A few thoughts from Mueller’s Volume II summary of the obstruction case (he refrained from making) against the president

Here are some of Mueller’s own carefully chosen words, from his executive summary of Volume II — Obstruction of Justice.   I have broken them into smaller paragraphs, and inserted comments, to aid in the mastication and digestion of a few key points.

Overarching factual issues. We did not make a traditional prosecution decision about these facts,

Because, according to Mueller, regulations obliged him to obey the OLC opinion about not indicting a sitting president and fairness prevented charging him when the president would have no opportunity to immediately clear his good name,

but the evidence we obtained supports several general statements about the President’s conduct.

Several features of the conduct we investigated distinguish it from typical obstruction-of-justice cases.

First, the investigation concerned the President, and some of his actions, such as firing the FBI director, involved facially lawful acts within his Article II authority, which raises constitutional issues discussed below.

At the same time, the President’s position as the head of the Executive Branch provided him with unique and powerful means of influencing official proceedings, subordinate officers, and potential witnesses—all of which is relevant to a potential obstruction-of-justice analysis.

Second, unlike cases in which a subject engages in obstruction of justice to cover up a crime, the evidence we obtained did not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.

Although the obstruction statutes do not require proof of such a crime, the absence of that evidence affects the analysis of the President’s intent and requires consideration of other possible motives for his conduct.

It was this second point that Bill Barr chose as the center of his supremely lawyerly but plainspoken talking points, his best (and only) grounds for defending Trump against the weight of the evidence in the Mueller Report.   

According to Barr, Mueller “acknowledged” that the President had been “angry and frustrated” about the unfair investigation of an innocent man– and so his “intent” — a key to obstruction and criminal conspiracy as well, cannot, according to Barr,  be proven to be corrupt, or obstructive, beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law– therefore— since any innocent man would have, arguably, acted the same way the president did:   NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

Third, many of the President’s acts directed at witnesses, including discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons, took place in public view.

That circumstance is unusual, but no principle of law excludes public acts from the reach of the obstruction laws.

If the likely effect of public acts is to influence witnesses or alter their testimony, the harm to the justice system’s integrity is the same.  

Every time details of Trump’s pattern of acts to thwart investigation into himself and his administration emerge, the public groans “we heard that one already!  He tweeted it!”.   FOX thunders “old news!  already litigated!”     Here Mueller reminds America that the many likely obstructive acts detailed in his report are no less obstructive if done by tweet.

Although the series of events we investigated involved discrete acts, the overall pattern of the President’s conduct towards the investigations can shed light on the nature of the President’s acts and the inferences that can be drawn about his intent.

In particular, the actions we investigated can be divided into two phases, reflecting a possible shift in the President’s motives.

The first phase covered the period from the President’s first interactions with Comey through the President’s firing of Comey. During that time, the President had been repeatedly told he was not personally under investigation.

Mueller writes briefly about the original investigation, based on allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, and triggered by the firing of FBI director James Comey when he wouldn’t let the “Flynn thing” go, and then the need to expand it when the president began actively trying to thwart the investigation at every turn. 

This is the crux of Mueller’s unspoken (but carefully laid out) case against Trump– willful and ongoing obstruction of all legal investigations involving him.   Trump’s furious response to the investigations kicked into higher gear once the Special Counsel was appointed to conduct his “witch hunt.”

Soon after the firing of Comey and the appointment of the Special Counsel, however, the President became aware that his own conduct was being investigated in an obstruction-of-justice inquiry.

At that point, the President engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation.

Judgments about the nature of the President’s motives during each phase would be informed by the totality of the evidence.

The totality of the evidence looks pretty bad here, if you add it all up, and points to an unwavering and corrupt intent to obstruct legal process, a felony.   

The number of close associates of the president who were fired, who quit, resigned, were implicated in unethical behavior, indicted, convicted, locked up, the many ongoing (and redacted) investigations into Unindicted Donald and numerous associates, do not appear to be factors in the presumed-innocent president’s favor.  Nor does his blanket, openly contemptuous refusal to obey any and all subpoenas and his standing order to everyone with pertinent information not to speak to Congress.  

Or, we can go with Bill Barr’s generous, loyal, exculpatory view:   

The president’s motive was, as Mueller himself “acknowledged,” that the president was (righteously) angry and frustrated, which anyone would have been in the president’s position, particularly if they knew they were innocent.  The president, said Barr, has been proven as innocent, of everything, as viciously villainized pious Christian girls’ basketball coach and scrupulously fair Justice Boof Kavanaugh himself, unfairly besieged on every side by enraged, irrational partisan spies and traitors, funded by a cabal of wealthy extreme leftwing freedom haters,  who don’t base their actions on fact and reason, but on irrational hatred of a good and unfairly, illegally, attacked man whose only crime is trying to restore lost greatness to our divided nation.  As Jesus Christ Himself desires, most ardently.

