Month: March 2019

This is how you write a headline

by digby

Congrats to the people of Seattle for seeing the actual story in the headlines.

Other newspapers have not done so well …

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Let’s see the report

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Attorney General William Barr submitted a short letter to Congress and the public on Sunday explaining the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. It is an elegant little note that leaves more questions unanswered than it answers.

As a political document, Barr’s letter is brilliant. It framed the conclusions in the most positive way for the president while setting forth the most anodyne facts and only four partial quotes from what’s been described as the “comprehensive” Mueller report. The resulting headlines are exactly what the Trump administration wished for.

The most important statement in the letter was this one, apparently a direct quote from Mueller:

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

In a footnote to the letter, it defines “coordination”:

In assessing potential conspiracy charges, the Special Counsel also considered whether members of the Trump campaign “coordinated” with Russian election interference activities. The Special Counsel defined “coordination” as an “agreement — tacit or express — between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.

Barr further explained that the special counsel had not offered any judgment as to whether the president had obstructed justice, deciding instead to simply lay out the evidence uncovered on both sides, and explicitly saying that this did not exonerate the president. Barr then said he had personally determined that the president was in the clear. This should come as no surprise to those who read his memo to the White House before being nominated, in which he described the Mueller theory of obstruction of justice was “fatally misconceived.”

Although Barr’s statement on the suspected collusion in the election interference case sounds conclusive, informed lawyers parsing his language suggest that it’s may not be an unequivocal as is seems. Former federal prosecutor Ken White writes in the Atlantic:

When prosecutors say that an investigation “did not establish” something, that doesn’t mean that they concluded it didn’t happen, or even that they don’t believe it happened. It means that the investigation didn’t produce enough information to prove that it happened. Without seeing Mueller’s full report, we don’t know whether this is a firm conclusion about lack of coordination or a frank admission of insufficient evidence. The difference is meaningful, both as a matter of history and because it might determine how much further Democrats in Congress are willing to push committee investigations of the matter.

It’s also notable that this narrow construction of “election interference activities” doesn’t answer some of the other important questions about whether Trump might have been compromised by Russia due to his lies about the secret $300 million deal for Moscow Trump Tower, or why he seemed so eager to lift sanctions on Russia after the 2016 election. Indeed, it doesn’t examine any of the details we’ve been reading about over the past two years, or the behavior we’ve seen with our own eyes. These are all questions that simply must be answered. Bill Barr’s sparse prose and carefully edited quotes won’t do.

The letter characterizes the Mueller investigation as a strictly prosecutorial enterprise. But it was also a counterintelligence investigation, which will require a briefing to the Intelligence committees on Capitol Hill. Perhaps that’s where the answers will be found concerning Trump’s odd, secretive behavior toward Vladimir Putin and the ramifications of his possible kompromat or quid pro quos, which would have nothing to do with the election hacking and interference campaign. Those are live issues that Congress has a solemn duty to pursue.
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Why did Mueller leave the question of obstruction open? Many prosecutors find that very odd indeed. But there’s precedent for a special prosecutor to leave that question unanswered. During the Watergate scandal, Leon Jaworski’s office sent the evidence it had to Congress without a conclusion about President Nixon’s guilt. Jaworski believed that the political process was the proper venue to decide whether the president had committed an impeachable offense.

Barr appears to have decided that Trump couldn’t have had the intent to cover up a crime he didn’t commit. That’s nonsense. If someone is successful at obstructing justice, it may well be impossible to prove he committed the underlying crime. That’s the whole point.

This is one reason why proof of an underlying crime is not required for an obstruction charge. There are thousands of such cases around the country, including some famous examples, like those of Martha Stewart and Scooter Libby. But it’s especially clear that this is a fatuous argument in cases of possible impeachment. There was never any evidence that Richard Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in. He was impeached for the cover-up and abuse of power. Likewise, Bill Clinton was impeached for obstruction of justice for allegedly trying to influence his secretary’s testimony and having a friend seek a job for Monica Lewinsky in order to cover up his illicit affair. The Paula Jones civil case underlying the alleged perjury and cover-up was dismissed by a judge.

