Special Prosecutors Are Bad for America

[1]2,097 words

Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller ended his investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election on March 22. It was clear from the get-go that the probe was a Stalinist, “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” sort of investigation. While most of fashionable Washington, DC and the mainstream media were completely supportive of it, this situation should be considered a near-miss disaster for Americans in general, and not just the Trump administration.

The Mueller probe was launched based on faulty assumptions and a flawed philosophical foundation. The investigation ignored long-running corruption on Hillary Clinton’s part. And the only reason why the Special Prosecutor didn’t nail Trump was because the GOP retained the Senate in 2018, and thus a new Attorney General could be appointed.

Watergate

Special Prosecutors became a thing after the 1972 presidential election. The FBI’s famous founder and longtime Director, J. Edgar Hoover, had recently died. Seeking to rein in the FBI’s power, President Nixon passed over Associate Director Mark Felt for the Director’s spot. Enraged, Felt leaked incriminating information about the Nixon White House’s involvement in the Watergate break-in that had been collected by the FBI to Leftist reporters at The Washington Post. The press kept the story alive for more than a year, and because both houses of Congress were in the hands of the Democrats, Nixon was forced to resign when it was clear that he was going to be impeached over the matter.

Nixon probably discovered that his aides had broken into the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the Watergate Hotel when everyone else did. His mistake was that he had been recording all the conversations in the White House (which was then a common practice for all presidents), and he said something that could be interpreted as “obstruction of justice” – the catch-all crime the FBI uses. If the Republicans had held the Senate, Nixon wouldn’t have resigned.

The fall of the Nixon White House became a legend for the political Left, but for the United States, the following years would bring a series of disasters which were no doubt worsened by the successful coup against Nixon: Saigon fell in 1975, the Soviet Union expanded its influence considerably, and Iran underwent a revolution, flipping from being a staunch American ally to a staunch foe and inflicting a series of humiliations on the United States. And finally, the economy went into a “stagflation” slump that lasted until the early 1980s.

When Mark Felt was revealed to be the shadowy source known as “Deep Throat,” the entire affair appeared to have been that of a scorned, unelected government official using his power to undermine the results of a democratic election. And after Trump was elected in 2016, the Leftist press revealed a new angle to Nixon’s story. During the 1968 election, President Lyndon Johnson had gotten wind of the fact that Nixon had passed a message to South Vietnam in order to sabotage the peace conference that LBJ was setting up in an attempt to boost Democratic candidate Hubert H. Humphrey’s chances. Johnson thought that Nixon was committing treason, even though it is unlikely that the peace conference would have happened in any case. It is also unlikely that Nixon had actually committed treason, or had violated the Logan Act of 1799; he was, after all, a former Vice President and a presidential candidate running in an election which had Vietnam as its central issue.

Lawrence Walsh & Iran-Contra

The Special Investigation, which was headed by Lawrence Walsh, into the Iran-Contra Affair is the only one of those under discussion where the investigation was probably justified. In the 1980s, Central America, most especially Nicaragua and El Salvador, had fallen apart. The Communists were making headway. Given that the Cold War was in full swing, this alarmed the Reagan administration. The Democratically-controlled Congress, under the pretext of preventing America from getting embroiled in yet another protracted guerrilla war as in Vietnam, banned the US government from directly funding the anti-Communist Contra rebels. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the US Marines thus headed an operation to sell weapons to Iran – which was then engaged in a ferocious war with Iraq – and use the resulting profits to fund the Contras.

Once revealed to the public, the question of the legality of this operation turned out to be difficult to untangle. Plus, the Reagan administration had some very good reasons to support the Contras. The Cold War wasn’t imaginary. Additionally, the investigators ended up appearing as if they supported Communist gains in the Americas. The still-unhealed wounds from Vietnam War were also a factor; the investigators appeared to the public like hippies scorning a patriotic veteran. Oliver North became famous, and was seen by many as a martyr.[1] [2]

Ken Starr & the blue dress

President Bill Clinton was also investigated by a Special Prosecutor. While still grieving the death of his mother, Clinton authorized the Justice Department to appoint a Special Prosecutor to dissolve the cloud of suspicion surrounding Whitewater, a failed real estate investment scheme in Arkansas which Clinton had been involved with during the 1970s and ‘80s. Ken Starr headed the investigation. It never found that Clinton had committed any wrongdoing related to Whitewater or any other matter covered by the investigation’s charter. Instead, they discovered that Clinton had had an affair with a Jewish intern named Monica Lewinsky. Clinton was less than truthful regarding the affair, and was proven to be a liar when semen on a blue dress belonging to Lewinsky was proven to be Clinton’s in a DNA test.

The Ken Starr investigation was a disaster for the United States. It obscured what should have been a national conversation[2] [3] regarding the rise of al-Qaeda and radical Islamism. It’s not that the information wasn’t out there; the idea of a clash of civilizations had first been raised in 1992, and the famous Samuel Huntington book of that title was published in 1996. The first attack on the World Trade Center had already occurred in February 1993, when federal law enforcement was wasting time prosecuting what would become the Waco massacre. Other Islamist attacks on American targets took place during Clinton’s presidency, but when he finally retaliated by bombing al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, he was accused of trying to distract public attention from the Starr investigation. The press claimed that the tail was wagging the dog. Today, we’re well aware that it was in fact Ken Starr and the blue dress that was the side show.

[4]

Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress was more a cloak for al-Qaeda.

Mueller and the “Russian hacking” investigation

The full story of how the Mueller investigation was launched has yet to be written, but here are some key aspects:

The Mueller investigation’s negatives

It must be pointed out that there will be people who are so invested in the Russian collusion narrative that they will never change their minds. When True Believers are shown their errors, they don’t accept the facts; they merely double down on their delusions. Additionally, whatever hostile group has gathered in the dark shadow cast by the Muller probe – as al-Qaeda did during the Lewinsky scandal – is unknown as of yet. But there are very likely anti-white or anti-American non-state actors who have gone undetected thanks to all this distraction. Furthermore, it is likely that America’s intelligence community today has more political hacks than competent employees.

But for the moment, these are the negatives that we know of:

Suggestions for the Next President & Next Special Prosecutor

Special Prosecutors should be eliminated entirely, but since this is unlikely for the foreseeable future, a new set of ground rules for dealing with such accusations against the Executive Branch should be developed. Here are my suggestions:

Notes

[1] [6] For further reading on Vietnam, I suggest The Nightingale’s Song (1995) by Robert Timberg.

[2] [7] Clinton should have also been able to bring about immigration reform. He very likely read Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation (1995).