In order to prove obstruction of justice, a prosecutor must prove corrupt intent.  This intent to thwart an investigation can be hard to prove [1], though, unless you are a supporter of the president’s, it is pretty clear that the president’s actions were (and are) motivated by the lifelong scofflaw’s desire to block anything he thinks could harm him. 

I found this podcast, an episode of NPR’s Embedded (which I’d heard when it came out) fascinating to listen to again.  Particularly in light of the additional information that Mueller’s investigators uncovered about Trump’s mood and behavior on finding out that he was under investigation. 

We now know that on May 17, 2017, the president was greatly alarmed to learn that a Special Counsel had been appointed, in spite of his firing of National Security Advisor Mike Flynn and, when he wouldn’t let the Flynn investigation go, fucking Jim Comey.  The president’s famous words to Sessions, McGahn and others in the Oval Office should really be more famous:

“Oh my God.  This is terrible.  This is the end of my presidency.  I’m fucked!”

Clearly the words of an innocent man, arguably, but no matter.  With a slight majority in the Senate the man has no fear of being removed from office, no matter how much evidence is stacked up against him by any real and theoretical House investigations.  Trump’s policies endear him to wealthy conservative campaign financiers, particularly his huge tax gift to America’s wealthiest and most deserving and his packing the federal courts (with the indispensable help of zero sum obstructionist Mitch McConnell, who refused to let Obama fill vacancies as they came up) with conservative, Federalist Society-vetted jurists.  These accomplishments, by themselves, are enough reason for Republicans to hold the line, even if Articles of Impeachment emerge from the House, even if the evidence of Trump’s corrupt intent and ultimate guilt of obstruction of justice and other crimes is overwhelming.

Like I said, this February 2018 podcast is fascinating to hear.  It lays out a pretty decent case for the president’s corrupt intent and shows cause and effect quite clearly.  I know this is all considered OLD NEWS, particularly for a populace trained to respond only to BREAKING NEWS, but it is important news.   It is also important EVIDENCE.  It’s amazing how strong a case is laid out by this investigative team more than a year before the Mueller Report fleshed out much of this with sworn quotes from witnesses and participants. 

From Mueller we learn that on May 17th Sessions received a call from his deputy A.G., Trump appointee Rod Rosenstein  (who, after Mueller filed his ‘inconclusive’ report, resigned with obsequious curtsies to Trump) informing him that he had appointed a Special Counsel.  Sessions informed Trump, who promptly lost his shit.   Trump felt betrayed by two men he’d handpicked and appointed to lead the Justice Department, men he’d trusted to be loyal and protect him. 

Trump yelled at loyal Alabama racist Jeff Sessions for following DOJ ethics advisors instead of being Trump’s loyal consigliere, his Roy Cohn, his Robert Kennedy.   In Trump’s mind Sessions traitorously refused to undo his recusal, a failure that allowed a “witch hunt” against him to continue.  This witch hunt jeopardized Trump’s presidency and aggravated Trump no end.   Sessions clearly honored the legal standard for recusal — the appearance of impropriety — in Sessions’ case a glaring appearance of impropriety.   Trump snarled at Sessions about how he failed to  protect Trump from first Comey and now Mueller.   After lambasting Sessions he returns to his predicament:

“Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency.   It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything.   This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

From Mueller report, page 290. 

Clearly the same words would possibly be spoken by an innocent man, arguably, but Trump’s actions after uttering these words point strongly to consciousness of guilt, his corrupt intent.

Around this time he casually admitted on TV that he would have fired Comey (who pressed on investigating Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russia and his perjury to FBI investigators)  without the letters he had Rosenstein and Sessions write (letters that recommended Comey’s firing based on his mishandling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails).  Trump intended, several times over the course of the Special Counsel’s investigation, to fire Mueller and shut down and/or obstruct the investigation.  He did this in numerous ways, as laid out in Mueller’s executive summary, the one Bagpiper Bill Barr refused to release for several weeks, a month.  The president made his intention to end the “witch hunt” clear over and over, as reported in Mueller’s report, as described in the Embedded podcast more than a year before even Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report was released.

