Is anyone as disgusted as I am that “our” attorney general will be having a press conference prior to releasing the Mueller report? I don’t know why the media outlets will cover it at all- we are so f-ed.
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Yes! I wish the media would boycott the “press conference”. I turned off my TV in protest.
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Barr’s pronouncements said nothing about that President could not be exonerated, per Mueller…
and comments from Chris Wallace, Fox
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The report set to be released will be only lightly redacted and give a granular accounting of the ways in which the president’s behavior raised concerns he might have tried to obstruct justice, people familiar with it said.
Justice Department officials have briefed the White House on the report’s general outlines, these people said. It will reveal that Mueller decided he could not come to a conclusion on the question of obstruction because it was difficult to determine Trump’s intent and some of his actions could be interpreted innocently, the people said. But it will offer a detailed blow-by-blow of his alleged conduct — analyzing tweets, private threats and other episodes at the center of Mueller’s inquiry, they added.
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Some ‘interesting’ tweets regarding what the WH is thinking…what they knew and when…and how Barr fulfilled the strategy to spin the story in the President’s favor.
Begs the question - why is DOJ in the pocket of the WH?
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It’s HERE Mueller Report!~
Pg. 10 Definition of Collusion vs. Coordination
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I’m on page 261 of the Mueller report, I have to say, so far, it reads an awful lot like a roadmap for congress. 
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And you wonder with Pelosi’s firm grip on the subject of Impeachment that we’d get anywhere…? But yes, it looks like all lanes lead to Congress.
You’re a wiz on the reading @Pet_Proletariat
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Poor Nancy. This is a lot for any leader. I trust Nancy, if she says that Trump isn’t worth impeachment after this report, believe her because it may be more valuable to use as a political cudgel going into 2020.
If anything this report shows repeatedly the Trump campaign is a group of shifty, quasi-criminal and criminal political hacks and liars out to make money and gain power to do more shifty, quasi-criminal, corrupt things with that power.
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I agree…She is smart, effective and the best vote counter out there.
She can see the through line here…Dems can not get an impeachment thru the Senate, and not worth the efforts…already too close to 2020.
Maybe some committees can subpoena Trump and get him? in front of Congress but I doubt. More eyes on 2020 and there may be a way of getting him out via SDNY perhaps
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This New York Times “takeaway” article is the best I’ve come across so far. It’s a quick read, and worth the time – these are the points the nation should be focused on.
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T 'n Co were open to Russian help and looked for openings and backchannel methods to get that help. Jared was very open to this.
In December 2016, a few weeks after Donald Trump’s surprise election victory, Russian president Vladimir Putin convened what a Russian oligarch described as an “all-hands” meeting with some of his country’s top businessmen. A main topic of discussion: U.S. sanctions against Russia.
One of the oligarchs present was Petr Aven, co-founder of Alfa Bank, Russia’s biggest commercial bank. Aven had recently met with with Putin one on one to discuss the sanctions and what to do about them. Putin said he had been struggling to get messages to Trump’s inner circle, and urged Aven to take steps to protect his bank from additional U.S. penalties, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which details the episode. Aven perceived that as an order, not a request, according to Mueller, and understood “that there would be consequences if he did not follow through.”
Aven quickly understood that his mission was to contact the Trump transition team, and began an effort to contact Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
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Mueller’s nearly 450-page report granularly describes this and related episodes, revealing how Putin explicitly encouraged his country’s wealthiest and most powerful businessmen to make contact with Trump’s transition team after the election. The directives help explain the “flurry” of contact the oligarchs made with Trump’s associates in the weeks following the reality TV star’s unexpected victory, Mueller wrote.Even though Mueller did not establish any conspiracy between Trump’s team and Russia, the special counsel’s report shows how important it was to Putin to establish a backchannel line of communication to Trump’s transition team — and how receptive Trump’s associates were to the overtures.
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Erik Prince, brother of Betsy DeVos is there to help in terms of funding and helping locate Hillary’s emails.
Blackwater founder Erik Prince was involved in funding an effort to verify if a cache of stolen emails purporting to be from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server were legitimate, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
Prince in 2016 was approached by Barbara Ledeen, an aide to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and agreed to fund the hiring of a tech expert to verify if the emails were from Clinton’s server, which was the subject of a 2016 FBI investigation.
“Ledeen claimed to have obtained a trove of emails (from what she described as the ‘dark web’) that purported to be the deleted Clinton emails. Ledeen wanted to authenticate the emails and solicited contributions to fund that effort. Erik Prince provided funding to hire a tech advisor to ascertain the authenticity of the emails,” reads a section of the Mueller report, which was released Thursday.
“According to Prince, the tech advisor determined that the emails were not authentic,” the report continues.
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Interesting, House Democrats will conference on Monday about what to do next, taking the holiday weekend to read the report.
