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Roger Stone arrested by FBI in early morning raid; where were the raids for Hillary Clinton and others? Panel reaction on ‘Hannity.’

The indictment of President Trump’s former political adviser Roger Stone – who was arrested Friday on charges of obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements and witness tampering – demonstrates yet again that there is no known evidence of Trump-Russia “collusion.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating allegations since May 2017 that Donald Trump or people on his presidential campaign may have worked with Russia to win the 2016 election. There’s no question that if Mueller believed he had proof of such activity the special counsel would have charged Stone with some collusion-related offense involving a conspiracy.

Significantly, Stone wasn’t charged with anything involving collusion. In fact, not a single person has been charged with the alleged crime Mueller was appointed to investigate.

FBI’S SHOW OF FORCE IN ROGER STONE ARREST SPURS CRITICISM OF MUELLER TACTICS

Instead, in his indictment of Stone, Mueller chose to do what he has done so often – bring charges that were generated by his own investigation. These are commonly referred to as “process crimes.” That is, they are offenses against the legal process. Such offenses typically occur when someone interferes with the procedures of an investigation.

Nowhere in Mueller’s indictment is it alleged that Stone conspired, coordinated or colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.

This is not to minimize “process crimes.” They are serious violations of the law. No person should ever lie, mislead or obstruct a legitimate law enforcement investigation.

However, the distinction between a principle crime and a process crime is significant. The former is an independent criminal act. The latter is derived from the investigation into whether such an act ever occurred.

“I will plead not guilty to these charges,” Stone told reporters after his arrest and appearance in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “I will defeat them in court. This is a politically motivated investigation.”

So far, Mueller’s exhaustive probe has produced no evidence and no indictments in support of his original mandate. The special counsel has little to show for his efforts that have cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and hobbled the president with unfounded accusations from the moment he took office.

So far, Mueller’s exhaustive probe has produced no evidence and no indictments in support of his original mandate. The special counsel has little to show for his efforts that have cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and hobbled the president with unfounded accusations from the moment he took office.

The inexorable truth is that a nefarious plot supposedly hatched between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the bowels of the Kremlin was a hoax all along – it simply never happened.

As President Trump has said many times, “there was no collusion.”

In fact, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for unverified Russian information and then fed it to the FBI and Justice Department in a scheme to damage Trump, her political opponent.

Hence, Trump-Russian “collusion” was nothing more than a clever and devious invention. Clinton-Russian “collusion” was authentic and one of the dirtiest tricks in modern American politics.

The FBI became complicit in the scheme to frame Trump in a series of wrongful, if not corrupt, decisions.

First, the bureau should never have launched its initial investigation in July 2016 that later developed into the Mueller probe. It had no probable cause and no credible evidence to justify its probe.

Second, the FBI should never have misused an unverified anti-Trump “dossier” composed by a discredited and biased source in order to get a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser. In the process, the FBI and Justice Department withheld evidence from an intelligence court and deceived the judges who issued the wiretap warrants.

And finally, a special counsel should never have been appointed. Under federal regulations there must first be some evidence of a crime to appoint a special counsel. No such evidence existed.

Had it not been for the misconduct of the FBI and the Justice Department, there would never have been an investigation for Stone to allegedly obstruct – meaning that no indictment would have been handed down against him.

The plain truth is that the improper existence of Mueller’s investigation created the crimes Stone stands accused of committing.

The indictment against Stone suggests he may have had some advance knowledge or inside information about the content of hacked Clinton campaign emails that were released by WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016.

WikiLeaks has never said how it obtained the emails. It has been reported that Russian intelligence operatives were responsible for the hacks.

While Stone’s efforts to garner details about the emails and pass them along to the Trump campaign surely makes for a tantalizing story, this activity is not a crime. At the time, hundreds of journalists – including me – were contacting sources or attempting to elicit further information directly from WikiLeaks. None of us has been accused of a crime.

Stone appears to have speculated or projected that the hacked emails would be highly damaging to Clinton’s campaign. This, of course, was stating the obvious.

An examination of Stone’s emails shows that he offered little more than the same information that WikiLeaks had already stated publicly. Stone’s mistake, if any, is that he created the appearance that he knew more than he actually did.

But millions of people exaggerate their knowledge about all sorts of things every day to make themselves seem smarter or more important than they really are. They don’t wind up getting charged with committing any crimes.

