Better in their words…

WSJ 10/2/2019

Washington is in an impeachment frenzy, which is a dangerous moment for facts and context. A classic example is the political and media overreaction to Monday’s stories concerning Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr and impeachment.

Mr. Pompeo’s alleged misdeed is that he was among those listening to Mr. Trump’s July 25 telephone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. But why shouldn’t a Secretary of State be on a call to the new President of an important country? U.S. foreign policy is the secretary’s job. As far as we know, Mr. Pompeo isn’t responsible for Mr. Trump’s decision to mention Joe Biden in that conversation. This is not impeachable behavior, or even impeachment news.

As for Mr. Barr, he is supposedly implicated because he asked Mr. Trump to ask Prime Minister Scott Morrison for Australia’s cooperation with the Justice Department probe of illegal foreign influence in the 2016 election. Mr. Barr and prosecutors have also sought the cooperation of other foreign governments.

We certainly hope they have. Everyone has known for some time that Justice is investigating what happened in 2016, and Justice made that public last week in a statement when the transcript of Mr. Trump’s Ukraine phone call was released.

“A Department of Justice team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election,” the statement said. “While the Attorney General has yet to contact Ukraine in connection with this investigation, certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information to Mr. Durham, which he is evaluating.” Some media scoop.

Australia’s cooperation is important because it relates to the role that Alexander Downer, former Australian foreign minister, played in tipping off U.S. intelligence about Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos’s comments about Russia in July 2016. This relates to how the FBI came to rely on Russian misinformation to open a counterintelligence probe into the Trump 2016 campaign.

The press is portraying Monday’s news as a plot to “discredit” former special counsel Robert Mueller. But the Mueller probe is over. The former special counsel chose not to investigate the Russian origin story and he never publicly explained his reasons. Yet there are many unanswered questions that deserve investigation because laws may have been broken. It is routine for U.S. prosecutors to seek help from foreign counterparts in such cases.

Note the double standard at work here. Democrats and most of the press corps want to impeach Mr. Trump for inviting foreign help to investigate Joe Biden and his son’s role in Ukraine. But at the same time they want everyone to forget that the Clinton campaign in 2016 paid for foreign dirt that the FBI used to justify a secret surveillance warrant against the Trump campaign.

That is what Mr. Barr has asked Mr. Durham to investigate, and the U.S. Attorney has a reputation for being thorough and fair. He may find there was no illegality involved. But investigating this is a public service because half of America now wonders if James Comey’s FBI took sides in a presidential election based on foreign propaganda ginned up by the opponents of Donald Trump.

This attack on Mr. Barr looks like a pre-emptive warning to steer him and Mr. Durham off the case, or to discredit anything they might conclude or prosecute. “Democrats’ worst fears about William Barr are proving correct,” says the headline on a news article by the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake that is a textbook example of partisan framing.

We hope the prosecutors won’t be deterred. When Washington is in impeachment heat, it pays to be skeptical and look for the other half of the story.

via Foreign Influence and Double Standards – WSJ.