Note to Team Mueller: If you don’t indict, then you can’t incite. So says the title of The Hill’s response to the “bombshell” report by the New York Times attempting to undermine Attorney General Barr’s exoneration of President Trump.
From the Times
WASHINGTON — Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.
The Hill’s John Solomon pens a stellar repost to the Times’s yellow journalism.
He calls out the Mueller team’s leakers and by association, the New York Times itself.
The job of prosecutors is not, as the Times headline suggested, to pen “damaging” narratives about people they couldn’t indict. And it’s not their job to air those people’s dirty laundry, or that of suspects outside of a grand jury room or a courtroom.
Solomon goes on to say (emphasis mine)
…no federal prosecutor has the right to impugn an uncharged investigative target’s reputation through anonymous leaks or literary reports. They are not allowed to anonymously inject into the court of public opinion any “damaging” information about what they couldn’t succeed at offering in a court of law as proof of criminality.
Here’s the money quote (again emphasis mine).
Prosecution isn’t a game of horseshoes or hand grenades where prosecutors get to score points or inflict damage without indicting the target. In fact, the Founding Fathers built a legal system specifically to avoid the tarring of citizens when there wasn’t enough proof to meet a criminal charge.
Mr Solomon goes on to explain in detail how the rules for Grand Jury information work. It’s a great article. The writers, editors and other propagandists at the “Paper of Record,” might do well to read it. Representative Elijah Cummings, Chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee along with other Democrats conducting opposition research thinly disguised as “oversight,” ought to have a look also.
Mike Ford is a retired Infantry Officer who writes on Military, Foreign Affairs and occasionally dabbles in Political and Economic matters.
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