Unless it can be shown that Stone was somehow involved in the actual hacking of the Clinton emails, he violated no felony laws. This is why he was not charged with a conspiracy crime.

Five of the charges against Stone are for making false statements during the Mueller investigation. These will be exceedingly difficult for the special counsel to prove. The statute governing these offenses (18 U.S.C. 1001) requires proof that the false statements be made “knowingly and willfully.”

A faulty memory or a diminished recollection is not sufficient to sustain the specific intent requirement of the criminal charge. If Stone recalled events differently than Mueller interprets them it is not a crime.

Moreover, Stone amended some of his testimony with corrected statements. These this will be introduced as evidence in his defense.

The charges of witness tampering and obstruction of an investigation may be more problematic for Stone. Much will depend on the facts as they are developed.

For now, Mueller’s indictment of Stone should be read through a skeptical lens. Prosecutors only present their own slanted version of events. At trial, Stone’s defense attorneys will present his countervailing evidence and arguments. Like all defendants, Stone must be presumed innocent unless prosecutors can prove him guilty.

Sadly, Mueller’s “process charges” against Stone and others in the Trump orbit represent selective and unequal prosecution when compared with their treatment of allies of Clinton.

Neither top Clinton aides Huma Abedin nor Cheryl Mills were charged with giving false statements to the FBI during their 2016 interviews about Clinton’s email scandal, in which Clinton improperly used a private email server instead of the required State Department secure email system when she was secretary of state.

Abedin and Mills both insisted they knew nothing about Clinton’s private email server until after she departed the State Department. Yet email exchanges proved their statements were clearly false.

Former FBI Director James Comey said that no prosecutions of Abedin and Mills were justified, dismissively telling the House Judiciary Committee: “There’s always conflicting recollections of facts.”

This from the same guy who twisted the facts and contorted the law to clear Clinton from the felony statutes she so flagrantly violated. Comey misconstrued the law in a manner that could only have been deliberate. He then weaponized the law to investigate Trump without legal justification or credible evidence.

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The same double-standard of justice is now being applied by Comey’s long-time friend and ally, Robert Mueller.

President Trump’s enemies are desperate to find something – anything – in the Mueller investigation that points to wrongdoing by Trump because they want to see the president impeached and forced from office. So far, nothing that has been made public is the “smoking gun” they fantasize about that could show Trump engaged in any criminal activity.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE BY GREGG JARRETT

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/gregg-jarrett-stone-indictment-shows-no-evidence-of-trump-russia-collusion

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Mexico rebukes — but accepts — ‘unilateral’ U.S. move to return asylum seekers pending hearing – The Washington Post

TIJUANA, Mexico — Mexico’s government said Friday it would not impede U.S. plans to send asylum-seeking migrants back across the southern border while they await a hearing in U.S. courts.

Mexican authorities made it clear they did not support the Trump administration’s program, but they appeared reluctant to pick a new fight with the White House less than two months into the term of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The decision appeared to clear the way for U.S. agents to begin the new protocols even as many migrants remained bottlenecked in Tijuana — just steps from the border — and officials in the teeming border city said resources were strained to the limit.

“We are not saying we will open any kind of refugee camps or something like that,” Roberto Velasco, spokesman for the Mexican Foreign Ministry, told The Washington Post.

“We simply do not have the resources for that,” he added. “What we are saying is, we will open the door for the aid to come.”

The new policy could also face swift legal challenges in the United States.

Central American migrants walk to the San Ysidro border crossing south of San Diego to attempt to enter the United States in April 2018. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Velasco told reporters in Mexico City that the United States was prepared to send back the first group: up to 20 migrants across the footbridge at the San Ysidro border crossing near San Diego.

Velasco, however, also outlined some ground rules. He said Mexico would not accept migrants appealing a denial of asylum, unaccompanied children or people with serious health problems. The Department of Homeland Security said unaccompanied minors would be exempt from the U.S. policy.

“The Mexican government does not agree with the unilateral measure implemented by the U.S. government,” Velasco said. “Nonetheless, and in line with our new migration policy, we reiterate our commitment to migrants and to human rights. Migration should be a choice, not a necessity.”

The returned migrants would be the first group of people to have been affected by the U.S. policy, originally called “Remain in Mexico” and formally announced in December.

Immigrants in the United States currently wait months or years for their cases to be resolved, partly a result of an 800,000-plus-case backlog in the immigration courts. But a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said the asylum cases of those sent back to Mexico should be decided within a year, with an initial hearing within 45 days.

