Terms of Entrapment: Trump Should Demand Hillary's Deal
Missing from the leaked list of questions Special Counsel Robert Mueller is said to want to ask President Trump is the classic one: when did you stop beating your wife? This is how farcical Mueller's witch hunt has become – a list of questions that could have been written by a failing first-year law student amounting to the same perjury trap that got Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, and Michael Flynn.
Again, what's the crime? Collusion is not a crime, and the only proven collusion is among the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and a British spy working with Russian sources. Yet President Trump's legal team has been threatened with a grand jury subpoena. The office and residences of his lawyer, Michael Cohen, have been raided.
While Mueller and Team Trump negotiate the terms of entrapment, Team Trump should consider demanding from Mueller the same deal Hillary Clinton got, including the writing of an exoneration memo before the interview. The interview should be on the Friday of a holiday weekend – Hillary's was on July 2. There should be no notes taken and no recordings or transcripts made. The interview should not be under oath, and Mueller should not attend, as Comey did not attend Hillary's.
Trump should insist on an interview limited to just two hours and at which staff members past and current can be present, like Mike Flynn, Carter Page, and Paul Manafort. They should be given immunity deals, as were the likes of Cheryl Mills at Hillary's interview. His interviewer should be as pro-Trump as Peter Strzok, who conducted Hillary's interview, was pro-Clinton. He should be allowed to say, "I don't recall" or its equivalent 39 times, as Hillary did. Prior to the interview, Mueller should have a press conference listing the charges against Trump and then exonerate him, explaining why no reasonable prosecutor, which Mueller is not, would take the case. At least this time, this would be a true statement – Mueller pursues Trump without a crime, in violation of the special counsel statute. Comey acted as a Hillary staffer, ignoring the most obvious and real crimes, such a mishandling classified information and destroying evidence under subpoena.
Wasn't having a private server that contained classified information, having multiple devices that were later physically smashed, and using BleachBit to destroy 33,000 emails that were under subpoena sufficient evidence of intent?
Only a corrupt and complicit FBI director, acting as Hillary Clinton's surrogate campaign manager, who months earlier had decided he would exonerate her, could ignore the damning evidence:
As FBI director last year, James Comey began writing drafts of a statement exonerating Hillary Clinton, even before all witnesses in the investigation – including Clinton herself – had been interviewed.
The Senate Judiciary Committee obtained the Comey memos as part of its investigation into his firing by President Trump, which occurred on May 9. The revelation that Comey had begun drafting memos of his exoneration statement comes from transcripts of interviews given last fall by two FBI officials.
James Rybicki, Comey's chief of staff, and Trisha Anderson, the principal deputy general counsel of national security and cyberlaw at the FBI, gave the interviews as part of an investigation conducted by the Office of Special Counsel into the FBI's handling of the Clinton email investigation.
In a July 5, 2016, press conference, Comey said that he would not be recommending charges against Clinton for mishandling classified information despite her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
While the transcripts of those interviews are heavily redacted, they indicate that Comey started working on an announcement clearing Clinton in April or May of last year, before the FBI interviewed 17 witnesses in the case, including Clinton and some of her top aides.
Having already decided that he would exonerate her regardless of the evidence explains why he did not attended the July 2, 2016 interview of Hillary Clinton, did not put her under oath, and did not ever impanel a grand jury in the – there's that word again – "matter." The fix was in.
Unlike Hillary Clinton, who put our national security at risk in order to hide pay-for-play collusion with Clinton Foundation donors, and who allowed the sale of 20% of our uranium to Russian interests, Trump has done everything to hurt Russian interests, from arming Ukraine, imposing stiff sanctions, striking Syria, and boosting American energy to rebuilding the American military.
Yet Hillary was given a free ride, unlike Kristian Saucier, who was imprisoned for taking six photos of his submarine for his personal memory book. He was not a spy for a foreign power; he had no intent, to coin a phrase, to do anything with these photos except keep them as personal memories of his proud and honorable service.
It's time for these double standards to end. Trump's interview should be conducted under the same terms and conditions as Hillary's, or it should not take place at all until Mueller finds an actual crime to investigate. He can find that just by looking in the mirror.
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor's Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
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