Month: March 2019

Bias in our veins
by Tom Sullivan

Jennifer Eberhardt studies implicit bias at Stanford University, how even unconscious racial attitudes affect our interactions with others. Eberhardt works with police departments tech companies in their training. NPR interviewed the MacArthur grant recipient this week about her new book, “Biased.” One story she told has stuck with me all week.

While visiting Charlottesville, VA during her research, a middle-aged Uber driver spoke of a black woman, recently deceased, who had helped raise him. Yet, after explaining how important she had been in his life and his affection for her, she recounts, he admitted there was still “bigotry in my veins“:

EBERHARDT: OK. So I’m getting a little nervous, and I can only see the back of his baseball cap – right? – ’cause I’m in the back seat. I couldn’t see his expression or anything. And so I just asked him – I said, well, what did you mean? He says, well, I can feel it rising up. And I said, well, when can you feel it rising up? He said, when I’m outnumbered. You know, he said he lived in Florida, and he said he felt it there when he was outnumbered by Latinos. I just thought it was so honest.

Bias can be triggered by stress, she explains. Situations police face requiring split-second decisions are prone to unconscious bias surfacing:

“I think typically when people think about bias, they’re thinking about burning crosses and people filled with hate,” Eberhardt said on “CBS This Morning” Monday. “But you don’t have to be a bigot to have bias. Bias is affecting all of us. You don’t have to be a bad person.”

[…]

She said the foundations are wired into our brains from infancy. “Babies as young as three months of age already are showing a preference for faces of their own race,” she said. “This starts early. I mean, it has to do with who we’re surrounded by, and our brains get conditioned to looking at those faces and being able to distinguish among them.”

When I’m outnumbered

Throughout the nation’s history, the dominant culture — the dominant white population — has to a certain degree tolerated immigrants, the presence of people of non-Christian faiths, even the presence of large numbers of slaves, so long as they are perceived as small in number and/or not a threat to that dominance. Beyond some undefined trigger point, that perception shifts. For persons who are not overt racists, bias lies below the surface so long as the Others are in (and know) their place.

The politically motivated hype surrounding the arrival of immigrants at the U.S. southern border, plus the new visibility of previously closeted Americans has fellow citizens in Pennsylvania and elsewhere remote to the border convinced they are about to be outnumbered.

Alvin Toffler examined the health effects of rapid change in “Future Shock” (1970). Perhaps we suffer the cognitive effects of feeling overwhelmed by news and information, both good and bad, in quantities no human can process. What we used to know, we now half-know, think we know, and cannot agree on. So, why bother trying? Could bias against objective facts as a basis for making collective decisions about the world be “rising up” because we feel outnumbered by them? So long as facts know their place, we tolerate them. But when they become so many we perceive them as a threat to our control?

I once wrote about a similar overload phenomenon described in a book from the same period:

It seems people still reference Tom Wolfe’s essay, “O Rotten Gotham—Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink,” published as the last chapter of “The Pump House Gang” in 1968. Touring the city with anthropologist Edward T. Hall of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Wolfe examined how New York affects people, referencing the work of ethologist John B. Calhoun. From Wikipedia:

The ethologist John B. Calhoun coined the term “behavioral sink” to describe the collapse in behavior which resulted from overcrowding. Over a number of years, Calhoun conducted over-population experiments on rats which culminated in 1962 with the publication of an article in the Scientific American of a study of behavior under conditions of overcrowding. In it, Calhoun coined the term “behavioral sink”. Calhoun’s work became used, rightly or wrongly, as an animal model of societal collapse, and his study has become a touchstone of urban sociology and psychology in general.

[…]

In everyday life in New York– just the usual, getting to work, working in massively congested areas like 42nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Lexington, especially now that the Pan-Am Building is set there, working in cubicles such as those in the editorial offices at Time-Life, Inc., which Dr. Hall cites as typical of New York’s poor handling of space, working in cubicles with low ceilings and, often, no access to a window, while construction crews all over Manhattan drive everybody up the Masonite wall with air-pressure generators with noises up to the boil-a-brain decibel levels, then rushing to get home, piling into subways and trains, fighting for time and space, the usual day in New York– the whole now-normal thing keeps shooting jolts of adrenaline into the body, breaking down the body’s defenses and winding up with the work-a-daddy human animal stroked out at the breakfast table with his head apoplexed like a cauliflower out of his $6.95 semispread Pima-cotton shirt and nosed over into a plate of No-Kloresto egg substitute, signing off with the black thrombosis, cancer, kidney, liver, or stomach failure, and the adrenals ooze to a halt, the size of eggplants in July.

