House Judiciary Committee (HJC) Chairman Jerry Nadler is on a fool’s errand if he thinks he can uncover persuasive evidence of criminal conduct by Donald Trump — the high crimes and misdemeanor necessary for the president’s impeachment — when the specially recruited, highly partisan Mueller team of prosecutors could not. This shortcoming is particularly telling because the pattern for the past 50 years has been exactly the reverse: Congress inevitably has had to rely on evidence garnered by special prosecution teams, which possess investigation tools and expertise that Congress simply cannot duplicate.
In modern times, the pattern stretches back at least as far as 1957, with Sen. John McClellan’s Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management (the McClellan Rackets Committee). The ranting and raving of its chief counsel Robert Kennedy brought publicity but no actual prosecutions — particularly as long as the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover chose not to devote resources to combating organized crime.
That all changed in 1961, when RFK became the youngest attorney general in the nation’s history and led a Department of Justice (DOJ) with significant tools for investigation. On the positive side, he totally revamped the Organized Crime Section in the DOJ to mount a frontal assault on mob-related activities through creation of Organized Crime Strike Force. By 1972, as described in this documentary, organized crime families had been all but eliminated outside of New York City. On the negative side, also beginning with RFK, the use and abuse of DOJ’s powers began to affect highly politicized prosecutions.
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See Also:
(1) What 18 Years After 9/11 Have Wrought
(3) Levin: ‘This is what sleazeball genocidal regimes do: They lie’
(4) Do Elizabeth Warren And Bernie Sanders Preview A Democratic Populist Crack-Up?