Only a rare genius of obstruction and evasion like Bagpiper Bill Barr could spin his boss’s corrupt-looking intent as the innocent, totally understandable motive of a wrongly accused man angry and frustrated about a partisan witch hunt.  But that spin would come a year after this great podcast came out.

Here is the host of the Embedded podcast:

MCEVERS: People who believe Trump obstructed justice say he basically tried to influence, slow down or even stop the Russia investigation in his interactions with Comey and with some other people. And the deal with obstruction is even if the Russia investigation turns up nothing on Trump – if there’s no there there, as Trump and his party insist, he can still be found to have obstructed justice. Like, you can obstruct a thing that doesn’t turn out to be a thing. Trump supporters say the idea that he obstructed anything is ridiculous. And they say Trump’s just an unorthodox president who does things like a New York City real estate developer. We should say right here at the beginning that Trump’s lawyers declined our request for an interview.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MCEVERS: So what we’re going to do today is lay out a bunch of key moments over the first year of Trump’s presidency – basically, everything we know that could be considered evidence of possible obstruction – a lot of these big, major news stories that pop up on your TV and your news feed – so that when you hear the next headline about obstruction of justice, you’ll know what it means because this part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, this is the one that some legal experts say might actually be adding up to a case against the president.

The host asks the DOJ correspondent to define obstruction of justice:

MCEVERS: (Laughter) All right. To start off with, why don’t you just do what you can to describe what is obstruction of justice?

JOHNSON: So what it means is to attempt to impede or hinder some kind of investigation – a congressional investigation, an FBI investigation, a Justice Department investigation – with corrupt intent. So the law says you don’t have to succeed in derailing the investigation. You just have to try. But the key words there are corrupt intent – some kind of bad purpose. And it can be hard to prove that. Not everybody comes out and says I am firing this person because I want to jam up this investigation which is targeting me or my children. So you have to try to prove, if you’re a prosecutor, some kind of pattern of behavior and also a good reason – a good reason to tell the judge and eventually the jury about why this person would work so hard to jam up a federal investigation. That’s what an obstruction is.

Once again, apply Boof Kavanaugh’s mother’s judicial philosophy (I paraphrase):

Use common sense.   What smells true and what smells like a pile of Bagpiper Bill’s steaming scats?

[1] recall that Bagpiper Bill Barr decided, and publicly insisted, that Trump’s intent was the intent of an innocent man honestly wishing to be done with a baseless partisan witch hunt against him and that his anger and frustration (both “acknowledged” by Mueller)  were the proof of his innocence.   

As was the case with the crying, angry, frustrated Boof Kavanaugh, unfairly crucified by left wing fringe billionaires who manufactured a story about a drunk prep school boy falling on to a younger girl and grabbing at her clothes.

Let me say at the start: if someone holds a view that is not based on rationality — an irrational view —  the calm, friendly presentation of every reasonable reason in the world to see the issue otherwise will not change that view, in most cases.   

A lifelong racist is unlikely to change his views just because one, two, even ten people from the hated race impress him greatly.  This is a famous bypass of Reason we can see clearly in this historical example: every major Nazi had a list of “good” Jews to be spared the “Final Solution” or any part of it.   This was a Jew they personally knew, liked and protected.   Mr. Hitler himself had 340 Jews on his personal list! [1]   “Doesn’t mean we don’t utterly hate the vicious, race-poisoning Jews and want to exterminate every last one of them and their despicable babies, wipe out their accursed seed, just leave Max alone, Max is cool.”

