Letter From Stephen Boyd (Asst Attorney General) to Jerry Nadler

[auburn41 492]

I was born in a crossfire hurricane.......it's coming boys......Hillary, Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Yates, Rice, Lynch, Strozk, Paige, McCabe, Ohr and others should be really nervous!

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/447760-justice-gives-congress-new-details-on-spying-probe

In the letter Monday, Boyd described Barr’s review as “broad in scope and multifaceted" and said it is "intended to illuminate open questions regarding the activities of U.S. and foreign intelligence services as well as non-governmental organizations and individuals.”

“As the Attorney General has stated publicly at congressional hearings and elsewhere, there remain open questions relating to the origins of this counter-intelligence investigation and the U.S. and foreign intelligence activities that took place prior to and during that investigation,” Boyd wrote.

“The purpose of the Review is to more fully understand the efficacy and propriety of those steps and to answer, to the satisfaction of the Attorney General, those open questions. Among other things, the Review will seek to determine whether the investigation complied with applicable policies and laws,” he wrote.

The letter comes weeks after Trump ordered U.S. intelligence leaders to cooperate with Barr’s investigation. Trump also gave Barr broad authorities to declassify and potentially release sensitive documents related to the probe.

Boyd described the review as a “collaborative” effort between the department and the intelligence community as well as “certain foreign actors.”

He also wrote that the department had requested certain unnamed intelligence community entities preserve relevant records, make available witnesses who may be “pertinent” to the inquiry and begin “identifying and assembling materials” relevant to the review consistent with Trump’s order and federal law.

 

[SaltyTiger 7,764]

3 hours ago, auburn41 said:

I was born in a crossfire hurricane.......it's coming boys......Hillary, Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Yates, Rice, Lynch, Strozk, Paige, McCabe, Ohr and others should be really nervous!

I wish others included our own beloved Brothers Homer and Tex. 

[TexasTiger 12,812]

You guys are an insult to our Founders.

[SaltyTiger 7,764]

2 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

You guys are an insult to our Founders.

Why 

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

4 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

You guys are an insult to our Founders.

Aweeee. Does baby Tex need his bottle?

[TexasTiger 12,812]

10 hours ago, NolaAuTiger said:

Aweeee. Does baby Tex need his bottle?

You are remarkably unoriginal.

[japantiger 4,051]

16 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

You guys are an insult to our Founders.

So let me see if I have this straight; it is being alleged and investigated by a US attorney;  (with good evidence by the way; much of it public now); that the full DOJ leadership and Intel community leadership apparatus illegally targeted a political campaign and private citizens to prevent a candidate from being elected; and then if elected; to stage a coup d'etat; and we're an insult to the Founders ... you've gone full truther....get help.  

[kd4au 1,145]

22 hours ago, SaltyTiger said:

I wish others included our own beloved Brothers Homer and Tex. 

How do we know it doesn't ? I think they would have to be on the DNC payroll to post what they post or they may be working for the Russians who knows.

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

10 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

You are remarkably unoriginal.

Says the dude who claims others are “an insult to our Founders.” 😂

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

7 hours ago, japantiger said:

So let me see if I have this straight; it is being alleged and investigated by a US attorney;  (with good evidence by the way; much of it public now); that the full DOJ leadership and Intel community leadership apparatus illegally targeted a political campaign and private citizens to prevent a candidate from being elected; and then if elected; to stage a coup d'etat; and we're an insult to the Founders ... you've gone full truther....get help.  

Sound reasoning is an asset Tex does not possess.

[homersapien 11,354]

You folks are a hoot.

There were a total of 272 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia-linked operatives identified, including at least 38 meetings. And we know that at least 33 high-ranking campaign officials and Trump advisers were aware of contacts with Russia-linked operatives during the campaign and transition, including Trump himself. None of these contacts were ever reported to the proper authorities. Instead, the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.

And you seriously believe the investigation lacked justification? 

Not to mention:

Trump Says He’d ‘Take’ Foreign Dirt on 2020 Opponents

The president told ABC he wouldn’t alert the FBI if foreign figures approached him with information on a 2020 opponent because it’s “not an interference.”

That is the definition of "collusion".

Keep up those ad hominem attacks though.  They are a pitiful reflection of your lack of substantive argument.

[auburn41 492]

6 hours ago, homersapien said:

You folks are a hoot.

There were a total of 272 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia-linked operatives identified, including at least 38 meetings. And we know that at least 33 high-ranking campaign officials and Trump advisers were aware of contacts with Russia-linked operatives during the campaign and transition, including Trump himself. None of these contacts were ever reported to the proper authorities. Instead, the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.

