Is Barr About To Betray The Nation?
Yesterday I mocked Andy McCarthy for seeming to regard a handful of firings and a handful of tongue lashings from OIG--phrased in legalese and buried in the footnotes of monstrous .pdf reports that few read--were an appropriate response to the Deep State attempting to stage a coup. If that doesn't satisfy you, he suggested, go for indictments. I'm all in favor of the latter approach.
But then I was reminded by Titan 28 that John Solomon is telling the world not to hold its breath on prosecutions.
I'll paste in the relevant part of Lou Dobbs' interview of Solomon. However, I first want to express my reservations about what Solomon is saying.
John Solomon undoubtedly has good sources. OTOH, Bill Barr and John Durham are not numbered among those sources. Further, at this point I doubt that Barr and Durham's prosecutive intentions have been shared with Solomon's sources--I doubt they've been shared with almost anybody, since even President Trump has complained that he's not in the investigative loop.
As for the regular complaints that Durham has yet to interview Comey or Brennan, those complaints are pointless. It was always most likely that the main subjects of any investigation such as Durham's would not interview the main subjects until near the end.
With that said, here's the relevant portions of the Solomon interview:
Dobbs: You are confirming that less than two weeks into the Trump presidency, they should have known that Flynn wasn’t guilty because they’d already concluded that … and that he wasn’t working as an agent of Russia … that the Steele dossier was a fraud and a manufactured bunch of nonsense … and that FBI targets like Carter Page and Papadopoulos made exculpatory statements, and yet it rolled on.
Solomon: Between January 7th and January 30th of 2017 – President Trump had only served 10 days in office at that point – the entire underpinnings of the Russia collusion case were completely disproven. They knew that the Steele dossier had been disowned by its primary source. They knew that the primary targets they had been monitoring had made statements that undercut the main allegations that they were investigating, and then on January 30th, the FBI writes a memo to the Justice Dept stating flatly “Mike Flynn is not an agent of Russia.” That was what they were looking at at that moment – all of it feel apart – and yet we ended up with another two years and three months of investigations. It’s an outrage when people look at these documents.
Dobbs:And the interview records – the 302s – have disappeared. They can’t be found, or at least they won’t be found.
Solomon:That’s a very suspicious thing. The FBI keeps very good records, except in the case of Mike Flynn’s one interview. That should also trouble us all just like the altered document that they did on Carter Page. The FBI did not act like the FBI here. They acted like a band of criminals in some of the activities they engaged in.
It's not just suspicious--it's total BS. In fact, if Chris Wray says he can't find those docs, he should be fired. Period.
Dobbs: When you look at the Inspector General’s report which documents 17 outright lies by the FBI, you wonder which is the real FBI.
Solomon:There was a small group of people that hijacked this process, and we will find that they did it ultimately for political purposes, but it’s not the FBI only. I’m going to have a story next week on what senior Justice Dept officials were telling Bob Mueller a few months later after the case fell apart – how concerned they were about the FBI’s conduct. I’m going to break that story next week. You will not believe the comments that senior Justice officials were saying about the FBI’s conduct. Sadly, they didn’t stop them, but they knew what was going on was wrong.
I regard the reported statements of Sally Yates and Mary McCord as self serving. The fact is that at the time of the Flynn interview they personally went to the WH to accuse Flynn of lying to VP Mike Pence. No matter what they later said about Comey not following 'protocol' or about the Logan Act being a 'stretch' as a prosecutive theory--and 'stretch' is very much an understatement--they were key to getting Flynn fired.
Dobbs: I know that you are very much … confident in Attorney General William Barr and John Durham, the US attorney who he assigned to investigate the investigators of Spygate. But here we are more than a year later. There isn’t a work product. There isn’t a conclusion, and that has also been part of what has been the “new FBI.” Truth goes there to die, and reports? We wait patiently, and we’re told that they can’t comment because they’re carrying out an investigation and haven’t filed a report. It looks like subterfuge – a straight-forward [process] that allows them not to comment and not to ever deliver the truth.
Solomon: I’ve done a lot of reporting in this area, and here are the three things I hear. There has been an exhaustive investigation. There are bombshell new revelations that will be coming out, particularly about how early the effort to spy on Trump and maybe other Republicans was. I think you’re going to see it go back to December of 2015, perhaps. I think there are going to be new revelations … new discipline … new shaming of the people that oversaw this. I don’t there will be a lot of indictments. There may be some more firings. There may be one or two indictments, but we’re going to get some accountability. I do think that John Durham’s going to have a nice novel when he’s done here. We’re going to learn a lot more, and learning and exposing it hopefully will be one incentive not to do it again. But I think if people are looking for a lot of prosecutions, I think they will be disappointed.
Dobbs: Put me down as disappointed because if you can do what these politically-corrupt officials of the FBI and Justice Dept did – and get away with it – the American people have been fundamentally betrayed by also the investigators who are investigating the investigators.
If there isn't a lot more than "new discipline, new shaming" maybe "one or two indictments" I'll be far more than disappointed. I'll feel outraged and betrayed. I will despair for the future. And Trump should feel the same way. As it is, I still lean toward the view that true accountability is in the offing.