If something as common as “racism” [2], which can be rationalized but which does not have a rational basis, is immune to reason and persuasion, then we can conclude that much else about human behavior is.  Belief, after all, requires faith that one is correct.   Belief and faith are often not based on any facts one can verify.  Faith, some people say, is superior to Reason because while Reason limits one to provable theories that the limited human mind can test, only Faith can bind us to the ineffable, the unexplainable and immortality itself.  Faith-based arguments, famously, cannot be undermined by appeals to mere human logic.

There is a good argument for faith.   Humans need faith.   I don’t sneeze at faith.  It is absolutely essential to “keep the faith” (as my father used to say) when times are bad.   When a person loses faith she loses hope and without hope all that’s left is helpless resignation to the shit show in progress.   We have faith that people who profess to love us actually do, that when things get bad they will act the way we believe they will, the way they’d want us to act toward them if they were in trouble.  

I am not arguing against faith, not at all.  I am not saying human Reason is the end all of the human experience or any kind of infallible guide to human behavior (though, often it is our best option).   There is a universe of things the brilliant homo sapiens (“wise ape”) mind has only guesses about.   Mental health is one of them as are the realms that cannot be detected yet by the senses or by even the most sophisticated instruments we have designed.   

Homo sapiens are famous for acts of mass insanity.  The concept of WAR was invented by the wise ape, after all.  Let’s not get too hopped up about this “wise ape” shit, our history is bloodied by plenty of mindless, stupid, destructive practices too.  Mass killing done in the name of “Reason” and oceans of blood spilled in the name of defending “Faith”.

My aim here is to show  that often facts on the ground tell one story clearly while propaganda convinces people of another, usually invented, story entirely.   That’s where I’m headed, for whatever the exercise might be worth today.

I learned, during a talk with a friend from down south the other night, that his experience in the military, particularly when he was stationed in Germany, wiped away any traces of racism he may have had after years of segregation in his home town.   Overseas the group he hung around with, joked with, sought out, played music with, drank with, were the Americans.   That included Americans of types he did not know well or at all from where he grew up, types he wouldn’t even have encountered in This home state, Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Iranian-Americans, etc.  His service in the army left him more of an American, in the proudest sense of the word, than when he went in.

Institutions like the military can have a democratizing effect.   Labor unions (whatever their faults and corruptions) perform the same function.   They place people of diverse backgrounds on common ground, united for a common, larger purpose.   No logic or reason is involved in the transformation of personal prejudices, just give a group of people a challenging common goal and you can see the great naturally equalizing effect.   Not every two members of these groups will become friends, rivalries and hatreds between individuals will emerge — but these things will, for the most part, no longer be based on anti-group prejudice.

 We have facts on the ground, actual facts that can be verified — like captured children sleeping on the ground under foil emergency blankets in locked enclosures they are locked into, areas supervised by armed guards.  We imprison these children because they are “illegals”, have entered the United States illegally, or perhaps are the children of asylum seekers, there has been little clarity provided for their detention beyond the president’s repeated assertion that America is full and that we have no room for these little illegals and their criminal parents. 

Trump’s followers get angry when these detention centers, like Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which was an “internment camp” for Japanese Americans immiserated and locked up during the Second World War, are referred to as concentration camps.   They could be called “penal camps”, perhaps, because the children are alleged to be little criminals (“illegals”) and their detention is part of their punishment (which explains why sanitary conditions for these masses of kids appear to have been an afterthought, if any thought was given to their health and safety at all [3]).   They could be called “detention” or “internment” camps, would that be OK?   It is also fair, judging by what similar enclosures for people of a certain type who were collected behind barbed wire and prevented from leaving by armed guards have been called all through recent history “concentration camps”. 

The word got an understandably bad name from the fucking Nazis.   And I know the song: we are sick of being gratuitously and unfairly compared to fucking Nazis!    Protecting our borders from illegal aliens makes us Nazis, now?!!!   FUCK YOU!   

OK, OK calm down.