And you seriously believe the investigation lacked justification? 

Not to mention:

Trump Says He’d ‘Take’ Foreign Dirt on 2020 Opponents

The president told ABC he wouldn’t alert the FBI if foreign figures approached him with information on a 2020 opponent because it’s “not an interference.”

That is the definition of "collusion".

Keep up those ad hominem attacks though.  They are a pitiful reflection of your lack of substantive argument.

What I believe clearly does not matter. The Mueller report cleared the Trump campaign. We will see after the investigation of how this mess started whether or not this investigation was justified. 

And you can’t believe the President’s response to a hypothetical and call it “collusion,” while the candidate that you voted for payed a foreign government for information on Trump in order to affect the US election and you don’t have a problem with it. Simply amazing. 

The Trump campaign did nothing wrong according to your savior Mueller but the Clinton campaign is definitely guilty of collusion as you define it. 

[homersapien 11,354]

5 hours ago, auburn41 said:

'What I believe clearly does not matter. The Mueller report cleared the Trump campaign'.

A whole lot of irony in that sentence.

You are nuts.

[auburn41 492]

33 minutes ago, homersapien said:

A whole lot of irony in that sentence.

You are nuts.

I guess we will see won’t we?  And you can bet, if the investigation finds that there was justification to start the spying campaign on American citizens, I’ll admit that I was wrong. Much more than others on this board wouldn’t you say???😂😂😂#clueless

[homersapien 11,354]

11 hours ago, auburn41 said:

I guess we will see won’t we?  And you can bet, if the investigation finds that there was justification to start the spying campaign on American citizens, I’ll admit that I was wrong. Much more than others on this board wouldn’t you say???😂😂😂#clueless

Well, we will obviously have to wait for the next election. 

That's what Trump has done to the Justice Department, not to mention the rule of law.  So meanwhile, you can revel in that.

[auburn41 492]

2 hours ago, homersapien said:

Well, we will obviously have to wait for the next election. 

That's what Trump has done to the Justice Department, not to mention the rule of law.  So meanwhile, you can reveal in that.

So what do you want me to reveal?  The investigation will reveal the truth and you can revel in that😂.

[auburn41 492]

3 hours ago, homersapien said:

A whole lot of irony in that sentence.

You are nuts.

And I just wanted to ask you for some clarification. Did Mr Mueller charge anyone in the Trump campaign with conspiracy with the Russians?  So there is not any irony in my statement. You are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. Facts can not be argued with. 😂

[homersapien 11,354]

8 hours ago, auburn41 said:

So what do you want me to reveal?  The investigation will reveal the truth and you can revel in that😂.

Sorry.  Typo.  Meant to say revel.

[japantiger 4,051]

On 6/15/2019 at 8:28 AM, homersapien said:

You folks are a hoot.

There were a total of 272 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia-linked operatives identified, including at least 38 meetings. And we know that at least 33 high-ranking campaign officials and Trump advisers were aware of contacts with Russia-linked operatives during the campaign and transition, including Trump himself. None of these contacts were ever reported to the proper authorities. Instead, the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.

And you seriously believe the investigation lacked justification? 

Not to mention:

Trump Says He’d ‘Take’ Foreign Dirt on 2020 Opponents

The president told ABC he wouldn’t alert the FBI if foreign figures approached him with information on a 2020 opponent because it’s “not an interference.”

That is the definition of "collusion".

Keep up those ad hominem attacks though.  They are a pitiful reflection of your lack of substantive argument.

"Truther" says Orange Man Bad...

[aubiefifty 16,718]

On 6/12/2019 at 10:24 AM, TexasTiger said:

You are remarkably unoriginal.

nola likes to talk pretty to try and impress the masses but then his true self comes out and just reaffirms to me whom he really is.

[aubiefifty 16,718]

10 hours ago, auburn41 said:

And I just wanted to ask you for some clarification. Did Mr Mueller charge anyone in the Trump campaign with conspiracy with the Russians?  So there is not any irony in my statement. You are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. Facts can not be argued with. 😂

talkingpointsmemo.com

In Deciding On Trump Obstruction, Mueller Faced 'Uncharted' Territory

By Josh Kovensky May 31, 2019 5:06 pm

5-6 minutes

All the facts are there. Cursing, pettiness, and allegedly obstructive acts abound in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report.

But as Mueller and his team have now impressed upon the world, per a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel Opinion, the special counsel could lay out a detailed obstruction of justice case against President Trump — but could not consider whether the President broke the law.