[More than 10,000 migrants request visas as caravan hits Mexico]

Critics say Trump’s new policy will have little impact unless Mexico agrees to extend it throughout the nearly 2,000-mile border, since the largest number of U.S. border apprehensions is in Texas. Yet it’s unclear whether Mexico will be willing to absorb tens of thousands of asylum seekers a year, and many migrants are wary of high-crime border cities there. Two Honduran teens traveling with a caravan were killed in Tijuana late last year.

On Friday, even municipal officials in Tijuana said they remained in the dark about the details.

Cesar Palencia, chief of migrant affairs in Tijuana, said he did not believe the city would be capable of attending to all of the asylum seekers, and that no new space had been set up to receive them.

“We don’t see a strategy to attend to them,” he said. “It’s not in keeping with the law, and I consider it a violation of migrants’ rights.”

Palencia was also concerned that the strategy would cause more people to be forced to remain in Mexico for the long term, and further limit their options to reenter the United States.

“What happens if someone from Honduras goes in front of a judge and says, ‘My life is at risk, but I’ve been living in Mexico for three years’?” he said. “It seems like a method of denying them.”

Leopoldo Guerrero Díaz, the secretary general of Tijuana, said that it was the responsibility of the Mexican government to prepare spaces for the migrants.

He said El Barretal — a shelter established for 6,000 migrants who arrived en masse in November — had the space for more migrants, but that other shelters in the city were already at capacity.

“Tijuana has traditionally received thousands of migrants, but not in the manner they’re arriving now. No city in the country has the capacity,” Guerrero Diaz said.

Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, said it appears that the “various parts of the Mexican government aren’t on the same page” about cooperating with the United States.

“My sense is that this is still in negotiation,” Selee said. “You get the sense the Mexican government is making up its collective mind.”

“Since there’s nothing written down, there’s no actual formal agreement, all of this is going to be in flux for a while,” he said.

Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the agency’s union, and a vocal Trump supporter, said the president’s initiative will work only if it is rolled out across the entire southern border. If it is limited to legal ports of entry, he said, the plan will only spur migrants to cross illegally.

“If it’s border-wide, it will be an absolute game changer,” Judd said. “It will drive illegal immigration down.”

The top Democrats on the Senate and House Judiciary panels said Friday that the program was evidence that “the Trump administration is on a mission to take apart the asylum system,” founded upon the principle “that people fleeing for their lives cannot be turned away without a chance to make their case.”

“Asylum seekers are easy prey for criminals and gangs in Mexico, but the Trump plan forces people to remain in harm’s way,” they wrote in a statement, accusing Trump of pursuing “nativist policies” that create “more chaos at the border, harming refugees instead of protecting them.”

On its southern border, meanwhile, Mexico has been dealing with a different immigration issue: 13,000 people who left in a new caravan from Honduras last week are in line to enter legally. Though authorities have promised them they can stay anywhere in the country for at least one year, it has encouraged them to seek jobs in the country’s southern states.

Yet many could attempt to make the trek north toward the U.S. border to request asylum.

Muzaffar Chishti, the director of the Migration Policy Institute’s Office at the New York University School of Law, said the U.S. policy change is “intended to create a certain amount of order.”

But it could have the opposite result.

“You need the infrastructure in place to house and feed people,” he said. “If that’s not provided, it’s going to be a humanitarian crisis, or it’s going to be an incentive for people to give up entering at ports of entry.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit that has filed lawsuits against previous efforts by Trump to restrict migrants from seeking asylum, called the new policy “inhumane and unlawful.”

“Rates of violence in U.S.-Mexico border towns are often as high or higher than they are in the countries asylum seekers are fleeing,” the group said in a statement. “People will die. They will die on both sides of the border, whether in Mexico because of organized crime, en route because of increased trafficking, or, because they will be forced to cross between ports of entry, on the U.S. side from exposure to the elements.”

Mary Beth Sheridan in Mexico City and Maria Sacchetti and Karoun Demirjian in Washington contributed to this report.

While Washington focuses on the wall, Mexico fears its own border crisis

For Central Americans, children open a path to the U.S. — and bring a discount

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news

Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/mexico-rebukes–but-accepts–unilateral-us-move-to-return-asylum-seekers-pending-hearing/2019/01/25/52062470-202b-11e9-a759-2b8541bbbe20_story.html

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Trump Repeats Unfounded Arguments in New Appeal for a Border Wall – The New York Times

Mr. Trump continued to inflate figures about crime and drugs.

