The people who talk about obstruction of justice in Robert Mueller's
investigation appear unaware that in the United States the
prosecution can be guilty of obstruction of justice.
Most people don't understand that the Bill of Rights provisions
regulating law enforcement were added to the Constitution to prevent
corrupt law enforcement agencies from misusing the criminal justice
system to harass political activists. One of the worst
abuses in British legal history was the "Star Chamber"
proceeding which allowed the use of secret unsubstantiated
allegations against the accused, especially political activists.
The involvement of British intelligence agent Christopher
Steele in the investigation in effect makes it a form of Star
Chamber proceeding. I know he says he's retired, but think
about it. Obviously, if he's on a "secret mission" for the
British government, he's not going to say "I'm on a secret mission
to discredit Donald Trump." He's going to say "I'm
retired." I have enough respect for Britain's
MI6
to believe that it can arrange for agents on secret
assignments to appear to have "jobs" that have no connection
to the British government.
American courts need to know how information is
obtained, Agents like Steele need to keep some
information and sources of information secret. Courts need to
know the truth. Agents must be able to lie convincingly such as when
the British overstated the status of Iraq's Weapons of
Mass Destruction.
Regardless of whether or not Steele prepared the
Trump dossier on assignment for his government, the dossier
appears to be the type of propaganda piece an agent might prepare
for his government. It's not important whether Steele's document
caused the Mueller investigation or merely encouraged
it. What is important is that allowing a foreign agent
to encourage a criminal investigation of an American politician
allows other countries to meddle in our politics by providing
evidence to destroy politicians they don't like.
Consider a hypothetical situation that could have occurred before
the 2016 election. A country wishing to hurt
Hillary Clinton might have secretly provided incriminating emails to
Wikileaks. Any country that has Hillary emails won't want our
government to know it has emails with information about American
procedures, personnel and goals so emails would have to be
distributed secretly. What if such emails indicated
Hillary had worked out a deal with Britain to have Americans stay in
Benghazi to protect equipment the British left behind when a
terrorist attack caused them to evacuate the area in exchange
for something like a contribution to the Clinton Foundation or
unspecified help if Hillary ran for president? The emails
could not have been used to start a criminal investigation because
government could not have verified that the documents were
authentic unaltered emails which had been obtained in accordance
with American laws.
Now that I think about it, if Russia had been really anxious to
elect Trump wouldn't it have tried to secretly distribute real
or fake Clinton emails?
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