Legal scholars told TPM that this apparent paradox comes down in part to the fact that Mueller is the first special counsel to operate under an OLC opinion that forbids prosecutors from charging a sitting president, and in part to the fact that it’s a murky, rarely tested area of constitutional law.

Mueller addressed this apparent paradox at his surprise Wednesday press conference, saying that as long as indicting a sitting president was banned under DOJ policy, he could not make a determination on accusing the President of obstruction because it would violate principles of fairness.

“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller said. “We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the President did commit a crime.”

“It would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge,” Mueller added.

The OLC opinion was predated by widespread belief in the legal community that a sitting president could not be indicted and a Watergate-era DOJ determination on the issue, but it was not formally issued until October 2000.

Georgetown Law Professor Susan Bloch, who testified at 1990s Senate hearings on whether a sitting president could be indicted, told TPM that Mueller found himself in “totally uncharted territory.”

“It’s the first time we’ve had a president looking like he’s done something criminal since that OLC position was taken,” she added, saying it was the first time the opinion had to be “utilized.” 

Jens David Ohlin, a law professor at Cornell, told TPM that the distinction Mueller drew between laying out the evidence leading to a charge and concluding that a charge was warranted was “incredibly formalistic.”

“It’s a one-way ratchet,” Ohlin said. “Under this view, the DOJ can say he didn’t engage in wrongdoing, but they can’t accuse the president of wrongdoing, so it only goes one way.”

At his press conference, Mueller said that much of his reasoning came down to “principles of fairness.”

Anyone who faces criminal charges from the government deserves a hearing before an impartial judge and jury of their peers. Accusing Trump of obstruction in the report while being unable to indict him would have unfairly deprived him of this right, the thinking goes.

Instead, Mueller said that his office “did not exonerate” Trump, but found that it could not take a definitive position on whether the President violated the law.

Different legal experts that TPM spoke with agreed that Mueller faced a legal gray area in deciding the issue.

Two previous special counsels have considered this issue in depth, albeit in different ways.

During the Watergate scandal, special prosecutor Leon Jaworski wrote a so-called “roadmap” that outlined a patch to impeaching President Richard Nixon.

Stanford Law Professor David Alan Sklansky called Jaworski’s approach relatively “bare-bones,” as opposed to that of Clinton-era special counsel Ken Starr, who attempted to lay out for Congress his view of the President’s impeachable offenses.

“I wasn’t sure how Mueller was gonna handle it,” Sklansky said. “It’s been handled in different ways by different special counsels.”

Attorney General Bill Barr told CBS that Mueller “could’ve reached a conclusion.”

“The opinion says you cannot indict a president while he is in office, but he could’ve reached a decision as to whether it was criminal activity. But he had his reasons for not doing it,” Barr said in the interview.

Either way, thanks to the ban on bringing charges against a sitting president, any decision about how to resolve the obstruction allegations would likely devolve to Congress.

Rick Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at NYU Law School, told TPM that the DOJ policy did not prevent the special counsel from “inform[ing] Congress of its conclusion that the President has committed a crime.”

He went on to accuse Mueller of “abdicat[ing] his core responsibility.”

“Our best opportunity in our hyper-polarized era for generating any kind of consensus on whether the President has broken the law is a definitive judgment, one way or the other, from an independent special counsel investigation,” Pildes told TPM. “That is one of the central points of initiating such an independent investigation.

this is closer to the truth than the facts you are trying distort.

[aubiefifty 16,718]

19 hours ago, auburn41 said:

What I believe clearly does not matter. The Mueller report cleared the Trump campaign. We will see after the investigation of how this mess started whether or not this investigation was justified. 

And you can’t believe the President’s response to a hypothetical and call it “collusion,” while the candidate that you voted for payed a foreign government for information on Trump in order to affect the US election and you don’t have a problem with it. Simply amazing. 

The Trump campaign did nothing wrong according to your savior Mueller but the Clinton campaign is definitely guilty of collusion as you define it. 

At his press conference, Mueller said that much of his reasoning came down to “principles of fairness.”

Anyone who faces criminal charges from the government deserves a hearing before an impartial judge and jury of their peers. Accusing Trump of obstruction in the report while being unable to indict him would have unfairly deprived him of this right, the thinking goes.

Instead, Mueller said that his office “did not exonerate” Trump, but found that it could not take a definitive position on whether the President violated the law.

but go ahead and keep lying............

[TexasTiger 12,812]

On 6/12/2019 at 11:52 PM, kd4au said:

How do we know it doesn't ? I think they would have to be on the DNC payroll to post what they post or they may be working for the Russians who knows.

You’re disturbed. 

