You Decide

After Mueller’s Exoneration of Trump, Full Disclosure

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY March 23, 2019 11:13 AM

Source: National Review

"......Well, if we’re going to have disclosure, fine. But let’s have full disclosure: Mueller’s report in addition to the FISA applications; the memoranda pertinent to the opening and continuation of the investigation; the testimony in secret hearings; the scope memorandum Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein issued on August 2, 2017, after failing to cite a crime when he appointed Mueller — let’s have all of it.

As far as the special counsel’s report goes, because of the way the regulations work (at least when the Justice Department deigns to follow them), we now have Mueller’s bottom line, but not his reasoning and the underlying facts. It is the opposite of the Trump opposition’s preferred Roger Stone and George Papadopoulos scenario, where Mueller’s team spins pages and pages of “Gee, sure seems like a lot of almost-collusion here” before you flip to the end and find that there’s no case — just a campaign hanger-on who lied to an investigator long after the imaginary espionage conspiracy occurred. At the moment, we just have Mueller’s conclusion: There is no basis to indict the president for a crime — not collusion, not obstruction, not false statements. The collusion-peddlers, who took great umbrage at the suggestion that “VERIFIED” FISA surveillance-warrant applications should be disclosed, now demand Mueller’s full report so they can get to the familiar work of obscuring the bottom line and spinning the spin.

As we’ve noted before, unlike Mueller, who needs a crime to indict, Congress does not need a crime to impeach. The media-Democrat alliance does not need a crime to inflate Mueller’s not-quite-so stories into treason. To keep this carnival rolling on for another year and a half, they just need fodder for the narrative — which is so predictably morphing from the collusion narrative to the impeachment narrative to the campaign narrative. ....."

"......There was no need for a special counsel. And there was no case — again, obviously. Mueller never charged any Trump associate with any kind of espionage conspiracy. As we’ve pointed out repeatedly, when prosecutors have a conspiracy case, they induce the cooperating accomplice witnesses to plead guilty to the conspiracy and implicate the other conspirators at the time of the plea. Mueller, instead, pled his putative accomplices to process crimes of lying to investigators, and to massive fraud crimes that had nothing to do with Trump or Russia. No competent prosecutor builds a case that way — and Mueller is an exceptionally competent prosecutor....."

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/trump-russia-investigation-mueller-report-full-disclosure-documents-testimony/