IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby NathanLoiselle » Mon Mar 25, 2019 1:41 am

Have I commented on this yet? No? Oh.


Who didn't expect Barr to say what he's said. He was appointed by Trump after all.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Fun With Mr. Fudge » Mon Mar 25, 2019 1:46 am

Barr has released his summary of the main findings. I'll note some findings and a few musings and things I found interesting. First, Bar is actually not done reviewing the info in the report, it seems:

Although my review is ongoing, I believe that it is in the public interest to describe the report and to summarize the principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation.


He notes that Mueller did not find that Trump or other campaign officials actively conspired with the Russians.

The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”


The wording is interesting, though, because Trump will claim (and already has claimed) that this proves he was innocent. On the contrary, it simply failed to find him guilty. That's a subtle but (I think) important distinction that I suspect will matter to almost no one.

Honestly, I hope he's innocent because how screwed up would it be if he were guilty and got away with it? If he's guilty of crimes, I want him to be held accountable, but I don't want him just to be guilty because I don't like him. This is the one thing that has always bothered me about people's eagerness for Trump to be found guilty of conspiring with a foreign government. This is not something you should want your president to have done.

The Special Counsel's investigation determined that there were two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election. The first involved attempts by a Russian organization, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), to conduct disinformation and social media operations in the United States designed to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with the election... The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks. Based on these activities, the Special Counsel brought criminal charges against a number of Russian military officers for conspiring to hack into computers in the United States for purposes of influencing the election.


That said, Barr's take on the findings -- assuming there's no invisible asterisk that becomes visible later -- doesn't change the fact that Russia actively interfered in the election in an effort to get Trump into the White House. That, along with all the lying and authoritarian behavior Trump has displayed during his first term, will continue to disturb me. I wonder if he will become even worse because now maybe he feels emboldened to act on more authoritarian impulses, since this report will be a mighty political cudgel.

Mueller did not make a determination on the obstruction of justice issue. In fact, Barr specifically said, contrary to Trump's statements on the matter, that Mueller did not exonerate Trump. Rather, Mueller actively avoided drawing a conclusion altogether.

...the Special Counsel considered whether to evaluate the conduct under Department standards governing prosecution and declination decisions but ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion - one way or the other – as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction. Instead, for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as “difficult issues” of law and fact concerning whether the President's actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction. The Special Counsel states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”



Barr, in concert with Deputy AG Rosenstein, claimed that the evidence wasn't sufficient to prosecute Trump for obstruction. Moreover, Barr says it has nothing to do with the DOJ's policy on not indicting sitting presidents. This, I think, is the most interesting and controversial part of the summary, especially given the controversy surrounding Barr's appointment in the first place.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel's investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense. Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.


From what I've seen so far, this will be the thing Democrats zero in on the most -- presumably in addition to ongoing investigations and suggestions of financial fraud that arose during Michael Cohen's testimony. But pursuing these matters, as valid as I think they are, will get politically difficult because of how much stock was put in this whole Russia thing. I doubt a president will get impeached over a white collar crime or nepotism or violating the emoluments clause even if Trump were clearly guilty, especially not in this political climate. Or maybe those kinds of transgressions will simply be considered okay -- or non-impeachable -- until a Democratic president does them. But obviously, that's speculation, and I hope I'm wrong about much of what I suspect.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Absentia » Mon Mar 25, 2019 6:48 am

Fun With Mr. Fudge wrote:Honestly, I hope he's innocent because how screwed up would it be if he were guilty and got away with it? If he's guilty of crimes, I want him to be held accountable, but I don't want him just to be guilty because I don't like him. This is the one thing that has always bothered me about people's eagerness for Trump to be found guilty of conspiring with a foreign government. This is not something you should want your president to have done.


Word.

It seems like this is a case where Trump made a problem much bigger for himself than it needed to be because he's so compulsively mendacious and vindictive that he always acts like a guilty man even when he isn't. (Bill Clinton had shades of the same problem.) He managed to get half of his inner circle arrested, his finances investigated, and raise obstruction of justice questions over an investigation that apparently clears him. That is some incredibly bad crisis management.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Aquila89 » Mon Mar 25, 2019 3:10 pm

Talk about overhyping. They called it this generation's Watergate when all it was was Benghazi for liberals. Or, as Matt Lewis said, the political equivalent of Al Capone's vault.

