Shit, this is turning into Twin Peaks. When will the Secret Diary of Robert Mueller be found??!?
Seriously, isn’t this report showing illicit dealings and suspicion a help for the states’ cases? I think it’d be stupid to reveal its full contents for a while if, in fact, it does help the other cases. No?
At the end of the day it’s always a political question, because Trump has obstructed justice. The fact that he does it publicly somehow obscures it, but it’s obstruction of justice to say that the Justice Department investigation is just a bunch of Angry Democrats on a witch hunt, that Mueller was appointed illegally, that people shouldn’t trust that an impartial investigation can exist. Even repeatedly insulting and belittling AG Sessions falls under that. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Mueller’s full report mentions all this stuff, and then just points out that Trump is a horrible asshole in all respects of his life and it would be hard to prove mens rea since acts like this all the time anyway (the same logic as to why it’s so hard to prove that Trump defames anybody). Does this all amount to an impeachable offense? It’s up to Congress and always was.
I’d thought the tRump tower meeting might be worthy of some charges but they’d either go with the “a sitting president can’t be prosecuted” DOJ theory or they’d simply say whoa, too much classified stuff in here, can’t release any of it for, like, 1000 years. And then it’d be a long, drawn out legal fight (just like everything else) and maybe eventually in another ~6 years the public might get a couple of heavily redacted pages saying nothing much.
I wasn’t quite expecting the “no prosecution needed here!” message to come like this.
A new thread to discuss other investigations of Trump, post-Mueller: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=872946
The DoJ is headed by Barr, and under the President’s control.
If Barr releases the Mueller report, but follows DoJ policy and removes from it all incriminating details relating to Donald Trump since he hasn’t been indicted, then what happens next? Who would be able to see the redacted parts?
No one, but it would be immaterial since the people who you would want to have know about those portions are the FBI and anyone else who would want to be investigating those things, but they all already know about them and are investigating them.
Like Obi Wan Kenobi, Mueller’s presence will live on in the various other investigations. 
For those trying to figure out how we got here, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone – a strong progressive – a has written a pretty damning account of the journalistic malpractice involved in this story from the start.
“I got conned” is a pretty valid defense; we’re all liable to believe that which confirms our priors, and we trust journalists to be skeptical and judicious. Unfortunately, nowadays that trust is misplaced.
Those invested in goalpoast-moving and straw-grasping will find it less useful.
If you saw one hundred separate and plausible examples of skulduggery low crimes, you would reasonably conclude guilt. However, unless one of those examples had proof beyond a reasonable doubt, then he isn’t “guilty”.
If they had proceeded to an indictment, Trump had oodles of cards to play. All of which might eventually be overcome, but only after a lot of time, effort, and more time. I’m guessing the Dem leadership sees the silver lining, that Trump will be their opponent in 2020, because everybody who wants to run “R” will have to bend the knee. Senators, Representatives, all the way down.
I only hope he doesn’t get us all killed before then. Than at least we can start the repairs.
But hey! Magnitsky will be undone, the Exxon/Putin deal for Arctic oil will go through as planned, and we will all have cheap gasoline and Putin gets billions in hard cash. Always look on the blight side of life.
While I completely support the investigation and think that it was well-deserved, it is nice to see someone writing against the investigation in an intellectually honest way. Or, at least, halfway through, I don’t see any particular lies.
That said, I think Schiff, CNN, and Trump’s crew probably bear the most blame. Schiff spread some blatant falsehoods, CNN clamped down on collusion like Trump was an angel in all other respects, and team Trump kept the focus on the one thing they were relatively sure that they were clean on (also spreading a bunch of falsehoods), allowing Trump Foundation and whatever all else fly past with nary a mention.
Ultimately, the main problem with the media isn’t so much that they are partisan or dishonest, it’s that 1) most reporters are sort of stupid, and 2) most readers are too, and that’s where most of the market is. They say partisan things because they’re not able to distinguish between their opinions and facts, and the market rewards them for it.
But, at the same time, Manafort deserves jailtime and whether the media goes crazy or not, goes off in the wrong direction or not, the FBI goes where the evidence leads. The reporting doesn’t affect anything that matters at the end of the day. Trump should go to jail for the things he’s actually done - assuming that he has actually committed crimes. That’s not something the media can or ever will accomplish. Caring about them or their opinions is not valuable. The only thing that matters are indictments.