Here is  Mueller’s immediate written reaction to Barr’s purposeful misinterpretation of the findings of his investigation, which Barr only withheld from public view for less than a month, while he pressed on with his false and misleading narrative about Mueller’s findings.  In common language Mueller’s short letter boils down to: dude, why are you lying?

You decide which side of the scale the totality of the evidence that Trump obstructed (and continues to obstruct) justice comes down on, now that you’ve considered both sides.   You have a strong summary denial, on one side, and hundreds of pages of sworn testimony and doggedly uncovered unflattering facts on the other.  

And more than a thousand former federal prosecutors, from both parties, signing a letter that asserts the obvious: but for the fact that this man is the president, he’d have been indicted on several counts already, based on the evidence that Mueller laid out.

As for who is to make the final determination on holding a colorably corrupt president accountable to the rule of law, Mueller wrote:

The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.

Public Service Announcement

To make it as easy as possible to understand the necessity for holding our unaccountable rogue president accountable, in the only constitutional way remaining, I provide three links.   

The first is a two minute clip that shows how radically public opinion can change as more information is provided live on TV.   It goes on to a short, compelling presentation of the importance, in a democracy, of nobody being above the law.   It’s cued up for you here.

Few Americans are going to read a 448 page report to decide if Trump deserves to be impeached or not.   Here is the summary Bob Mueller prepared for Bill Barr to release, a day or two before Barr wrote his own “summary” that spun the findings “no collusion, no obstruction, basically exoneration.”  Scroll down to Volume Two on obstruction, the cover-up.  A ten or fifteen minute read that will reward your time by fleshing out the evidence and giving you hope about justice ultimately prevailing.    It also contains some fascinating details and is a very easy read.  

The third item to consider is Mueller’s remarkable one page letter to Barr, his boss.  It was written in response to Barr’s deliberate public distortions of Mueller’s findings and politely but firmly says “what the fuck?  You are fucking lying, dude!”

Here is a copy of the letter on FOX News.   Ooops.  Nothing to see here, but spin (you can actually read it, but you have to figure out how).

Here is a direct link to Mueller’s March 27 letter to Barr, written as soon as Barr started publicly distorting the substance and findings of the Mueller report. 

A concerned citizen doing what he can to keep fellow citizens informed by facts, rather than enflamed by inflammatory talking points repeated over and over and over.

Pop and violence

My grandfather, who my sister and I always called Pop, was a physically strong man.   Trim and powerful into his eightieth (and last) year, his large hands could open any jar easily and he could show you his strength whenever you asked him to, just by squeezing your hand.  Those big hands were always very gentle whenever they touched my sister or me, he never hurt us for more than a second, to make his point when we pressed him.  When we asked Pop if he was always strong he’d tell us about his youth back in Russia. 

“They couldn’t put a finger on me!” he’d often say gruffly, meaning the many local Ukrainians, the goyim who periodically went nuts and started beating and raping Jews.  He got along with the goyim, he told us, would take a wagon out to their farms and deliver goods, and he’d drink with them.   He dressed like a Russian, he had blonde hair and pale blue eyes, he looked Russian.   They respected him.  More on this later.

The one story that stayed with me, and will stand in for all others, was about the time the wagon Pop was driving, a horse drawn flatbed that carried groceries out to the surrounding farms, broke a wheel.   To replace the wheel they needed to jack up the wagon, prop it aloft for as long as it took to do the work.  They were in the middle of nowhere when the wheel shattered and they had no way to prop the wagon up while the work was done.   So Pop lifted the wagon off the ground on the side with the broken wheel.   He held it up on his shoulder until his companion pulled off the broken wheel and replaced it with a good one.   Then they went on their way.  All in a day’s work for Pop.   To hear Pop talk about his youth, he was one strong, silent, tough young Jew.

One night when my sister and I were quite young Pop babysat for us.   We were older than babies, probably six and four, or maybe eight and six, but that’s always the word that’s used, isn’t it, babysit?  Pop was in the kitchen, right next to the dining room, and my sister and I began to argue in the dining room.   Things escalated quickly.  Pop came out to intervene just as I grabbed my sister by the neck and started choking her.  (My sister usually did just fine in physical and psychological battles, no worries, gentle reader).   I don’t remember Pop putting a hand on either of us to separate us, I think it was his pure horror that made me drop my hands, made my sister and I instantly stop fighting.

