As a political body, I feel reasonably safe to say, the House Committee is free to roam as widely as they so choose. Mueller is far more constrained, legally, than the Intelligence Committee was and he’s still able to go pretty far out from his original purpose, under his charter.
Was the House investigation really that narrow? Wikipedia says “In January 2017, both the House and Senate intelligence committees launched investigations on the Russian meddling into the presidential election, including possible ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia.”
If it turns out that Mueller presents tons of info on Russian “meddling” that the House committee ignored, whether or not it was “collusion” (which is a nebulous concept, I think), then I would think that the House committee investigation would be (or ought to be) discredited.
Mmm…delicious nothingburger…
How do you prove collusion, anyway? It’s not like someone’s going to send a written message that says “ Hi Trump Campaign, this is he Russian government. We support you over your opponent, wanna collude? And the Trump Campaign would never send one back that says “ Hell Yes, when can we meet in order to collude.” Because no can be this stupid.
Whoops, this is Stupid Watergate and that’s exactly what happened.
And I find it telling that you don’t think that tax evasion and money laundering committed by the person holding the highest office in the land should be considered important by most people.
I was reading your post and thinking “No one would do that EXCEPT THESE MORONS.”
Mueller seems to be able to go after anything vaguely connected, based on reports of what he’s actually doing.
I don’t know what House committees are legally allowed to do. But as a practical matter, this investigation was about Russian collusion. Which makes sense to me, considering that it’s the House Intelligence committee. You want to claim that the House Intelligence committee can investigate guys for tax evasion I can’t argue with you, but it’s a very big stretch to claim that they should have investigated such things, and at any rate they didn’t and that’s not what their report was about.
This might have something to it. Problem is that the House Committee has not concluded that there was no Russian meddling - to the contrary. So if the House committee concludes that Russia meddled and Mueller also concludes that Russia meddled, then additional info that Mueller comes up with wouldn’t necessarily be anything significant. Only if it fundamentally changes our understanding of Russian meddling, which is a much taller order.
Didn’t they make some positive claims (such as that the meddling was not designed to help Trump)? If any of those are disproven by Mueller’s ultimate findings, then that ought to discredit their investigation.
The pretzels one has to twist oneself into in order to stay on the Trump train are impressive. Are those goalposts getting heavier every time? At some point do you ask yourself whether it is worth it?
If you read his charter, he is free to investigate all crimes that reveal themselves while investigating the core topic that he was tasked with - with approval by Rosenstein and a Grand Jury, based on the evidence presented.
As best I can tell, they try to keep their legal limits a bit vague themselves, figuring that very few people have standing or the finances to take them all of the way to Supreme Court, and few are liable to spend their money on such an endeavor when the laws are so vague that the Supreme Court could really go any direction (and will probably err in the favor of the powers of the Federal government). It’s sort of an extra layer above “easier to ask forgiveness than permission”.
To an extent, yes.
The issue of whether the Russians were trying to help Trump versus sow turmoil generally is of much lesser significance than whether Trump colluded in their efforts, but I agree that the former too would be a miss by the Committee.
Exactly. Which effectively gives him an extremely broad mandate, since all these guys are connected to other guys and are doing different things with each other. So for example you start investigating Manafort’s connections to Russia and you look back at all his dealing for the past decade and you find some tax evasion and the like and there you are. And if you find that Manafort (or whoever) also dealt with some other characters, and some of those same characters also dealt with him WRT to some other dealings, then you investigate those other dealings too. And so on, ad infinitum.
It’s much much broader than an Intelligence Committee targeted specifically on matters of relevance to Intelligence Committees.
Someone remind me. Didn’t Mueller recently indict 13 Russians for “meddling” in our election?
(Unless we’re going to semantically quibble over “interfere” vs “meddle” vs “influence”?)
But that’s also a meaningless statement. It’s like saying that an unemployed obese man who suffers from depression but who just this morning has decided to quit smoking, go vegan, run 5 miles every day, build his own house using only simple tools, and marry a supermodel has a narrower field of lifestyle options than a person in prison. Like…well, maybe, but I’d be willing to be that the guy in prison will still be there tomorrow. I wouldn’t bet that the obese man will have quit smoking or done any of those other things.
Fundamentally, there’s a big difference between having a mandate imposed on you by someone who can enforce it, and not.
Mueller has already produced some information that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and yet the Majority of the House Intelligence Committee found no evidence of such.
It already looks bad for them.
No, it’s like the difference between having an extremely broad mandate whose extremely broad boundaries can be enforced, and having a much narrower mandate whose narrower boundaries are very hard to enforce. Claiming that the second is a broader mandate because no one can force them to adhere to their proper role is incorrect.
In any event, as above, as a practical matter that’s not what the report was about.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to, but at most Mueller produced evidence of something that Lance Turbo considers collusion and which the House committee does not. (We don’t know what Mueller himself thinks about that question.)
To one subgroup, yes. But that subgroup was going to look at them negatively regardless.
I’ll trust LT on this one. He has the interests of the country at heart.
There’s a minor typo in your link, so here it is cleaned up: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/378035-rosenstein-defends-mueller-probe-no-reason-to-end-special-counsel
There are several individuals whose actions have been shown to meet the standard everyday definition of collusion. It’s weird that you don’t know what I’m referring to.
GOP committee member Tom Rooney of FL laments:
But you voted to approve this latest slapdash coat of whitewash anyway, didn’t you, Tom? So STFU.
So help me, can we please do away with this term, “collusion”?? There is no crime of “collusion”!! It doesn’t exist.
Long after Mueller has charged all the Trump players with conspiracy to commit all manner of crimes against these United States, Trump supporters will still be saying, “But look!! See?? We told you there was no collusion!! Nyeah!!!”