In both of those cases, the Justice Department did not come to a conclusion, instead leaving it up to Congress and the public to decide. Barr chose to do something very different by making his own determination. Since we know that Barr held strong views about presidential obstruction of justice before he ever saw any evidence, and only took 48 hours to make the determination, this decision calls his judgment into question.

Under the Justice Department rules, it was within the attorney general’s prerogative to summarize the report with a terse explanation and determine its conclusions for himself. But in exercising that right the way he has, Barr didn’t do himself or the president any favors. If the Mueller report really does exonerate the president, as Barr says, then there should be no problem releasing it to the public. If the evidence is less unequivocal, when the report does come out Barr will looks like he was covering it up.

And it will come out. Last week the House voted unanimously for the Mueller report to be released. That vote was backed up by the one guy who should be thrilled to see his full vindication exposed in all its detailed glory:

The bottom line is that while Trump and his supporters are understandably taking a victory lap based upon Barr’s letter, they shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking this is over. There are still dozens of questions that must be answered. The special counsel investigation may have come to an end, but the congressional investigations have just begun.

Two Comments RE: Barr’s Letter: 

by tristero

Oh, Trump and Co. conspired all right. Mueller just couldn’t prove it beyond the technical legal definition of “reasonable doubt.” That is why the entire report must be released.

Trump thinks he got away with it. That will increase the chance he’s gonna get caught in the future because he’s likely to get even more arrogant and sloppy.

Nobody’s asking
by Tom Sullivan

One of the few real talents the sitting president possesses is making every story about himself. Even stories that are not about him are about him once he’s done grabbing them by the pull quotes.

So focused are we on what Attorney General William Barr’s 4-page press release on the Mueller report doesn’t say about conspiracy between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, no one is bothering to comment on what it does say about Russia.

Russia likes that just fine (AP):

Russian officials and state media who have vehemently denied that the Kremlin wanted Trump to win and was helping him in the campaign on Monday relished the news.

“The results of Mueller’s investigation are a disgrace for the U.S. and its political elites,” Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the information committee at the Federation Council, tweeted on Monday. “All of the accusations were proved to be trumped up.”

Russian authorities over the past months portrayed the Mueller probe as a witch hunt against Trump and a tool of the Democratic Party to fan the flames of the anti-Russian sentiment in the U.S.

Etc., etc.

What Barr says Mueller’s report did conclude was 1) a Kremlin-connected troll farm, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), “conducted disinformation and social media operations designed to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with” the U.S. 2016 presidential election, and 2) Russian government actors also “hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations.” They hacked Republican National Committee computers too, but who’s counting? Russia never leaked those emails.

This is old news, of course. Mueller indicted a baker’s dozen of Russian intelligence officers for these crimes in February 2018.

But press inquiries and panel after talk-show panel will focus on whether or not the full report exonerates the obsequious “tough guy” in the Oval Office who dreams Russian President Vladimir Putin will let him into the tough guys club. Despite unprecedented documented contacts between a U.S. presidential campaign and representatives of a hostile foreign power, despite being told by the entire U.S. intelligence community Russia committed crimes meddling in the campaign, Trump denied it. He and his campaign did so for months until, after Helsinki, he was forced to admit, grudgingly, that his buddy Vlad might have had something to do with it.

Now that (according to Barr) Mueller’s report confirms what we already knew about Russian interference, what does the U.S. president have to say about that? What does he plan to do about that? Nobody’s asking.

Mueller may believe “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime” involving the data theft. But when the redacted report becomes public, we can expect confirmation Trump did engage is a series of quid-pro-quo deals whereby the campaign exchanged promises of lifting sanctions on Russia in exchange for helping him win and/or awarding him Trump Tower Moscow. That is, we can expect confirmation of what David Corn writes is already in evidence:

Trump and his lieutenants interacted with Russia while Putin was attacking the 2016 election and provided encouraging signals to the Kremlin as it sought to subvert American democracy. They aided and abetted Moscow’s attempt to cover up its assault on the United States (which aimed to help Trump win the White House). And they lied about all this … Trump and his gang betrayed the United States in the greatest scandal in American history.