The Nazis gave concentration camps a bad name, assuredly, but concentration camps are not DEATH CAMPS.    The first camps the Nazis built were concentration camps, armed shit holes in which to collect and intimidate their many classes of enemies.   In those camps prisoners were bullied, humiliated, sometimes brutalized, occasionally killed, but the concentration camp was a collection point for detained enemies.   It is easy to think of these Nazi concentration camps as the same as death camps, but the Nazi innovation of the vernichtungslager was, at the time and as far as we know until today, a purely unique Nazi idea.  

It’s the image of the death camp is what gets so many Americans worked up over calling these detention centers for children “concentration camps”.   The Nazi death camp was a mechanized killing center with state of the art gas chambers and crematoria for disposing of the murdered bodies sent over from a network of concentration camps.  I get why people are angry when they think these internment centers for filthy, stinking little illegal aliens are being compared to death camps. I understand why it is easy to weaponize the use of the term “concentration camp” to underscore what you feel to be an unfair attack.   

Common sense is not so common, as Sekhnet’s mother often told her.   An easy answer if not always a sufficient answer.

Propaganda changes the subject from whether what we are doing to children (and entire families) at our southern border comports with our American ideals about protecting the weak to whether a pushy progressive politician is a fucking disgusting piece of shit for comparing our mild policy of reasonable deterrence to Nazi mass killing!

Mueller Report.  Are you going to believe a 448 page report that Mueller says speaks for itself, presents a trove of evidence and explains why he could not exonerate the president of possible obstruction of justice or the constantly repeated, supremely unambiguous mantra “no collusion, no obstruction, complete and total exoneration” ?

Propaganda spins the “message” of the Mueller report by packaging, branding and marketing it to as many Americans as possible as a particular thing, as NOTHING TO SEE.   Ten detailed instances of the president’s apparent attempts to obstruct justice are reduced by America’s top law enforcement official to a single, clear message “no obstruction.”   Mueller did not find Trump guilty of obstruction, according to Bill Barr, he simply laid out various scenarios while avoiding responsibility by wimping out and leaving it to his boss to make the hard call.   Barr made the hard call, which pleased the president greatly, and loser Democrats still want a do-over!   Like the fucking loser babies they are.

Propaganda makes the entire ground slippery, for even the most sure-footed.   The great Amy Goodman, a brilliant, painstaking journalist and advocate of democracy, stated today that the Mueller report found “no collusion” with Russia.   That is the phrase so often used it has become interchangeable with “could not make a legal case for criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.”  Are the two things different?  “Collusion” is not a crime that can be charged against an American citizen, “criminal conspiracy” is.

As Mueller states in his report, one reason he could not determine that the Trump campaign had been engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia is that his investigators were often lied to, key documents were destroyed, highly placed individuals simply refused to speak to investigators or submit written answers to written questions.   “No collusion” is a significant distortion of what the Mueller report says about the more than 100 instances of proven coordination between members of the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian government.

Yeah, I’m speaking to the choir, a barbershop quartet-sized choir.  If you are reading this you probably agree with much, if not all, of what I am saying.   Few who believe, in spite of all the evidence, that Mr. Trump is a great man who only wants to make America great again will read past a few remarks here.   They believe that Mr. Trump didn’t need the job because he’s already rich and powerful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, that he’s sacrificing his own happiness to be a public servant.  They are not going to sit there and read beyond my first smart-ass Jew criticism  of the confused, dithering, incoherent, self-serving massive pile of lies and his blind followers. [4]

I am more sensitive to this kind of misdirection than many people, get more worked up than most about propaganda that distorts things we can see with your own eyes.  All through my growing up difficult questions were routinely dodged, often brutally, by a brilliant but tormented father who employed all manner of techniques to not only not answer anything that made him uncomfortable but to make me feel like an asshole for even posing the questions.    As he was dying my father apologized profusely for this practice, but by then I was almost fifty years-old and my oversensitivity had been long ago instilled.