ISTM that what Taibbi’s criticizing there is bad journalistic PR, rather than bad journalism. Like every other media story these days, the Mueller investigation was over-hyped in an excessively speculative way in order to grab attention, and that led to a lot of people temporarily believing it was a more earth-shattering issue than it turned out to be.
That is indeed a systemic problem with our news media, but it’s not specific to the Mueller report. But now Taibbi’s fretting that the public reaction to the over-hype will be to discredit subsequent criticisms of the Trump administration, and he blames that specifically on the journalism about the Mueller investigation.
I think that’s short-sighted. Ultimately, we’ve got a problem that our mainstream media are too sensationalistic, too attention-hungry, too eager to oversell and flog to death any story that looks like it might have “legs” in the public attention, and as a result people in general distrust the media. That would all just shake out into adjusting the “grain-of-salt baseline” of skepticism if it weren’t for an additional phenomenon.
Namely, conservatives tend to be exceptionally credulous about and reliant on strongly biased right-wing media, and there’s no left-wing counterpart that gets that kind of allegiance from liberals. So we end up with both conservatives and liberals feeling distrustful about mainstream media due to its hype and speculation issues. But whereas liberals respond to that with an increase of disillusionment and apathy about news overall, conservatives respond by clinging more closely and trustfully to anti-liberal propaganda and disinformation.
Taibbi’s not wrong that this is a far-reaching and long-term problem for liberals, but he’s wrong to blame it specifically on the reporting about Mueller.
Uh, no. He is very clear about what he is criticizing, and it is shitty journalism. He links to article after article that was later shown to be unverified, inaccurate, or just plain false.
You obviously haven’t caught much MSNBC in the last two years, or noticed that their shows and especially Rachel Maddow, Russiamonger extraordinare, have been doing pretty fabulous in the ratings. If that’s apathy, she’ll take it. How much you wanna bet that her ratings don’t take a slide anytime soon, despite being utterly wrong?
Glenn Greenwald is another staunch progressive that used to be a regular guest on MSNBC and CNN. When he was skeptical of the whole Russia Collusion schtick, they stopped inviting him on. CIA and FBI types which once upon a time would have been treated with skepticism by the left, were trusted implicitly.
Partisanship, groupthink and confirmation bias aren’t left/right issues, they are human issues.
The whole thing had the unmistakable marks of a conspiracy theory and a moral panic from the get go, and it will continue like that for as long as there is face to be lost in admitting being a chump.
Or voting for one.
Given that all of these things are true, I don’t know that your analysis is very on-point:
Given all of that, regardless of Steele or anything else, you really need to look into the question of what all his crew was involved in.
And again, those are all true things that can be supported by Mueller’s indictments or other reliable sources. If you can look at those and say that it was unwarranted for Rosenstein to issue the order for an investigation, then I’d be strongly curious what your thinking is.
A conspiracy theory that resulted in numerous convictions.
It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter! And even…and even if we win…if we win… Ha! Even if we win. Even if we play so far over our heads that our noses bleed for a week to ten days. Even if God in Heaven above comes down and points His hand at our side of the field. Even if every man, woman and child held hands together and prayed for us to win. It just wouldn’t matter because all the really good-looking girls would still go out with the guys from Mohawk because they’ve got all the money!
I’m not sure what “more extreme” thing Obama could have done to get the Senate to vote on Garland. Although McConnell has currently sewn his own lips to Trump’s backside, Human Centipede fashion, the legislative branch is usually sufficiently separate from the executive to prevent the latter from dictating what the former should or shouldn’t do.
I don’t dispute that there has been shitty journalism - most of it coming from Fox News but some of it, I concede, has come from sources regarded to be more center-left or outright left. But since when are CIA and FBI types, as you call them, automatically treated with skepticism by the left, and since when have they been trusted implicitly by the left? I certainly don’t pretend to speak for all leftists, but I think I most educated leftists have simply responded to whatever evidence has been made public. The journalism that has been fairly criticized has been the reporting of leaks and anonymous sources – that is a trend that needs to be reversed.
Efffffffffffffffff Barrrrrrrrrrrrr!
And Mueller no longer has the respect he had previously. At least, not from me. Sometimes Straight Arrows bend.
We’re seeing this shitty journalism today, as a political appointees letter to Congress is being considered the same as the actual report.