Trump will crow about how the report clears him. The Russians just did the same. But if he accepts that, Trump must also be made to address the conclusion that his Russian friend attacked the country he swore an empty oath to defend. He ought not be allowed to move on as though his buddy Vlad is this country’s friend. Reporters should ask the would-be tough guy and patriot in blunt terms:

• Vladimir Putin looked you in the eye and said Russia was not involved with “the so-called interference of Russia in the American elections.” The Mueller report confirms he lied to your face. What are you going to do about that, Mr. President, and when are you going to do it?
• As a true, flag-hugging, great-making American, will you, the Trump Organization, and its officials, forsake ever doing business with Vladimir Putin, his emissaries, current and former Russian intelligence operatives, and will you commit now to accepting no more money or loans from the Russian government or its affiliated banks, so help you God?

Don’t hold your breath waiting for those questions or the answers.

The Barr Letter, 1st take

by digby

I’m working on a longer piece for Salon at the moment so I’ll just slake your curiosity by linking this first take on the Barr letter by Marcy Wheeler. Her site is inundated right now so I don’t think she’ll mind if I just copy the whole thing:

Attorney General William Barr just engaged in utterly cowardly dereliction of duty.

DURING HIS CONFIRMATION HEARING, BARR CONFIRMED THAT THINGS TRUMP HAS DONE ARE OBSTRUCTION

When we were awaiting the Mueller report yesterday, I wondered whether William Barr was thinking about two things he had said as part of his confirmation process. First, in his column that has always been interpreted to say that a President can’t obstruct justice, at the bottom of the first page, he instead acknowledged that a President actually could obstruct justice.

Obviously, the President and any other official can commit obstruction in this classic sense of sabotaging a proceeding’s truth-finding function. Thus, for example, if a President knowingly destroys or alters evidence, suborns perjury, or induces a witness to change testimony, or commits any act deliberately impairing the integrity or availability of evidence, then he, like anyone else, commits the crime of obstruction.

Barr — who at the time had no understanding of the evidence — made three comments in his confirmation hearing about obstruction. Among others, he point blank said that a person could not lawfully issue a pardon in exchange of someone’s promise not to incriminate him.

“Do you believe a president could lawfully issue a pardon in exchange for the recipient’s promise not incriminate him?” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Barr during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“No, that would be a crime,” Barr said.

We know Trump has repeatedly floated pardons to witnesses who have, in hopes of obtaining a pardon, not incriminated him.

That’s true of Paul Manafort most of all.

So on the basis of what he said to get this job, Barr is already on the record saying that Trump obstructed justice.

BARR IGNORES THE CRIMES IN FRONT OF HIM TO AVOID CONSIDERING WHETHER TRUMP OBSTRUCTED THOSE CRIMES

Now consider how Barr — having been given the job by Mueller of deciding whether Trump obstructed justice — he avoided holding himself to sworn views he expressed during confirmation.

In the letter sent to Jerry Nadler (who surely just kicked off an impeachment inquiry in earnest) and others, his analysis consists of the following.

The guts of the letter describe the two parts of Mueller’s report. The first part reviews the results of Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. It describes the conclusions this way:

[T]he Special Counsel did not find that any U.S. person or Trump campaign official or associate conspired or knowingly coordinated with the IRA in its efforts

[T]he Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in [its] efforts … to gather and disseminate information to influence the election

Note that the second bullet does not even exonerate Roger Stone, as it pertains only to the Russian government, not Russians generally or WikiLeaks or anyone else. This is important given that we know the Trump campaign knew of and encouraged Roger Stone’s coordination with WikiLeaks.

Then Barr moves along to the second section, in which Mueller considered whether Trump obstructed justice. In it, Barr doesn’t mention the scope of the activities that Mueller considered evidence of obstruction of justice. He notes that, after laying out a case for and against accusing the President of a crime, Mueller’s report,

states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Barr and Rod Rosenstein have spent 72 whole hours considering that evidence to come up with this judgment:

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.

