As I have said many times, I think the Russia Collusion Hoax is by far the worst political scandal in American history. However, as I wrote here, I also think it is far from clear that any of the perpetrators of that hoax will be, or should be, criminally prosecuted.
Vice President JD Vance doesn’t share my doubts:
Vice President JD Vance said in an interview Sunday that “a lot of people” are about to get indicted over the Obama administration’s machinations on so-called Russiagate.
Without divulging specific names of who will get charged, Vance pointed to recent disclosures from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard as ironclad evidence that there had been “an aggressive violation of the law” revolving around Russiagate.
“I absolutely want to see indictments,” Vance told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” in a pre-taped interview. “Of course, you’ve got to have the law follow the facts here.”
I would love to see indictments, too. But for what? Vance is short on specifics, at least in the quoted portions of the interview:
“You don’t just indict people to indict people. You indict people because they broke the law,” he went on. “If you look at what Tulsi and Kash Patel have revealed in the last couple of weeks, I don’t know how anybody can look at that and say there was [not] an aggressive violation of the law.”
What law?
“I absolutely think they broke the law. And you’re going to see a lot of people get indicted for that,” he later added.
***
“What they basically did is they defrauded the American people in order to take Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign talking points and turn them into intelligence,” Vance said, accusing the Obama-era intelligence apparatus of “lying about what the intel said.”
“Defrauding the American people” is an element of what Donald Trump was indicted for in the notorious New York case, where his conviction will surely be tossed out on appeal. There is no such crime as “defrauding the American people,” unless you are talking about submitting false invoices and the like.
“They would take something that supported a Hillary Clinton campaign talking point, and they would overemphasize it and exaggerate it,” the vice president continued. “They took anything that actually contradicted that narrative, and they buried it deep.”
True.
Vance broadly argued that “they actually laundered Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign talking points through the American intelligence services.” He did not specify names.
True again. But what is the crime? The closest Vance comes (again, in the quotes reproduced in the linked article) is to say that the hoaxers lied. That is certainly true, but lying is not, in general, a crime. If lying were a crime, the ranks of Congressional Democrats would be thinned considerably.
Lying is a crime if it constitutes perjury–lying about a material fact, under oath, in some official proceeding. The most serious accusation of perjury that I am aware of relates to John Brennan’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on May 23, 2017:
Yet in congressional testimony under oath on May 23, 2017, Brennan claimed the Steele dossier “wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done.”
That testimony was false, and it could be the basis for a perjury indictment, except that the statute of limitations for perjury–violation of 18 U.S.C. §1621–is, pursuant to 18 U.S.C. §3282, five years. That statute expired three years ago. Maybe Brennan or others have committed perjury more recently. I don’t know, but at some point before long, prosecutors are going to have to get specific.
It has been said that a grand jury to investigate Russiagate has been, or will be, empaneled in Florida. I hope that is correct, as there is virtually no chance of a jury convicting high-ranking Democrats of a crime in Washington, D.C. And I hope that some of the malefactors who perpetrated America’s worst scandal can be brought to justice. But I am concerned that there has been a lot of loose talk about jailing the miscreants, while it remains to be seen whether viable grounds for prosecution exist, and if so, against whom.
There may be provisions of the federal criminal code that can be applied to these officials’ conduct, but I would like to see an explanation of what they are, and why they fit the facts, before we encourage the conservative base to indulge visions of Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper et al. in orange jumpsuits.
