The movie “The Post” is the story of events surrounding the Washington Post’s publishing of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
It’s a good movie and its recent release may be a case of excellent timing as we may soon need history to repeat itself.
The Pentagon Papers were a top secret Department of Defense study of the United States’ political-military involvement in Vietnam. It was leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a former U.S. military analyst. He was charged with conspiracy, espionage and theft of government property, but those offenses were later dismissed.
Ellsberg is 86 now and might not feel up to digging up any more secret documents.
That’s too bad because, the way things are going with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether President Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia, similar leaks may be all that saves us from a constitutional crisis and grave threat to the rule of law.
Trump and his water carriers, also known as the Republican Party, and its propaganda arm, Fox News, have launched a ham-handed attempt to scuttle Mueller’s probe, which includes the question of whether the president committed obstruction of justice.
The latest attempt by Trump’s goons involves a memo prepared by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes alleging surveillance abuses by the FBI and the Justice Department. Republicans say the document shows that the investigation may be tainted by political bias.
Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote to Congress last week, warning that releasing the memo without giving the Justice Department and the FBI an opportunity to review it “would be extraordinarily reckless,’’ because doing so could harm national security and ongoing investigations.
Still, the Republican-controlled intelligence committee, on a party-line vote, approved its release. Trump has five days to decide whether it should be made public.
You can pretty much bet your house that it’s going to become public. Trump, who has long declared bias against him on the part of the FBI, has already said he wants that to happen.
It’s important to note that the GOP memo wasn’t something prepared by investigators and pulled out of a file someplace. It was prepared by Comrade Nunes himself.
Not surprisingly, the intelligence committee also voted along party lines against releasing a rebuttal memo prepared by the Democrats on the panel. After all, why would you want the public to see all the story if it’s not in your best interest to do so?
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It’s not hard to figure out what’s going on here.
Trump and the GOP want to discredit Mueller to the point that they can either shut down his investigation or dispute anything bad about the president that comes out of it.
Trump has already fired FBI Director James Comey to try to stop the investigation and it’s been reported he would have already fired Mueller if the White House counsel hadn’t threatened to quit over that move.
In a piece on the Atlantic web site, the author, Paul Rosenzweig, makes the case that the next domino that Trump wants to knock over could be Assistant Attorney General Ron Rosenstein.
Rosenzweig said he doesn’t expect Mueller to indict Trump for obstruction of justice because the Department of Justice has a long-standing legal opinion that sitting presidents may not be indicted.
He said if Mueller finds evidence of criminality involving the president he will file a report on his findings with the attorney general’s office. It will be up to Rosenstein to decide whether to convey it to Congress and whether to make it public.
A Senior Fellow at the R Street Institute and a Principal at Red Branch Consulting, who 20 years ago served as a Senior Counsel in the investigation of President Clinton, Rosenzweig wrote:
“So, every time you read about the threat to fire Mueller, remember this — the critical actor in most future scenarios is not Mueller, but Rosenstein. Knowing Rosenstein personally, I have high confidence that he will make what he thinks is the best decision for the country — the same may not be true of his replacement (or of the replacement attorney general, should Sessions be fired).
“That, of course, is why the highly dubious “secret memo” prepared by House Republicans reportedly targets Rosenstein – even though he is a Trump appointee who advocated firing Comey, Trump supporters fear he will follow the rule of law”
Here’s the full story.
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Here’s where we may need somebody with the guts of Ellsberg.
If the Republicans, a party standing pretty much in lockstep with the most corrupt and incompetent president in history, willing to give a pass to Russian interference in our elections and destroy the reputation of the FBI and Justice Department, uses the Nunes memo to railroad Rosenstein, then the Democratic memo, if it hasn’t been released already, must be leaked.
And if Trump is able to replace Rosenstein with a stooge who fires Mueller or buries his report then all details of the investigation have to be leaked, ala the Pentagon Papers nearly 50 years ago.
I know it’s against the law. I don’t care.
I don’t care because by that point we will be sitting in a full-blown crisis, with our top law enforcement agency undermined and run by enough Trump cronies that it will do the bidding of this morally bankrupt president.
We’ll stop being the United States as we know it. We can’t worry about playing by the rules when the other side will break every rule, lie, cheat and steal to get what it wants, even if their despicable actions destroy the rule of law in a country built on the rule of law.
We can’t worry about fair play when the consequences are so dire. In other words, we have to be like the Republicans.
I know, it makes you want to take a shower just thinking about it. But that’s beside the point.
So, who’s our next Daniel Ellsberg?
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