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| comment | | "parent_author":"",<br>"parent_permlink":"news",<br>"author":"rmosutton",<br>"permlink":"mueller-manafort-and-the-mafia",<br>"title":"Mueller,<br> Manafort and the Mafia",<br>"body":"By know you should know already that the past weekend was a particularly rough one for the special counsel,<br> Robert Mueller,<br> who is ostensibly investigating the possibility of Americans having colluded with Russians to affect the 2016 elections. That,<br> at least,<br> is what he was supposedly doing,<br> and what he was supposedly mandated to do.\n\nHowever,<br> a bunch of his team was in a court in Virginia last week working on charges of bank fraud from 2006 against Paul Manafort,<br> who for a time was the campaign manager for the Donald Trump campaign. The charges were being put before the court of Judge T.S. Ellis III,<br> and apparently he was a bit taken aback.\n\nYou see,<br> there is a tactic used by experienced FBI organized-crime types against the Mafia,<br> where they will pick up a lower-end button man and threaten huge charges against him to get him to \"sing\" against his don or capo or other higher-up type. \"*Here you go,<br> Tony,<br> you tell us what's going on or you'll spend 80 years in the slammer on this and this and this,<br> that we have the goods on you for*.\" You've seen the movies.\n\nManafort had actually moved for dismissal of the case,<br> based on the fact that Mueller had no standing to pursue it. So Judge Ellis looked at the charges against Manafort,<br> and then he looked at the Mueller types doing the prosecuting. \"*OK,<br> who the heck ARE you guys to be prosecuting a 2006 bank fraud case? We have a thing here called jurisdiction,<br> and I don't see any evidence that you have any of that stuff.*\"\n\nJurisdiction,<br> of course,<br> is the whole \"Who can prosecute whom\" thing. A sheriff in Kootenai County,<br> Idaho,<br> cannot bring charges for a burglary in Augusta,<br> Georgia,<br> because he doesn't have the right to act legally outside his own county. And,<br> in the view of Judge Ellis,<br> a special counsel who,<br> we are all told,<br> is supposed to be investigating Russian election tampering does not have the standing to bring 2006 bank fraud charges -- in 2018.\n\nOf course,<br> being a reasonable man,<br> Judge Ellis asked the logical question,<br> that is,<br> would the prosecutor please produce the \"scope memo\",<br> which is the authorization from the Justice Department that allows them to pursue this case. \"*Hem-haw*\",<br> the Mueller people hemmed and hawed,<br> \"*We can't do that,<br> except in a heavily redacted version,<br> because you're just a lowly judge and this is real national security stuff that you aren't good enough to see*.\"\n\nOr words to that effect.\n\nJudge Ellis,<br> to his credit,<br> would have none of that. As far as whether he could or not see the whole memo,<br> he declared \"*I'll be the judge of that*\",<br> and ordered them to produce the unredacted version in 12 days or risk having their standing to prosecute summarily canceled.\n\nOf course,<br> he didn't stop there. He looked the Mueller types in the eye and accused them of *prosecuting people and not a crime*,<br> that they were just using Manafort as a singer to try to get President Trump without a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing on the president's part.\n\nThey're either going to come back with an unredacted scope memo,<br> in which case the judge may see no authorization to pursue old bank fraud cases,<br> or with a redacted version -- or with no memo at all,<br> in which case the Manafort case may just get tossed on lack of prosecutorial authority.\n\nMafia tactics are for Mafia cases,<br> we can assume the good judge was thinking. It is a standard of prosecutors' malpractice to pursue a person as opposed to a crime,<br> and Judge Ellis saw the Mueller people as doing just that. So does this column,<br> and so does the nation.\n\nJudge Ellis is a hero today,<br> and it is our hope that the law,<br> not what is now the Mueller Mafia,<br> prevails.\n\nWe'll be watching.\n\nCopyright 2018 by Robert Sutton",<br>"json_metadata":" \"tags\":[\"news\",<br>\"justice\",<br>\"society\",<br>\"life\",<br>\"trump\" ,<br>\"app\":\"steemit\/0.1\",<br>\"format\":\"markdown\" " |
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