Oh, come on. You know what else is a factual statement? If Obama signed an agreement with Iran, and I described it this way: “Barack Obama, who kicked off his state Senate career in the home of a known terrorist, just signed an agreement to ease sanctions on a state sponsor of terror.”
That would be completely factual. It would also be a horseshit insinuation. The factual preamble is designed to cast aspersions on an act of the president. Hey, the whole statement is factually correct, so no one could possibly argue with the way it was formulated, right?
This is just ridiculous. The Democrats have had the House for all of about two months. They’ve started to actually conduct oversight of the President and his administration, which hadn’t actually occurred yet. Unless you think to believe that they’ve done nothing in violation of law or ethics, it seems likely that some of this oversight will result in evidence of wrongdoing by the administration.
If you want to believe that Barr is a fair and objective judge of Mueller’s report, then you are free too. I think that’s a pretty ridiculous belief, but you are free to do so, and I am free to criticize you for it, and point to the evidence as to why this is a ridiculous belief.
So far, we know nothing beyond “Barr doesn’t really think this report warrants a criminal indictment of the President or those close to him who haven’t already been indicted”. This doesn’t really tell us much at all about the actual report.
He’s going to crow, boast, strut, preen, tweet his heart out, pound his chest, and go on to win again in 2020. And the Mueller investigation will turn out to have been a nothingberder.
ETA: I hope I’m overreacting and turn out to be wrong.
A lot of people–myself included–never expected there to be enough evidence of full-on conspiracy, but understand that the investigation is one way to start exposing Trump’s venal, corrupt character and the bullshit bogus facade of himself that he is constantly propping up. It’s no less a political attack than just about every imbecilic thing that comes out of his mouth or that he tweets. Everyone sees that, too.
Seth Abramson is a great tweeter to follow for the perspective of a lawyer who thinks this is just the beginning of the “collusion” investigation: https://twitter.com/SethAbramson
To some extent that is true, and for anything like their investigation of Deutsche Bank, I expect that they’re not going to find much.
On the other hand, if they investigate topics like the Presidential Records Act, I expect that they’ll come up with a whole bunch of goodies.
It really depends. Unfortunately, all the smart people generally end up in the Senate. Compare the Nunes Memo to the (effectively) same on that was written by Chuck Grassley and its a world apart. So while there are probably some great things to investigate that are better-suited to investigation by Congress, in its legitimate oversight duties, I’m not super hopeful that they’ll find or stick to those.
Elijah Cummings seems to be doing some good work. Schiff…no. We’ll have to see with the others.
He just tweeted today, part of it it was"Keep America Great." He has saved the country all by himself. And that is the fucking slogan for the next election, I predict. And enough people will buy it. We may be fucked.
When do Manafort and Stone get their pardons? Soon, he’ll be raging even at a higher level about investigating the Clintons and Comey; you know, the real Russian colluders.
Doesn’t sound to me like it. Sounds like sour grapes and conspiracism. To be sure, Barr has a very specific view of Executive Power that does go the President’s way and we shouldn’t expect a reasonable choice from him on that line. BUT, there’s no indication in the letter that he usurped the choice from Mueller, that’s just Abramson having a fever dream. And I highly doubt that the full report will say anything different than the summary does: Mueller couldn’t make a full determination and decided to leave it to the DOJ.
Lawyers aren’t de facto brilliant and mechanistically reasonable. Just because one says something don’t make it so. I’ve seen arguments from CREW and against CREW that were both by highly regarded lawyers, coming to vastly different conclusions. It’s a wide space out there and mostly you’re just giving your opinion and trying to cheat to find something to support it.
I’m still trying to sort it all out but perhaps it was Barr (and Rosenstein) who declined to press for obstruction of justice?
Again, I think it was overtly political, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Barr and Rosenstein necessarily believe the president was guilt-less. It probably means that they just didn’t want to go there. Barr had already been on record as saying that, in his legal opinion, the president couldn’t obstruct justice simply by firing Comey. I don’t know what Rosenstein’s position on the matter is, but he’s the outgoing deputy AG, so maybe whatever he believed was overruled, or not.
I honestly don’t care if obstruction charges weren’t filed or even recommended or hinted at. I think the way to deal with Trump is to deal with him at the ballot box.
Please help this poor hungover soul. I can’t follow all of this. Mueller did, or did not say, that there was no collusion? Or the AG has made that conclusion based on his reading of the report? Or something else? Simple sentences please.
I’m reasonably sure that it’s more detailed and thereby worse. But, the Barr summary had the first word and that word will almost certainly prove to be at least consistent within reason of Mueller’s decisions and that’s enough for the public to not much care.
I’ll care, but it won’t matter at all. It will mostly tell us whether more is coming.
If all discussion of whether or not to indict Trump Jr on the foreign donations statute is missing (post-redaction) for example, then we can be pretty sure that the FEC or FBI is holding onto that. It’s just being treated as a campaign finance violation, not a Russian coordination crime, and we can expect it to still be in the works.
I think that the main thing which we’ll get out of the Mueller report will be to know exactly how tightly he defined his mandate. I’m guessing that he tightened up as time continued on and decided that, in terms of protecting the investigations from interference and preventing flight by the subjects, pardons, etc. the best strategy was to spin it out so that unknown others in the FBI and DOJ could operate without their movements being watched.
I expect a few glaring gaps in the report. But, of course, I am quite liable to be wrong as well.