Consumers of news in Punxsutawney and Provo can now share the experience. Their fight-or-flight responses stay dialed up to 11 by the tightly wound knot of personality disorders in the Oval Office and by an infotainment complex with advertising revenues driven by viewer outrage. Facts are no longer material to people’s truth claims when they feel stressed and outnumbered.

“Someday, when we’re sitting around the electronic campfires we’ve lit to pretend-warm the huts in our Mars colonies,” Dahlia Lithwick writes, “we will tell our grandchildren about whatever vestigial memories we have of facts.”

We’ll remember them fondly with bigotry in our veins.

The Deadliest Addiction

by tristero

The Sacklers are a family of junkies. The Sacklers are suffering from an addiction to money. And tragically, it has led them to do terrible, terrible things. As this article makes clear, in their corner of the world, money addiction is so widespread it’s literally a pandemic:

The legal complaint, released at a news conference by the state attorney general Letitia James, was heavily redacted. Even so, it contains striking details alleging systematic fraud not only by the Sacklers but by a group of large but lesser-known companies that distributed alarming amounts of prescription painkillers amid a rising epidemic of abuse that has killed hundreds of thousands of people nationwide. 

The major pharmaceutical distributors — Cardinal Health, McKesson and Amerisource Bergen — warned pharmacies when their monthly opioid limits were approaching, then helped them manipulate the timing and volume of orders to circumvent the limits, the complaint charged. On the rare occasion when a distributor would conduct “surprise” audits of its customers, it would often alert them in advance, the complaint says.

Over the past two decades, more than 200,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 200,000 more have died from overdoses involving illegal opioids, like heroin.

Money addiction, unlike other addictions, doesn’t kill the addict. It kills others:

In New York State, where prescriptions for opioids increased ninefold between 2000 and 2011, opioid-related deaths have more than doubled since 2013, the lawsuit said. Nine New Yorkers die each day. 

Fortunately, the Sacklers’ enablers have started to wake to the serious problem the family has with money and are refusing to enable their addiction:

The Sacklers are one of the richest families in the United States, known for their generous philanthropy in the arts. But they have come under increasing scrutiny after new documents came to light in a Massachusetts case suggesting that some family members helped direct misleading marketing efforts for OxyContin and ignored evidence that the drug was being abused. Over the past several weeks, a number of cultural institutions in the United States and abroad have said they will no longer accept the family’s money.

Why is Ivanka being coddled by everyone?

by digby

She’s the president’s daughter. But she is also a senior White House adviser, a businesswoman who worked in her father’s corrupt businesses and is married to another senior white house adviser. She has been involved up to her finely drawn eyebrows in all the Trump scandals, from the fraud to the campaign to the fact that she can’t get a normal security clearance. And yet people are treating her as if she’s little 8 year old Sascha Obama:

Cohen’s false testimony to Congress in 2017 ultimately did not include all of the provisos and caveats that Ryan said Lowell had asked for. They determined that Cohen going out of his way to be so specific about Ivanka’s involvement would, in fact, have seemed awkward. Instead, Cohen’s commentary about Ivanka was boiled down to about one sentence.

Still, the revelation of Lowell’s involvement, as the e-mails suggest, in Cohen’s original testimony will likely be of interest to congressional investigators. After Cohen appeared before Congress for four marathon days last month, the House Judiciary Committee sent sweeping document requests to 81 individuals and organizations—many brought up by Cohen in his appearances—including Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Jared Kushner, the Trump Organization, and its C.F.O., Allen Weisselberg. Ivanka herself was not asked for documents, though 52 individuals and organizations were asked for documents related to Ivanka or her businesses. Many, like former attorney general Jeff Sessions, former White House communications director Hope Hicks, and former Trump bodyguard Matthew Calamari, were asked for documents that could pertain to conversations between Ivanka and foreign governments. Cohen was also asked for documents related to Ivanka and any potential emolument violations, discussions with foreign governments, financial transactions with the Russian government or businesses, the Trump Tower Moscow project, and changes made to his initial congressional testimony.

