IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

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

Postby NathanLoiselle » Wed Mar 27, 2019 10:34 pm

I too dropped a report like Mueller. I gave it to A.G. Mr. Toilet. So far he hasn't released a report on my report. Something about flushing it and making shit up.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Absentia » Thu Mar 28, 2019 4:28 pm

One of the questions surrounding the Barr letter is that we didn't know how long the original report was. Without that information, it's hard to guess how much he might be omitting (or covering up, if you prefer that angle). I say "didn't know" because now we do, and, well...

Mueller Report Exceeds 300 Pages

NY Times wrote:The total of 300-plus pages suggests that Mr. Mueller went well beyond the kind of bare-bones summary required by the Justice Department regulation governing his appointment and detailed his conclusions at length. And it raises questions about what Mr. Barr might have left out of the four dense pages he sent Congress.


And so the speculation will continue until they release the fucking thing. Mitch McConnell has blocked a resolution calling for the report to be released, because of course he did.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Kate » Thu Mar 28, 2019 5:28 pm

Information on the grand jury is legally required to be redacted, with a few exceptions. Congress may be able to subpeona those records but if they don't plan to impeach Trump anyway, it might not be worth the attempt.

In addition to that, we are mostly old enough to remember Valerie Plame and I think it is probably safe to assume that no one here would want the safety and identity of any intelligence operatives to be compromised, and there is almost certainly information of that kind in the 300 pages of this report because investigating foreign infiltration of our elections almost certainly involves relying on our spies, and even releasing this information just to Congress and no one else can be a huge vulnerability.

Basically, there are legitimate reasons for redactions. If it takes months and comes back with half the report redacted, I will be skeptical, but it's reasonable to take a few weeks to ensure it is done legally and the people involved in gathering the information are safeguarded.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Absentia » Fri Mar 29, 2019 8:53 pm

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/attorney-general-barr-mueller-report-shared-white-house/story?id=62042921

Barr announces that he is in the process of working with Mueller's office to redact sensitive information before releasing the report publicly. He anticipates the release will be some time in mid-April.

This is good, obviously. I'd argue it would have been better to skip the summary letter and let the report speak for itself, but as long as the public gets to see the details without overzealous redaction I'll be satisfied.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Aquila89 » Tue Apr 02, 2019 2:01 pm

Mid-April? That's when the final season of Game of Thrones comes out, so a lot of people will be distracted. Coincidence? (Yes.)
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Marcuse » Tue Apr 02, 2019 9:28 pm

Aquila89 wrote:Mid-April? That's when the final season of Game of Thrones comes out, so a lot of people will be distracted. Coincidence? (Yes.)


Game of drones, you win, or you die.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Absentia » Wed Apr 03, 2019 7:03 am



This is a good, clear explanation of the biggest legal questions surrounding the Barr letter. (In fact his whole channel is quite good if you're interested in law.)
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Fun With Mr. Fudge » Thu Apr 04, 2019 11:21 am

Fun With Mr. Fudge wrote:
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.


We can also add making the Mueller report public to the long list of things Trump has changed his mind about.

From Politico:

In a series of tweets, Trump disparaged congressional Democrats for their efforts to obtain the full report; noted that one of them had opposed the public release of grand jury information from independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s report on Bill Clinton; and tweeted a Fox News clip of lawyer Alan Dershowitz emphasizing that the Justice Department could keep the entire Mueller report confidential.


Here are a couple of examples of Trump backtracking.





Aquila89 wrote: Besides, if Barr was seriously misrepresenting Mueller's findings, don't you think Mueller or members of his team would say something about it?


It looks like members of Mueller's team have said something about it. Per the New York Times:

Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.


The article goes on to say:

The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation. Mr. Barr only briefly cited the special counsel’s work in his letter.


And:

The officials and others interviewed declined to flesh out why some of the special counsel’s investigators viewed their findings as potentially more damaging for the president than Mr. Barr explained, although the report is believed to examine Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the investigation.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Aquila89 » Thu Apr 04, 2019 3:32 pm

The Washington Post on the same subject, however, wrote:

members of Mueller’s team have complained to close associates that the evidence they gathered on obstruction was alarming and significant.