Well, I never expected that Trump will be impeached. And I never really thought he was a Russian puppet. But his behavior sometimes made me think there's something there. He certainly made a great impression of a man with a lot to hide. Probably because he's a narcissist and can't stand being scrutinized.

And God, all those people who worshipped Mueller, who were so certain that Trump is going to jail. Have they learned nothing from 2016? Do they want to be in a "best liberal meltdowns" montage?
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Absentia » Mon Mar 25, 2019 4:43 pm

I've been reading articles and tweets from a number of legal and intelligence experts (not the kind that are normally disposed to wild speculation) who have suggested that the language in Barr's letter can be read as a carefully worded attempt to downplay Mueller's findings without technically contradicting them.

For instance, Barr says Mueller concludes that the Trump campaign did not coordinate with "the Russian government". But the line between the Russian government and nominally private oligarchs and agents who work on Putin's behalf is notoriously muddy. So hypothetically, if Mueller had found that Trump was working with someone like Konstantin Kilimnik, Barr could spin that as not being "the Russian government" per se but it would still be a pretty damning connection.

It's not at all clear that this is what happened; distilling a long report into a four page summary is necessarily going to involve omitting some details and context. But the point is that anything less than a full release of the report is going to raise questions about how much Barr's personal interest in keeping his boss happy is coloring his interpretation.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Marcuse » Mon Mar 25, 2019 7:03 pm

I've been suspicious for a while about the inquiry into collusion with Russia that hadn't indicted anyone for collusion with Russia. I fully expect that the Russians themselves had an interest in the American election and agitated in favour of Trump and against Hillary. What I think is not happening here is any coordination between Trump and Russia in the way people seemed to imagine: that Trump was taking calls from Putin discussing how they were going to rig the election out from under the American people in order to serve foreign interests. There's no way Russia would be that stupid even if they did act to affect the election.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Fun With Mr. Fudge » Mon Mar 25, 2019 8:58 pm

Aquila89 wrote:Talk about overhyping. They called it this generation's Watergate when all it was was Benghazi for liberals. Or, as Matt Lewis said, the political equivalent of Al Capone's vault.


Interestingly, Nixon's former White House Counsel John Dean actually argued that if Barr had been AG under Nixon, his presidency would probably have been safe.



We don't exactly know what is in the report or what Barr left out in his summary. We do know that before being appointed AG he already thought Trump couldn't be charged with obstruction, and part of his reasoning for clearing Trump was that you'd have to prove he colluded with the Russian government in order for the notion of obstruction to apply (so his decision on that end isn't at all reassuring to me). Plus we don't know if the ongoing investigations will yield anything damning.

Granted, with the current framing of the report serving as a kind of perceptual anchor, I think it will probably be hard to get people to believe it or care if the possibility Absentia mentioned -- that the campaign colluded with nongovernment officials -- turns out to be the case. My mind also goes goes back to the phrase "did not establish," which I think is important. People keep reporting that to mean Mueller found that there was "no collusion," but that seems way too oversimplified, given that we don't know the evidence or other statements in more detail. We don't even know the standard for "establishing."
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Krashlia » Mon Mar 25, 2019 10:22 pm

But, the important thing to know is that we don't have the full report, Just someones summary.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Tue Mar 26, 2019 3:22 am

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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Aquila89 » Tue Mar 26, 2019 4:04 pm

Trump said he's fine with releasing the full report, so I doubt there's anything seriously damning in it. Besides, if Barr was seriously misrepresenting Mueller's findings, don't you think Mueller or members of his team would say something about it?

By now, it makes little sense to assume that Trump is beholden to the Russians anyway. Yeah, he said some nice things about Putin, but his actual policies were not pro-Russian. He didn't end sanctions. He bombed Syria - Russia's ally - after chemical attacks, something Obama wouldn't do. He continued to support Ukraine and sent lethal weapons there, again something Obama wouldn't do.