[TexasTiger 12,812]

On 6/12/2019 at 6:35 PM, japantiger said:

So let me see if I have this straight; it is being alleged and investigated by a US attorney;  (with good evidence by the way; much of it public now); that the full DOJ leadership and Intel community leadership apparatus illegally targeted a political campaign and private citizens to prevent a candidate from being elected; and then if elected; to stage a coup d'etat; and we're an insult to the Founders ... you've gone full truther....get help.  

If they wanted to thwart his election they would have leaked it. Instead, Comey torpedoed Hillary. But you don’t do facts.

[auburn41 492]

8 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

talkingpointsmemo.com

In Deciding On Trump Obstruction, Mueller Faced 'Uncharted' Territory

By Josh Kovensky May 31, 2019 5:06 pm

5-6 minutes

All the facts are there. Cursing, pettiness, and allegedly obstructive acts abound in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report.

But as Mueller and his team have now impressed upon the world, per a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel Opinion, the special counsel could lay out a detailed obstruction of justice case against President Trump — but could not consider whether the President broke the law.

Legal scholars told TPM that this apparent paradox comes down in part to the fact that Mueller is the first special counsel to operate under an OLC opinion that forbids prosecutors from charging a sitting president, and in part to the fact that it’s a murky, rarely tested area of constitutional law.

Mueller addressed this apparent paradox at his surprise Wednesday press conference, saying that as long as indicting a sitting president was banned under DOJ policy, he could not make a determination on accusing the President of obstruction because it would violate principles of fairness.

“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller said. “We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the President did commit a crime.”

“It would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge,” Mueller added.

The OLC opinion was predated by widespread belief in the legal community that a sitting president could not be indicted and a Watergate-era DOJ determination on the issue, but it was not formally issued until October 2000.

Georgetown Law Professor Susan Bloch, who testified at 1990s Senate hearings on whether a sitting president could be indicted, told TPM that Mueller found himself in “totally uncharted territory.”

“It’s the first time we’ve had a president looking like he’s done something criminal since that OLC position was taken,” she added, saying it was the first time the opinion had to be “utilized.” 

Jens David Ohlin, a law professor at Cornell, told TPM that the distinction Mueller drew between laying out the evidence leading to a charge and concluding that a charge was warranted was “incredibly formalistic.”

“It’s a one-way ratchet,” Ohlin said. “Under this view, the DOJ can say he didn’t engage in wrongdoing, but they can’t accuse the president of wrongdoing, so it only goes one way.”

At his press conference, Mueller said that much of his reasoning came down to “principles of fairness.”

Anyone who faces criminal charges from the government deserves a hearing before an impartial judge and jury of their peers. Accusing Trump of obstruction in the report while being unable to indict him would have unfairly deprived him of this right, the thinking goes.

Instead, Mueller said that his office “did not exonerate” Trump, but found that it could not take a definitive position on whether the President violated the law.

Different legal experts that TPM spoke with agreed that Mueller faced a legal gray area in deciding the issue.

Two previous special counsels have considered this issue in depth, albeit in different ways.

During the Watergate scandal, special prosecutor Leon Jaworski wrote a so-called “roadmap” that outlined a patch to impeaching President Richard Nixon.

Stanford Law Professor David Alan Sklansky called Jaworski’s approach relatively “bare-bones,” as opposed to that of Clinton-era special counsel Ken Starr, who attempted to lay out for Congress his view of the President’s impeachable offenses.

“I wasn’t sure how Mueller was gonna handle it,” Sklansky said. “It’s been handled in different ways by different special counsels.”

Attorney General Bill Barr told CBS that Mueller “could’ve reached a conclusion.”

“The opinion says you cannot indict a president while he is in office, but he could’ve reached a decision as to whether it was criminal activity. But he had his reasons for not doing it,” Barr said in the interview.

Either way, thanks to the ban on bringing charges against a sitting president, any decision about how to resolve the obstruction allegations would likely devolve to Congress.

Rick Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at NYU Law School, told TPM that the DOJ policy did not prevent the special counsel from “inform[ing] Congress of its conclusion that the President has committed a crime.”

He went on to accuse Mueller of “abdicat[ing] his core responsibility.”

“Our best opportunity in our hyper-polarized era for generating any kind of consensus on whether the President has broken the law is a definitive judgment, one way or the other, from an independent special counsel investigation,” Pildes told TPM. “That is one of the central points of initiating such an independent investigation.

this is closer to the truth than the facts you are trying distort.

Please re-read my post and show me where I said anything about OBSTRUCTION.  And I clearly stated that no one in the Trump campaign was charged with Conspiracy/collusion.