Taxpayers paid for 22 Months, 19 Lawyers, 40 FBI, 2,800 Subpoenas, 500 Search Warrants, 500 Witnesses to investigate baseless Leftist claims about Russia

And still they are not happy

In his summary to congressional leaders on Sunday, Attorney General William Barr said Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his staff "thoroughly investigated allegations" that members of the Trump presidential campaign and others associated with it "conspired with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, or sought to obstruct the related federal investigations."

The FBI launched the counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016; Mueller took it over the following May, after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed him as special counsel.

According to Barr, in the course of his 22-month probe, Mueller "employed 19 lawyers who were assisted by a team of approximately 40 FBI agents, intelligence forensic accountants, and other professional staff. The Special Counsel issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communication records, issued almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses.

Still unknown: How much did all of that cost us, the taxpayers?

President Trump tweeted in November 2018 that the "Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt" had wasted "more than $40,000,000," but the final tally has not been released.

The Office of Special Counsel has posted its direct expenditures through September 30, 2018, as follows:

For the period May 17, 2017 through September 30, 2017: $3,213,695

 For the period October 1, 2017 through March 31, 2018: $4,506,624

For the period April 1, 2018 through September 30, 2018: $4,567,533

That's a total of $9,394,300, by the reckoning of Mueller's office, with 6 months unaccounted for.

Judicial Watch in December sued the U.S. Department of Justice for records of costs incurred by the security detail for Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

As a result of his thorough investigation, Mueller indicted several Trump associates on charges unrelated to Russian collusion or coordination.

But he "did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities," Barr said, quoting from the report.

The second part of Mueller's report involves obstruction of justice, and here Mueller "did not draw a conclusion one way or the other as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction."

Following are the relevant paragraphs from Barr’s summary, which have been seized on by Democrats determined to forge ahead with their investigation/s into Trump world.

After making a "thorough factual investigation" into these matters (obstruction), the Special Counsel considered whether to evaluate the conduct under Department standards governing prosecution and declination decisions but ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion one way or the other as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction. Instead, for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as "difficult issues" of law and fact concerning whether the President's actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction.

The Special Counsel states that "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

Barr noted that Mueller left it to Barr himself "to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime." And Barr said it does not:

As Barr wrote:

Over the course of the investigation, the Special Counsel's office engaged in discussions with certain Department officials regarding many of the legal and factual matters at issue in the Special Counsel's obstruction investigation. After reviewing the Special Counsel's final report on these issues; consulting with Department officials, including the Office of Legal Counsel; and applying the principles of federal prosecution that guide our charging decisions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel's investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense. Our determination was made Without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.

In making this determination, we noted that the Special Counsel recognized that "the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference," and that, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President's intent with respect to obstruction.

Generally speaking, to obtain and sustain an obstruction conviction, the government would need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person, acting with corrupt intent, engaged in obstructive conduct with a sufficient nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding. In cataloguing the President's actions, many of which took place in public view, the report identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct, had a nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding, and were done with corrupt intent, each of which, under the Department's principles of federal prosecution guiding charging decisions, would need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to establish an obstruction-of-justice offense.

Barr concluded his summary by saying he understands the public interest in the investigation: "For that reason, my goal and intent is to release as much of the Special Counsel's report as I can consistent with applicable law, regulations, and Departmental policies."

He noted that some material in the report, including grand jury matters and information that may bear on other pending legal cases, may not be disclosed by law.

But Barr promised to "move forward expeditiously in determining what can be released in light of applicable law."

SOURCE 

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Trump has driven the Left mad.  They have lost touch with reality and the possible

Michael Reagan

Democrats are so desperate to prevent a second Trump term that their mob of 2020 presidential wannabes are throwing out every dumb, out-of-the-box or unconstitutional idea they can think of to stop him:

– Eliminate the Electoral College.

– Lower the voting age to 6 — sorry, 16.

– Pack the Supreme Court.

The other day Sen. Elizabeth Warren came up with getting rid of the Electoral College and electing presidents directly by popular vote.

