The Trump Collusion Case Is Not Getting the Clinton Emails Treatment
If the Justice Department is hell-bent on making a case, it plays an intimidating game of hardball.
In July 2016, the Obama administration
announced its decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felony
mishandling of classified information and destruction of government
files. In the aftermath, I observed
that there is a very aggressive way that the Justice Department and the
FBI go about their business when they are trying to make a case — one
profoundly different from the way they went about the Clinton emails
investigation. There, they tried not to make the case.
That observation bears repeating today, as we watch Special Counsel
Robert Mueller’s investigation of any possible Trump-campaign collusion
in Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Mueller is a former FBI director and top Justice Department prosecutor.
To say he is going about the collusion caper aggressively would be an
understatement. The earth is being scorched by the stunningly large team
he has assembled, which includes 16 other prosecutors (among them,
Democratic party donors and activists) along with dozens of
investigators (mostly from the FBI and IRS).At the end of October, Mueller announced the first charges in the case. In the intensive commentary that followed, another investigative development attracted almost no attention. But in terms of Mueller’s seriousness of purpose, it speaks just as loudly as the George Papadopoulos guilty plea and the indictment of Paul Manafort and Richard Gates.
Mueller succeeded in convincing a federal judge to force an attorney for Manafort and Gates to provide grand-jury testimony against them. As Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports, just as the charges against these defendants were announced with great fanfare, the U.S. district court in Washington, D.C., quietly unsealed a ruling compelling the testimony of the lawyer — who, though not referred to by name in the decision, has been identified by CNN as Melissa Laurenza, a partner at the Akin Gump law firm.
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