The essence of Mr. Trump’s pitch for a border wall — that a porous border had led to a crime and drug epidemic — remained unchanged.

Last year, he said, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement “removed 10,000 known or suspected gang members like MS-13 and members as bad as them.” (This is exaggerated; the agency reported it had removed 5,872 “known or suspected” gang members in the 2018 fiscal year.)

In addition, Mr. Trump repeated the statistic that in the past two years, ICE “arrested a total of 266,000 criminal aliens inside of the United States, including those charged or convicted of nearly 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes and 4,000 homicides or, as you would call them, violent, vicious killings.” The figures include both charges and convictions, and each arrest may represent multiple offenses. The most common charges were traffic violations and drug and immigration offenses.

“Drugs kill much more than 70,000 Americans a year and cost our society in excess of $700 billion,” the president said. The figures are accurate for overdose deaths and the economic costs of addiction. But a border wall would do little to prevent the 35 percent of overdose deaths involving prescription opioids or the $627.5 billion in costs incurred because of tobacco, alcohol and prescription drug addiction.

Still, the president pressed the case.

“I believe that crime in this country can go down by a massive percentage if we have great security on our southern border,” Mr. Trump said. “I believe drugs, large percentages of which come through the southern border, will be cut by a number that nobody will believe.”

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/us/politics/trump-shutdown-border-wall-fact-check.html

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Tragic end to search for Spanish boy trapped in hole for 13 days – New York Post

MADRID — Rescue crews in Spain early Saturday found the body of a 2-year-old boy, whose fall into a deep borehole 13 days earlier prompted a complex and heart-wrenching search-and-rescue operation that had the country holding its breath.

Julen Rosello fell down the narrow 360-foot-deep borehole on Jan. 13 while his family was preparing a countryside Sunday lunch. Adding to the family’s tragedy, Spanish media had reported that his parents had another young son who died of a heart attack in 2017.

Julen’s remains were found in the early hours of Saturday by rescuers digging a tunnel to reach him, said Alfonso Rodriguez, the Spanish government’s representative for the southern region of Andalusia. They were accompanied by a member of the Civil Guard, which then took charge of removing the body.

Rodriguez said that the results of the boy’s autopsy would remain secret under a judicial commission following up with the accident’s investigation. The Civil Guard was investigating if the borehole had been made illegally.

The tragedy had gripped Spaniards from day one and the country had followed closely every turn of an extremely complex operation, frequently hampered by layers of hard rock.

Spain’s King Felipe VI and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez both offered their condolences to the family.

“All of Spain shares in the infinite sadness of Julen’s family,” Sanchez wrote on Twitter. “We have followed each step taken to reach him. We will always be grateful for the tireless effort of those who worked to find him during these days. My support and warmth to his parents and loved ones.”

Julen RoselloFacebook

The dry waterhole, only 10 inches in diameter, was too narrow for an adult to get into and hardened soil and rock blocked equipment from progressing to the place two-thirds of the way down where the toddler was trapped.

During the nearly two weeks of the ordeal, officials came up with several alternative routes to the toddler. A series of small explosions set off since Thursday afternoon, including a fourth one late on Friday, helped the crews make their way through a 12 ½-foot-long horizontal tunnel to the cavity.

Before that tunnel could be dug some 230 feet underground, a vertical shaft was drilled during days of painstaking engineering to bring miners and rescue experts up and down.

The difficulty of the operation had prompted Jorge Martin, a spokesman with the Malaga province Civil Guard, to say: “We have to be very careful, here the mountain is in control.”

Only hair that matched Julen’s DNA was found in the borehole and no other verbal or visual contact had been established with him. Despite that, officials had refused to speculate over whether the boy could have survived so long.

In one of the few media interviews the child’s parents gave before the body was found, father Jose Rosello said the family was “heartbroken” by the long wait but hoping for “a miracle.”

El Pais reported that the couple had lost Julen’s older brother, Oliver, when the 3-year-old suffered a heart attack during a walk on the beach two years ago.

Source Article from https://nypost.com/2019/01/26/tragic-end-to-search-for-spanish-boy-trapped-in-hole-for-13-days/

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How to stop a Covington Catholic screw-up from happening again – Washington Examiner

Last Friday, during the March for Life at the Lincoln Memorial, a junior in high school became the target of society’s collective hatred. Nick Sandmann was quickly dubbed a racist who embodied everything wrong in Trump’s America, and became the subject of online vitriol and rage, from death threats to calls to dox him and his classmates.