House Democrats will convene via conference call on Monday to discuss the next steps following the public release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s election interference and whether President Trump obstructed justice.
In a letter to House Democrats Thursday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told her caucus that they will talk about their strategy following the Passover and Easter holiday weekend, which will also offer lawmakers time to review the 448-page report in full.
Pelosi said the conclusion offered by Attorney General William Barr in his four-page summary and press conference that Trump did not obstruct justice was “directly undercut” by Mueller’s report. Pelosi added that the version of the Mueller report provided by the Justice Department was “disrespectfully late and selectively redacted.”
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George Conway III sees the Mueller Report gives Congress every right to impeach this president. Conway keeps speaking out on what a corrupt president this 45 has been. (am putting it here…as a go around the 3 post rule!)
So it turns out that, indeed, President Trump was not exonerated at all, and certainly not “totally” or “completely,” as he claimed. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III didn’t reach a conclusion about whether Trump committed crimes of obstruction of justice — in part because, while a sitting president, Trump can’t be prosecuted under long-standing Justice Department directives, and in part because of “difficult issues” raised by “the President’s actions and intent.” Those difficult issues involve, among other things, the potentially tricky interplay between the criminal obstruction laws and the president’s constitutional authority, and the difficulty in proving criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt.
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So too with a president. The Constitution provides for impeachment and removal from office for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But the history and context of the phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” makes clear that not every statutory crime is impeachable, and not every impeachable offense need be criminal. As Charles L. Black Jr. put it in a seminal pamphlet on impeachment in 1974, “assaults on the integrity of the processes of government” count as impeachable, even if they are not criminal.[The Post’s View: The Mueller report is the opposite of exoneration ]
And presidential attempts to abuse power by putting personal interests above the nation’s can surely be impeachable. The president may have the raw constitutional power to, say, squelch an investigation or to pardon a close associate. But if he does so not to serve the public interest, but to serve his own, he surely could be removed from office, even if he has not committed a criminal act.
By these standards, the facts in Mueller’s report condemn Trump even more than the report’s refusal to clear him of a crime. Charged with faithfully executing the laws, the president is, in effect, the nation’s highest law enforcement officer. Yet Mueller’s investigation “found multiple acts by the President that were capable of executing undue influence over law enforcement investigations.”
Trump tried to “limit the scope of the investigation.” He tried to discourage witnesses from cooperating with the government through “suggestions of possible future pardons.” He engaged in “direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.” A fair reading of the special counsel’s narrative is that “the likely effect” of these acts was “to intimidate witnesses or to alter their testimony,” with the result that “the justice system’s integrity [was] threatened.” Page after page, act after act, Mueller’s report describes a relentless torrent of such obstructive activity by Trump.
Contrast poor Richard M. Nixon. He was almost certain to be impeached, and removed from office, after the infamous “smoking gun” tape came out. On that tape, the president is heard directing his chief of staff to get the CIA director, Richard Helms, to tell the FBI “don’t go any further into this case” — Watergate — for national security reasons. That order never went anywhere, because Helms ignored it.
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Trump, on the other hand, was a one-man show. His aides tried to stop him, according to Mueller: “The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”
As for Trump’s supposed defense that there was no underlying “collusion” crime, well, as the special counsel points out, it’s not a defense, even in a criminal prosecution. But it’s actually unhelpful in the comparison to Watergate. The underlying crime in Watergate was a clumsy, third-rate burglary in an election campaign that turned out to be a landslide.
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NYTimes: Read the Mueller Report: Full Document
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What can the Dems do? Renato Mariotti’s take Is excellent.
What they do with it is in large part a political question. The majority of House Democrats have already concluded that impeachment is not “worthwhile,” Nevertheless, some House members, primarily from the progressive wing of the Democratic Caucus, have indicated they intend to use the full extent of their investigatory powers.
They have plenty to work with. The Mueller report paints a picture of a president who took extraordinary steps to undermine a lawful investigation into him and his associates. Trump fired the FBI director, tried to fire Mueller, asked the FBI director to stop investigating former national security adviser Michael Flynn, tried to persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his recusal and tank the investigation, and tried to influence the testimony of witnesses. Mueller properly rejected all of the defenses to obstruction of justice put forward by Trump’s lawyers. Candidly, as a criminal defense attorney, I cannot see how I would convince a jury that there is reasonable doubt based on these facts.
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Sorry I’m replying late… didn’t Barr originally announce he would not share the report with the White House to review before giving it to Congress, but then he went ahead and briefed the White House anyway? I was disappointed (but not surprised) when the news came out he’d been briefing the WH after saying he wouldn’t share the report with them until it was released to Congress. I realize it’s sort of a fuzzy line, but frankly, imho it was improper.
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