Informing the president that he was not a suspect when he clearly was!

At National Review, Andy McCarthy asks,

May the president of the United States be charged with obstruction based on non-criminal discretionary acts that are unquestionably within his constitutional authority as chief executive?

…As a matter of principle, the law-enforcement arm of government must operate on a presumption of innocence. Therefore, in this country, a prosecutor should be assigned only if there is strong evidence that a crime has been committed; in the absence of such evidence, a prosecutor should never be assigned to investigate whether an American may have committed some unknown crime.

…Mueller was appointed in the absence of strong evidence of a crime that would legitimately trigger a criminal investigation or prosecution. Since that should not have happened, one must ask: Why?

…Regardless of the motivation, the scheme to sustain the Russia investigation even after Obama left office and Trump was in a position to end it had three parts: (1) important information about the investigation needed to be withheld from the new president; (2) Trump had to be led to believe he was not under investigation (even though he was central to the investigation) so that he would not feel threatened by the investigation; and (3) Trump had to be admonished about respecting the independence of law-enforcement, to instill the fear that if he invoked his constitutional authority to shut down the investigation, he would be accused of obstruction.

This audacious strategy worked for four months, but it was done in by its core contradiction: It called for informing the president that he was not a suspect when he clearly was.

…There was no crime and he had been told he was not a suspect, yet the FBI was conducting itself as if there had been a shocking crime in which he was the main suspect.

Remember: The Obama strategy was to straitjacket Trump by making him the focus of a continuing investigation, even if there was no apparent crime and even though Trump, as president, had the power to end the investigation. With Comey now sidelined, the only way to continue exploiting the Russia counterintelligence investigation for this purpose was to get a special counsel appointed.

It is now clear that the collusion narrative was catalyzed by an unverifiable dossier of rank, anonymous hearsay, commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British spy who lied to the FBI about his communications with the media — which the bureau should have anticipated since, as a mercenary retained by an opposition-research operation working for Democrats, Steele’s job was to get Mrs. Clinton elected, not to investigate Russia. These facts were kept from the FISA court when the Justice Department and the FBI used the dossier to seek surveillance warrants. It increasingly appears that the officials who made these judgments may have more to answer for than the Americans on whom they were spying.

…It is worth repeating that the Russia investigation is a counterintelligence probe; it was not a judicial proceeding or a criminal investigation. Counterintelligence probes are not conducted to enforce the law through judicial proceedings; they are conducted to inform the president of threats posed by foreign powers. The president may shut them down at will, and doing so does not obstruct justice in any way.

Read more here.