Propaganda comes in many forms.  Often simply omitting a terrible fact or two, in the manner of the famous Grey Lady’s reporting on certain difficult subjects over the decades, is good enough.  Tie goes to the runner!   Nothing to fucking see here!

Think carefully, friends.  I have faith in your powers of reason.

[1] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p.  133. 

[2]  I use racism in its most generic sense.  Only an anti-Semite would call the Jews a “race”.   Mexicans (even the rapists) are not a “race”, nor are “Muslims” or “liberal cucks”.   Racism, which America has practiced since long before its founding, is a fabulously pliable notion and a powerful way to keep the ignorant divided and suspicious of their fellow human beings, the easier to manipulate and rule them. 

[3] Many of the children visited by outside lawyers and advocates do not have access to washing facilities of any kind.  Their unchanged clothes stink, they have not been able to wash their clothes or themelves in days, in some cases weeks.  They are not given toothbrushes to brush their teeth or sinks where they can even wash their faces.   Older children are expected to care for younger ones.   They are being treated the way one treats one’s enemies.  Pretty much the way the inmates in every concentration camp have always been treated. 

one source

[4]   Looking for the exact number of Jews on Mr. Hitler’s special list in Hannah Arendt’s masterpiece (see note 1 above)  I came across this evocative description, by Eichmann, of blind obedience based on unquestioning faith in a leader:

Eichmann, with his rather modest mental gifts, was certainly the last man in the courtroom to be expected to challenge these notions [“superior orders”, “law”] and to strike out on his own.   Since, in addition to performing what he conceived to be the duties of a law-abiding citizen, he had acted upon orders — always so careful to be “covered”– he became completely muddled and ended by stressing alternatively the virtues and vices of blind obedience, or the “obedience of corpses,” Kadarvergehorsam, as he himself called it.     

Arendt p.135

Hope Hicks, a young woman who was one of candidate and president Donald Trump’s closest aides (she served as a top White House press official) appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last week.   She “testified” for eight hours, with five attorneys (two personal, two White House, and one from the DOJ.  The DOJ?  WTF?)  present to advise her, and, according to the transcript of the closed door meeting, gave inadequate (NO) answers to 155 questions.  The White House lawyer objected each time, claiming she was immune to testifying about anything that happened during the presidency of the most transparent president in history.

Her name appears in the Mueller Report more than 180 times.   She was, for a long time, known as the president’s closest confidante.  Her testimony could go a long way toward illuminating the president’s state of mind and his intent in the days he first began trying to shut down the Mueller investigation.  

Although, of course, current Attorney General Bill Barr has already taken care of the issue of president’s completely, unimpeachably non-criminal intent.   He  famously excused the president’s many guilty-appearing actions as the understandable anger and frustration of an innocent man unfairly attacked by traitors and spies.   And Bill Barr, we all know, is an honorable man. 

Hope Hicks spoke, under oath, to Mueller’s investigators about Trump’s rage when Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel on May 17, 2017.  He was, according to Hicks, who saw the president immediately after his outburst at Jeff Sessions in the Oval Office, as upset as she’d ever seen him.  

The only other time she saw him as distraught, she told Mueller’s vicious partisans,  was when the completely out of context, innocent Access Hollywood pussy grabber tape came out toward the end of the 2016 campaign.  When Sessions told the president that Trump himself was now under investigation, Trump apparently said “I’m fucked.” before lashing out at Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III:

According to notes written by Jody Hunt—then chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions—Trump “slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.’”

“The President became angry and lambasted the Attorney General for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, ‘How did you let this happen, Jeff,’” the report continues, paraphrasing Hunt’s notes.

Sessions himself told the special counsel that Trump said, “’You were supposed to protect me,’ or words to that effect,” according to the report.

