Scooter Libby – Memphis Flyer

In 40 years of covering Washington politics, I have never seen anything like President Trump’s amazing rise to power. I have seen presidents laid low by botched Congressional investigations that lead to special prosecutors. That’s why I’m starting to feel like I’ve seen this movie before.

Spoiler Alert: This political thriller ends with the president’s top aides striking plea bargains with federal prosecutors to reduce prison sentences.

Juan Williams

The U.S. has a rich recent history of special prosecutors. The odds are rising that one more is coming to look into alleged links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The dwindling trust in the GOP majority in Congress to conduct such a probe is due to the fading credibility of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Republican chairman of that panel, Senator Richard Burr, is widely perceived as a Trump acolyte.

When FBI director James Comey announced shortly before last year’s election that his agents had reopened their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Burr bragged there is “not a separation between me and Donald Trump.”

Senator Charles Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, was slow to bury Burr with a call for a special prosecutor, perhaps seeking to avoid charges that he was politicizing the probe. But on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Schumer made that call. A special prosecutor was necessary, he asserted, to probe “whether the Trump campaign was complicit in working with the Russians to influence the election.”

Now Republicans, including Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Susan Collins, are starting to peel away. Graham has said that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke with Russian diplomats, “then, for sure, you need a special prosecutor.”

On cue, last week Sessions had to recuse himself from the FBI’s probes into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia after The Washington Post revealed he met with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. twice last year. Those details seemed to contradict sworn testimony he gave during his Senate confirmation hearing.

If trust in the Senate probe is weak, then the credibility of any House investigation is even weaker. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) served with Sessions on Trump’s presidential transition team. Nunes was also one of the lawmakers actively recruited by Reince Priebus to counter stories about Trump’s ties to Russia. In a rambling press conference last week, he said he did not want the committee’s investigation to turn into a “witch hunt” and warned of “McCarthyism,” where innocent Americans were “haul[ed] before Congress.”

Representative Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat on the committee, further diminished trust in any House probe when he said last week that the FBI director refused to share with the committee more than “a fraction of what the FBI knows.”

Last week, we learned that the Trump White House Counsel’s office issued a memo to all White House staff instructing them to preserve all documents related to Russia. If history is a guide, all that is left now is for public pressure to build on the GOP and the special prosecutor to be named.

Here’s a quick look at that history: During the Iran-Contra affair, President Reagan tried to put the scandal behind him by agreeing to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh. Walsh indicted several of Reagan’s top aides, including Defense Secretary Caspar “Cap” Weinberger.

During President Clinton’s first term, shady controversies from his time as governor of Arkansas led to the appointment of the special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and set the stage for the Monica Lewinsky sex story that resulted in Clinton’s impeachment.

President George W. Bush’s Attorney General, John Ashcroft, recused himself from a White House probe. His deputy then appointed an independent special counsel to find out who leaked the name of a CIA agent. That special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, won the conviction of the Vice President’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Senator John McCain said that he has “more hope than belief” that the GOP Congress will properly investigate Trump’s ties to Russia. “Have no doubt, what the Russians tried to do to our election could have destroyed democracy,” McCain said.

Julius Caesar feared the Ides of March with good reason. As the middle of the month approaches, President Trump and his GOP supporters will be under fearsome pressure to go along with the naming of a special prosecutor.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

Reuters | Lee Celano

Robert Durst

HBO struck gold with the six-part documentary, The Jinx:
The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. Especially during the jaw-dropping finale, when the alleged triple-murderer was heard off-camera, muttering to himself into a hot microphone what sounded like a confession. Durst’s arrest the day after the show’s finale created such white-hot news coverage that I don’t think I’d be revealing any secrets to offer a short synopsis. Durst is the estranged heir to one of the richest real-estate firms in New York, which manages 1 World Trade Center, among other high-rent properties. His personal wealth is estimated at $100 million. In 1982, Durst’s first wife disappeared and her body was never found. Though suspected of murder, Durst remained free until the investigation was reopened in 2000.

The day before Durst’s closest confidant was to be interviewed about the case by prosecutors in Los Angeles, she was found murdered execution-style in her home. Fleeing to Galveston, Texas, Durst rented a $300-a-month room and disguised himself as a mute woman.

In 2001, Durst was arrested for killing his 71-year-old neighbor and dismembering the corpse, which he placed in several garbage bags and scattered in Galveston Bay. Celebrity attorney Dick DeGuerin, who not-so-successfully represented David Koresh during the Waco standoff, admitted that Durst cut up the body, but said that it was postmortem, after a struggle over a gun. The jury decided that Durst acted in self-defense when the gun went off, so the slicing and dicing was moot, and he got off. They never found the head.

Durst agreed to take part in hours of interviews with filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, ostensibly to deflect blame and set the record straight. In the series’ final episode, after being confronted with damning evidence, Durst retired to the men’s room, forgetting he was still wearing a live microphone and said, “There it is. I’m caught. What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” The day after the final episode aired, Durst was arrested in a New Orleans hotel with $40,000 in cash, a loaded revolver, his passport and original birth certificate, an over-the-head latex mask, and five ounces of pot.

He will most assuredly be arraigned in Los Angeles for murder, so if you enjoyed the documentary, just wait until the trial. Some of the greatest entertainment L.A. produces comes from their live broadcasts of criminal trials. Look at what they’ve given us over the years: O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, the cops who beat Rodney King, Phil Spector, and Dr. Conrad Murray. But the Robert Durst show will be the trial of this early century. This will be too salacious not to televise.

HBO’s ratings were far too good not to continue this series. We know that we live in a violent country and that there are killers who walk among us — some of them mass murderers. The Durst case took over three decades to unravel, which proves that justice is sometimes late in arriving, but you never know when it will come knocking at your door.

The authorities already know the identities of some others who have committed terrible atrocities, and yet they walk free. Their names are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, and Tenet. They met in secrecy, concocting a story to sell to the American people about why the Iraq War was absolutely necessary on the pretense of weapons of mass destruction, a term of their own invention.

They invaded and occupied a nation that had not harmed us, then sent over the U.S. Viceroy, “Jerry” Bremer, who disbanded the Iraqi army and barred former members of Saddam’s political party from government, thus throwing hundreds of thousands of men out of work. These two dumbass decisions led directly to insurgency, chaos, sectarian civil war, and the birth of ISIS. The cost of the Iraq War is immeasurable in both dollars and human lives. So where are all the warmongers now? They’re all wealthy and serve on corporate boards and think tanks. Some are professors at prestigious universities. Bremer lives in Vermont, painting rural landscapes while dabbling in French cuisine. Cheney made a fortune in “blind trust” stocks from no-bid contracts to Halliburton and its subsidiaries. The rest advise the current Republican Party. No one but Cheney’s flunky, Scooter Libby, ever faced criminal charges concerning the war, but rumblings about legal recourse have been growing louder across the globe.

In 2012, the Malaysian War Crimes Tribunal convicted Bush, Cheney, and six others in absentia for war crimes. Torture victims told of mistreatment by U.S. soldiers and contractors who used some of the same practices that Japanese were executed for after WWII. Transcripts of the trial were sent to the International Criminal Court, which may never act, but the Durst case proved there’s no statute of limitations on atrocities.

Then, when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream, I know of a cozy, tropical prison down in Cuba that’s just perfect for detaining war criminals. Imagine the ratings if they televised that trial.