Since his appearance on Capitol Hill, Cohen has continued to cooperate with Congress and investigators in the Southern District of New York and the New York Attorney General’s office, who are pursuing a number of investigations that focus on Trump, his family, and their business, including the hush-money payments to women alleging affairs with Trump, matters related to the presidential inauguration, whether the Trump Organization inflated insurance claims in the past, and if the president offered Cohen a pardon.

The e-mail between Cohen and his attorney about his testimony sheds light on the potential new avenues for investigators to probe, as the country settles into a post-Mueller universe. One stunning feature of the saga so far is that, while the president and his family have remained unscathed, they’ve left a trail of wreckage in their wake. Paul Manafort is set to serve about six years in prison. Roger Stone awaits trial as Michael Flynn and Rick Gates anticipate their sentences. Cohen, of course, is set to report to serve his three-year sentence at the beginning of May. Equally stunning is the number of documents Trump’s former associates have saved, and how willing they’ve been to share those receipts with investigators.

I guess they all thins she’s a “red line” that will make Trump blow his stack, as if that means anything. Or maybe they just thinks she’s a nice young mom who doens’t deserve to be implcated in all this unpleasantness. But she is a grown woman who chose to do what she is doing and it’s ridiculosu that she isn’t in the hot seat like everyone else is.

He involvement in the business was deep and it was important. She was the face of much of their fraudulent development projects where they lied repeatedly about how much money of their own they had into them and got big loans based on fraudulent claims about how much of their project had been sold. She’s the apple of her daddy’s eye — and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

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A large majority of women say they will not vote for Trump

by digby

I think the real question is why so many American men still like him:

In a survey released by Quinnipiac on Thursday, 60 percent of women voters said they would “definitely not” vote for Trump in the 2020 election assuming he becomes the Republican nominee, as flagged by The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. This is compared to 27 percent of women who said they would definitely vote for him. Another 10 percent said they would consider voting for him, while three percent weren’t sure.

Among voters overall, 53 percent said they would definitely not vote for Trump in 2020, while 30 percent said they definitely would and 13 percent said they’d consider it.

This is a similar finding to some other polls in recent months, such as one from the Post in January, in which 64 percent of women said they definitely wouldn’t vote for Trump in 2020, with 20 percent saying they definitely would and 15 percent saying they’d consider it. Compared to this, Quinnipiac’s poll is actually a slight improvement.

Exit polls from the 2016 election showed that about 41 percent of women voted for Trump, although he earned 52 percent of the support from white women, per the Post. In November, an Axios poll showed 64 percent of women have an unfavorable view of the president.

There has long been a gender gap between the two parties. But Trump has pushed it to new levels. Since women of color didn’t vote for Trump in the first place, it’s pretty clear that he has finally pushed quite a few white women too far. It’s a little bit late. But better late than never.

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The financial crimes investigations begin

by digby

David Fahrenthold at the WaPo is out with another scoop:

When Donald Trump wanted to make a good impression — on a lender, a business partner, or a journalist — he sometimes sent them official-looking documents called “Statements of Financial Condition.”

These documents sometimes ran up to 20 pages. They were full of numbers, laying out Trump’s properties, debts and multibillion-dollar net worth.

But, for someone trying to get a true picture of Trump’s net worth, the documents were deeply flawed. Some simply omitted properties that carried big debts. Some assets were overvalued. And some key numbers were wrong.

See the full documents here
2011 statement
2012 statement
2013 statement

For instance, Trump’s financial statement for 2011 said he had 55 home lots to sell at his golf course in Southern California. Those lots would sell for $3 million or more, the statement said.

But Trump had only 31 lots zoned and ready for sale at the course, according to city records. He claimed credit for 24 lots — and at least $72 million in future revenue — he didn’t have.

He also claimed his Virginia vineyard had 2,000 acres, when it really has about 1,200. He said Trump Tower has 68 stories. It has 58.
[…]
Trump Tower only has 58 stories, but Trump re-numbered the floors to make it seem taller.

Now, investigators on Capitol Hill and in New York are homing in on these unusual documents in an apparent attempt to determine whether Trump’s familiar habit of bragging about his wealth ever crossed a line into fraud.

