Homerun McCarthy!
Readers will know by now the mantra we've been mumbling for, well, since February, 2018, as it turns out. It goes along these lines:
FISA, probable cause, criminal predicate, Preliminary Investigation, reasonable suspicion, Full Investigation, enterprise counterintelligence investigation, specific and articulable facts, predication, predication, predication.
And variations on the theme with seemingly no end.
Andy McCarthy today, Politics is front and center for Russiagate probe -- and the farce has reached new heights , lays it out for everyone in easily digestible bite size chunks, but what he's talking about is what Bill Barr keeps talking about whenever he's asked: Predication. And that's the by far most likely reason that Robert Mueller doesn't want to talk to Congress and Congress doesn't want to talk to Robert Mueller--despite all the political theater going on.
McCarthy:
The bottom line is that the special counsel not only found no collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
It appears that the FBI’s investigation was opened on false pretenses: [= no valid predication] namely, the fiction that low-level Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos was dealing with a Russian agent (he wasn’t), who told him Russia possessed emails damaging to Hillary Clinton (he probably didn’t), which information Papadopoulos passed on to an Australian diplomat – wrong again: Papadopoulos said nothing to the diplomat about emails; rather, after WikiLeaks published hacked DNC emails, the diplomat, in consultation with the Obama State Department, suddenly decided Papadopoulos’s reference to damaging information about Clinton must have been about the hacked DNC emails (it wasn’t).
It gets worse. The high likelihood is that, after taking over the investigation in May 2017, Mueller knew early on that there was no “collusion” case against the president. [= knew there was no valid predication for the investigation he just agreed to take]
That allegation was largely built on the “Steele dossier,” the Clinton campaign-sponsored opposition research screed, which was based on anonymous sources and multiple levels of hearsay, and which the government is now investigating on suspicion that it may have been Russian disinformation. Based on the dossier, the Obama Justice Department and the FBI started seeking FISA court warrants to surveil Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, in October 2016.
The last warrant of four 90-day warrants would have lapsed in September 2017. But Mueller, who by then had been on the case for four months, opted not to go back to the FISA court to seek a new warrant. That suggests that investigators no longer stood behind the dossier and its sensational, uncorroborated claim that Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin. [= knew there was no probable cause behind it, no valid predication]
Of course, that raises a big question: Why did Mueller allow the “collusion” investigation to continue for well over a year after it seemed obvious that there was no case? [= exactly the question Barr wants an answer for--where was the predication for all that investigative activity?]
This is real bottom line stuff, and everything else flows from it. This is really serious stuff, and the Kathleen Kavalec notes are a bit like icing on the cake.
ADDENDUM: The basic reason that I believe none of the Dem political theater is going to derail Barr's investigation is simply this: If there's one thing the American people can fasten on to and assimilate, can understand, it's FBI Spying on Americans. That's what will ultimately drive this whole thing, while the legal types use their phrases like "probable cause" and "predication." That's why Barr was SO RIGHT to say he wouldn't back down from using that word: SPYING. Yes, talk about "predication" and so forth, but always come back to FBI SPYING. Well, let's not forget about John Brennan, of course. But I guarantee: FBI SPYING is what will resonate in the public consciousness.