A MUST READ FOR EVERY “FRIEND OF INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY” …
On 19 April 2019, Emmet Flood, Special Counsel to the President, penned a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr. The purpose of the letter was to “memorialize concerns” relating to the Special Counsel Office (SCO) report and genesis. Another concern, though not highlighted below, was about White House retention of executive privilege in future Congressional investigations.
The full letter is included as a pdf at the end of this post.
We believe the White House concerns stated in Flood’s letter are valid and should worry all Americans, independent of their political party affiliation.
Here is a succinct summary of the primary concerns:
The SCO Report was legally defective when it stated that “evidence on the obstruction question prevented it from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred.” Conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred was NOT the assigned task of the SCO; especially in the American justice system where innocence is presumed and federal prosecutors are NEVER required to prove it.
The SCO failed to do its one and only job with regard to the obstruction question — “provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.” It did neither. Instead, it “transmitted a 182-page discussion of raw evidentiary material combined with its own inconclusive observations that will never be subjected to adversarial testing or independent analysis.”
The SCO was created when unelected high ranking Government officials, with access to classified information derived from a counterintelligence investigation and from classified intelligence intercepts, engaged in a campaign of illegal leaks to trigger a criminal investigation into the President of the United States.
The letter concludes appropriately by warning every friend of individual liberty that if this can be done to a President, then it can be done to any of us too.
The SCO’s deliberate failure to investigate its own creation and to perform its duties per the requirements of governing law should awaken Americans to the erosion of our constitutional protections and the politicization of our justice system.
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