The initial story fell apart by Monday. The narrative that pushed Sandmann and his fellow high schoolers as the bigots who’d mobbed an elderly Native American man was proven false, and the mea culpas began rolling in from outlets like The Atlantic and the New York Times. As The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan put it, “The Media Botched the Covington Catholic Story.”

So why did so many commentators, including elite journalists, jump to attack Sandmann armed with nothing more than an out-of-context video clip?

The traditional argument is that when we’re online, we can be anonymous, and that encourages our worst impulses. As Likeable, a social media marketing agency, put it, “If you could steal from a bank and you knew no one could identify you, would you? Our identity helps keep our actions in check because we must be responsible for those actions afterward.” Anonymity removes that check. But this explanation falls short. Most of Sandmann’s attackers were loud and proud, not hiding behind anonymous profiles.

The truth behind these online pile-ons is almost completely the opposite. Online pile-ons are a very public form of virtue signaling, aided by the unique psychological triggers of social media. Social media platforms designed their products to trigger a neurological response when someone engages with your post. Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook, says, “Whenever someone likes or comments on a post or photograph, we give you a little dopamine hit.” Dopamine is associated with feelings of euphoria and bliss, and we’re hardwired to seek out hits of the chemical.

Unfortunately, an effective way to get dopamine-inducing likes and retweets on social media is to tweet savagely about your political opponents, because it gets your fans fired up. You also get points for being early — social media rewards trend-setters, not followers. When college professor Reza Aslan tweeted about Sandmann’s “punchable face,” he was rewarded with more than 23,000 dopamine-inducing likes.

By contrast, calm and moderate posts rarely go viral. “Let’s wait and see what all the facts are” takes may age well, but they don’t viscerally engage fans’ emotions. Getting the story right matters, and not just because getting it wrong reduces the credibility of journalists and news organizations. There are real victims to these online pile-ons. In the case of Nick Sandmann, powerful elites with hundreds of thousands of followers publicly attacked a high schooler whose ability to fight back was limited.

How can we stop our collective rush to judgment?

A good place to start would be to adopt the following policy when we’re evaluating something our political opponents did that looks very bad: If the situation were reversed and it were my political allies under fire, would I rush to judgment, or would I look for additional context? If we’d do so when our allies were at risk of looking bad, then we have a moral obligation to do the same when it’s our opponents.

When we’re savagely tweeting about a breaking controversy, we should also take a moment and ask ourselves how our tweets will age if we’re wrong. Tweeting about a high schooler’s “punchable” face, as Aslan did, wouldn’t look great even if Aslan was right that the high-schooler in question was racist. But as details emerged that contradicted Aslan’s assumptions, his tweet began to look worse and worse. A few moments of humility (“What if my analysis of the situation is wrong?”) could have saved a lot of journalists from looking bad while also preventing a lot of trauma for innocent high schoolers.

We’re living in a brave new world where social media incentivizes savagery and a rush to judgment. A little cultivated empathy and humility could help.

Julian Adorney (@Julian_Liberty) is a Young Voices contributor.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/how-to-stop-a-covington-catholic-screw-up-from-happening-again

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Trump’s border wall drama isn’t over. This is just intermission – Washington Examiner

With airports jammed with angry passengers, Republican senators blaming each other behind closed doors for the government shutdown, and President Trump’s poll numbers tanking, the writing was on the wall. Feeling pressure from his fellow Republicans to reopen the government, Trump announced Friday afternoon that a deal was reached for federal employees to come back to work as negotiations on border security are given a little more time.

A week ago, the White House was firm on its demand: Parts of the government will remain shuttered until Democratic lawmakers write a $5.7 billion check for a border wall. Trump’s capitulation (and make no mistake, it was a capitulation) is a complete reversal of the White House position and a blowout win for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in her first month back on the job.

Trump, however, remained defiant. At the same time he asked lawmakers to work in unison for the benefit of the nation, he threatened to use the nuclear option if Congress can’t come up with a solution. “I have a very powerful alternative, but I did not want to use it at this time,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden. “Hopefully, it will be unnecessary.”

