“If they put this in a movie, you’d turn it off immediately, saying, ‘There is no way this is possible. … This is comedy, not drama.’”
This was Mike Pompeo speaking to Jesse Watters on Monday evening about the news that Charles McGonigal, the FBI agent claimed to be a Russian asset, was also put in command of the DNC “hack” probe. (We’ll soon have more to say about this relationship.) McGonigal was also charged with researching the Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, but she covertly went to work for him to assist him in obtaining the lifting of sanctions against him. In the Southern District of New York, he and court interpreter Sergey Shestakov, a U.S. citizen, were indicted; the charges are detailed here.
As a result of the FBI’s Russia hoax, Pompeo stated he had personally endured this for two years. “It’s hard to know where to begin,” he said, “because it is so outlandish. … Director [James] Comey has a lot of questions to answer about how he picked this guy, why he picked this guy, and did he not know what this guy was up to?”
Once again, the FBI has a poor reputation. According to a tweet by Jack Posobiec, “I’m just going to repeat this for the people in the back. An FBI official who investigated Trump for illegal ties to Russia but found none has just been arrested for his illegal ties to Russia. Internalize this.”
Alan Dershowitz, a legal commentator, has stated for several weeks that the Trump and Biden classified document controversies will balance each other out and neither man will be charged. He repeated this to Sean Hannity on Monday evening. There are other factors at play: Trump, as president, presumably has the right to declassify any document at anytime, but Biden’s possession of the records would have to be shown purposeful, and he would likely claim ignorance.
Where did this new “intention” standard originate? According to our understanding, it is criminal to just hold classified materials. Comey cited the difficulties of establishing purpose when he stated that “no reasonable prosecutor” would pursue the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Even if prosecutors were required to establish purpose, Clinton’s mishandling of classified emails and destruction of evidence appeared to us to be quite deliberate.
(Aside: Dershowitz — bafflingly — has always maintained that Clinton, as egregious as her actions were, should not have been criminally prosecuted and said so again yesterday. He seems to be playing the part of her defense attorney and simply will not go there. Hannity pressed him on that, with Dershowitz still saying she claimed those were personal emails and she had not destroyed anything classified. He also said it wasn’t necessarily deliberate. With all respect, Mr. Dershowitz, this willful blindness where Clinton is concerned is making it harder to rely on you as an expert.)
Dershowitz predicts that neither Trump nor Biden will face criminal prosecution for possession of sensitive materials. The greater concern, though, is the huge corruption inside the Biden family, including Joe, and what the records he hid in several locations may have to do with it. Dershowitz did urge for “full openness” with regard to the records, adding that Biden, as the current president, has the authority to immediately declassify them all.
Gregg Jarrett reiterated that, yes, the president does have the authority to declassify. “It’s an exclusive power contained in the Constitution through the Commander in Chief Clause. The vice president doesn’t have that right, or Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.” Unlike Dershowitz, he believes that the evidence against Hillary was “overwhelming” and it was a “terrible injustice” not to bring a case against her. He said that “every prosecutor in America would love to have brought such an easy case.”
He agreed with Dershowitz that the Trump and Biden instances involving confidential data will be a wash, but he disagreed with us that knowledge and purpose is the essential criterion. Section F of 18 U.S. Code Section 793 also allows for excessive negligence or carelessness. The increasing number of sites where Biden’s secret information are being discovered “renders ‘inadvertence’ unlikely, and instead appears to meet the legal definition of recklessness, or gross carelessness. Therefore, I believe that would be a really good legal case.”
More on this story via The Western Journal:
Jarrett sounded much like Jonathan Turley when he called Biden’s “whack-a-mole” rebuttals to these ongoing discoveries — the infamous Corvette defense included — “more and more preposterous.” And for Biden to say he had no regrets was just arrogance, he said. Biden has to know that taking those documents was gravely wrong; plus (and most importantly for his party), it’s interfering with the goal of prosecuting Trump. You know he cares about that. CONTINUE READING…