8 Feb 2018 2:53 pm
Speaking of wacky conspiracy theories, look who starts babbling.Misty » 08 Feb 2018 1:11 pm » wrote: **** Russians are all over the place.
Everyone in the campaign was meeting with Russians and lying about it.
Russians attended the inauguration.
Apparently to this day, Pres. Trump is not under criminal investigation.
From the knowledgeable and ultra-cautious Andrew McCarthy.
Since a time well before Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel, I have been harping on the critical distinction between counterintelligence investigations and criminal investigations. It is often missed, even by lawyers if they are unacquainted with national-security law. You can’t blame people for being confused: Both kinds of inquiries are called “investigations,” just as apples and oranges are both “fruits,” but they are very different things....
The point of the Russia investigation is to gather the information that President Trump needs to protect the country, including our electoral system. You can snicker at that all you want if you are Trump-deranged and invested in the fantasy that Trump “colluded” with Russia to undermine our electoral system. But the following happen to be constitutional facts: Trump is president and counterintelligence operations are conducted for the purpose of informing him, not for the purpose of building criminal prosecutions.
If Mueller was to be engaged in a criminal investigation of Trump, the Justice Department was supposed to make that clear in defining the scope of the special-counsel appointment. It did no such thing.
But let’s set that aside. According to Director Comey, Trump was not a criminal suspect. Asking Comey to go easy on Flynn — who was under criminal investigation for lying to the FBI — cannot legitimately have turned Trump into a suspect. As we’ve covered at length, the president is authorized to exercise prosecutorial discretion (an executive power) by weighing in on the merits of prosecuting a person; Trump did not direct Comey to drop the investigation, though he could have...
It might be different if the Russia investigation were principally a criminal investigation and Trump were a suspect. But it is not (according to the Justice Department’s order appointing Mueller) and he is not (according to Director Comey, in conjunction with the utter absence of evidence that Trump was involved in any criminal conspiracy, much less a criminal conspiracy involving Russian espionage against the United States).
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... -absurdity