press unsuccessfully to keep the actual truth silent.  Geoff Shepard in his book, The Real Watergate Scandal:  Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down, argues that based on new evidence members of the judicial system conspired with the House Judiciary Committee to engage in illegal activities to remove Nixon.  By the way, the FBI’s Mark Felt was conveniently outed as “Deep Throat” by Bob Woodward when he passed away.  As they say, “dead men tell no lies.”  For those who have taken the time to read Colodny’s book, “Deep Throat” was General Alexander Haig, serving as Nixon’s Chief of Staff at the time.  I discuss details in another essay, “A Praetorian Guard?”

So, how was the William Clinton impeachment different?  After an independent counsel’s investigation (which reported to the US House of Representatives, not the Attorney General), Clinton was found to have committed felony crimes.  The Kenneth Starr report found 11 grounds (criminal evidence) for impeachment.  The Republican-led House forwarded two charges for impeachment—perjury and obstruction of justice-- to the Senate for conviction.  Sixty-seven votes were needed for a conviction.  There were insufficient votes to convict because votes were based mostly on political party affiliation.  Not a single Democrat voted to impeach Clinton—for actual crimes.

         

During his impeachment proceedings, Bill Clinton was defended by Cheryl Mills.  Sound familiar?  Mills was also involved in Hillary Clinton’s legal issues with the DOJ and FBI.  Lawyer-client confidentiality were sanctified in this case while perverted for Trump and his lawyers.

Why did Mueller call for a press conference today?  He wanted to send a signal.  He failed to find a legal means for removing Trump, something he clearly wanted to happen.  He allowed or ensured his 400+ page report to keep the political coup alive.  It is now a race between the Attorney General’s investigation into the investigators and Nadler’s show trials.

 

          Two years ago, I suggested a more plausible Mueller report.   Regardless of the outcome of the race between Nadler’s show trials and Barr’s investigation of the investigators, Mueller chose a side.  He will forever be known as “one’s name is Mud.”