The two tiered justice system--McCade vs. Papadopoulos

Andrew McCarthy:

The date of a meeting, that’s all the lie was about.

George Papadopoulos claimed that a meeting he’d had with the mysterious Maltese professor, Josef Mifsud, happened slightly before the green-as-grass 28-year-old was recruited into the Trump campaign. In reality, it was slightly after.

It wasn’t a very important lie. It was of no consequence to the FBI or the special counsel’s investigation. Papadopoulos was such an afterthought that the Bureau did not bother to interview him until late January 2017 — about 10 months after he met Mifsud. By the time Papadopoulos was charged, the Trump–Russia investigation had been ongoing for well over a year — it was already clear that there was no conspiracy.

Yet that didn’t stop Mueller’s staff and Rod Rosenstein, their Justice Department superior, from indicting Papadopoulos on a felony charge. Nor did it stop them from exhorting a federal court to impose a sentence of incarceration. (The judge thought so little of the case, a prison term of 14 days was imposed.)

It wasn’t enough that prosecutors and agents had scared the bejesus out Papadopoulos by scheming to arrest him as he disembarked from a flight in the early evening – after the court was closed, ensuring that young George would spend the night in jail. The fact that he had voluntarily spoken to the feds, that he had counsel who’d made themselves and him available to Mueller’s prosecutors, that he was no flight risk – none of that counted for anything. After all, what fun would it be to call his lawyers and arrange his surrender for processing and quick release on bail? Not when government officials could flex their muscles and show him who’s boss, right?

I couldn’t help thinking about the hardball treatment of Papadopoulos when, yesterday, CNN announced the hiring of Andrew McCabe as a commentator. McCabe, of course, was the FBI’s deputy director before being fired after the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, concluded that he made multiple false statements to the FBI — including under oath. McCabe was questioned in connection with his leak of investigative information to the media. The leak may have damaged the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation (it certainly exposed information the Bureau was trying to keep under wraps).

As I’ve previously recounted, McCabe is quite the operator: According to the IG report, to try to throw snoops off the scent, the then–deputy director indignantly reamed out subordinates in New York and Washington — as if these FBI field offices were guilty of the leak McCabe himself had orchestrated. His mendacity obviously obstructed the leak investigation, requiring additional interviews as agents ran down the misleading information.

McCabe has never been charged.

Government officials who leak while demonstrating their contempt for Donald Trump manage to land on their feet. McCabe joins a CNN stable that includes former Obama national intelligence director James Clapper, who is best known for lying to Congress about the government’s bulk collection of telephone metadata . . . and for discussing Steele dossier information with CNN shortly before the network published a report about it . . . and not long before it hired Clapper as a commentator. CNN missed out on former Obama CIA director John Brennan, who falsely denied to the Senate that his agency spied on the chamber’s intelligence committee. Brennan, who said he was really sorry, was inked by MSNBC.

As Papadopoulos can tell you, non-government types who mislead government investigations don’t do so well.
...

The Papadopoulos case was an attempt to extort testimony out of a guy who worked in a campaign that the leaders of the FBI had an animus toward.  He was not the only one the FBI and special counsel sought to ruin for their support of the Trump campaign.  They were trying to use them to prove a lie perpetrated by Trump's political enemies.  They who pushed this lie for the FBI and DOJ need to be brought to justice if there is truly to be liberty and justice for all.