Where were they when...

Byron York writes in part in the Washington Examiner,

...But now, as Barr looks into how it all started, some voices that were part of that frenzy are changing their tune about the value of investigations. They now express concern about investigations, concern that Barr is politicizing the Justice Department to go after perceived political enemies.

"The power to investigate is the power to destroy," a former U.S. attorney, Gregory Brower, told the Washington Post recently. "The ability to simply point to a pending investigation against a person can have devastating effects on that person and can have a potential political benefit to the person orchestrating the investigation."

"President Trump appears to be now using [his] power, with an assist from the Justice Department, to exact revenge on some perceived political enemies," said NBC's Chuck Todd.

The president is "weaponizing the Department of Justice against perceived enemies," said CNN's Anderson Cooper.

Not to be too blunt about it, but where were these voices the last three years?

Where were they when the Steele dossier burst onto the scene in January 2017, with its extremely damaging and unsupported allegations, leaked to undermine the president right as he took office?

Where were they when the public learned that the FBI, using false information, wiretapped a low-level former Trump foreign policy adviser, Carter Page, giving it entree into some of the campaign's communications?

Where were they when the Justice Department cooked up the idea that Flynn had violated the Logan Act, the 1799 law under which no one has ever been convicted, as a reason to question Flynn? And where were they when officials bragged about going outside channels to grab a chat with a busy, distracted Flynn, and later used that as the basis for a false statement charge even though investigators did not believe Flynn actually lied?

...Former FBI No. 2 and current CNN commentator Andrew McCabe played a role in the excesses we now associate with the Trump-Russia investigation. Now, though, he is complaining about the Justice Department's internal investigation into whether he lied under oath to agents seeking the source of a high-level leak. The source was McCabe himself, but he denied it multiple times. The Justice Department, facing an uphill battle trying a case before a deeply anti-Trump District of Columbia jury, recently decided against charging McCabe. And now, McCabe is indignant about the treatment meted out to investigative targets.

...More complaints are sure to come as Barr, and Barr's appointees, investigate the questionable acts of the investigators. Yes, it will be painful for some. But the public deserves to know what happened.

Read more here.

Mysterious

"Howzabout Republicans investigate, too?"

At Spectator, Dov Fischer assures us that if there had been collusion between Trump and Russia,

Mueller would have found it, CNN and MSNBC and ABC/NBC/CBS (one word, really) would have preempted all regularly scheduled programming for three days to cover it for 72 consecutive hours, like when President Kennedy was assassinated and when Obama was born and was visited by The Three Grand Morons (He Who Heals the Planet and Lowers the Tides; He Who Makes Papier Mâché Greek and Roman Columns; and the first CEO of Solyndra). Like a dog chasing its tail, Schiff can keep running round-and-round in his circle until he expires (whether physically or upon being declared “obsolete” by Ocasio-Cortez when she starts recycling him into those single-use disposable plastic bags she loves to use and throw into the landfills).

...Yes, Congressional oversight of the Executive branch is an important Constitutional provision. The Clintons, for example, were so corrupt that the Republicans’ failed greatly by focusing so exclusively on Clinton’s peccadilloes and cigars that they overlooked the bigger picture: Whitewater 1992. Travelgate 1993. Vince Foster 1993 (maybe nothing, maybe something — but, as Nadler and Schiff help model, worth an investigation). Filegate 1995. There were Cattle Futures, a Rose Law Firm and its billing records, all kinds of corruption. All that real corruption overshadowed the Ultimate #MeToo Guy’s cruel sexual assaults on Paula Corbin Jones, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick (rape), and Monica Lewinsky.

And of course the Obama Wasted Decade was rife with corruption and incompetence that demanded oversight: Fast and Furious, Lois Lerner, the Benghazi Massacre and botched Susan Rice/ Hillary cover-up, the Associated Press Phone Records, the Botched Obamacare Rollout, the Criminalization of James Rosen, the $800,000-plus GSA Weekend “Training Conference,” the Pigford Scandal, Solyndra, other Shovel-Ready (but-Not-Really) Jobs, Treaties Without Congressional Advice and Consent, Weaponizing the FISA Courts, the Forbidden Unmaskings, the Secretary of State’s Emails and Secret Server, the Chinese mass Hacking of Office of Personnel Management, the VA Scandal of Veterans dying while waiting interminably for medical appointments, the New Black Panther Voter Intimidation, the Secret Cash to Iran, Colluding with Leftists in Israel to subvert that country’s national election, Tango’ing While Islamist Terrorists Were Murdering in Europe, hundreds of Waivers Exempting Political Allies from Obamacare, appointing as White House Communications Director Anita Dunn (who praised Mao to children), Appointing as CIA Director a guy who voted for Gus Hall of the Communist Party to be President of America, appointing a Tax Cheat as Secretary of the Treasury, designating the Fort Hood Islamist Terror attack as “Workplace Violence,” and Lots & Lots of Lots of Other Stuff.