Pop was so upset he retreated to the kitchen and started throwing up in the kitchen sink.  My sister and I felt so bad we left the rest of our fight for the next time.  There would always be time to continue our intermittent war, I guess we both reasoned, we were concerned about Pop who couldn’t seem to stop crying.

Many years later my sister and I were having lunch with Pop in the apartment in Miami Beach.   Our grandmother had just narrated how Pop had gone next door to talk to their neighbor, a tough-talking old Jew both of them suspected (possibly because he always bragged about it) had been a Jewish gangster in his earlier years in Brooklyn .   When the guy didn’t answer the door, and Pop could see him through the screen door, sitting in his usual chair, Pop tried the door, found it open and walked in.   He found the neighbor dead.

“Wow, Pop, you must have been shocked.  Weren’t you scared, standing there next to your friend’s dead body?” my sister asked.   

Pop scoffed.   “A dead man, to me?” he said, and flipped the cloth napkin on the table with the back of his hand.    My feelings about a dead man, his gesture said, are not even worth the couple of words it would take to dismiss them.   

I knew, even as a boy, that “one day the letters from Europe just stopped coming”.  The coins Pop’s father sent to my mother, and the Russian stamps, stopped in 1942, when my mother was 14.   She used to practice her Yiddish writing to the grandfather she’d never meet.   Nobody would ever meet him.   

Along with the rest of Pop’s family the old man was marched (if he’d survived the privations of a year of hellish ghetto life– his home had been designated the eastern edge of the ghetto), by local Ukrainian goyim who couldn’t put a finger on Pop, supervised by Nazis who regarded Jews as dangerous, gigantic insects, to a ravine on the northwestern edge of town.     

Eyewitnesses describe the ravine, raked in preparation by local Ukrainians, the softened earth waiting to receive layer after layer of dead Jews.  I have read the chilling testimony, by those who saw the execution and somehow lived to talk about it.  Fragments of bone from this killing place blow in the wind to this day, skitter across the dry ground, according to someone who visited and wrote about the town for the New York Times not long ago.

I never wondered, once I learned, as a boy, that the rest of Pop’s family (but for one I learned about recently, apparently as strong and tough as Pop, who survived the war in a series of harrowing Russian prison camps after being accused of disloyalty as a draftee in the Red Army) had been made to vanish, how somebody as strong as Pop could be so full of fear, and sometimes prejudice.    They hadn’t put a finger on him in Russia, perhaps, but that was as much pure, dumb luck as anything about Pop’s impressive physical strength.

Three comments from a reader

I rarely get comments on this sparsely read blahg.  Yesterday I got two.  I had an email for each, asking if I approved the comment for “publication”.  The comments were from the same person.  I read the first, and then the second.   The second email had this red warning banner at the top:

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I see now that I have a third comment from Boxerpaws.   So I’ll answer them all here, to err on the side of safety.  I hope you read these replies, my friend, and thank you for your comments.

The comment on  this post

the IRS would have busted Pres Trump if they had found any wrongdoing. What Fred Trump did or didn’t do is irrelevant.

The IRS has a special unit that deals with the tax returns of very wealthy citizens.   Over the years they collected a tiny amount of money from Fred for his under-reporting income, undervaluing assets and other tax mistakes or violations.  Young Donald and his siblings were lifetime beneficiaries of Fred’s tax avoidance schemes and certainly knew, as adults, that he was fraudulently funneling money to them using fake corporations they were officers of, and his other tax dodges.   Did you read the massive NY Times investigative piece?  The Failing NYT was never sued by the president’s many lawyers, in spite of the threat printed in the article itself. 

President Trump will not produce any financial documents … because?   There is every appearance that the president is lying about the longest tax audit in American history.  His appeal of a judge’s decision in the Deutsche Bank case is another example of him being “the most transparent president in history”.  He has been known, on occasion, to lie.  This is something you have to admit, I think.

Also Fred, in old age, had lawyers summon Donald and the other siblings to make sure now President Trump’s plan to become sole executor of Fred’s wealth never happened.   Don’t forget how many times Fred had thrown in tens of millions ($400,000,000 in today’s dollars) to insulate his reckless (or audacious, if you prefer) son from multiple business disasters.

Your comments on this post

“Barr did what Mueller asked, but he waited a few weeks before releasing anything from Mueller.”  Barr had no requirement to release it at all. He released it both for public consumption and Congress.

