Former DNI John Ratcliffe Accuses Special Counsel Team of Improper Actions in Effort to Get Trump
Former DNI John Ratcliffe appeared with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures,” and he ripped into the indictment of former President Donald Trump, calling it a “travesty.”
Ratcliffe reminded everyone of the past abuses that have gone on in the effort to get Trump and have been detailed in things like the Inspectors General reports and the Durham report. He noted how the FBI lawyer made a false claim to the FISA court to get a warrant to surveil a Trump team member. Ratcliffe said the same kind of thing was happening in this indictment. He highlighted something that many reports are missing — that they were allegedly “committing crimes to prosecute crimes.” Ratcliffe alleged that a member of Jack Smith’s special counsel team had threatened “a lawyer representing President Trump’s personal valet,” Walt Nauta, and that the lawyer had to “flip” Nauta. Otherwise, the lawyer might not get the position as a judge he was aiming for.
Here’s what Ratcliffe was talking about in regard to the “threat.”
Nauta had already spoken to prosecutors in the investigation when they called his lawyer Stanley Woodward and summoned him to a meeting at Justice Department headquarters for an urgent matter that they were reluctant to discuss over the phone, the letter said.
When Woodward arrived at the conference room, he was seated across from several prosecutors working on the investigation, including the chief of the counterintelligence section, Jay Bratt, who explained that they wanted Nauta to cooperate with the government against Trump, the letter said.
Nauta should cooperate with the government because he had given potentially conflicting testimony that could result in a false statements charge, the prosecutors said according to the letter. Woodward is said to have demurred, disputing that Nauta had made false statements.
Bratt then turned to Woodward and remarked that he did not think that Woodward was a “Trump guy” and that “he would do the right thing,” before noting that he knew Woodward had submitted an application to be a judge at the superior court in Washington DC that was currently pending, the letter said.
This reportedly completely unnerved Woodward, “who recounted the exchange to associates after leaving the meeting” and then “promptly informed the Justice Department at the time they would have no further communications unless Nauta was getting charged or an immunity deal.” Woodward has submitted court papers describing this meeting to the court. Nauta is now charged along with Trump in the indictment on some of the charges.
Ratcliffe further said that Jack Smith’s flowery claims about “one set of laws” didn’t amount to much if you don’t have equal and even application of the law. If you applied the laws in the same way, Hillary Clinton would have been indicted and Joe Biden will be indicted, Ratcliffe said.
As a former federal prosecutor, I can tell you when you line up the cases against Secretary of State Clinton, President Donald Trump, and Senator Joe Biden. There is no reasonable prosecutor that won’t tell you that the easiest case to make, a slam dunk case, is that Senator Joe Biden broke the law. There is no legal excuse, justification, or rationale that ever justifies a U.S. Senator having possession of classified documents in his home or his office.
Ratcliffe was referencing the allegation that they had recovered at least one document from Joe Biden from 1974 when he was a senator. He would not have had any right at any time to take that home — senators can only view things like that in a SCIF. Ratcliffe said a case like that could have been brought against Joe Biden in seven days.
But as Ratcliffe noted, there’s nothing happening from the special counsel on Biden, “You could put out a missing person’s report on Robert Hur, the special counsel.”
Ratcliffe said the new Republican president needs to turn the Justice Department upside down and reform it.
Post a Comment