HANSON: Trump Is Threat to Status Quo While FBI & DOJ Lawbreakers are Custodians of It

If appearance of false testimony is felonious behavior DOJ will have to charge McCabe with perjury By Victor Davis Hanson Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON D.C. The more Special Counsel Robert Mueller searches for hypothetical lawbreaking (by President Trump or his Campaign) the more he ignores the actual lawbreakers. The country is about to witness an investigatory train wreck.

• In one direction Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation train is looking for any conceivable thing that President Donald Trumps campaign team might have done wrong in 2016.
• The other oncoming train is slower but also larger. It involves Congressional Investigations Department of Justice referrals and Inspector Generals Reports mostly focused on improper or illegal FBI and DOJ behavior during the 2016 election.

Why are the two now about to collide?

By charging former national-security adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI Mueller emphasized that even the appearance of false testimony is felonious behavior.

If that is so then the DOJ will probably have to charge former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe with perjury or related offenses.

A report from the Office of the Inspector General indicates that McCabe lied at least four times to federal investigators.

• Former FBI director James Comey may also have lied to Congress when he testified that he had not written his report on the Hillary Clinton email scandal before interviewing Clinton.
• Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA director John Brennan lied under oath to Congress on matters related to surveillance.
• Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin probably lied when they told FBI investigators they had no idea that their then-boss Hillary Clinton was using an illegal private email server. Both had communicated with Clinton about it.

Mueller is said to be investigating whether Trump obstructed justice by requesting that Comey go easy on Flynn. If so then the DOJ will have to look at Comey himself and DOJ officials who obstructed a federal court. On at least four occasions they were not honest about the deeply flawed Christopher Steele dossier being the source of information used in applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Comey also has said that he predicated the nature of the Clinton email investigation on his assumptions about her chances of winning the presidency another investigatory abuse. The Mueller team is reportedly still looking into the possibility of election-cycle collusion with Russia by Trump officials. That track will require Muellers DOJ counterparts to look carefully at the Clinton campaign which paid opposition researcher Steele a British subject for dirt on Trump that was produced through collusion with Russian sources.

Mueller is also said to be investigating whether Trump or his advisers broke laws concerning the release of confidential government information. If so the DOJ may have to indict Comey. He confessed to passing along confidential FBI memos to a friend for the expressed purpose of leaking their contents to the press.

High-ranking Obama administration officials may also be subject to indictments given that they may have requested the unmasking" of American citizens whose communications were intercepted during the surveillance of foreign parties and then leaked the names of those citizens to the press. Muellers team apparently has assumed that Michael Cohens status as Trumps attorney offers no protections under normal attorney-client privilege protocols.  Investigators have swarmed Cohens offices and residence supposedly in fear that he might destroy pertinent records.

• If that is true the DOJ will have to investigate why the FBI allowed Clinton aide Cheryl Mills (right) to pose as Clintons attorney and thereby be shielded from providing testimony on what she knew about the email scandal involving her client."
• The FBI should probably then reopen the investigation into the Clinton email scandal given that Clinton destroyed more than 30000 emails as well as computer hard drives that had been requested by federal investigators.

What is going on? Mueller has searched far and wide for wrongdoing but so far has found little. Meanwhile there is plenty of other wrongdoing already found but no one seems to be looking at it. Flynn Cohen and other Trump aides are considered small enough fry to go after. Clinton Comey McCabe and others seem big enough fry to leave alone. No one thought Hillary Clinton would blow the election. Top Obama officials at the FBI DOJ intelligence agencies and National Security Council believed in 2015 and 2016 that they could ignore laws with impunity because a protective Clinton administration would soon be in power. Politics have infected these investigations. Trump was seen as a threat to the status quo and FBI and DOJ lawbreakers were seen as custodians of it.

The more Mueller searches for hypothetical lawbreaking the more he is inadvertently underscoring that actual lawbreakers must be subject to the same standard of justice.

Ironically Muellers investigation has reminded America that it is past time to call Comey McCabe and a host of Obama-era DOJ and FBI officials to account.

For over a year we have had two standards of legality when there can only be one. A reckoning is near. Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.