Breitbart uncovered a NY Times article from April 2018 in which Mark Zaid co-authored an op-ed detailing how Robert Mueller and his team could become whistleblowers if the President fired him and dismantled his office.
Zaid is the attorney for the current whistleblower who claimed the President’s phone call with the Ukraine President amounted to extortion by Trump to get information on his rival for 2020, Joe Biden.
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This is his scheme to make leakers/whistleblowers out of Mueller and his staff:
Here’s how it could work:
The moment he was dismissed, Mr. Mueller could lawfully take all the evidence he had collected — even the most highly classified materials — straight to Congress. If he personally lost access to the evidence, a remaining member of the Office of Special Counsel could do the same.
Such a move would require speedy execution, so his office should already have a contingency plan. It is illegal to send classified documents across the regular internet, and Congress does not have access to the secure email system used by the executive branch. Therefore, someone with proper security clearance would probably need to manually transport the evidence — hard copy pages or encrypted hard drives — from the special counsel’s facility to Capitol Hill, less than a mile away.
Every detail of such transports is governed by regulations for handling classified information. The president might order federal marshals to arrest the courier en route, alleging national security information was being mishandled, so this individual would have to know and follow the law.
But if the evidence safely reached Congress, the president probably could not contain it. The 37 members of Congress on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as well as their staffs, are authorized to receive the most sensitive of classified information. Committee members from both parties would get access.
If necessary, members of Congress could unilaterally release classified information on the floor of the House or the Senate. The Constitution’s speech and debate clause would protect them from criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits. If Mr. Trump attempted any legal action, courts would almost certainly dismiss it on separation-of-powers grounds. With bipartisan support, Congress could even pass a new statute specifically to declassify key documents, overriding a presidential veto if necessary.
If individual whistle-blowers know what to ask for, they can also litigate…
There’s more but you get the idea.
The deviousness of this well in advance of the current so-called whistleblowers does send a message. Zaid might well have come up with a scheme to have fake whistleblowers claim they were frightened by the Ukraine call.
The whole thing smacks of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking. These nutjobs really seem to believe the President is the problem when it’s clear Zaid has some serious issues.
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