There is an emerging picture that shows a Special Prosecutor who might just be taking very special care to avoid appearances of a Republican driven witch hunt. Although Robert Mueller was ostensibly appointed to investigate Trump campaign connections to Russia, it's the Democratic presidential campaign that may be the one to come under fire from the Justice Department. This particular suspicion is not new for me, though at times it has seemed quite far fetched. It begins to seem less far fetched in light of an essay by Donna Brazile in today's Politico.
Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC tells of Brazile's discovery that Hillary Clinton and the DNC may not have behaved in an entirely ethical manner in their treatment of Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primaries. Brazile writes:
I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement.
The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.
This is an astonishing admission, given Brazile's well known loyalty to the Clintons and the Democratic party. So, why does she bare her soul at this particular moment. The answer may lie in the tenuous, verging on nonexistent link between the Trump campaign and indictments just handed down by Robert Mueller.
Greg Jarrett of Fox News reminds us today that no one in the Trump campaign has committed the crime of colluding with Russia. There is a good reason to believe this. "Collusion" is not a crime.
It is not a crime to talk to a Russian. Not that the media would ever understand that. They have never managed to point to a single statute that makes “colluding” with a foreign government in a political campaign a crime, likely because it does not exist in the criminal codes.
In fact, the indictments against Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, are all related to tax evasion, money laundering, and failure to register as a foreign agent, and all of those alleged misdeeds occurred before Manafort was connected to the Trump campaign. As to the guilty plea by George Papadopoulos, he pled to a single charge of making false statements to the FBI, in which he misstated certain sequences of events around his attempts to arrange a Trump campaign meeting with Russians that never occurred.
But, as Greg Jarrett reports, there is evidence of other crimes committed by a political campaign in the 2016 presidential election.
It is against the law for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to funnel millions of dollars to a British spy and to Russian sources in order to obtain the infamous and discredited Trump “dossier.” The Federal Election Campaign Act (52 USC 30101) prohibits foreign nationals and governments from giving or receiving money in U.S. campaigns. It also prohibits the filing of false or misleading campaign reports to hide the true purpose of the money (52 USC 30121). This is what Clinton and the DNC appear to have done.
Most often the penalty for violating this law is a fine, but in egregious cases, like this one, criminal prosecutions have been sought and convictions obtained. In this sense, it could be said that Hillary Clinton is the one who was conspiring with the Russians by breaking campaign finance laws with impunity.
It is, perhaps, telling that today is the day that Politico carries an article by Donna Brazile lamenting a moral lapse where Hillary and the DNC stacked the deck against Bernie Sanders? Brazile seems such an unlikely candidate for raising questions of integrity. Back in November of 2016, Brazile was not in the least bit apologetic about helping Hillary beat out Bernie for the Democratic presidential nomination, even though CNN dropped her as contributor after they found she had leaked debate questions to Hillary ahead of a primary debate.
Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, is not only refusing to apologize for giving debate questions to candidate Hillary Clinton. She's also saying she would do it again if given the opportunity.
“My conscience — as an activist, a strategist — is very clear,” she said in an interview with talk-radio host Joe Madison that aired on Monday.
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The far-from-contrite political veteran also recycled her discredited claims that the hacked emails that exposed her perfidy against presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders were somehow altered by Russian intelligence agents.
A year has gone by. The Hillary presidency, almost universally expected to be a slam dunk as the election returns began to come in, evaporated overnight. And now today Brazile tells us about her emotional apology to Bernie. She made it, she said, right after her alleged search for evidence of DNC corruption did not come up empty.
I had to keep my promise to Bernie. I was in agony as I dialed him. Keeping this secret was against everything that I stood for, all that I valued as a woman and as a public servant.
“Hello, senator. I’ve completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer,” I said. “But I will not kill the patient.”
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I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election.
Last year Brazile had no regrets after she had cheated for Hillary in the debates. She said she would do it all again. But this year she tells us Hillary was a cancer, or Hillary's actions were a cancer, and that she knew it before the election. Donna Brazile is one of the Democratic party's most faithful. She is a nationally prominent Democratic activist, and she has been for decades. She was an adviser to Bill Clinton in his presidential campaigns of 1992 and 1996. Twice she was interim head of the Democratic National Committee.
But today she throws Hillary under the bus, and in the process throws Debbie Wasserman-Schultz under with her. Both of them might soon be in potentially serious legal trouble — DWS for her connections to and employment of Imran Awan, Hillary for the offenses described above by Greg Jarrett.
It has been reported that President Trump met with Robert Mueller the day before Mueller was appointed to investigate connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. It has also been reported that Robert Mueller loaded up his team with prosecutors who have personally contributed — some rather heavily — to the Democratic party and/or Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton. The total amount contributed by Team Mueller is reported to be in the vicinity of $50,000. It makes sense to me that, if any Democrats are ever to be prosecuted by the Trump Department of Justice, it had better be loyal Democrats who do the prosecuting.
Hillary is toxic and the Democratic party is deep trouble. For Hillary to take such a smack from Donna Brazile, an activist Democrat whose party loyalty seems to outweigh her honesty, it signals, at the very least, an astounding decline in Hillary's political influence. The Clinton crime family remains afloat, but signs are it will soon be taking on water. Today's confession by Donna Brazile suggests that the rats are headed for the portholes.