Thus, there is plenty to justify Congress overseeing a President. The 2020 elections will reveal how many fair-minded voters remain among our country’s electorate after four years of non-stop media fake news and round-the-clock hostile propaganda against the President. Any fair-minded such person would recognize that Nadler’s sudden blitzkrieg of 81 sets of document demands is not about oversight but about overkill. It is not about assuring that the President does his job faithfully but about trying in every corrupt way to subvert the President from doing his job at all. If the President has to keep devoting time to meeting with attorneys and reviewing documents, and having his friends and family similarly harassed, there comes a point presumably when he inevitably has to compromise time that he otherwise would be devoting to leading the country. And that is the idea of The Resistance: Mr. Trump is doing so much — deregulating so rapidly and consequentially, ending bad treaties and agreements, moving forward so fast on energy independence, revamping foreign policy, bringing troops home, challenging and changing abuses of freedom and rights on college campuses, revitalizing the economy in so many ways, revamping the courts one federal judge at a time, and so much more — that, if The Resistance has been unable to stop him for two years, they may as well retreat to “Fail Safe” and just tie him up for the next two years with document demands, subpoenas, and witch hunts until they finally slow him down. Now we know why they have been hugging those trees: to paper his Administration to death.

...However, an important adjunct counter step should be one that protects the President by having those on his side of the aisle take the lead in fighting back. Was it Obama who said something about bringing guns to knife fights? Was it Holder who said that, when they go low, we kick them? How about a novel idea: Instead of knives or guns or kicking, howzabout just shoving their same tactical turd back at them? They want to investigate? Howzabout Republicans investigate, too?

...Remember Watergate?

...Until now, it seems that the Republicans — even the good ones like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and the resurrected Lindsey Graham — have been leaving the President and his White House team to fend for themselves, with some support from Congressmen Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, Devin Nunes, and some others from the Freedom Caucus. But the Republican Congressmen no longer have the power. The Republicans in the Senate do; yet they are asleep.

How to wake them up? There is a way. One person in that Senate can do it: Amy Klobuchar. She makes people clean her combs after she uses them to eat salad. She insults them, sabotages their job applications, humiliates them by forcing them to go to other people and to recite their personal failings like at a Maoist cultural purification facility. Best of all — she throws solid hard objects wildly at people. If Klobuchar would promise to throw dishes and binders at the GOP Senate committee chairmen — just to wake them up — by golly, I might vote for her.

That is, if I ever move to Minnesota, the home of Amy Klobuchar, Al Franken, Keith Ellison, and Ilhan Omar. What do they call it again? Oh, yeah, Minnesota Nice.

Read more here.

Fireworks ahead in mid-January!

Sundance reminds us at The Conservative Treehouse,

...On January 15th, 2018, the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General Michael Horowitz will deliver approximately 1.2 million pages of documentation and evidence gathered in the year-long investigation into the politicization of the DOJ and FBI, by senior leadership and upper-level career leadership lawyers and bureaucrats.

In addition to Horowitz, and generally overlooked by media, there has been another internal FBI and DOJ task force quietly gathering information over the Intelligence Community, including those qualified to receive “classified intelligence” within Congress, since July/August 2016.

There’s no doubt the “Leak Task Force” has been monitoring all of the committee actions and releases by people they are suspecting of leaks. There’s a solid argument to be made that several leaks that led to false media reporting were actually part of task-force sting operations intended to expose those leakers.

Thankfully, no-one was paying much attention to either the IG investigation or the leak task-force until recently. The MSM completely overlooked their existence until early December reports on FBI conduct indicated the IG had not only collected information, but the investigative discoveries actually led to damage-control reactions by the DOJ and FBI.

Examples of damage-control include reassignments of FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok; FBI/DOJ lawyer, Lisa Page; DOJ Deputy Attorney, Bruce Ohr; and FBI Chief Legal Counsel James Baker.

These moves, especially the reassignment of FBI’s top lawyer James Baker, indicate the severity of the information gathered by the Inspector General. These are not insignificant personnel shifts.

Read more here.

Obama has a "horse in this race."