OK.  But as the sentences that follow the quote point out, during those weeks Barr waited, with Mueller’s fully redacted executive summary and a letter from Mueller disputing Barr’s conclusion of “no collusion, no obstruction, exoneration” in his hands as of March 27, Americans were deliberately misled by Barr.   The narrative that Americans absorbed in the course of almost a month of redacting, in the absence of the details of numerous incidents of obstruction of justice that were laid out in the report (and in the executive summary) was false.  

Have you read the Mueller summary outlining the ten or more examples of obstruction ?  It’s a ten minute read, all Americans should read it.

Mueller told Barr in the presence of witnesses that the DOJ ruling that a sitting Pres cannot be indicted had no bearing on his decision. So which time did Mueller lie? The first time to Barr et al or the 2nd time at his ‘presser’. 2. there is no LAW stating that a sitting Pres can’t be indicted. It amounts to a DOJ guideline. Nothing more,nothing less. IF a sitting Pres couldn’t be indicted for a crime he could rob a bank/murder his wife and get away with it as long as he was in office. Use your head.

Let’s assume that Barr was telling the truth, and witnesses can verify that Mueller lied to him over and over at a meeting when he said under no circumstances could he have indicted President Trump using the evidence compiled in his report.   How does that change anything dozens of witnesses said, under penalty of perjury, in Mueller’s report?   Also note that Trump and Barr are the only two people we know of ever to accuse Republican Eagle Scout Mueller of dishonesty. 

Do we assume, if Mueller lied to Barr about that policy decision, and even falsely claimed that a certain regulation required him to abide by the OLC guideline about indicting a sitting president, that he’s lying about everything in his report, including all of the sworn testimony of many witnesses?  

If so, doesn’t the same assumption apply to President Trump, who sometimes lies?

The standard for impeachment is not the same as for a criminal trial — they do not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the president committed crimes.   To remove an impeached public official from office they only have to show, to the satisfaction of the American people and 65 Senators, how he abused his power to undermine our constitutional system.

As candidate Trump himself observed, he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters.  This seems to be the case, if you ignore all the findings in the Mueller Report and focus only on whether Mueller lied to Barr about one key point during a closed door meeting.  

Let us turn to President Trump’s strong refutation of the Mueller report. Here is the president’s strong case that Mueller is a vicious enemy of his, with a giant “conflict of interest”.  

How am I not using my head?

Thanks again for these comments.

 

Pathetic Porcine Puppet

The president clearly has nothing to hide.  That’s why he is suing Deutsche Bank to prevent them from turning over his subpoenaed financial records, having his Secretary of the Treasury refuse to provide other subpoenaed records and preventing everybody who ever worked for him (excluding the close associates who have been convicted of crimes and are serving prison time) from cooperating with Congressional investigations.  A clear sign that the man is a victim of vicious, inhuman partisans who only want to bring him down for no reason at all!

Enter the shameful new Attorney General, the man Laurence Tribe accurately called a “pathetic porcine puppet of a puerile president”.   Barr speaks clearly, even under oath: yes, the president is right to think that spies were illegally gathering information against him as he ran for president.  Yes, Mueller basically exonerated him, although his DOJ is “investigating” whether Mueller and his team conducted an illegal investigation of the president.  

Then, always on message,  he said this on CBS, immediately after Mueller reiterated that everything Congress needs to protect our democracy is written in his unread report:

“Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they’re doing is in the higher interest, the better good.  They don’t realize that what they’re doing is really antithetical to the democratic system that we have.”

Dig it, you smug and true-believing disgrace.

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NOT unhinged!

The innocent man Bill Barr explained that even Mueller acknowledged was angry and frustrated during the two year witch hunt, defended himself to a group of reporters yesterday after Mueller and Barr spoke to America.   Here is what the president said about Mueller:

I think he is a total (sic) conflicted person.  I think Mueller is a true Never-Trumper.  He’s somebody that dislikes Donald Trump, he’s somebody that didn’t get a job that he requested, that he wanted very badly, and then he was appointed, and despite that, and despite FORTY MILLION DOLLARS, eighteen Trump-haters, including people that worked for Hillary Clinton, and some of the worst human beings on earth, they got nothing.  It’s pretty amazing.

He went on to elaborate about Mueller’s conflict of interest:

I think he’s totally conflicted because, as you know, he wanted to be the FBI director and I said no, as you know, I had a business dispute after he left the FBI, we had a business dispute, not a nice one, he wasn’t happy with what I did and I don’t blame him, but I had to do it because it was the right thing to do, but I had a business dispute and he loves Comey, you look at the relationship that those two, so whether it’s love or deep like, but he was conflicted.

