The Barr Appointment

Trump’s chosen replacement for Jeff Sessions will soon be running the Justice Department as Attorney General. What may we expect?

For the first time, Trump will have someone in place who is not limited in terms of what he can do by his previous relationship with Russia, as was Sessions. Trump has always said that if he had known beforehand that Sessions had such a conflict of interest, he would never have put him forward as AG. Now that “the gloves are off”, I think William Barr will be gingerly directed by Trump to do the following.

1. Expand the on-going investigation into the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) to more obviously include investigation of the Clinton’s themselves.

This investigation into the CGI predates the last presidential election. It was revived and has been quietly underway for over a year now. It has not been in the news, but this has “bombshell” potential, as it could see Hillary and Bill Clinton indicted to face a range of charges related to “kickbacks” and “influence peddling” while Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State.  

The starting point of any such investigation could be the Douglas Band memo. This memo was apparently requested from Mr. Band by Chelsea Clinton who was reportedly concerned that some of her parent’s business dealings and the actions of the CGI could look a bit shady, and she wanted a full explanation of what was going on between Band’s company, the CGI, the Secretary of State, and the former President.

To many, this memo reads like a recipe book for influence peddling, where Douglas Band’s company, Teneo acted as the go-between facilitating the greasing of the palms of everyone involved, with the Office of the Secretary of State as the apparent leverage for the grease. This is how it may have worked….

1. A company gave money to the CGI. Because of this…

2. The company got a meeting with the Secretary of State, at which the Secretary of State gave certain undertakings to help the company out, possibly including such things as contracts for services for Haiti Relief, which was financed by the US taxpayer. And then…

3. The company met with Bill Clinton and gave him a “personal services contract” worth many times more than what the company originally gave to the CGI.

These contracts were worth $116 Million to Bill Clinton during the time that his wife was Secretary of State. 

None of the allegations of influence peddling have been proven, but this situation raised the notice of the FBI prior to the last election. It is interesting that the investigation was slowed down while Obama was President and while Hillary Clinton was running for office. Without Wikileaks, we would never have known about the Band memo at all. I guess the Russians may be useful after all!

2. Reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail server while she was Secretary of State. 

It is illegal for a federal government employee in the USA to send or receive official communications by way of a personal e-mail; for them to send or receive any secret or top secret information through a personal e-mail; and for such an employee to dispose of e-mails that were for government business in such a way that they cannot be recorded in National Archives. Clinton did all three of these things, literally tens of thousands of times, because at no time while she was the Secretary of State for the United States did she ever use the government’s official and secure e-mail server.

It is important to note that every single e-mail that she sent was technically illegal. While the law would normally not take notice of an official communication by way of a personal e-mail to do something like call the official limo to pick someone up, the sending and receiving of secret and top secret information by way of something as secure as a “gmail” account would normally result in someone getting a lengthy prison term.

Let’s reflect for a moment on what Clinton actually did, and why she likely did it. 

By using a personal e-mail server, Clinton controlled the entire e-mail history of her time in office as Secretary of State. By making sure that she never used a government e-mail, there is no way that her political opponents could comb though her e-mail history to find anything that could embarrass her should she, for example, run to be the President of the United States someday. Note that she actually deleted 30,000 of what must have been the more embarrassing e-mails, which would have been impossible if she had used the government e-mail server, as they would have been in the government’s e-mail system or in National Archives.

It therefore seems obvious that, even when she was made Secretary of State in 2011, she still harboured ambitions to be the President and she was biding her time until she could run again, and she did everything she could to shield herself from her future critics while she bided her time. But using a personal server to prevent anyone from learning about her real history in office put the national security of her country, and likely the lives of many Americans in jeopardy. As always with the Clintons, ambition trumped loyalty. Besides being illegal, her conduct was, in a word, reprehensible.

And talking about reprehensible, Comey’s finding that there was not enough evidence on which to base a prosecution of Hillary Clinton, as announced in the middle of the last US presidential election, was totally bizarre. 

There are two parts that need to be proven to make out a criminal offence – the Act and the Intention. 

There is no question that Clinton brazenly refused to EVER use the government server, in spite of having been offered government Blackberries on numerous occasions, including when her own cellphones were inoperable. There is no question that she committed the Act, or Acts.

The Intention element means that the person must have intended to have committed a crime for the criminal accusation to be made out – they had to know what they were doing, and had to have “a guilty mind”. Clinton is a lawyer and one of the smartest people in that country. It is inconceivable that she did not know that what she was doing was illegal, and that she did not intent to do “it”, as she actually did “it” – that is, send and receive e-mail over an illegal and non-government server - literally tens of thousands of times over a period of four years.

While not a conspiracy theorist, and while I normally give the Cops the benefit of the doubt, Comey’s effective exoneration of Clinton in the middle of a presidential election smacks of purposeful political interference. His demented comments regarding Trump since he was fired - he even wrote a book! - strongly suggest that he may have knowingly attempted to influence that election on Clinton’s behalf – his comments betray his own “guilty mind”. As noted in a previous blog, he was properly fired by Trump.

3. Appoint a second special prosecutor.

I think Barr will appoint a second special prosecutor to pursue the above two investigations. To do this, he has to show that the FBI somehow has a conflict of interest that can only be resolved by way of resort to a special prosecutor.

The FBI staff who were there when Comey ran the place are still there. Comey’s comments both before and after his firing should be enough to show an actual bias in favour of the Clintons, or at least the possibility of bias on the part of some persons in the FBI, which I think would also be enough to spark the appointment. And so, I suspect that soon enough, Comey may come to realize why he needed to keep his mouth shut all along.

The point of all of this would, of course, be to deflect attention from the Mueller investigation. In fact, if the existing FBI investigation into the CGI is already well along, and should Mueller take many more months before tabling a report or issuing final indictments, it is actually possible that we may see some of the Clintons indicted before anyone in the Trump family.