The Washington Times this morning is indicating stuff is about to get real.
“The SCO Report suffers from an extraordinary legal defect: It quite deliberately fails to comply with the requirements of governing law,” Mr. Flood wrote to Attorney General William Barr in a hand-delivered letter.
…
Mr. Mueller punted to Mr. Barr a decision on whether to find that Mr. Trump obstructed justice. Mr. Barr concluded he did not.
Mr. Muller said he couldn’t conclude that “no criminal conduct occurred.” Mr. Flood said that is not a federal prosecutor’s job.
“In closing its investigation,” Mr. Flood said, quoting the regulation, “the SCO had only one job to ‘provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.’ Yet the one thing the SCO was obligated to do is the very thing the SCO — intentionally and unapologetically — refused to do.”
…
“The SCO’s inverted-proof standard and ‘exoneration’ statements can be understood only as political statements, issuing from persons (federal prosecutors) who in our system of government are rightly expected never to be political in the performance of their duties,” he said. “The inverted burden of proof knowingly embedded in the SCO’s conclusion shows that the Special Counsel and his staff failed in their duty to act as prosecutors and only as prosecutors.”
It’s interesting that this is precisely the argument that I’ve been making since the redacted version of the report came out:
Ponder…. if this was the outcome, we can’t tell if it was a crime created or not, what in the world did we need a special counsel for in the first place? What was required here both in terms of the law and in terms of the public interest was somebody saying yay or nay. The Mueller report, as presented, fails to do so.
It will be interesting now to see whether or not the Democrats try to discredit Flood, as they have everybody else it gets in their way. Flood is a particularly interesting case in that regard, given his history in the Clinton administration during the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
My take is that this is the opening salvo against the Democrats. following that of course, will be the Inspector General’s report, which should be out by the end of this month, along with whatever else Bill Barr has in the pipeline.