So why did he praise Putin? Probably because he likes autocrats - see his relationships with Xi Jinping, MbS or Kim Jong-un. And his words ultimately mean little. He said that Xi and him are great friends, but still started a trade war with China. He said he fell in love with Kim, but still walked away from their second meeting.

One more thing: Michael Cohen said in his testimony that Trump did not want or expect to win the election. If he didn't want to win, why would he accept help from the Russians?
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Fun With Mr. Fudge » Tue Mar 26, 2019 6:19 pm

Aquila89 wrote:Trump said he's fine with releasing the full report, so I doubt there's anything seriously damning in it.


Trump also said he was eager to be interviewed by Mueller and would do it under oath and also indicated that he would sign a spending bill that did not include the border wall funding he wanted. I'm not saying Trump is lying, but he has a long history of backtracking and lying that goes way beyond those two examples, so I'm skeptical.

Besides, if Barr was seriously misrepresenting Mueller's findings, don't you think Mueller or members of his team would say something about it?


Who said seriously misrepresent? The possibility Abesntia mentioned was specifically about not technically lying while hiding politically damaging things. Wrongdoing and lawbreaking are not always the same thing. It may be that Trump did seriously shady things without breaking the law -- and cases like Roger Stone's may shed light on that. Besides, my main concern is obstruction, and Barr's previously established, extremely expansive view of presidential power, along with the fact that he reached out to Trump's lawyers with a 19-page memo explaining his disagreement with Mueller's investigation does not instill confidence that he was completely impartial in his statement of the facts.

By now, it makes little sense to assume that Trump is beholden to the Russians anyway.


I think it makes little sense to assume that Russian collusion would be the only reason Trump would want to impede an investigation into his possible Russian ties if that's what he was trying to do. Do I think it's possible that he has a history of money laundering? Well, a suspicious history of receiving money from foreign entities when he was nearly a billion dollars in debt and past interactions with people like Felix Sater, who had ties with the Russian mafia and whom Trump publicly lied about having close business ties with, suggest he may have activities and connections he wanted to hide. Obviously I don't know.

Of course Trump isn't Nixon, but I think when people dismiss the Watergate comparison, some forget that Nixon was never actually formally charged with a crime and it was never even shown that he ordered or had advanced knowledge of the Watergate break-in. It was the cover-up that likely would have gotten him impeached if he hadn't resigned. And the burglary might not have been the only thing Nixon wanted to cover up. Some of the money used to fund his campaign was allegedly laundered in Mexico and elsewhere abroad, for example.

Nixon had a history of doing legally dubious or outright illegal things to hide or distract from politically damaging secrets. Hell, he covered up a CIA-sanctioned murder to hide the fact that he secretly carpet-bombed Cambodia. Would Trump go to impeachable lengths to hide damaging information? I don't know. But he lies way too often and seems tied to way too many nefarious characters for me not to have serious doubts in the absence of solid evidence.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Marcuse » Wed Mar 27, 2019 6:31 pm

FunwithMrFudge wrote:But he lies way too often...for me not to have serious doubts


The thing for me is that he lies like a child; in that obvious way that everyone knows damn well that he's lying and it's usually something easily provable. The only difference with him is that he's also ignorant enough to double down in the face of concrete proof he's lying and insist he's still right. He seems to do that because he's allergic to thinking he might be wrong about something, which is the kind of confidence that a lot of business people seem to have.

Maybe he thinks he's emulating Putin, who does things we all kinda sorta know are shit but never have quite enough to pin him down on, but we usually have plenty to pin Trump down he just blusters and is obviously lying.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Fun With Mr. Fudge » Wed Mar 27, 2019 7:40 pm

Marcuse wrote:
FunwithMrFudge wrote:But he lies way too often...for me not to have serious doubts


The thing for me is that he lies like a child; in that obvious way that everyone knows damn well that he's lying and it's usually something easily provable.


I kind of see your point, and I don't think it's invalid, but my first thoughts reading this were: (1) How would we know if he's told a hard-to-prove lie? and (2) How do we know the frequency of the hard-to-prove lies? I imagine if they're hard to prove, they might also be hard to spot at least sometimes. I'm not trying to disagree with you; those are real questions in my mind.

I know the man talks and lies like a child, but how much of that is Trump the man versus Trump the showman?