“’Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency,’” Trump continued, per the report. “’It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

source    (obviously Breitbart, FOX and The Stormer cover this material differently)

here is a direct citation to a searchable version of the lying, vicious, totally exonerating Mueller report where you can find the quotes cited above on page 290

OK, truthfully, between you me and the lamp post that any one of Trump’s treasonous enemies could be hanging from (in Trump’s perfect world) — the Democrats are reaching here.  Hicks was close to the president, true, and told Mueller that the president was very angry that Jeff Sessions would not protect him, as Roy Cohn [1] (who was disbarred toward the end of his despicable life) always had.   But, seriously, is that any reason to put her in position to commit perjury to protect the man she owes her career to?  (She’s now an executive at the company that owns FOX news).

Let us not forget, Hope Hicks gave those Democrat traitors on the Judiciary Committee a legal sounding reason for not answering anything they asked.  She cited “Absolute Immunity” a perfectly legal sounding term one of Trump’s more creative (and brazen) lawyers pulled directly out of his Roy Cohn-like homophobic ass.  Will this novel yet legal sounding reason for giving inadequate sworn testimony stand up in court? Only if Boof Kavanaugh has the final say.  

Although, even Boof would probably be constrained by the long held, indisputable legal principle that says once a privilege is waived (as Executive Privilege was waived  for Hicks once the then White House employee voluntarily spoke under oath to Mueller) it cannot be reasserted.

The fucking law again!   So goddamned unfair!   Where is Roy Cohn when you need him?!!!

[1]  (recycled footnote from here)  

Because when I have any doubt about a factual assertion I make here I do a quick and easy fact check, I asked google “was Roy Cohn a homophobe?”  He was, many sources agree.   Here is one of the results that came up in about one second, a marvelous little summary of the career of this malevolent creature, a career I highlighted in a footnote scroll to the bottom of this one for two excellent treatments of this evil fuck:

I missed delivering to you a wonderful, if also sick, punchline in the debate over whether Trump obstructed justice, continues to obstruct justice by willfully disobeying legal requests for documents and testimony and ordering everybody in his orbit to resist, to dummy up.   He is one lawyered up presumed-innocent guilty-acting motherfucker, I’ll say that for him.

Lawyers with any skill are masters of evasion, within the narrow bounds of truthfulness and their ethical responsibility the best of them can obscure the truth like nobody’s business.   Think of Bill Barr’s supremely misleading remarks at his confirmation hearing, Boof Kavanaugh’s tearful and evasive rant at the end of his sickening confirmation process.   Numerous demonstrable lies, but none, arguably, rising to the level of perjury.  A good lawyer knows how to walk purposefully up to the line of perjury and phrase things so his answer achieves the desired purpose without crossing the line.   

This ability to cavil [1], and the willingness to employ cant [2],  while directing attention away from damaging truth, is the main reason lawyers are so despised by so many.   Just make it plain, you lawyerly fuck.   There is even a movement, in law schools, to encourage young lawyers to write in plain English.   I don’t know how well it’s caught on.  Most of the legal writing I wade through is larded with conditional phrases, qualifiers, finely parsed distinctions, self-serving characterizations and shit like that.  We long for people to just speak plainly, just say what you mean, particularly lawmakers and government officials.  Speak plainly without lying– not a lot to ask, even from lawyers.  Plain talk is refreshing, it restores our faith in our human capacity to communicate openly.

Procol Harem’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” is apparently one of the most popular wedding songs of all time.   The band made many millions in royalties over the decades since the song was on the charts.   One member of the band, the organist who wrote the distinctive Bach-like intro, was not credited as one of the songwriters.  He received no royalty checks.   An interviewer spoke to him during his lawsuit against the others for the millions in back royalties he claimed were owed to him, and the right to future millions.   

The interviewer (you have to picture both of them as British, which they are, for the full effect) listened to his story and said “so, you’re saying they could have been more generous to you.”   

