by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY November 11, 2017

-- If the Justice Department is hell-bent on making a case, it plays an intimidating game of hardball.

In July 2016, the Obama administration announced its decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felony mishandling of classified information and destruction of government files. In the aftermath, I observed that there is a very aggressive way that the Justice Department and the FBI go about their business when they are trying to make a case — one profoundly different from the way they went about the Clinton emails investigation.

There, they tried not to make the case. That observation bears repeating today, as we watch Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of any possible Trump-campaign collusion in Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Mueller is a former FBI director and top Justice Department prosecutor. To say he is going about the collusion caper aggressively would be an understatement.
The earth is being scorched by the stunningly large team he has assembled, which includes 16 other prosecutors (among them, Democratic party donors and activists) along with dozens of investigators (mostly from the FBI and IRS).

At the end of October, Mueller announced the first charges in the case. In the intensive commentary that followed, another investigative development attracted almost no attention. But in terms of Mueller’s seriousness of purpose, it speaks just as loudly as the George Papadopoulos guilty plea and the indictment of Paul Manafort and Richard Gates. Mueller succeeded in convincing a federal judge to force an attorney for Manafort and Gates to provide grand-jury testimony against them.

As Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports, just as the charges against these defendants were announced with great fanfare, the U.S. district court in Washington, D.C., quietly unsealed a ruling compelling the testimony of the lawyer — who, though not referred to by name in the decision, has been identified by CNN as Melissa Laurenza, a partner at the Akin Gump law firm.

Interestingly, the jurist who rendered the 37-page memorandum opinion is Beryl A. Howell, who served for years as a senior Judiciary Committee adviser to the fiercely partisan Democratic Senator Pat Leahy (of Vermont) before being appointed to the bench by President Obama. Howell is now the district court’s chief judge.
Why do I think that, in choosing to set up shop in Washington, Mueller and his team noted the district court’s local rule that vests the chief judge with responsibility to “hear and determine all matters relating to proceedings before the grand jury”? (See here, Rule 57.14 at p. 168.)
And why do I think that the Trump collusion case is not getting the kid-glove Clinton emails treatment?

Lest we forget, President Obama had endorsed Mrs. Clinton, his former secretary of state and his party’s nominee, to be president. Moreover, Obama had knowingly participated in the conduct for which Clinton was under investigation — using a pseudonym in communicating with her about classified government business over an unsecure private communication system.

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[DANG!!! this is getting PRETTY STINKY!!! TM]

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/45...ardball-tactics