The statements are at the center of at least two of the inquiries that continue to follow Trump, unaffected by the end of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. On Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform said it had requested 10 years of these statements from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA.

And earlier this month, the New York state Department of Financial Services subpoenaed records from Trump’s longtime insurer, Aon. A person familiar with that subpoena, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said “a key component” was questions about whether Trump had given Aon these documents in an effort to lower his insurance premiums.

Of course he lied on official documents. Honestly, there’s just no way that he didn’t.

people go to prison for things like this https://t.co/2YZUvDetSd

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) March 28, 2019

Indeed, they do. They sent a Real Housewife and her husband to jail for exactly this sort of crime, with a whole lot less money at stake:

On July 29, 2013, Teresa and Joe Giudice were charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, and bank fraud, making false statements on loan applications, and bankruptcy fraud in a 39-count indictment. The indictment also charged Joe Giudice with failure to file tax returns for tax years 2004 through 2008, during which time he allegedly earned nearly $1 million. Teresa’s attorney told the Associated Press she would plead not guilty and “we look forward to vindicating her.” On August 14, 2013, the two pleaded not guilty in federal court to financial fraud charges.

On March 4, 2014, Teresa and Joe entered a guilty plea to 41 counts of fraud, following a deal struck with federal prosecutors. The couple was accused of engaging in bank, mail, wire, and bankruptcy fraud, which allegedly saw them net over $5 million over a 10-year period. On October 2, 2014, Teresa was sentenced to 15 months in a federal prison; Joe was sentenced to 41 months, followed by potential deportation to Italy. Together, the couple must also pay $414,000 in restitution.

They have ruled that Joe Giudice will be deported to Italy. He has been here since he was an infant.

Now, we know that the people who perpetrated fraud on their customers in the foreclosure crisis pretty much got off scot-free. We didn’t want to look in the rearview mirror. And that was a huge mistake.

And now we have another Reality Show star who happens to be president, apparently involved in similar criminal activity. This is what happens when there is no accountability for very wealthy white-collar criminals.

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What did Barr expect?

by digby

I’m sure the full Mueller report will fully exonerate the Trump and that he will finally pivot and become president the day it’s released. Clearly that’s why the president has called for it and the full GOP caucus in the House voted for it even before it was submitted. That’s how sure they are of Trump’s innocence.

And we know that nit-pickers and nay-sayers and dead-enders and old Resistance hags like me will continue to wonder about Barr’s “conclusions” as long as all we have are four chopped sentences from the Mueller report — sentences that are not as clear cut as everyone in the press is making them out to be — are all we have to go on.

Do we have rare bipartisan consensus? (Hah! No. I think we know they don’t really want to release the report.)

Anyway, this piece by the WaPo’s Eric Wemple blog makes note of the fact that news organizations are all misreporting the Barr Letter’s piece about collusion. They are saying Mueller found no evidence of conspiracy and that’s not exactly what the sentence quoted from the Mueller report actually said:

“[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

It’s fair to say that Mueller won’t be charging Trump campaign officials for charges related to Russia’s manifest efforts to steer the 2016 presidential election in his favor.

To assert “no evidence,” however, is another matter altogether. Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s ubiquitous chief legal analyst, tells the Erik Wemple Blog: “One thing we know with certainty is that Mueller is not bringing a criminal case based on the collusion set of issues.” Toobin was addressing none of the journalism of recent days — merely the legal issues at hand. “But that doesn’t mean there’s no evidence of collusion. It only means there’s not a prosecutable case. There’s a world of difference between ‘no evidence’ and not enough evidence to bring an actual case,” Toobin says.

A former federal prosecutor, Toobin noted that people in this line of work don’t traffic in terms such as “no evidence.” Prosecutors tend to speak in terms of “sufficient evidence” to bring a case vs. “insufficient evidence” to do so. Use of the term “did not establish,” says Toobin, is appropriate for these circumstances: “It’s important to recognize what it means. It means not proven. It doesn’t mean zero evidence,” he says.

Ben Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare and law analyst at NBC News/MSNBC, says that when media outlets cite “no evidence,” such an assertion “may turn out to be a lucky guess, but it is not supported by the current record.”

