Freedom Line Blog

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey says appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS scandal would be a bad idea because the investigator would still report to the President.

Better, Mukasey said, for congressional investigations to continue, with a potentially ironic assist from one of the most corrupt divisions in the Department of Justice.

“Ironically, if you decide to have a criminal investigation, I would think that perhaps the proper entity to investigate is the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which has been charged politicizing the way it enforces the law and would have an excellent opportunity to redeem itself and get out from under those charges if it were to conduct an impartial investigation,” Mukasey added.

Though I’m a big fan of Mukasey, particularly his tenure as AG, I just don’t see how the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division gets near this case. In order to prove Mukasey right, the Division would have to conclude in its investigation that major wrongdoing occurred, recommending resignations, fines or criminal charges. Anything less and the Division will be accused of rolling out a whitewash to cover for the Obama administration.

This doesn’t even mention the fact that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, as the Mukasey quote alludes to and our own Quin Hillyer has argued, is a breeding ground for corrupt applications of the law. How these legal weasels can be trusted with playing such a sensitive investigation straight is beyond me.

No, the closest we’ll get to an independent arbiter on any of the Obama scandals will be the federal judiciary, and even then there’s no guarantee. Best for the House to continue exercising its oversight responsibilities until they find some smoking guns.

H/T: The Daily Caller

Robert Costa at National Review reports that certain members of the Senate GOP sent a letter to President Barack Obama demanding an immediate end to the Justice Department’s politically motivated investigation of CIA interrogators.  I published a column this week concluding that the only reason this nearly two-year travesty is still being funded is because it plays to the president’s liberal base.

The most troubling aspect of the president’s threatened but unlikely prosecutions is that they target interrogators who were acting under authorization from the Justice Department.  The fact that current U.S. Attorney Eric Holder takes a different view than his predecessors John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey is irrelevant.  Prosecuting people for activity that is only determined to be a crime after the fact is a violation of the Constitution’s ex post facto prohibition.

If President Obama really wanted to thread the needle between following the law and pleasing his fellow liberals, he would shut down Holder’s after-the-fact prosecutions and  issue an executive order directing all federal personnel not to use whatever interrogation techniques – enhanced or otherwise – that he deems unacceptable.  That he’s instead choosing to make career civil servants sweat out indictments for doing their job is shameful.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey pens a chilling recall of some terrorist history in today’s Wall Street Journal.

An excerpt:

In November 1990, Meir Kahane, a right-wing Israeli politician, was assassinated after delivering a speech at a Manhattan hotel by El-Sayid Nosair, quickly pigeonholed as a lone misfit whose failures at work had driven him over the edge.  The material seized from his home lay largely unexamined in boxes until a truck bomb was detonated under the World Trade Center in 1993, when the perpetrators of that act announced that freeing Nosair from prison was one of their demands.

“Authorities then examined the neglected boxes and found jihadist literature urging the attacks on Western civilization through a terror campaign that would include toppling large buildings that were centers of finance and tourism.  An amateur video of Kahane’s speech the night he was assassinated revealed that one of the 1993 bombers, Mohammed Salameh, was present in the hall when Nosair committed his act, and the ensuing investigation disclosed that Nosair was supposed to have made his escape with the help of another, Mahmoud Abouhalima, who was waiting outside at the wheel of a cab….”

The entire piece is yet another reminder, as if another were needed, that the organized, concentrated Islamic jihadist threat against this country cannot be wished away or denied, nor will it fade away.  The political lives of our leaders are measured in years.  Jihadists measure their cause in centuries.