 “They could hardly have been less generous,” the uncredited songwriter replied. [3]

We have Robert Mueller, lifelong conservative and former FBI director, a public servant seemingly beyond reproach, a Marine and before that an Eagle Scout.   He investigated a president who was constantly trying to undermine his investigation, made several attempts to rig the outcome, including a few feints toward firing Mueller, actively discredited Mueller’s impartiality and eventually hired a faithful and dogged Attorney General who vowed to protect him no matter what the investigation found.   Mueller found a mountain of evidence of apparent presidential wrongdoing, but he obeyed a regulation that he said compelled him to abide by two OLC memos, both written during presidential impeachments, and from which he concluded he had an ethical and legal duty not put the president under an unfair cloud.  

Let’s be clear.   The president bragged about being ready to speak to Mueller any time, but his rotating army of lawyers (notice that nobody works for Trump for very long) vetoed that.  Trump, they all agreed, would be walking into a “perjury trap”.  We note that a “perjury trap” only works against a compulsive liar who has at least one dirty secret to hide.  The president consented to answer written questions from Mueller, questions he claimed, ridiculously, to have answered all by himself.

Fast forward past Bill Barr’s numerous infomercials for his boss’s exoneration by a disappointing Mueller who weakly punted responsibility to the A.G. to make a final, binding charging decision about the extent of the president’s arguable misconduct and his corrupt acts done with the power of the president of the United States.    This was a month before any part of the completed report was released to anyone but Trump’s lawyers, the only people so far to have seen the document before it was redacted.

Past Mueller’s remarkable letter to Barr, the letter that was not seen by the public until many weeks later.   Mueller’s letter was immediately after Barr’s public comments on the report.   Mueller contested Barr’s distorted mischaracterizations, informing him that his misleading remarks have caused public confusion and requesting again that Barr immediately release Mueller’s own redacted summaries.   The remarkable letter, a very important piece of evidence for Congress, is here.

Past the month that Barr waited to release anything from Mueller but his own deliberately misleading spin about COMPLETE AND TOTAL exoneration, which many Americans who will never even read an article about the 448 page report (“that speaks for itself”) believe to be unimpeachably true in spite of instance after instance, with names, dates, quotes from people involved, all fitting a larger, consistent, pattern of obstruction of justice.

Past the month after that, before it was revealed that Barr had perjured himself when he said under oath that he had no idea how Mueller felt about his characterization of the Special Counsel’s findings.   He mocked the question, in the way that religious men who believes they are carrying out the Lord’s will often do and got a laugh from the Republican peanut gallery in the Senate that day.   “How would I know what Bob thinks of my summary?”

Past the day, a month later, when the letter from Mueller (dated two months earlier) that told Bill exactly how Bob felt was revealed.  As soon as Bob heard Barr’s lying summary of his findings he wrote to correct the record.  Bob was angry enough to put it into writing, make a record that he was protesting this confusing mischaracterization of the investigation’s conclusions finally became public.   Mueller was obeying the best instinct of a law-abiding lawyer, he was making a record.   With luck, fifty years from now when everything is unsealed, posterity will know that Bob Mueller was, in the end, an honorable man.

Mueller got up in front of cameras, the day he retired from his role as Special Counsel, and spoke publicly for almost ten minutes.   His remarks were bookended by the continuing untruthful spin of the deeply religious, God-fearing protector of the Unitary Executive, William Barr.   Mueller spoke carefully, like a lawyer.  He may have reiterated that the president, rather than, as he claimed, fully cooperating with investigators, submitted answers that were “inadequate.”   I don’t think he cited the president’s refusal to answer follow up questions to remedy the inadequacy of his lawyers’ written answers.

“Inadequate”, that was how Mueller characterized the answers you can read here.

I was surprised to find the interrogatories on-line.   I’d heard that Trump’s attorneys had answered virtually every question with a variation on “I don’t recall”.   I scanned and found this to be true for every answer I read.   Mueller’s questions are detailed and lawyerly, a challenge to read, and in light of the evasive answers given, not worthwhile struggling to read.   