That “very powerful alternative” Trump is referring to is a declaration of national emergency, a proclamation that would provide him with a way to get his border wall money without having to go through the normal legislative process. Ordinarily, the executive branch is constitutionally barred from spending any taxpayer money on any program unless Congress explicitly authorizes and appropriates the funds. Outside of declaring war or authorizing the use of military force, the ability to appropriate funds, or not, is the legislative branch’s most coveted power.

Lawmakers from both political parties protect the power of the purse with every fiber of their being because it’s one of the few tactics Congress can employ to pressure the president. Trump’s declaring of a national emergency would rip that power away. If lawyers in the executive branch can argue that there is indeed a dire national emergency along the southwestern border with Mexico, billions of dollars in the military construction budget will be made available for the border structure Trump so desperately wants. Trump could task the Army Corps of Engineers to start building right away.

Democrats, who are as strongly opposed to a border wall as Trump is enamored by it, would not be powerless bystanders if the president tried to do an end-run around Congress. They could technically prohibit any money from being used for construction of a border barrier through legislation, although GOP opposition would likely kill it. They could file a lawsuit against Trump, arguing that his emergency declaration is not, in fact, an emergency, but rather an instigation of an artificial crisis in order to justify an unjustifiable project.

A lawsuit would work itself through the court system and wind up in the Supreme Court, where the case could prove to be one of the most important trials of executive power since the fight over military commissions in the George W. Bush era. The border wall could become a proxy war between the executive and legislative branches, a classic battle over constitutional power that the judiciary would have to arbitrate. If Trump loses that fight, the precedent it would set would impact the flexibility of presidents in the future to tap into their emergency powers.

Trump may decide that a national emergency is too big of a step. The House Freedom Caucus, Trump’s most reliable support base on Capitol Hill, has already questioned whether an emergency proclamation is a smart idea. Lawmakers such as Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows are concerned that a declaration now could provide a future Democratic president with the power to do something similar on progressive priorities like climate change. The White House may gamble on another government shutdown, perhaps believing that the public would blame Democrats for being too obstructionist this time around.

Either way, the three-week government reopening shouldn’t be celebrated as a major breakthrough. The end of the longest shutdown in history may turn out to be the intermission to the meatier second act.

Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/trumps-border-wall-drama-isnt-over-this-is-just-intermission

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Gregg Jarrett: Stone indictment shows no evidence of Trump-Russia ‘collusion’ – Fox News

Video

Jarrett: Roger Stone indictment doesn’t show Trump-Russia ‘collusion’

Roger Stone arrested by FBI in early morning raid; where were the raids for Hillary Clinton and others? Panel reaction on ‘Hannity.’

The indictment of President Trump’s former political adviser Roger Stone – who was arrested Friday on charges of obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements and witness tampering – demonstrates yet again that there is no known evidence of Trump-Russia “collusion.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating allegations since May 2017 that Donald Trump or people on his presidential campaign may have worked with Russia to win the 2016 election. There’s no question that if Mueller believed he had proof of such activity the special counsel would have charged Stone with some collusion-related offense involving a conspiracy.

Significantly, Stone wasn’t charged with anything involving collusion. In fact, not a single person has been charged with the alleged crime Mueller was appointed to investigate.

FBI’S SHOW OF FORCE IN ROGER STONE ARREST SPURS CRITICISM OF MUELLER TACTICS

Instead, in his indictment of Stone, Mueller chose to do what he has done so often – bring charges that were generated by his own investigation. These are commonly referred to as “process crimes.” That is, they are offenses against the legal process. Such offenses typically occur when someone interferes with the procedures of an investigation.

Nowhere in Mueller’s indictment is it alleged that Stone conspired, coordinated or colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.

This is not to minimize “process crimes.” They are serious violations of the law. No person should ever lie, mislead or obstruct a legitimate law enforcement investigation.

However, the distinction between a principle crime and a process crime is significant. The former is an independent criminal act. The latter is derived from the investigation into whether such an act ever occurred.

“I will plead not guilty to these charges,” Stone told reporters after his arrest and appearance in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “I will defeat them in court. This is a politically motivated investigation.”

So far, Mueller’s exhaustive probe has produced no evidence and no indictments in support of his original mandate. The special counsel has little to show for his efforts that have cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and hobbled the president with unfounded accusations from the moment he took office.

So far, Mueller’s exhaustive probe has produced no evidence and no indictments in support of his original mandate. The special counsel has little to show for his efforts that have cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and hobbled the president with unfounded accusations from the moment he took office.