[snip]

In making this determination, we noted that the Special Counsel recognized that “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference,” and that, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction. Generally speaking, to obtain and sustain an obstruction conviction, the government would need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person, acting with corrupt intent, engaged in obstructive conduct with a sufficient nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding.

Here’s the thing, though: at least given what they lay out here, they only considered whether Trump was covering up his involvement in the hack-and-leak operation. It doesn’t consider whether Trump was covering up a quid pro quo, which is what there is abundant evidence of.

They didn’t consider whether Trump obstructed the crime that he appears to have obstructed. They considered whether he obstructed a different crime. And having considered whether Trump obstructed the crime he didn’t commit, rather than considering whether he obstructed the crime he did commit, they decided not to charge him with a crime.

As Marcy says, I think we need to consider that the Trump Tower Moscow wasn’t considered part of Mueller’s remit. In other words, if it didn’t have something to do with the “election interference” it wasn’t considered. And yet that is likely the real reason for Trump’s obsequious behavior toward Putin during the campaign and as president.

That’s a  matter of kompromat counterintelligence question and may not even be prosecutable without strong proof of the quid pro quo. But you can imagine that Trump certainly knew that Putin knew he was lying throughout the campaign and beyond about his business dealings in Russia.

And we may have to consider that Trump was a total dupe, manipulated at every stage by nefarious foreign actors which may just mean that he should be impeached for the high crime of being a corrupt authoritarian and a cretinous moron rather than a Russian agent.

Clearing Trump of collusion in the hacking and the dissemination of Hillary Clinton’s emails doesn’t really answer all the questions does it?

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Right-wingers always obsess over bodily functions

by digby

Bolsonaro is going to rival Trump for sheer vulagrity isn’t he?

In a very NSFW move, Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, posted a video on Twitter of a man urinating on another man in front of a crowd of people. Bolsonaro posted the sexually explicit video in an apparent effort to discredit Sao Paulo’s annual Carnival celebration, which has attracted protests against his far-right agenda. “I don’t feel comfortable showing it, but we have to expose the truth so the population are aware of their priorities,” Bolsonaro tweeted with the video. “This is what Brazilian carnival street parties have turned into,” he said.

The president then followed it up with another tweet in which he wrote only: “What is a golden shower?” Brazilians quickly condemned Bolsonaro’s tweet as a gross misrepresentation of the festival. Witnesses to the incident said it was an isolated incident amid the celebrations, according to Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paolo (FSP).

Bolsonaro is being accused of using the video to discredit the protests against him. Brazilian federal prosecutors recently launched an investigation into suspicious cash payments made into the account of the president’s driver.

This sort of thing borders on obsession in the right wing. They are always breathlessly reporting on the bodily functions of the people they hate. They think it dehumanizes them. Apparently, they don’t produce any human waste themselves.

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So, why all the lies?

by digby

I guess we can just say that everyone involved with Trump is a pathological liar because that’s the kind of person a pathological liar would hire. Therefore, the lies mean nothing because they all have the same psychological pathology.

Or it could mean they are hiding something.

This USA today article lays out some of the lies:

The first lie – the first one that was a crime, at least – came on the fourth day of Donald Trump’s presidency, in a White House office down the hall from Trump’s own.

That day, a pair of FBI agents came to question Trump’s top national security aide, Mike Flynn, about his dealings with the Russian government. Flynn gave the agents a tour of his new spot in the new administration, interrupted at one point as Trump and some movers walked past discussing where to hang art on the walls. Then Flynn took them back to his corner office and calmly lied to them about conversations with Russia’s ambassador.

Flynn, agents later wrote, “did not parse his words or hesitate.” He simply lied.

The exchange was the start of a remarkable succession of lies over nearly two yearsby some of Trump’s closest political associates, told to federal agents, Congress and the public that distanced the president and his campaign from an investigation into whether his campaign participated in Russian efforts to disrupt the election that put him in office.

Whatever else special counsel Robert Mueller’s now-concluded investigation may reveal, it has devoted considerable attention to the Trump associates whose lies to lawmakers and investigators deflected attention from connections between Russia and the president’s campaign, and to a central question hanging over many of the charges Mueller has filed: Why did they lie?