Though the distinction looks at first like the sort of issue that shouldn’t be allowed past the water cooler, it drives at a larger drama playing out across the U.S. government these days. The whole country is basing its understanding of the Mueller probe on the summary of Barr, an appointee of President Trump who almost a year ago wrote a memo criticizing the obstruction-of-justice theory apparently adopted by Mueller. A four-page summary of a complex and lengthy investigation of this import does not suffice.

Wittes says he’s not “dug in” to any view about what’s actually in the Mueller report regarding collusion or conspiracy. “I accept absolutely Bob Mueller’s judgment as described by Bill Barr that there is no prosecutable case here. But there’s a different question — what happened here? — that this letter does not remotely begin to answer and the press shouldn’t be confusing those two things,” says Wittes, adding that the media should stop deploying the phrase “no evidence” forthwith. “This is not a close call.”

There’s a symmetry, argues Wittes, in the coverage of the Mueller story: “Just as much of the press was irresponsible in its speculations about what Mueller was likely to find, journalists are now being irresponsible in their ambitious characterization of his decision not to bring conspiracy cases,” says Wittes.

The distinction is needling its way into the discussion of the Mueller probe. On MSNBC on Wednesday afternoon, host Katy Tur told Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), “Bill Barr’s summary says Robert Mueller found no evidence of conspiracy between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russians — no tacit or explicit conspiracy. Are you saying Robert Mueller might be wrong, or are — what are you saying?” Krishnamoorthi replied, “What I’m saying is there might be evidence of collusion.” Tur: “If there’s no evidence of collusion to rise to the level of crime, what do you suggest as a remedy?”

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, insists he has seen evidence of collusion and has said, “Undoubtedly there is collusion.”

The Erik Wemple Blog has checked in with several news organizations regarding the use of “no evidence.” The AP responded, “We stand by the lead.” Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards at the New York Times, tells us via email that he hasn’t participated in any discussions on this topic, but “our phrasing seems accurate to me.” He cites this line from the Barr summary: “The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

Cameron Barr, managing editor for The Post, told the Erik Wemple Blog, “We think the point is a valid one. The National desk circulated this guidance yesterday: ‘It is not accurate to say that Mueller found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump associates and Russia. Barr’s memo states that Mueller did not ‘find’ or ‘establish’ a criminal conspiracy — meaning whatever evidence the special counsel found, it did not rise to the level of that legal standard.’ ”

And a CNN representative responded to an inquiry by noting that the “no evidence” passage has been amended to mirror the language of the Barr summary, and that a clarification has been added to the story.

After this blog pushed its “no evidence” formulation into the public realm Monday, a kind Twitter user apprised us of the problem with the term. We issued a correction.

Lawyers are careful with their language. There’s a reason why Mueller used the words he used. We need to know what that is. There are just too many questions. Obviously, it is essential that we see Mueller’s full report and particularly what preceded those brackets. If Mueller wrote, “Despite evidence that the candidate and his campaign encouraged the election interference and failed to report numerous attempts by Russian agents to infiltrate the campaign —the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities” the conclusion might not be quite so obvious. Or perhaps it says, “the counterintelligence investigation into the president’s conduct with Russia is classified but — the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

It probably doesn’t say either of those things. But the fact that Barr cherry-picked only partial four sentences to make his “conclusion” necessarily raises questions.

And yes, I know that it’s all a big Deep State Hoax and I shouldn’t be talking about anything but “the issues” but I still think there’s a problem with a president openly encouraging a foreign power to sabotage his rival’s campaign. And I think his foreign policy shows that his relationship to that foreign power is bizarre even if he didn’t conspire with them and it’s likely because he’s a corrupt imbecilic egomaniac who is trying to preserve his ability to turn the presidency into big bucks around the world.

That’s bad, even if he didn’t “conspire or coordinate” with the Russian government and I don’t think we’ve gotten to the bottom of it yet. There is still a potential national security threat and it’s serious.

By writing that short letter the way he did, Barr could not have expected that all the questions would be put aside. What they clearly expected was that they could set a narrative that would put the onus on others to disprove. It’s hard to see why he would feel the need to issue such a short “conclusion” with just four edited quotes from the Mueller Report if they were so sure it would be seen as a positive in the end.

But who knows? Maybe they’re playing an elaborate “reveal” tease like a reality show that will, in the end, make Trump looks like the superhero, modern Jesus his followers all believe he is. But people have to be forgiven if they are still a little bit skeptical.