The “business dispute” (disclosed by Mueller in the report) happened in the 1990s when Mueller tried to get back some membership fees he’d paid to a Trump golf course he was no longer using.   What Mueller “wasn’t happy with… and I don’t blame him” was the Trump club’s refusal to refund any part of the fee.    Fucking so-called facts!

I like the sly insinuation that Mueller is a deeply closeted gay man, like Roy Cohn, enraged at Trump on behalf of his disgraced lover, the also deeply closeted Jim Comey.

I say, let’s have this sort of presidential rebuttal every day, during the long weeks of the impeachment hearings.  Wouldn’t that be cool?   McGahn, a lying Trump hater and a so-called note-taking snake!   Sater, a fucking Russian mafia Jew scumbag and liar!   Flynn, a self-serving, lying piece of traitorous shit!  Etc.

NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION, total and complete EXONERATION!   Extremely stable genius!!   USA!  USA!!!!

Make it Plain, make it clear

There is a great debate about whether the Mueller witch hunt turned up enough evidence of presidential wrongdoing, in spite of the many repetitions of NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION, complete and total EXONERATION, to require hearings in Congress about Trump’s obstructive acts to determine whether he needs to be removed from office.   The big bone of contention, among many Democrats, is that such hearings could strengthen the perpetually campaigning president when the Republican-controlled Senate refuses to remove him from office, no matter how strong the evidence against him is.

Much of this debate is based on sound bytes.  Mueller has provided none, though his detractors and interpreters have provided a ton of them.   Mueller comports himself like a public servant who lives in a country of literate, law-abiding, thoughtful patriots like himself.   He writes and speaks in a measured, disciplined way.  He does not tweet.  He hopes not to speak publicly again on the matter he has investigated for almost two years and written out over 448 precisely worded pages.

Two OLC memos lay out an opinion that a sitting president can’t be indicted while in office.   Mueller cites the regulation that requires his office to follow this opinion.   Since he cannot indict the president, he considered it unfair to accuse him, even secretly, in a sealed indictment, of doing the illegal things he appears to have done.   The regulations he was bound to comply with put Mueller in a bind.  The bind was that he uncovered a lot of evidence of serious presidential wrongdoing.

Enter Bill Barr, who needs no introduction at this point.  A master of evasion who auditioned for the job of protecting the president from the Mueller report with a 19 page legal opinion that showed the boss his formidable legal chops.   In that memo Barr laid out exactly how he would defend the president, no matter what the Special Counsel’s investigation unearthed.   Once appointed, Barr was as good as his word.  

According to Barr, Mueller left the charging decision up to the Attorney General, and his decision was that the report pretty much exonerates the president, since it did not prove that he was part of a criminal conspiracy with Russia and it did not prove that Trump, in spite of his many overt and some covert obstructive acts, (acts Barr explained away as motivated by the understandable anger and frustration of an unfairly accused, innocent man)  did anything to obstruct the investigation into Russian interference on behalf of the Trump campaign.  In short: no collusion, no obstruction.

Mueller immediately wrote a letter to Barr, a most unusual move for a DOJ subordinate, pointing out to Barr that he had sewn confusion in the minds of Americans by misrepresenting the substance and findings of his report.    Mueller asked Barr to immediately release Mueller’s redacted summary, which includes his conclusion that nothing in his report exonerates Trump. [1]

Here is the heart of that short letter.  It does not make for a sound byte, though I have inserted a few line breaks, for emphasis (and to make it read like a series of tweets, many Americans’ preferred format):

…Accordingly, the enclosed documents are in a form that can be released to the public consistent with legal requirements and Department policies.

I am requesting that you provide these materials to Congress and authorize their public release at this time.

The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.

We communicated that concern to the Department on the morning of March 25.  

There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.

This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations. See Department of Justice, Press Release (May 17, 2017).

Barr did what Mueller asked, but he waited a few weeks before releasing anything from Mueller.  He did this to allow time for his misleading interpretation to solidify as the controlling narrative of Mueller’s findings.  Not undermining public confidence in DOJ investigations was not Barr’s main concern, protecting the president, his client and master, from impeachment was.

Enter more than 1,000 former federal prosecutors, Democrats and Republicans, who sign a public letter citing findings from Mueller’s report and making a strong case that but for the fact that Trump is the sitting president, and OLC memos hold him immune from prosecution while in office, there was enough evidence in the report to indict anyone not protected by a special DOJ opinion.   Read their letter.  Hard to argue that they’re wrong, or rabid partisans, or that anyone else would not be slapped with multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice based on the weight of the evidence Mueller sets out.  

Hard to argue, also, that they wrote something that can be reduced to a tweet:

Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.

