Barr Notes: Prefers To Lead Investigation of FBI/DoJ Himself

Apologies for the somewhat crappy formatting.

As I've said in the past, I had questions about Barr's attitude toward the Special Counsel as an institution--even though he appointed Special Counsels the last time he was AG. So it's not altogether surprising that Paul Sperry is reporting:

Paul Sperry‏ @paulsperry_

BREAKING: I'm told AG Barr not fan of institution of the special counsel/prosecutor & feels public corruption cases should be dealt w inside DOJ by the attorney general, making chances of his appointing special counsel to investigate Obama FBI/DOJ officials in SpyGate scandal slim

8:45 AM - 8 Apr 2019

I think this is overall very good news. Barr has strong views on "what's been going on" and even went on record with the NYT, back in 2017, that the Hillary investigations seemed to him to be more important than anything to do with Trump:

"Of 10 former attorneys general contacted Tuesday, only one responded to a question about what they would do in Mr. Sessions’s situation.

“There is nothing inherently wrong about a president calling for an investigation,” said William P. Barr, who ran the Justice Department under President George Bush. “Although an investigation shouldn’t be launched just because a president wants it, the ultimate question is whether the matter warrants investigation.” 

"Mr. Barr said he sees more basis for investigating the uranium deal than any supposed collusion between Mr. Trump and Russia. “To the extent it is not pursuing these matters, the department is abdicating its responsibility,” he said."

Jack Posobiec is reporting the same, noting that

Is There Another Special Counsel In Our Future?

We know that AG Bill Barr has no constitutional problem with appointing a Special Counsel--he actually had extensive experience with the office the first time he was AG. Now the question is, Will he appoint a Special Counsel to get to the bottom of the Deep State plot to steer a presidential election and/or oust an elected President?

Paul Sperry reports that the decision is being run through a process inside DoJ. This should come as no surprise, since Trump and Barr are really all about restoring constitutional and legal procedure in decision making. None of which means that Barr will feel bound by the recommendation he receives. He made it clear in his confirmation testimony that he'll do what he thinks is right. Sperry:

Paul Sperry‏ @paulsperry_

I am told that AG Barr has to wait on US attorney Huber's report recommending (or not recommending) a special counsel before moving on a special counsel. Hurry up and wait!

8:38 PM - 29 Mar 2019

UPDATED: Nadler's Subpoena

There's been a fair bit of commentary regarding House Judiciary Chairman's Jerrold Nadler's subpoena for the full, unredacted Mueller Report. Nevertheless it may be helpful to go over the issue a bit more.

To begin with, the Special Counsel as we currently know it follows from provisions in the Ethics in Government Act. Those provisions were allowed to expire in 1999, but were replaced by the current DoJ Special Counsel regulations (28 CFR 600). While the previous Independent Counsel provision under the Ethics Government Act had been upheld by the Supreme Court (with only Justice Scalia dissenting), it had come under fire by both Democrats and Republicans

Justice Antonin Scalia provided critiques of the Act, based on both Constitutional law and the potential for harm in practice, in his dissenting opinion in the case Morrison v. Olson. Justice Scalia, a judicial conservative, noted that the U.S. Constitution granted consolidated power to enforce the law exclusively to the Executive Branch. The Act extended the power to initiate criminal investigation to the United States House of Representatives and the Senate, which Scalia viewed as a violation of the separation of powers. He believed that the House of Representatives' investigation through the use of a special prosecutor "[arose] out of a bitter power dispute between the President and the Legislative Branch".

Even some Congressmen who had voted for the Act criticized it privately, leading to speculation that "if it had been an anonymous vote, it would have been voted down two-to-one". ...

Specific provisions of the Act have faced criticism as either too weak or too strong. The Special Prosecutor created by Title VI was empowered to pursue investigations with minimal evidence, and was required to pursue any accusation that the District Attorney could not disprove. It allowed for legal harassment of political opponents, even in cases that prosecutors stated they would have dropped in any other federal court. ...

Mueller's "Enterprise" Witchhunt

In past articles on the Russia Hoax I've stressed that the guidelines that govern FBI investigations are the key to understanding the Deep State's assault on the Trump administration. In that regard I have several times referred to the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane case as a sort of "umbrella" investigation, one that subsumes the investigations on given individuals, such as Carter Page. The whole issue of the precise nature of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation has arisen once again, in the context of disgraced former FBI Director James Comey's testimony last week before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). I think it will prove helpful to revisit this topic because, as I hope to show, there are important consequences that flow from this.

What Kind Of Investigation Is Crossfire Hurricane?

Back on March 20, 2017, then FBI Director Comey testified before HPSCI regarding Russian "active measures" during the 2016 election. Chairman Nunes characterized the committee's work as concerned with Russian "active measures" during the 2016 presidential election, but the Democrats stated that it was all about "collusion" between the Trump campaign and "the Russians." In his testimony Comey confirmed for the committee that the FBI's investigation, which we now know as Crossfire Hurricane and which began in late July, 2016, was concerned with "any coordination between people associated with the Trump campaign and the Russians."

This is important, because in Deputy Attorney General (DAG) Rod Rosenstein's letter of May 17, 2017, in which he appointed Robert Mueller as Special Counsel (SC), Rosenstein's authorization closely tracks Comey's testimony:

The Special Counsel is authorized to conduct the investigation confirmed by then-FBI Director James B. Comey in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 20, 2017, including any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of Donald Trump; ...

There are several important bits of information that we need to take special note of in this.

• First, Mueller is not starting up a new investigation--he's taking over an already existing investigation, the same one that was confirmed by Comey two months earlier. 
• Second, and very importantly, Mueller's investigation is not authorized as a general investigation into Russian "active measures" (i.e., interference, meddling) in the 2016 campaign but instead is rather narrowly focused on "coordination between people associated with the Trump campaign and the Russians."

In other words, Rosenstein did not authorize Mueller to investigate coordination between people associated with the Clinton campaign and the Russians--only the Trump campaign.

Who's Afraid of Lisa Page?

In his testimony before the House, embattled former FBI Counterintelligence official Peter Strzok maintained that, contrary to all logical inference, any statements in text messages between himself and FBI attorney Lisa Page that appeared to exhibit bias against Donald Trump could never have affected his investigative actions. However, John Solomon, in his brilliant article (One FBI text message in Russia probe that should alarm every American), has shown that Strzok's texts actually demonstrate FBI bias at the very inception of the Special Counsel investigation. In a series of texts dated 5/19/17 (two days after Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel) Strzok stated to Page: "you and I both know ... there's no big there there." Page, in testimony to the House that followed on that of Strzok, has confirmed that the sense of this text referred to the allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. In fact, the texts show that Strzok explicitly viewed the Special Counsel investigation not as an investigation into criminal wrongdoing--as required by the Special Counsel statute--but as "an investigation leading to impeachment." In other words, he viewed the Mueller "probe" as an essentially political use of the Special Counsel statute to rid the Washington establishment of a president they didn't want. A goal he was heartily in favor of. This abuse of the Special Counsel statute constitutes, as Solomon points out, "political bias in action."