Mueller delivered his final report Friday to Attorney General William Barr, marking the end of an investigation that has loomed over the first two years of Trump’s presidency. The Justice Department has so far revealed none of the report’s conclusions, but over the past year and a half, prosecutors have sketched some of them in hundreds of pages of court filings.

Prosecutors have revealed that Trump’s campaign worked eagerly to benefit from a Russian intelligence operation that hacked his opponents’ emails and echoed them in phony social media campaigns, an effort the U.S. government later concluded was aimed in part at helping to deliver Trump the presidency. And investigators charged that a succession of top aides then lied to pretend they hadn’t.

Mueller’s office accused seven people, all but one of them former aides or advisers to Trump, with making dozens of false statements during the Russia investigation.

The investigation has produced a deluge of falsehoods on subjects from the president’s business dealings in Moscow to a meeting his son and campaign chief attended in Trump Tower in 2016 with a Russian promising “dirt” on his political opponent. But lying to the public is usually not a crime, and Mueller’s investigators zeroed in on those directed to lawmakers and federal investigators.

Trump’s lawyers maintain that the lies reflect little more than a misguided impulse to protect themselves from things that weren’t crimes to begin with. “The thing about all these lies is that if they all just told the damn truth they probably wouldn’t have been in any trouble,” said Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lead attorney.

Prosecutors haven’t hinted at their answer, other than to reveal that it is one of the subjects they investigated.

But some of the people they have accused of lying have supplied answers of their own: One suggested he lied out of loyalty. Others appear to have been protecting the president. One, Michael Cohen, a former executive in Trump’s private business and his personal lawyer, said he lied because the president wanted him to.

“Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump. Every day most of us knew we were coming in and we were going to lie for him on something and that became the norm,” Cohen said in sworn testimony to a House committee Feb. 27. “And that’s exactly what’s happening right now in this country and it’s exactly what’s happening here in government.”

3 months of Russia lies

Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI on Jan. 24, 2017, about conversations with Russia’s ambassador, including one in which he discussed rolling back sanctions the Obama administration had imposed in response to Moscow’s election-meddling.

Three days after that meeting, two FBI agents went looking for a young campaign aide, George Papadopoulos. They took him from his mother’s house in Chicago to the bureau’s office there, switched on a video camera, and warned him to tell the truth.

“The only way you’re getting in trouble today is if you lie to us,” one said, according to court records.

For two hours, the agents quizzed Papadopoulos on his interactions with a professor in London named Joseph Mifsud and other people Papadopoulos believed had ties to the Russian government. Eventually, Papadopoulos revealed that Mifsud told him in early 2016 that Moscow had gathered “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, in the form of “thousands of emails,” months before the government revealed that Russia’s military intelligence service had hacked Democratic political organizations. But Papadopoulos passed his encounter with Mifsud off as a “strange coincidence,” unrelated to his work for Trump.

He later admitted that wasn’t true; Mifsud approached him because of his role on the campaign.

More lies by Trump associates followed.

That August, Michael Cohen lied in a written statement to two congressional committees about Trump’s efforts to construct a potentially lucrative high-rise in Moscow, telling them that they ended early in the campaign, when in fact those efforts continued until the point – almost six months later – when Trump had effectively secured the Republican presidential nomination. Cohen also tried to mislead members of Congress into thinking that Trump himself was uninvolved in the project.

A month after that, in September 2017, prosecutors allege that another Trump confidante, Roger Stone, lied to lawmakers about his efforts to gather information for the campaign about hacked emails that were being released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. Prosecutors said someone in Trump’s campaign directed a senior campaign official to get in touch with Stone about any other “damaging information” the group might have on Clinton.

When lawmakers summoned one of Stone’s associates to testify, Stone suggested he, too, stick to the story, saying in a text message obtained by prosecutors: “Stonewall it. Plead the fifth. Anything to save the plan’ … Richard Nixon.”

