by Dave
Removing money from politics would fix a lot of things. As would a shorter campaign season. But if we did that, the donors wouldn’t control things nearly so completely, and its a massive ROI for these companies to control the politicians so…catch-22, money remains in politics.
But I’m all in favor of removing it.
I do place a lot of weight on the tactics employed by the FBI during their investigation. Interestingly, Peter Strzok supposedly wrote up Flynn as probably truthful – it was Mueller’s prosecutors on the team that ignored Strzok’s writeup, and decided to drop the boom on him anyway.
Strzok did not decide on his own to interview Flynn. We know the matter was being monitored at the highest level of the Justice Department, by then–acting attorney general Sally Yates and then–FBI director James Comey. Strzok and a colleague were assigned to interview Flynn. More importantly, Strzok apparently reported that he believed Flynn had been truthful. Shortly after the interview occurred, it was reported that the FBI had decided no action would be taken against Flynn. On March 2, Comey testified to a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee that, while Flynn may have had some honest failures of recollection during the interview, the agents who questioned him concluded that he did not lie.
Tactics can be either delicate (as they were with HRC’s team – who all got immunity) or very heavy handed (lying to the FBI – that’s five years, bucko). Its really a critical difference. You can’t get anyone to roll on their superior if there is no threat. So by giving the immunity deals, they were saying, in effect, “we won’t force any of your subordinates to give you up.” They are saying the exact opposite to Trump’s former team. “We’re going to squeeze you like a lemon until there’s no juice left, until you give us something on your former boss.”
Its really a critical difference. The delicate approach ensures the investigation goes nowhere. The heavy-handed approach says you’d better give up your boss or your life will become very unpleasant.
Ideally there’d be some middle ground that conducted an investigation with at least some modicum of respect for innocence-until-proven-guilty – but that’s not the world we live in today.
And interestingly, it seems that Peter Strzok actually did that for Flynn. But he was ignored…
Its a complicated world out there.