Maybe he thinks he's emulating Putin, who does things we all kinda sorta know are shit but never have quite enough to pin him down on, but we usually have plenty to pin Trump down he just blusters and is obviously lying.


I suspect that in the hypothetical scenario wherein Trump attempts or executes hard-to-prove chicanery, he wouldn't need to be a Putinesque mastermind. He'd just need people smart enough to help him pull it off. For instance, it was his former fixer Michael Cohen who did the heavy lifting with setting up shell companies and Hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. That, by the way, is another potential crime (in Michael Cohen's case, it was definitely a crime, which he claims Trump instructed him to commit) that was confirmed as a result of investigations into the Trump campaign. And that -- the affairs or the possible campaign finance crimes -- is something else Trump could have wanted to hide. Again, just to clarify. I'm not saying he's definitely guilty or innocent. But I think there's more reason to be suspicious than not.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Aquila89 » Wed Mar 27, 2019 8:46 pm

Fun With Mr. Fudge wrote:The possibility Abesntia mentioned was specifically about not technically lying while hiding politically damaging things. Wrongdoing and lawbreaking are not always the same thing.


If he didn't break the law, he'll face no consequences. There's no way any Republican would vote to impeach him for something that isn't illegal. And for his supporters, there's no such thing as "politically damaging" when it comes to Trump.

Fun With Mr. Fudge wrote:I think it makes little sense to assume that Russian collusion would be the only reason Trump would want to impede an investigation into his possible Russian ties if that's what he was trying to do. Do I think it's possible that he has a history of money laundering? Well, a suspicious history of receiving money from foreign entities when he was nearly a billion dollars in debt and past interactions with people like Felix Sater, who had ties with the Russian mafia and whom Trump publicly lied about having close business ties with, suggest he may have activities and connections he wanted to hide.


A lot of things are possible. I can imagine, as I have said, that he was so much against the investigation because he's a narcissist, he thinks he's above everything and nobody has the right to question him. Another possible reason I've read that he knew that Mueller was friends with Comey and had Democrats on his team, so he assumed that they would put their personal loyalties above getting the facts - because that's what he would do.

It is of course possible that Trump committed financial crimes, but to my knowledge, Mueller wasn't investigating his finances, so the report won't reveal any of them.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Fun With Mr. Fudge » Wed Mar 27, 2019 9:34 pm

Aquila89 wrote:
Fun With Mr. Fudge wrote:The possibility Abesntia mentioned was specifically about not technically lying while hiding politically damaging things. Wrongdoing and lawbreaking are not always the same thing.


If he didn't break the law, he'll face no consequences. There's no way any Republican would vote to impeach him for something that isn't illegal. And for his supporters, there's no such thing as "politically damaging" when it comes to Trump.


But that's not the point. Putting aside the debate about presidential power for a moment, obstructing a federal or congressional investigation is illegal. If there was damaging information that Trump wanted to hide, that would be a possible incentive to impede the investigation -- i.e. obstruct justice -- that wouldn't require him to have committed a crime to hide in the first place. (Whether there were other crimes to hide is a different, though related issue). It speaks to the question of intent. Part of Barr's contention seems to be that since Trump wasn't found to have colluded with Russia's government, it suggests he wouldn't have a reason to intend to obstruct justice even if his actions appear to.

It's not clear to me that Trump had nothing to hide. That is the point. And that's why I brought up Watergate. Even though it was never proven that Nixon was directly tied to the break-in he was directly tied to the cover-up, so whether he committed a crime that needed covering up was irrelevant. The cover-up is a crime, generally speaking. That's why the obstruction issue is so important.

It is of course possible that Trump committed financial crimes, but to my knowledge, Mueller wasn't investigating his finances, so the report won't reveal any of them.


It appears he left that for the SDNY to investigate, but it doesn't make these issues necessarily unrelated -- not that you said they are. I'm just saying, it's not clear to me that these things are unrelated. Mueller appears to have limited his investigation to the election meddling and obstruction specifically. But if Trump didn't want other info coming out in the course of the collusion investigation, then those other issues seem relevant to me. That's why I want to see what comes of the other investigations. If they clear Trump, great. But I want to see the actual outcomes and as much evidence as can be legally/feasibly released.
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