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DeVos and Trump Know Their Constituents Well 

by tristero

Betsy DeVos wants to kill funding for the Special Olympics. It likely won’t happen, but that’s not the point. The point is that neglecting the disabled is a positive virtue — for a certain sort of person.

It’s the reason why Trump openly mocked a disabled reporter. He knew exactly who (and what) he was appealing to. He was appealing to this kind of mentality:

Soon after Hitler took power, the Nazis formulated policy based on their vision of a biologically “pure” population, to create an “Aryan master race.” The “Law for the prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases,” proclaimed July 14, 1933, forced the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness (schizophrenia and manic depression), retardation (“congenital feeble-mindedness”), physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism.

In short, defunding the Special Olympics and mocking the disabled is part and parcel of a deliberate program to win the hearts and minds (such as they are) of American white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis. It’s what they expect Trump to do. And he is nothing if not obliging.

“Deplorable?” No. Despicable.

Is it really just a “partisan divide” that means both sides are acting out of nothing more than tribal ID?

by digby

Nothing suspicious about any of those secret, private meetings. Nothing at all:

Though President Donald Trump has claimed “complete and total exoneration” based on Attorney General William Barr’s summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, the American public disagrees, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS. 

A majority (56%) says the President and his campaign have not been exonerated of collusion, but that what they’ve heard or read about the report shows collusion could not be proven. Fewer, 43%, say Trump and his team have been exonerated of collusion.

This is not hard to figure out. We saw the collusion with our own eyes when Trump enthusiastically welcomed their help, even asking them publicly to do more hacking.

We later found out that there were Russians crawling all over the campaign and the entire top level of the Trump campaign was meeting with Russian emmisaries purported to be representing the Russian government about getting “dirt” on Clinton. Trump even announced that he was going to make a yuge speech (never delivered) outlining all the things “the Clintons have done.” And we know not even one of these people went to the FBI to tell them Russian people were inexplicably all over their campaign, even after it was publicly known thathe Russian government was behind the hacking.

None of this may fit Mueller’s of the crime of “tacitly or expressly” conspiring or coordinating with the Russian government in its election interference activities, but people know “collusion” — a non-legal term — when they see it.

Republicans don’t care. Democrats do. You can make your own decision about whether or not that means “both sides” are so partisan that they can’t be trusted or whether it means one side’s brains have been rotted by Fox News.

Although Mueller could not establish Trump or his campaign “conspired or coordinated with” the Russian government, according to Barr’s letter, the poll finds the American people continue to view the issue through partisan lenses.

 Full poll results

Republicans and Democrats are on opposite sides of this question: 77% of Republicans say the President has been exonerated, 80% of Democrats say he has not. Independents break against exoneration — 58% say the President and his campaign were not exonerated.

Those who say they have heard or read “a great deal” about the report (about 23% of the public), however, are more apt to say the President has been cleared: 56% in that group say Trump and his campaign have been exonerated of any collusion, while 44% say it wasn’t exoneration but that collusion could not be proven.

The 43% overall in the new poll saying the President has been exonerated is about the same as the 42% who said in a CNN poll earlier this year that Trump’s campaign did not collude with the Russian government to help get Trump elected. That suggests the summary letter released Sunday did little to move public opinion on this matter.

And most feel the investigation ought not to end with that letter.

Nearly 6 in 10 Americans want to see Congress continue to pursue hearings into the findings of Mueller’s report. Just 43% feel Congress ought to end the investigation completely following the release of Barr’s summary of Mueller’s findings.

Here too, partisan divides are deep. Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats (88%) say Congress ought to hold hearings, while just 17% of Republicans agree.

A CNN Poll conducted before the report was final found that nearly 9 in 10 Americans thought there should be a full, public report on the investigation’s findings, while just 9% felt that was unnecessary. Barr’s letter said his plan was “to release as much of the special counsel’s report as I can” within legal limits. The Department of Justice has said that release will come in weeks, not months.

At this point, without the full report having been released, just 13% say that Mueller’s findings will sway their decision about whom to support in 2020 either way, with 7% saying it makes them more apt to back the President, and 6% less likely to do so. A combined 86% say that they had already figured out whether they would vote for or against Trump, or that the investigation won’t matter to them even though they are undecided now.