You Want Collusion? I'll Give You Collusion!
Yesterday in a comment I linked to the excellent Michael Smerconish interview with law prof Jonathan Turley. Now, Smerconish and Turley are both liberals, but they did chapter and verse on "collusion" and they both came to the same end point: Ain't no collusion. Turley said the obligatory nice things about what a straight arrow Mueller is, but he also went down the line on IG Michael Horowitz and AG Bill Barr. He couldn't praise those two guys highly enough. And then he pointed out something interesting: If you want to find collusion, look no further than Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election. As Turley says, what Mueller has done a great job on has been exposing collusion with Ukrainians, but we're not hearing much about that. Watch the whole interview here --it's not long.
Of course, if you really want to find out about Ukrainian collusion, just read The Mechanics of Deception and you'll get enough detail on that to choke a horse. It's all out there--it's been out there for a long time--but some people don't want you to hear about that.
So, this morning at Powerline, Scott Johnson had a nice blog on A redaction mystery solved . It seems that Mueller's sentencing memorandum on Paul Manafort has redacted publicly available information. Why would he do that? Aren't redactions for, like, secret stuff? Ah, well, there's a bit of a story to that, but it's not long and it's not terribly complicated.
Johnson's source pointed out that what got redacted was information that's readily available in the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) database. Yes, your federal government allows you to search an online database to find out who is registered with DoJ as an agent of a foreign government--and which foreign government(s) they're registered with. FARA is a law that was passed to smoke out clandestine Nazi propaganda agents . It's long been honored in the breach (believe me, I know all about that) and, anyway, the real point is transparency. As long as you're acting openly (a la Manafort), who really cares? The answer is, nobody cared until Mueller wanted to flip Manafort against Trump.
So Johnson's source did his search and found out that Manafort had been working on behalf of Ukrainians through a registered foreign agent named Daniel J. Edelman, Inc . Edelman, Inc., is right up there near the top of any list of influential PR firms. So, as Johnson asks, "why the redaction?" Of course Edelman, Inc., would be in the business of representing foreign governments.
The answer to that question probably can be answered by searching "john podesta daniel edelman". If you run that search you'll see that the top three results all feature "John Podesta" and you'll be reminded that John Podesta who, unlike Edelman, Inc., was not registered with FARA until Team Mueller started nosing around, has for years been actively acting as the agent of foreign governments. Apparently Team Mueller engaged in an elementary subterfuge--which nevertheless was clever enough to fool the entire MSM--to keep you from being reminded about John Podesta. Just in case you might think the Mueller probe wasn't being entirely even handed in giving Podesta a pass.
Or maybe you really believe Team Mueller has turned Podesta's entire life inside out, using FARA as a hook (the criminal predicate) to look for something, anything , to prosecute Podesta for. Such people exist, but I'm not one of them. We all know how much money foreign governments are willing to pay the top adviser to the POTUS in waiting. Yes, a few things went wrong with that scenario, but Podesta got to keep the money, so things didn't go too far wrong for him. And the really good news for Podesta was that Team Mueller had no interest in conducting Gestapo--or should I say KGB?--style raids on his residence, indicting him, keeping him in solitary for month after month, and finally landing him in jail for the rest of his life. That treatment was reserved for Trump associates.
If you ran that search, "john podesta daniel edelman", you'll also have pulled up a link to an interesting article that ran in The Hill in April, 2017: Beyond Manafort: Both parties deal with pro-Russian Ukrainians . The article is nowhere near as detailed as The Mechanics of Deception. For example, it won't tell you about the Ukrainian intelligence links of any of the participants in the Trump Tower meeting, and their close ties to the DNC and Clinton campaign. But it's still worth a read. And the main point is right in the title--the Ukrainians in question with whom Democrats as well as Republicans were colluding were Pro-Russian Ukrainians . The other significant takeaway is that Trump's own involvement with Ukrainian interests--aside from Manafort, who was fired--was de minimis . Most of the Republicans who were involved were of the NeverTrump persuasion. Clever that a law prof like Turley read and remembered this, but people who get paid to know this stuff ...
And there you have it: Collusion. In plain view.