The Mueller report describes several acts that satisfy all of the elements for an obstruction charge: conduct that obstructed or attempted to obstruct the truth-finding process, as to which the evidence of corrupt intent and connection to pending proceedings is overwhelming. These include:

and they go on to list a bunch of damning examples.  

But it’s not a tweet!

Mueller resigns earlier this week, his work done.  He gives a nine minute farewell speech during which he emphasizes that his report shows active Russian interference in the 2016 election, on behalf of the president, and that Americans need to do something about this vulnerability in our electoral system.   He also encourages all Americans to read his report, which, he points out, speaks for itself.

Barr got right to work, speaking before and after Mueller’s brief remarks (the follow up was done during a deliberately misleading chat with a CBS interviewer) making sure the confusing and misleading counter narrative he originally spun about the substance and findings of the report was fresh in everyone’s mind.  

You can read exactly what Mueller said in his farewell remarks here. 

Or you can just read this tweet from former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, which contains two statements from Mueller’s speech:

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Yes, Joe, the thing speaks for itself.

Now Democrats need to stop cowering in front of polls and hypotheticals about how much Trump would love an impeachment narrative for 2020, and start dragging witnesses in to testify about what they told Mueller.  Let America watch as these sworn witnesses tell the public what they told Mueller’s investigators, on must-see live television.  This is crucial, since virtually no Americans who need to be convinced are going to read Mueller’s book.   It will also be instructive to watch the angry president’s increasingly unhinged reactions to the sworn testimony as it comes out.  

Until the inevitable impeachment hearings begin, I refer those lazy patriots to Joe Scarborough’s tweet (above).  And God bless these United States…

 

[1]   Mueller wrote Barr on March 27, 2019

Dear Attorney General Barr:

I previously sent you a letter dated March 25, 2019, that enclosed the introduction and executive summary for each volume of the Special Counsel’s report marked with redactions to remove any information that potentially could be protected by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e); that concerned declination decisions; or that related to a charged case. We also had marked an additional two sentences for review and have now confirmed that these sentences can be released publicly.

Accordingly, the enclosed documents are in a form that can be released to the public consistent with legal requirements and Department policies. I am requesting that you provide these materials to Congress and authorize their public release at this time.

As we stated in our meeting of March 5 and reiterated to the Department early in the afternoon of March 24, the introductions and executive summaries of our two-volume report accurately summarize this Office’s work and conclusions. The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions. We communicated that concern to the Department on the morning of March 25.  There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations. See Department of Justice, Press Release (May 17, 2017).

While we understand that the Department is reviewing the full report to determine what is appropriate for public release — a process that our Office is working with you to complete — that process need not delay release of the enclosed materials. Release at this time would alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen and would answer congressional and public questions about the nature and outcome of our investigation. It would also accord with the standard for public release of notifications to Congress cited in your letter. See 28 C.F.R. 609(c) (“the Attorney General may determine the public release” of congressional notifications “would be in the public interest”).

Sincerely yours,

Arguing with True Believers

Arguing with a true believer is pointless, bringing a legal case against one, for good cause, not as much.   The belief of a true believer insulates the person from so-called facts or any counter narrative that contradicts the belief system.   Believers know the truth and you, no matter how much so-called evidence you think you have produced, are sadly mistaken.  Wrong.  SAD!   On your way to hell.  

That kind of dismissive, belief-based superiority does not generally work as well in a court of law where the decisions of judges, even if they deeply agree with the true believer, are bound by law, evidence and the specter of appeal.  Judges hate to be overturned on appeal.

The world is (among many other things) chaotic, confusing, contentious, often violent.    A belief system that puts this mad world in order, even if the system is internally inconsistent, is a comfort to many people.   These systems rest on bedrock articles of faith and come in many forms.  Some creeds encourage peace, others preach violence, always defended as a form of completely justified self-defense.   These belief systems are sold to people by skilled salesmen, by loved ones of unshakable faith, by charismatic leaders, sometimes by total con artist hucksters.  

The virtue of these systems, to those who believe in them,  is the certainty  they deliver about what is right and good and what is wrong and evil and the powerful sense of belonging in the good group that membership confers.  The articles of faith are easy to understand, simplify this complex world and give followers an uncomplicated road map to follow to belong to the group that stands against evil.   Wear the right hat, agree with the right slogans, join the right chant and you’re in.   It couldn’t be simpler.   The powerful sense of human belonging alone is enough to make people defend the faith, to the death, if necessary.