Cohen, Flynn and Papadopoulos have pleaded guilty to making false statements. So has Manafort’s former deputy Rick Gates, and an attorney who worked with the pair, Alexander Van Der Zwaan. Stone, who has maintained his innocence, is scheduled to go on trial in November on charges of lying to Congress and obstruction of justice.

Late last year, Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Trump’s campaign, met with investigators and appeared twice before a grand jury. There, prosecutors alleged in court filings, he lied about his interactions with a business associate in Ukraine who U.S. authorities say is tied to Russian intelligence. Prosecutors say Manafort passed polling data to the foreign associate while running Trump’s campaign.

Prosecutors didn’t charge Manafort with lying, though a judge concluded that he had. Instead they sought to use his lies against him when he was sentenced for other crimes, including conspiracy and tax and bank fraud related to years of lobbying work he conducted in Ukraine.
[…]
‘Loyalty’ and ‘orders’

Trump has tried repeatedly to discredit Mueller’s investigation, savaging it as a political “witch hunt.” The FBI has confirmed that it investigated whether the president also tried to obstruct it, and Mueller’s office closely scrutinized the false statements of Trump aides.

Both Cohen and Flynn have agreed to cooperate with prosecutors and have provided information about the circumstances in which they lied.

“The obvious question on the obstruction theory is who, if anyone, is suggesting that they’d want to cover it up,” said Shanlon Wu, a former federal prosecutor who represented Gates until last year.

“Isn’t it a remarkable coincidence — why are they all lying?” said Robert Ray, a former independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton. “Politics is one of those spaces where loyalty is prized above most everything,” Ray said. “When you look at these cases, it’s like everyone understood that — down to the lowest staffer.”

Flynn has never revealed why he lied, and it’s puzzled those who know him.
[…]

Robert “Rocky” Kempenaar, one of Flynn’s longtime friends from Rhode Island, said he believes he lied to protect the president and his administration and that he did not decide to do it on his own.

“He’s a general,” Kempenaar said. “He was following orders from above him. Whether it was the president, I don’t know, but I kind of figured it out knowing Michael the way we do.”

Cohen, too, placed Trump squarely at the center of the obstruction investigation. In scathing testimony to the House Oversight Committee in early February, he said Trump had implicitly encouraged him to lie to lawmakers about plans to build a Trump Tower in Russia. And he testified that some of Trump’s lawyers reviewed and edited a false written statement before he delivered it to Congress in 2017.

“Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress, that’s not how he operates,” Cohen said. “In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me, there’s no Russian business, and then go on to lie to the American people by saying the same thing.

But hey, it’s all fine. Trump is president when the economy is doing well and he hasn’t started another war (yet) so there’s no reason to care about anythng else, amirite?

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Perry Mason moments are a rarity

by digby

James Fallows: What history teaches us about uncovering coverups

The Atlantic writer says courtroom drama-style revelations are not how reality usually works – nor is hiding information in a democracy https://t.co/Z5SEByKxHE pic.twitter.com/7yyrfQxjUh

— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) March 24, 2019

I think we always look back the dramatic moments as the conclusive ones. He’s right. They weren’t. We remember John Dean and Alexander Butterfield as the turning points in Watergate, and in some respect they were, but really that cover-up was revealed over a long period of time and the cumulative effect of what we knew is what made those moments so dramatic. Ken Starr’s testimony in the Clinton impeachment hearing and Oliver North’s testimony in Iran Contra were big TV moments, but they didn’t change anything in the moment.

There has already been plenty of drama in the Russia scandal. In fact, there’s been so much of it that we are overwhelmed with it. But in the end, the conclusion to this scandal will be determined by what happens next, not what’s happened already.

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Yes, he “colluded” and was happy to do it

by digby

I wrote this for Salon this morning:

So Robert Mueller’s report has been filed. As I write this, we are still waiting for Attorney General William Barr to reveal what he calls its “principal conclusions” to leaders of the judiciary committees in Congress. Whether those turn out to actually be “conclusive” remains to be seen, but it’s safe to say that whatever Barr conveys to Capitol Hill will not provide the level of detail about the outstanding questions to which the public deserves to have answers.

