On Wednesday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a largely unredacted version of then-Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s August 2017 “scope memo” outlining the authority of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and the document reveals for that Mueller’s authority went significantly past what was known beforehand by Olympic stretching.
I’ve said all along that Rod Rosenstein was the linchpin for the cover-up of the 2016 attempted government coup by the Obama DOJ, FBI, and intelligence community.
Rosenstein oversaw Mueller’s investigation and was a key player in the path that the probe followed. He helped put the country through two years of hell and a Constitutional crisis. He was the subject of a two-page memo written by then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe that outlined how Rosenstein allegedly offered to wear a wire in the White House “to collect additional evidence on the president’s true intentions,” and thought the scheme was doable, because “he was not searched when he entered the White House.”
This is no different from when fired and disgraced former FBI director James Comey was sent by Barack Obama to “brief” President-Elect Donald Trump on the phony Steele dossier. Comey wasn’t really there to brief Trump, he was there to mention the items contained in the “salacious and unverified” dossier, in the hopes that Trump would run his mouth admitting he did certain things, believing he was safe around Comey. Well, it didn’t really work out too well for Comey, because Trump’s not an idiot, and nothing in the dossier was true. The sick part of it all is that the people involved in the coup attempt all knew from the very beginning that nothing in the dossier was real. It was a bunch of garbage.
Rosenstein has denied the allegations and slammed the FBI., specifically Andrew McCabe.
It was previously revealed that in May 2017, Rosenstein authorized Mueller to probe “i) any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation; [and] iii) any other matters within the scope of [obstruction of justice laws].”
However, Rosenstein’s August 2017 scope memo had remained largely redacted. It was redacted not to protect sources, but to protect themselves from getting caught in what they were doing. The newly released version of the document makes clear that Rosenstein did not hesitate to authorize a deep-dive criminal probe into the Trump team that extended way beyond Russian interference efforts. They figured if they couldn’t manufacture Russian collusion they would have a backup plan of attack.
Concerning the case of George Papadopoulos, a low-level former Trump foreign policy aide, Mueller was authorized to probe whether or not there had been a “crime or crimes” committed when he allegedly acted “as an unregistered agent of the government of Israel,” the brand new, lesser-redacted scope memo states.
That referred to a potential offense under the Foreign Agents Registration Act [FARA] , a little-known statute which, from 1966 to 2015, had been utilized only seven times. FARA prosecutions increased dramatically in recent years, and prosecutor Brandon L. Van Grack was appointed to head up a new FARA unit at Justice in 2019.
But, since then, Van Grack was being scrutinized for telling a federal court that he turned over all of the relevant exculpatory information involving former Trump National Security Adviser Lt. General Michael Flynn, even though a bunch of exculpatory documents surfaced last week, together with a top official’s handwritten memo debating whether or not the FBI’s “goal” was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”
Van Grack, it also came out this week, failed to supply evidence to Flynn’s attorneys that anti-Trump former FBI agent Peter Strzok intervened to instruct the FBI case manager dealing with the Flynn investigation to keep the probe open, even after the Washington field office of the FBI wanted to shut the case down for lack of evidence. Another Strzok text talked about that the FBI’s “7th floor” (FBI upper management) may have been involved in the choice to keep the Flynn case alive.
The newly released version of the 2017 scope memo also makes it very clear that Mueller might look into whether or not Flynn “committed a crime or crimes by engaging in conversations with Russian government officials during the period of the Trump transition.” They knew he was going to be the National Security Adviser for Trump, and there is nothing unusual about a man in that position talking with ambassadors of foreign nations. These scumbags just wanted to throw dirt at Trump, so they made a lot of hay about nothing, and threw a 33-year military man under the bus.
That was an apparent reference to the Logan Act, which has by no means been used in a modern criminal prosecution and had a questionable constitutional status; it was enacted in 1799 in an era before telephones and was meant to prevent people from falsely claiming to represent the United States government overseas. For a good example of a Logan Act violation just look at former Obama Secretary of State John Kerry who during the Trump administration was in contact with the Iranian regime government and was advising them how to handle President Trump, including telling them to ignore Trump and wait him out until his term was over. That is negotiating with the enemy on US foreign policy.
Liberal law professor Jonathan Turley said it was “chilling” that the FBI apparently was making an attempt to premise a case on the Logan Act.
“Any criminal investigation grounded in Logan Act questions is an obvious political pretext to attack the Trump Administration,” Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mike Johnson (R-LA) wrote to the missing-in-action FBI Director Christopher Wray on Monday, in a letter seeking in-person interviews and documents. “FBI attorney Lisa Page admitted to Congress the Justice Department saw the Logan Act as an ‘untested’ and ‘very, very old’ statute.”
The Rosenstein scope memo also authorized a FARA review into Flynn’s dealings with Turkey. Prosecutors have suggested Flynn’s guilty plea on one count of false statements to the FBI is what allowed him to escape liability for a potential FARA charge.
Moreover, the scope memo said that Mueller was charged specifically with investigating whether or not a number of former Trump officials, including Carter Page, Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort, had “committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election for President of the United States.” In the end, it turns out that the Obama administration interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Hillary Clinton and harm Donald Trump. The Obama administration did far worse than any foreign entity has ever done to interfere in a presidential election.
Collusion just isn’t a defined U.S. crime, meaning Mueller had a broad mandate to look for any foreign involvement by these officials searching for some criminal activity. Previously, the released version of the scope memo made clear that Manafort was under a probe for possible collusion and criminal activity. And even there we learned that the so-called “black ledger” that helped convict Manafort was made up. It was fake and never existed.
In the end, Mueller had to admit that he and his 9 angry Democrats found no illegal activity and no collision. The knew it from day one because the first person Mueller hired to prosecute the case was Andrew Weissmann, a notoriously unscrupulous lawyer who was told by Bruce Ohr, the #4 guy at DOJ at the time, that the Steele dossier was not credible, in fact, it was garbage. He knew that because Fusion GPS hire his wife to compile it. Weissmann was in Ohr’s briefing before he was ever hired by Mueller.
A huge part of the scope memo still remains redacted.
These people need to be charged and prosecuted.