“It was much more acute than Barr suggested,” said one person, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity.


So the complainst are only about the obstruction part; still no collusion.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Fun With Mr. Fudge » Thu Apr 04, 2019 4:41 pm

Aquila89 wrote:The Washington Post on the same subject, however, wrote:

members of Mueller’s team have complained to close associates that the evidence they gathered on obstruction was alarming and significant.

“It was much more acute than Barr suggested,” said one person, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity.


So the complainst are only about the obstruction part; still no collusion.


Even if their remarks "are only about" obstruction of justice, that's actually a big deal (at least in my opinion) and seems to suggest that Barr's summary is leaving out important information. Again, obstruction is the thing that got Nixon into hot water(gate).

I would also like to note that the Washington Post had this to say:

The Mueller team is reportedly saying it wrote summaries for each section, which it believed Barr could release immediately and without a need to redact. Instead, he chose to summarize the report almost completely in his own words and didn’t even include complete sentences from Mueller’s report.


So Barr went out of his way to write a memo of his own when summaries already existed that apparently didn't need to be redacted. At the very least, this raises valid questions and suspicions about what the point of doing that was.

Moreover, as has been pointed out previously, Barr only said Mueller "did not establish" that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government, not that there was "no collusion" with Russians in any way. I don't know what that means in terms of what was found that didn't meet the standard for "establishing" illegal collusion, which I take to possibly mean "beyond a reasonable doubt" from what I've read, though it's unclear. This is one of the many reasons we should see what's in the report to the extent that it's legally allowed/advisable.

This could go in circles and it would take a while to go over why I think "no collusion" is much too simple of a conclusion. Thankfully, former Cracked news anchor Cody Johnston already did it in a much funnier and more comprehensive way than I would:

(The most relevant part -- for the purposes of this discussion -- starts at 7:30)
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby iMURDAu » Thu Apr 04, 2019 10:46 pm

Keep redacting and let's get this thing public. I see no point in filing a freedom of information request for a classified report. I don't care about the speculation of what it may or may not include. There's no reason to hide the entire thing if you can black out major portions of it. What's with Trump's constant fear of being found out?
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Cobra-D » Thu Apr 18, 2019 5:57 pm

EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT! THE HIGHLY TALKED ABOUT REPORT IS FINALLY HERE!

Work today is gonna keep me busy today but so far this is my favorite part
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Absentia » Thu Apr 18, 2019 6:22 pm

I'm also at work so I can't read the whole thing yet, but based on snippets and social media reactions it looks like:

(a) All the shady activity the MSM reported was essentially true, but

(b) there's no "smoking gun" that would prove criminal liability, because

(c) the "collusion" was just a mutual, independent understanding between Russia and the Trump campaign that they had a shared interest in discrediting Clinton. No evidence of quid pro quo, or any Trump people taking orders from the Kremlin.

(d) Also basically impossible to prove liability on obstruction because it's an unprecedented situation and subject to interpretation regarding intent.


Naturally both sides are claiming vindication because their most extreme critics were proven wrong and nobody ever agreed on what "collusion" actually is anyway.
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Windy » Fri Apr 19, 2019 5:02 am

Absentia wrote:Naturally both sides are claiming vindication because their most extreme critics were proven wrong and nobody ever agreed on what "collusion" actually is anyway.


https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collusion

: secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose


Democrats believed Russian collusion was their easiest path toward impeachment. — WSJ, "Michael Cohen Was No Silver Bullet For the Hopeful Democrats," 8 Mar. 2019
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Re: IT'S HAPPENING--The Mueller Report Drops

Postby Absentia » Fri Apr 19, 2019 6:15 am

That particular definition is not a favorable one for Trump, because "secret cooperation" and "deceitfulness" are pretty close to the mark. But dictionaries are not intended to be law books, they're often not even consistent with each other, and, believe it or not, not everyone involved in this debate is adhering to the highest standards of cautious language usage.
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