The Department of Justice has reported that there are no new indictments forthcoming from the special counsel’s office, which many people assume means that Mueller concluded that Trump and his inner circle did not collude with Russia during the 2016 election campaign. That is incorrect.

We know that the DOJ has determined that sitting presidents can’t be indicted. That’s not settled constitutional law, but it is a federal policy that Mueller was bound to observe. So the lack of charges against President Trump doesn’t mean much. But the conventional wisdom at this moment holds that if there had been any proof of conspiracy, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner and perhaps others would have been indicted by Mueller’s team, so the evidence of conspiracy must not be there. That may be true, but we don’t know that at this point, and don’t know why Mueller may have reached that conclusion, without seeing the details of the report.

The fact that there were no indictments in a counterintelligence investigation would not in itself be unusual. The purpose isn’t prosecution — it’s fact-finding and removing the threat. Not all threats are criminal. For instance, people who might be unwittingly compromised could have their security clearances withdrawn or be fired from a government job, even though they haven’t necessarily committed a crime. If someone who is a serious threat to national security has committed other crimes, the feds might choose to indict him or her for those other offenses, rather than the ones that might expose national security secrets. There are several people enmeshed in this Trump scandal for whom those examples might serve.

As Frank Figliuzzi, the former assistant director of the FBI for counterintelligence explained on MSNBC on Saturday:

Counterintelligence is the chess game in the FBI. It’s the most cerebral part of the FBI and it’s nuanced and subtle. … It could be, and by the way, this is the case of the majority of FBI counterintelligence investigations, that you do not end up with a criminal prosecution but rather an incredibly nuanced case that someone has been compromised, that someone attempted to get assistance from a foreign adversary. But they are winks and nods. … So Mueller may have said, “Look if it’s not airtight, I’m not charging, but I’m going to explain it in a report,” and I think that’s what we should expect.

As I wrote the other day, regardless of whether all of this is explained in Mueller’s report to the Justice Department, by law he will have to report his findings to the intelligence committees, just as former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe was obligated to inform the “gang of eight” congressional leaders that he was opening the counterintelligence investigation in the first place.

We already knew there was next to no possibility that Trump himself would be indicted while he’s in office. That has long been his get-out-of-jail-free card. But none of that means that the information gleaned from the counterintelligence investigation won’t implicate Trump and his cronies in a Russian plot to disrupt the election. It may be, for instance, that it wasn’t a criminal conspiracy, just a monumental lack of basic ethics and a case of massive stupidity.

After all, there is evidence of collusion already in the public domain. We know that Donald Trump was aware in the summer of 2016 that the Russians were hacking into his rival’s emails, and he egged them on in public. He has continued to deny that they did it, even to this day. Trump was thrilled to have Vladimir Putin on his side and believed that made him some kind of foreign policy genius. There was a time when Republicans would have been hysterical at the prospect of a presidential candidate being so accommodating to foreign interference, especially if the Russians were involved. But Trump’s behavior has been completely out in the open. We’ve watched it unfold in real time and virtually the entire Republican Party thinks that’s perfectly fine.

We also know that Donald Trump was compromised. It’s been revealed that throughout the first half of the campaign he had Michael Cohen, who was then executive vice president of the Trump Organization, along with Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, working on a potentially hugely profitable deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. This was an outrageous thing to be doing at all while running for president, but he made it much worse by lying about it in public for many months well into his presidency. If you want to know why that was such a risky thing to do, just look back at the case of Michael Flynn.

Remember that Flynn was ostensibly fired for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about calls he made during the transition to the Russian ambassador suggesting that Trump would lift sanctions imposed on Russia over the apparent election interference. Remember that Acting Attorney General Sally Yates went directly to the White House, in the early days of the Trump administration, to warn officials about Flynn. That was because the FBI and Justice Department were worried about the fact that the Russians knew Flynn was lying and could potentially use that to blackmail him. Remember that Flynn, at least for a few weeks, was national security adviser to the president of the United States.