It’s a horrible idea that only comes up when Republicans win the White House despite the wishes of huge Democrat majorities in large states like California, New York and Illinois.

It came up in 1980 with my dad and in 2000 with Bush II.

Here it is again with Trump, who lost the national popular vote by several million in 2016 only because Hillary won big in New York and California.

People like Sen. Warren think if we closed up the Electoral College — which was set up by the Founding Fathers as a compromise between big states and small states — it will put their splintered, increasingly leftist and apparently suicidal party back in the White House in 2020.

Other Democrat presidential candidates who’ve never read the Constitution or believe we can simply get rid of the 12th Amendment over a weekend think it’s a great idea.

“Let’s get rid of the Electoral College” is a great applause line when a limousine socialist college professor like Warren throws it out to one of her Constitutionally challenged audiences on the campaign trail.

But since ending the Electoral College would take a Constitutional amendment ratified by three-fourths of the states, it will never happen — and she and the other desperate Democrats know it.

But what about that other radical idea to put Democrats back into power in D.C. — lowering the voting age to 16?

Democrats like it because they know they’d easily get the votes of most 16-year-olds, thanks to the diet of liberal political crap they’re fed everyday by their teachers.

All Democrats have to do is keep promising the kids a fake future that includes free college, stricter gun control laws and a socialist paradise of free health care and green jobs that don’t involve work.

They can also keep telling the kids scary stories about how the world is going to end in 12 years if the party of AOC doesn’t get control and begin outlawing fossil fuels, cows and capitalism.

As for the idea of expanding the size of the Supreme Court from nine to 15, it’s an old Democrat Party trick that FDR tried in the 1930s.

It was brought out of mothballs this week by Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., who’s probably right to think he’s just as qualified to be president as Kamala, Corey and at least half of the other wannabes.

FDR tried to add as many as six friendly judges at the beginning of his second term because the Supreme Court’s conservative majority kept slapping down his New Deal laws for being what they were — unconstitutional over-reaches of executive power.

Packing the Supreme Court with new judges who agree with you is not unconstitutional.

But the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 was such a transparent abuse of executive power that many Democrats in Congress joined with the Republican minority to oppose FDR’s planned power play.

Unfortunately for the country, FDR ultimately got his way when two justices changed their minds and voted to uphold the constitutionality of the Social Security Act and other New Deal legislation.

But his scheme to pack the high court backfired on him politically, which is something today’s desperate Democrats might want to remember.

SOURCE 

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An up-and-coming conservative: Marion Maréchal in France

If anything, the French are even more Patriotic and Conscious of their National Identity than Americans are. Perhaps because they are a more homogeneous population.   So Mr Trump might be a pointer to the future success of Marion Maréchal



Marine Le Pen’s niece takes her crusade to protect Catholic France into the classroom

The revamped Confluence neighbourhood of Lyon is a laboratory for modern eco-living. A self-driving electric bus runs along the river Rhône, and green architecture overlooks converted docks. Waterfront cafés serve health food, and arts centres rise on former industrial land. The new influx of metropolitan types into the district helped Emmanuel Macron win fully 82% of the vote in the second round of the French presidential election in 2017 against the nationalist Marine Le Pen.

Yet today this neighbourhood is also the improbable new home to a rather different sort of experiment, run by the youngest member of the Le Pen political dynasty. In a side street a private graduate school, the Institute of Social, Economic and Political Science, opened its doors last autumn. It is the brainchild of Marion Maréchal, niece of Marine, and granddaughter of Jean-Marie, founder of the National Front (now the National Rally). In theory the 29-yearold Ms Maréchal has given up politics, having been elected to the National Assembly for a term in 2012 while still a law student. In reality the third-generation Le Pen has ambitious plans to shape the agenda on the right—from outside electoral politics.

France may cherish conceptual thinking, but its aspirant politicians usually tread a route to electoral office via jobs as party hacks or on ministerial staff. Time spent in think-tanks or academia, American-style, is uncommon. What makes Ms Maréchal’s choice arresting is not that it reflects her political retirement: sitting in an empty classroom at the Lyon site, she states unambiguously that “I will certainly go back into politics.” It is, rather, that she sees the spread of ideas, and honing of a right-wing ideology, as a means of “continuing to be in politics, but in a different way”.