Imagine the terror of living in a country where a hoard of dangerous and unaccountable illegals swarm across porous boarders, are given free rein to rape, kill, smuggle banned, deadly drugs, decapitate, torture, contemptuously speak their secret languages while defying all laws of the country they have invaded.   Just the fact that they are rapists is enough reason to hate them, but there’s more.   We harness this legitimate fear and righteous hatred into a movement to stop these goddamned raping hoards and bring peace and justice to our shores.

When a true believer is imbued with faith, all of the arguments in the world cannot dent that belief.   I’m thinking, of course, of people hearing what they want to hear every time a charismatic demagogue opens his mouth.   Those who love and follow the demagogue hear the larger truth, even in the demagogue’s many demonstrably false lies.  He may be lying about many of the small details, even all of them, fine, but he’s completely right and honest about the big picture!    Those who hate the demagogue hear only a self-serving liar, rattling on, ignoring reality, warping the world to his image and stinking up the discourse, as demagogues often do.

A simple article of faith, a good motto, will always beat a set of complicated and nuanced facts, no matter how damning they may be.   If you are predisposed to believe something you will always find as much evidence as you need, it doesn’t take much.   The man you believe is unfairly persecuting your leader droned on for a long time, saying a lot of subtle things that supposedly contradicted and compromised the leader and his defenders, but then– in a moment that revealed his true despicable nature — he smirked, freeze that frame, he fucking smirked! Look at this fucking face!  Case closed!   The piece of shit showed his true biased partisan colors!   HAT SLOGAN BEATS COMPLICATED 448 page legalistic, biased so-called INVESTIGATOR REPORT!!!

Clearly I am thinking about the raging debate over the findings of the Mueller Report, in the wake of Mueller’s careful public remarks yesterday. Remarks that shed no light (unlike Mueller’s March 27 letter to Barr) on the argument over Attorney General Barr’s misleading and false statements that led his client, the president, to crow NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION, complete and total EXONERATION.   Trump’s remarks, in the absence of the report  or the summary Mueller prepared for immediate release (held by Barr for weeks), were fair enough.  They comported exactly with how Barr summarized Mueller’s findings in a letter he strongly argued was not intended as a summary, no matter what he may have written in it about summarizing the report.  

Mueller’s findings, like his remarks yesterday were legalistic, nuanced, by the book, bound by DOJ 1973 and 2000 directives against indicting, or even, in Mueller’s fairness analysis, accusing, a sitting president of a federal crime.  The 1973 DOJ policy against indicting a sitting president was reiterated in the DOJ Manual in 2000 after Ken Starr’s partisan investigation into Whitewater which led to perjury charges against a president confronted, in an unrelated case, with provable allegations that he had received blow jobs in the White House.   Starr pulled no punches:  Clinton committed perjury, impeach him.  

Mueller pulled his punches: we don’t exonerate him, and I present a great deal of evidence of crimes the president likely was directly involved in, and preserve a treasure trove of evidence riddled with holes due to perjury and obstruction, but I can’t say, without a full trial on the facts, that the president is guilty and, therefore, I cannot make a finding beyond that the massive evidence collected, and the pattern of obstruction of my investigation, does not allow me to exonerate him.   The report, he said, speaks for itself.

I was checking out a couple of FOX news videos today, in the wake of Mueller’s short, punctilious press conference yesterday.  One was entitled “Trump Reacts to Mueller’s Russia probe with angry tirade“.   It took me a moment to realize that FOX was applauding the president, a completely innocent man, for his anger.   Innocent people have the right to angry tirades!!!   Nothing wrong with an angry tirade, if you are justifiably enraged.  Ask Supreme Court Justice for life Boof Kavanaugh.  They work, yo!

NO COLLUSION.   Mueller found that the 140 contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials were part of Russia’s documented interference with the 2016 election.  Because of the lies Mueller’s team was told, deleted emails and texts, refusals of principals to be interviewed, he was unable to establish the legal elements of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.  He warned America again of the serious and coordinated Russian interference in the 2016 election, interference copiously documented in his report and a series of indictments, interference the Trump administration blocked investigation into and has done nothing to protect America against in 2020.

NO OBSTRUCTION.   Mueller dedicated a second volume of his report to an investigation and documentation of the president’s many attempts to impede the investigation, public statements that directly contradicted each other about firing various people involved with the investigation, ordering subordinates to make false records documenting lies to protect the president from evidence that could compromise him, threatening, bullying and intimidating potential witnesses, hectoring his attorney general to “unrecuse” and shut down the probes, submitting answers Mueller called “inadequate” to written questions and refusing to answer follow-up interrogatories.   The summary of this volume lays out ten very damning instances that smell very much like a vigorous and ongoing attempt to obstruct the investigation.   In response the president has another great slogan to fit on a hat:  No Do-Overs!