Exactly the same dynamic existed between Russia and Trump: They knew he was lying about having no business in Russia, and Trump knew they knew he was lying. He was downright obsequious toward Putin during the campaign, likely still hoping to get the “Moscow project” built if he lost the election (as he fully expected to). Once he won, Trump was seriously compromised. His behavior toward Putin as president, the private meetings and the submissive behavior in Helsinki all point to Trump’s knowledge that the Russians had leverage over him. For all we know, that’s not the whole story. Indeed, that’s likely just one of the compromising lies Trump has told that has become public. He lies all the time.

Those are just two examples of Trump’s corrupt and unethical behavior toward Russia. Neither of them is likely prosecutable, even if Trump weren’t protected by the Justice Department policy that holds a president can’t be indicted. It’s a national security problem for which the only remedy is to fire the president — aka impeach him or defeat him at the ballot box.

Sadly, since all this is already on the public record, if it hasn’t convinced Republicans that the president is a serious threat to the nation it’s hard to imagine what would change their minds. Nonetheless, Congress must pursue this no matter what Mueller decides.

Whatever Barr chooses on Sunday or in the days ahead, it will be largely up to the Democrats on Capitol Hill to pursue all the open questions — and there are many of them. Public hearings are essential.  There is so little trust in government institutions in America at the moment that it’s vitally important that the public be able to see and hear directly from the people involved in this investigation. Whether Congress holds impeachment hearings or simply does the oversight that was so sorely lacking in the first two years of Trump’s term, the people of this country can’t hold another presidential election without knowing what happened in the last one. A democracy can’t function like this.

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Leakproof
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by James Ledbetter via Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0.

The buzz around what may be in Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report is inescapable this morning. Without having read a word of the report, Fox News has declared Donald Trump vindicated of any wrongdoing. Multiple accounts circulate of investigations spun off the Trump-Russia investigations and still pending. Not to mention story after story, with the report still not public, about what comes next. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vows to oppose any Department of Justice classified briefing on the matter that would leave her members unable to discuss findings publicly.

News that Mueller will issue no new indictments could mean he found no wrongdoing by Trump, or that he did but simply issued no indictment, per Department of Justice guidelines on not indicting a sitting president. Politico reports White House aides nevertheless believe that dram of news exonerates Trump of wrongdoing before the report’s contents are public:

But now, if he is exonerated, Trump aides say the president will need to acknowledge that Mueller did a thorough and fair investigation to show that the outcome is legitimate and that the House is overreaching.

Good luck with getting a “thorough and fair” out of Donald Trump.

The same report indicates Trump aides are gearing up for a Mueller counteroffensive, but worry if they write down any of their contingency plans, they may leak.

That is not a problem for Mueller’s team, per the Guardian:

Recent reports indicate that Mueller’s office was granted Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) status, to ensure information inside remained secure. Smartphones and other electronic devices that can be turned into listening devices or cameras were likely to have been restricted. The office itself has not been publicly located by Mueller’s team, although its whereabouts remains an open secret among close followers of his work.

Those interviewed by Mueller’s investigators have reported being picked up from their lawyer’s offices, hotels or even nearby stations by agents assigned to the investigation, then dropped back at the same location to avoid being spotted going in and out of the building.

Comparisons to the sieve-like Whitewater investigation leave Kenneth Starr’s work looking like partisan hackery. (I know. I know.)

The special counsel has rarely even been seen outside his offices in Washington, with two notable exceptions. In July, he and Donald Trump Jr were spotted waiting at a departure gate at Washington’s Reagan airport. Then, in September, Mueller was seen receiving technical assistance at the Apple store in Georgetown.

It should come as no surprise that Friday’s announcement came without flourish. Former colleagues describe this as simply Mueller’s method.

An NBC News reporter Friday night was jazzed to be told by a waiter she was sitting at a table just vacated by Robert Mueller.

Mueller’s efforts yielded “indictments, convictions or guilty pleas from 34 people and three companies” in under two years, contrasting with Whitewater and the Iran-Contra investigations that continued for years longer.

In an administration unable to follow “the most basic rules of governance,” Mueller has shown public service can still be performed honorably.