Dismissed by French educationalists as a gimmick, the school is a centre of training, not research. It offers two-year diplomas— not yet approved by the French state—to just 90 students in social sciences and business. Class topics, pinned to the wall in the entrance hall, range from media training and leadership to “France, Christianity and secularism” and “world Islamist organisations”. This push to break the “ideological conformity” of French thinking is part of what Ms Maréchal calls “cultural politics” or “meta-poli-tics”. “Our fight cannot only take place in elections,” she told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington last year.

Ms Maréchal calls her brand of politics “conservative”. Which is telling, not least because the word is rarely used in France to define politics, and carries American echoes. Indeed, Benjamin Haddad, of the Atlantic Council in Washington, sees a parallel between the youngest Le Pen’s plans and the way American conservatives built institutions to mount a takeover of the Republican Party ahead of Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. She is in contact, if irregularly, with Steve Bannon; and the former editor of the London edition of Breitbart News is on her school’s advisory board.

The conservative label also reflects Ms Maréchal’s obsession with preserving French Catholic identity, in an attempt to put an acceptable face on what is often a toxic nativist discourse. If Ms Maréchal rails against French secularists, who chase nativity scenes from town halls at Christmas, her main gripe is mass Muslim immigration. “I don’t want France to become a land of Islam,” she says. The “great replacement” theory popularised by Renaud Camus, an essayist who warns that Europe will be demographically swamped, is “not absurd”, she adds, quoting a study suggesting that the “indigenous French” will be a minority by 2040. “Just like you,” she told her Washington audience, “we want our country back.”

Perhaps most striking, Ms Maréchal’s embrace of the word “conservative” reflects a political strategy that sets her apart from her aunt. Marine Le Pen is more exercised by unfettered capitalism and “savage globalisation” than by family values, in line with her courtship of the working-class former Communist vote in France’s rustbelt. Hers is a classic anti-elite populism—her slogan for elections to the European Parliament in May is “Let’s give power to the people” —and she wears the populist tag as a badge of pride.

Ms Maréchal, like her grandfather, is more attuned to the economic worries of small businesses and artisans. And her core project is the defence of a France of church spires, rural roots and family values, which taps into a seam of Catholic nationalism. Unlike her aunt, she marched against gay marriage. Naturally, she does this with a modern French twist: Ms Maréchal is separated from the father of her young daughter, and photos of her with a member of Italy’s Northern League have made the celebrity press. But Ms Maréchal’s aim is not, Italian-style, to unite the populist right and left; “I don’t call myself a populist,” she says. It is, rather, to merge the right and the far right, by allying the working-class vote with that of the “bourgeoisie enracinée” (rooted bourgeoisie).

A new Maréchal plan [Maréchal is French for "marshall"]

Plenty of obstacles stand in the way, among them historical baggage and wide differences between the far right and the French Republicans over Europe, not to mention Ms Le Pen’s tight grip on her own party. Ms Maréchal will not challenge her aunt any time soon. Yet party politics in France, and in Europe, are unusually fluid. The Republicans have bled moderates to Mr Macron, shifting the party’s centre of gravity to the right. One ex-deputy, Thierry Mariani, recently defected to Ms Le Pen. Italy shows how unlikely political bedfellows can nonetheless end up together, and in power.

Above all, Ms Maréchal is in no rush. She stands to benefit from the broader success of reactionary books (by authors such as Eric Zemmour) and journals. Valeurs Actuelles, a right-wing magazine, sells more copies each week than Libération, a leftish paper, does each day. The editor of L’Incorrect, a monthly, sits on Ms Maréchal’s advisory board. It was in 1992 that the youngest Le Pen made her debut, as the blonde infant on a campaign poster in her grandfather’s arms. Today, confessing “admiration” for “his struggles”, she is playing the long game. It would be rash to ignore her.

SOURCE

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