RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/no-durham-report-or-indictments-before-election-day/

The Justice Department’s decision does not mean there will be no more “Russiagate” disclosures.

A xios is reporting that Attorney General Bill Barr has informed the White House and top Republicans that there will be no report or indictments filed by Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham prior to the November 3 election. Durham, of course, is the prosecutor Barr assigned to investigate the genesis of the Trump–Russia probe launched during the 2016 campaign by the Obama administration.

The lack of imminent charges or a pre-election narrative report is not surprising to anyone who has watched this saga. The attorney general’s reported decision to alert government officials about it is not surprising in light of President Trump’s recent Twitter barrage, railing about the lack of arrests and prosecutions despite what he describes as “THIS TREASONOUS PLOT.” Indeed, as Axios elaborates, the president, in a Fox Business interview yesterday, complained that he believes Barr has “got all the information he needs” to file charges, yet insists on getting “more, more, more.” The president added that he doesn’t believe more is needed. “To be honest,” Trump huffed, “Bill Barr is going to go down as either the greatest attorney general in the history of the country, or he’s going to go down as, you now, a very sad situation.”

For what it’s worth, at the risk of belaboring an argument I’ve long made (most recently in a column at The Hill yesterday), many things that are in the nature of abuse-of-power simply are not violations of the criminal code. That worked to the president’s advantage during the Ukraine kerfuffle, as Democrats struggled in vain to turn his pressure on an ally for domestic political advantage into a crime. But it also applies to abuse of the executive branch’s investigative discretion. Trump’s own invocation of “treason,” which quite obviously does not apply, illustrates the difficulty of finding a penal code provision that fits the abuses of power at issue. Executive officials have vast discretion in opening investigations, especially when a foreign power is involved. It is very easy to spot overreach; it’s very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the overreach was criminal corruption.

“Past vaccines have taken a decade or longer to develop, and more than half over the past 20 years have failed during clinical trials. But four vaccine candidates have entered the last phase of clinical trials before approval by the Food and Drug Administration. Technological breakthroughs that were already in progress got a boost from a bureaucratic one in May, when the Trump administration launched “Operation Warp Speed.” The initiative organized government agencies and private companies around the goal of developing, manufacturing and distributing hundreds of millions of vaccine doses with initial doses available by early 2021.

Leading the operation is Moncef Slaoui, a Moroccan-born Belgian-American scientist who shepherded vaccine development at the U.K. drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline from 1988 to 2017. His interest in immunology and vaccine development is personal: When he was growing up in Casablanca, his younger sister died of whooping cough. He earned a doctorate in molecular biology and immunology at the Free University of Brussels, then immigrated to the U.S. for postdoctoral work at Harvard and Tufts medical schools.

In 1988 he landed a job in GSK’s vaccine division. There he helped develop one of the world’s thickest vaccine portfolios, including inoculations for meningitis, human papillomavirus and rotavirus. The company developed 14 successful vaccines during Mr. Slaoui’s tenure. When the Trump administration tapped him to run Operation Warp Speed, liberals predictably criticized him because he came out of private industry.