WEBCommentary Contributor

Author: Michael J. Gaynor
Date:  December 7, 2017

Topic category:  Constitution/Constitutional Crises

President Trump Should Privately Consult Ed Rollins and Appoint a New Attorney General to Supervise Special Counsel Mueller's Investigation


It appears that President Trump's investigators need to be investigated and a new Attorney General who has no need or desire to recuse himself should be appointed.

On December 6, 2017, Hofstra University, known for hosting presidential debates and studies of the Presidency of the United States, hosted a Distinguished Lecture Series Luncheon with keynote speakers Howard Dean and Edward Rollins for a discussion on "now congressional elections will influence politics and policymaking in 2018."

I was fortunate to attend.

 Dean, a Democrat and former Vermont Governor, presidential hopeful and Democratic National Committee chairman, spoke first. There was no "Dean scream." Dean was surprisingly soft spoken and humble, but undoubtedly unabashedly anti-Trump.

Notably, Dean volunteered that his predictions on the Trump presidential campaign had been wrong week after week and, trying to be "objective," attributed Trump's success in winning the Republican presidential nomination and the presidential election to the perception of Trump as "a disrupter."

Dean lamented that President Trump had proven himself to be one.

Dean also attributed former President Barack Obama's success in the 2008 presidential race to the belief that he would be a disrupter and opined that the former president had turned out to be more "establishment" than disrupter.

Rollins, 74,  a Republican campaign consultant and advisor who was National Campaign Director for the 49 state-winning Reagan-Bush 1984 campaign, national campaign chairman for the Mike Huckabee 2016 presidential campaign campaign and then Co-Chairman of the pro–Donald Trump Great America PAC, was not optimistic about the Republicans' 2018 Congressional election prospects and President Trump's reelection prospects,

Rollins opined that President Trump had won in 2016 by narrowly carrying three states that had been Democrat in presidential elections states for decades--Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin--and that President Trump may be hard pressed to carry Florida again in 2020 because Hurricane Maria had inspired hundreds of thousand of Puerto Ricans (United States citizens) to choose to relocate to Florida.

Rollins lamented that he does not meet privately with President Trump and referred to Special Counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller's staff as "an all-star team" posing a serious threat to the Trump Presidency.

Although Rollins did not mention any of the evidence of anti-Trump bias of any of the "all stars," Rollins may have some good advice for President Trump about dealing with Mueller and his "all stars."

Rollins related that on  Election Night 2016 his daughter was attending Mount Holyoke College, a liberal arts college for women in Massachusetts and the first member of the Seven Sisters colleges and he told her by telephone the "bad news" (presumably from her viewpoint) that Trump had won and the "good news" that another woman could become the first female President of the United States.

A questioner compared Mueller to a Panzer tank aimed at President Trump and aked whether Mueller's goal may be to force President Trump to resign.

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's decision to plead guilty to one count of lying to the FBI might have been motivated by a desire to protect his son from prosecution apparently prompted interest as to whether President Trump would resign to protect his children.

Perhaps the most interesting speculation was that President Trump would fire, or arrange for the firing, of Mueller.

Remembering Watergate, I am concerned that Attorney General Jeff Session's decision to recuse himself has disabled him from providing the supervision of Mueller now in order, a replacement Attorney General is needed and the right thing for President Trump to do, anti-Trump hysteria notwithstanding, is to find a suitable replacement, because the investigators need to be supervised.

Speaking of cover ups, Mueller's decision to quietly dispatch Peter Strzok from is very disturbing.

Strzok, previously the second-highest ranking counterintelligence agent at the FBI and now serving in its Human Resources department, (1) was the official responsible for changing language in former FBI director James Comey's statement describing unsuccessful 2016 Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's private email server use from "grossly negligent" (the words in a criminal statute) to "extremely careless" and (2) the FBI agent who officially signed off on the bureau's decision to launch its Russia investigation in July 2016.

The FBI stonewalled the House of Representatives Oversight Committee for months instead of furnishing Strzok's anti-Trump text messages to a female attorney at the FBI who is not his wife that led to his reassignment.

It appears that President Trump's investigators need to be investigated and a new Attorney General who has no need or desire to recuse himself should be appointed.

Michael J. Gaynor


Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.


Copyright © 2017 by Michael J. Gaynor
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