As for obstruction allegations, Trump doubles down, he’s consistent in this.  No subpoenas will be obeyed!   No documents will be released.  Let the courts rule against me, I have 5-4 on the Supreme Court now!   In his angry tirade today he claimed that the report written by his enemy, a vengeful man who had an undisclosed business deal with Trump that went bad and who was already angry because Trump denied him the FBI director job he coveted, a man with a conflict of interest who employed a team of angry Democrats, COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY EXONERATED him.

If you love somebody, as millions appear to love eternally fighting Trump, you can forgive that person an extended temper tantrum when they are unfairly attacked by unscrupulous, powerful enemies.   If you watch that same tirade without the love for the angry person, the facts will sometimes speak for themselves.

Our experiment in democracy may already be over, crushed by a skillful forty year campaign by ultra-wealthy extreme right wing zealots with roots deep in the rabid ideology of the John Birch Society.  It could be that enough people, softened by a lifetime of ads that have made them loyal consumers, prefer a muscular chant to something as squishy and complicated as flagrant violations of campaign finance law, flouting the rules against using the office of president to enrich yourself, abstractions like dead children of illegals at the borders, mass killing of the neighbors of possible terrorists, seizing and imprisonment of the illegal fake children of alien rapists.    MAGA means a return to the good old days, when you could honestly call a homosexual a fag without everybody jumping on you, when colored people knew their goddamn place, when the life of every six day-old embryo, every three month-old fetus, was the most sacred and precious of all of God’s creations.    You see, we were once a country of decency and God-fearing Christian values, my friends, and it is only right to return to that golden time when dissent was seen as treason and everybody knew their goddamned place.

I may just be an optimist, but I see signs that our legal system is still not completely corrupt, our democracy not quite completely dead.   An attorney general who, as spin-doctor spokesman and chief legal advisor to a president, deliberately misleads and confuses the public then lies under oath?   Congress’s constitutional duty is to impeach him.   The Senate won’t oust him?   It matters not, put the corrupt, demonically evasive protector of presidential unaccountability on trial for America to see.  Let Barr refuse a subpoena to testify in his own impeachment hearing, that’s OK too.   If the Supreme Court rules 5-4 on Barr’s right to tell Congress to suck it, democracy is already over.  Still, we have to follow the law if we are a nation of laws — it is the only roadmap away from tyranny.  Congress is the only body, under our constitution, who can hold a sitting president, or his hand-picked appointees, accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors [1].   Let the impeachment hearings begin.

If the impeachment investigation in the House, or the trial in the Senate, is stonewalled by Trump’s blanket refusal to cooperate, do you really think the Supreme Court will side with him 5-4 that he doesn’t need to allow subordinates to testify in an impeachment hearing because all charges against him are part of a vicious, partisan witch hunt against a completely innocent man who never, NEVER got a blow job while president!!!?  If so, we’re already finished as an even nominal democracy.   That argument would probably fly with Boof, but it’s hard to see the others, even the most craven, signing on to that decision.  Call me naive, but I still believe in the integrity of our (yes, deeply flawed) legal system and the constitutional system of checks and balances.  I also believe the Supreme Court justices, at least most of them, rule with an eye toward their place in history.  

I see evidence that plenty of government officials still believe in the rule of law too.   There are at least a thousand former federal prosecutors of integrity who signed a letter analyzing Mueller’s report and agreeing that it makes out a criminal obstruction case that would be pursued, but for the fact that the perpetrator is currently the president of the United States.   There are also federal prosecutors of integrity who are presently serving.  

If not, we’re already finished, and you are right to despair, but I am thinking otherwise.  Hope is better than resignation, until they nail the box shut.

It is upon us all to struggle against the idea that, living under a sociopathic scofflaw demagogue who is a useful donkey for manipulative billionaires and powerful bigots to ride, our fate as a nation is already sealed.

 

 

[1] At one point during Trump’s angry remarks outside the White House, he pointed out the legal requirement, for impeachment, of “high crimes AND misdemeanors”.   He pointed out the AND to the assembled reporters, a teachable moment.  You see, even if the Report did accuse me of high crimes, which, of course, my sworn enemies completely exonerated me, but you also, constitutionally, need misdemeanors.  It says AND, plainly, and not OR, it’s written right in the constitution.  You don’t have to be a legal scholar or even have a reading level higher than second grade to see A-N-D and not O-R.   He rested his case, witch hunt.    Many followers posted thumbs up icons after this irrefutable remark.  If you love the person, it doesn’t take much to make you click “like”.   MAGA.  MAGA!!!!