When Lady Justice sets down her scales so she can peek over her blindfold

It's not a super-frequent topic here at LITD, but some space has been given to the general question of the extent to which the DoJ and the FBI might be tainted by ideology, partisan tribalism, and / or career ambition.

In particular, I've looked at what can be ascertained about James Comey's character and personality from his record, his testimony before Congress, his writings and the way he comports himself publicly. Until the last couple of years, he enjoyed the respect of a number of respectable people. One doesn't get any inkling of brashness or cockiness in him. Without digressing into a rehash of the details surrounding his handling of the Clinton email situation, it appears he was leaned on, hard enough to show very confounding behavior at the July 4, 2016 press conference. That' of course, leads to a whole discussion of who did the leaning. Again, we'll not digress here, but recall who the president was at the time, and that the Democrats' presidential candidate was part of a notoriously hardball political machine.

Then there is Robert Mueller. His story is not exactly one of hoisting himself solely by his own bootstraps - he was born with the advantage of a well-credentialed family tree - but he set a pattern of remarkable accomplishment early on. Star athlete at his prep school, a Purple Heart for his Vietnam service, prosecutions of Manuel Noriega, the Pan Am Flight 102 Lockerbie bombers, and John Gotti.

During his tenure as FBI director, he appears to have been motivated by principle in his opposition to extension of the Terrorist Surveillance Program's domestic-wiretapping feature, to the point of being willing to submit his resignation if it came to that. (He was joined in that stance by the above-mentioned Comey.) He came nose-to-nose with President Bush on the matter of his agency not rounding up more stateside terrorists than it did. One can make legitimate arguments for both points of view in that standoff, but Mueller's position was that suspects had to be known to have committed an arrest-worthy offense.

Cut to the present, and what is becoming known about the team Mueller has assembled as special prosecutor. (LITD is not fond of the whole notion of special prosecutors, but, again, in the interest of focus, we'll reserve that discussion for another day.)

The fact is, it is comprised in significant part by partisan Democrats who have it in for Trump.

Most egregiously, there is the case of one Andrew Weissmann:

A lot of questions have been raised about the partisanship of Mueller’s team of attorneys. Nine of fifteen are known to be Democrat donors, apparently apolitical and GOP talent is hard to come-by. In particular, one guy, Andrew Weissmann has drawn a lot of attention. Not only is he an Obama and DNC donor, he has a reputation of being perfectly willing to destroy the lives of innocent people in order to claim a scalp:

Weissmann, as deputy and later director of the Enron Task Force, destroyed the venerable accounting firm of Arthur Andersen LLP and its 85,000 jobs worldwide — only to be reversed several years later by a unanimous Supreme Court.

Next, Weissmann creatively criminalized a business transaction between Merrill Lynch and Enron. Four Merrill executives went to prison for as long as a year. Weissmann’s team made sure they did not even get bail pending their appeals, even though the charges Weissmann concocted, like those against Andersen, were literally unprecedented.

Weissmann’s prosecution devastated the lives and families of the Merrill executives, causing enormous defense costs, unimaginable stress and torturous prison time. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the mass of the case.

Weissmann quietly resigned from the Enron Task Force just as the judge in the Enron Broadband prosecution began excoriating Weissmann’s team and the press began catching on to Weissmann’s modus operandi.

By the way, he is replicating this behavior with Paul Manafort. I don’t carry any brief for Manafort (see my coverage of him) but carrying out a pre-dawn, no-knock raid on a white collar suspect and then trying to prevent him from getting bail is just bullying of the type that deserves a righteous ass-whipping.

But more to the point is his enthusiasm for the stance of Obama holdover Sally Yates:

Merely being an egregious ass and a partisan Democrat is not a bar from being a DoJ lawyer, rather in that agency those are features, not bugs. What makes Weissmann stand out is that he’s very obviously an rabid anti-Trump kind of partisan, the kind you’d hire to do damage to the Trump administration and White House if that was your objective.

Case in point. One of the first crises to hit the Trump White House was the issuance of an executive order restricting the ability of people from six failed states and one state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, to travel to the United States. It was dishonestly portrayed as a “travel ban” and a “Muslim ban” but, in reality, if affected a handful of people and was clearly legal. Sally Yates, who was an Obama holdover acting as attorney general until Jeff Sessions could be confirmed. She refused to defend the executive order in court and expressed doubt as to its legality.

Judicial Watch has just received Sally Yates’s email and in it you find all kinds of career Justice people sucking up to her in the most disgusting manner:

The emails, several sent from official Justice Department email addresses, show strong support for Yates, who was fired for disobeying a direct order from the President:

• Thomas Delahanty, then the United States Attorney for Maine wrote: “You are my hero.”

• Liz Aloi, a career service employee and Chief of the Justice Department’s Special Financial Investigations Unit told Yates she was “Inspirational and heroic.”

• Emily Gray Rice, then the U.S. Attorney for New Hampshire and an Obama appointee said: “AAG Yates, thank you, as always, for making us proud. It is truly an honor to work for you.”

• Obama appointee Barbara McQuade, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan told Yates, “Thank you for your courage and leadership. This is wonderful news.”

• DOJ Civil Division Appellate Attorney Jeffrey Clair wrote: “Thank you AG Yates. I’ve been in civil/appellate for 30 years and have never seen an administration with such contempt for democratic values and the rule of law. The President’s order is an unconstitutional embarrassment and I applaud you for taking a principled stand against defending it.”

There's one particularly noteworthy correspondence in this gush-fest: an email from Weissmann to Yates. Terse, but pungent with praise: " . . . in awe. Thank you so much."

So one of Mueller’s top deputies was “in awe” of Sally Yates for refusing to do her Constitutional duty? And we really think this guy is going to treat the people on the Trump campaign he interacts with as anything but roadkill on his way to damage the Trump administration? Do we really believe he doesn’t carry a personal animus towards Trump for having kicked Yates to the curb? And if private text messages were grounds to kick the now famous Peter Storzok off the investigation team, wouldn’t praising someone fired by Trump for acting illegally using government email raise red flags?

This whole situation is full of arcane palace-intrigue details, and it's coming to this boiling point at the same time as a number of front-burner issues - renewed rising of Mideast tensions, the North Korean threat, the sad and spiritually rotten Alabama Senate race, the continuing revelations about the prevalence of sexual harassment in America, the tax bill making is way through Congress - rightfully claim our attention.

But consider for a moment that what is supposed to be the most impartial department in our federal government is pursuing a special-prosecutor investigation originally set up over supposed Russian collusion with the Trump campaign (a charge for which not one shred of evidence has been found) but now morphing into a sprawling look into all kinds of unrelated matters, and that that investigation team is staffed with rank partisans.

Deep Constitutional questions are before us. If this investigation throws the entire administration off-kilter at a time when the above-mentioned issues are on the national plate, we'll be perilously vulnerable.

That's what's at stake here.

UPDATE: There's another one:

Jeannie Rhee, who was hired by Mueller last summer to work on the probe, was the personal attorney of Ben Rhodes and also represented the Clinton Foundation, Ingraham revealed. "This information will put further pressure on Special Prosecutor Bob Mueller to resign."

Rhee is the third member of the Mueller team this week who has been shown to be brazenly partisan. Two other members of the team have been revealed as highly questionable hires in recent days as well — Peter Strzok, an anti-Trumper who helped exonerate Hillary Clinton, and Andrew Weissmann, an unscrupulous prosecutor who told outgoing acting Attorney General Sally Yates in an email that he was "proud" of her for defying President Trump's travel ban.

Rhodes had it in for Michale Flynn over Flynn's opposition to patty-cake with Iran the JCPOA.