Trump’s team of lawyers worked hard to craft the carefully phrased answers, virtually all of which are variations of “I don’t recall” or “I have no specific recollection” or “for the life of me, I truly don’t remember” or “how do you expect me to remember a detail like that?   Wouldn’t that make me look guilty if I did remember doing that, fuckface?”

Here’s what you do, and I promise it is worth the payoff.  Quickly skim the questions, just looking for names you are familiar with, run your finger quickly down the questions.  You’ll see Manafort and Flynn and Jared asked about.   The president answers, under penalty of perjury, that he doesn’t recall anything and that he’s been informed his office has already fully cooperated and provided all necessary documents and information.  Publicly the president was whining daily about the unfair, illegal witch hunt against him which was so unfair and vicious and SAD!

Skip down to Mueller’s last long, complicated question.  It is about Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, Erik Prince, “or anyone else associated with the transition”.   Follow your quick moving finger down  until you get to the president’s last “inadequate” answer.  GREAT SHIT!

Go read it now, quickly, just follow your finger to the bottom, it will take a minute.  Otherwise this next bit will be a spoiler.

Mueller could have told America, more accurately, truthfully, straightforwardly, unequivocally and unconfusingly:  “not only did the president refuse to cooperate with requests to speak to him directly, his legal team submitted evasive written answers pleading no memory of anything and, in one remarkable display of contempt I’ve never seen in my long career as an attorney and in law enforcement, refused to answer at all.  Not even another assertion about the presidents monumentally poor memory.   You figure it out, assholes!”

“Inadequate”?  Trump’s last written answer to the Mueller investigation  could hardly have been less adequate! 

click here for question and final answer

[1] cavil (v):    make petty or unnecessary objections.  complain, carp, grumble, moan, grouse, grouch, whine, bleat, find fault with, quibble about, niggle about…

[2] cant (n — can also be used as a verb):  hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature;  the pretending of having virtues, principles, or beliefs that one in fact does not have; dissembling, dissimulation, hypocrisy, insincerity, false piousness    

words related to cant:  deceit, deceitfulness, deceptoin, deceptiveness, dishonesty, double-dealing, falsity, perfidy, two-fadednees, affedtation, affectedness, pretense, pretension, pretentiousness, sanctimoniousness, self-righteousness, self-satisfactoin, duplicity, fakery, falseness, fraudulentness, shamming, artificiality, glibness, oiliness, smoothness, unctuousness 

antonym: sincerity

[3]     from WIkipedia:

In 2005, former Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher filed suit in the High Court against Gary Brooker and his publisher, claiming that he co-wrote the music for the song.^[44] Fisher won the case on 20 December 2006 but was awarded 40% of the composers’ share of the music copyright, rather than the 50% he was seeking and was not granted royalties for the period before 2005.^[45]

Brooker and publisher Onward Music were granted leave to appeal, and a hearing on the matter was held before a panel of three judges during the week of 1 October 2007. The decision, on 4 April 2008, by Lord Justice Mummery, in the Court of Appeal upheld Fisher’s co-authorship^[46] but ruled that he should receive no royalties as he had taken too long (38 years) to bring his claim to litigation. Full royalty rights were returned to Brooker.^[47]

On 5 November 2008, Fisher was granted permission to appeal this decision to the House of Lords.^[48] Lawyers say it is the first time the Law Lords have been asked to rule on a copyright dispute involving a song.^[49] The appeal was heard in the House of Lords on 22–23 April 2009.^[50]

On 30 July 2009 the Law Lords unanimously ruled in Fisher’s favour. They noted that the delay in bringing the case had not caused any harm to the other party; on the contrary he had benefited financially from it. They also pointed out that there were no time limits to copyright claims under English law. The right to future royalties was therefore returned to Fisher.^[51][52] Both the musicological basis of the judgment and its effect on the rights of musicians who contribute composition to future works have drawn some attention in the music world.^[53]