Apart from the umpteen other investigations toodling along, what I’m waiting for is to see 1) what’s actually in the report and 2) what the House does with what’s in the report. If the answer is genuinely “nothing and nothing”, then we’re pretty much boned. If the answer is “enough evidence to investigate further” and “a House investigation”, then something might happen. At the very least I want to see Trump testifying under oath, even if it’s only to claim that he’s innocent. The chances of him lying multiple times under oath are high.
There’s certainly a thick layer of irony in this. People jumped to all kinds of conclusions before the report was out, and not that the report is still not out, people are jumping to all kinds of conclusions about how terrible the previous conclusions were.
Sage Rat, What would be some examples of “Schiff’s blatant falsehoods”?
Forget it, Jake; it’s MAGAt Town.
In other words: the 24 hour news cycle. The actual reporting was fine; it’s how they fill the rest of their broadcast day – with rampant, wish-fulfillment opinion and speculation – was the problem.
My guess as to the contents of Mueller’s findings wrt to Russia: they hacked the emails and gave them to Wikileaks, who informed Roger Stone and the campaign of what they’d done. The campaign said “thank you very much!!”.
Sleazy, but not a conspiracy.
Good thread here: https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1109267638180593665
"Whatever’s in the report, there’s never been any outcome to this not involving every Republican loudly proclaiming it exonerates a flagrantly guilty president, and the media repeating the claim unchallenged b/c that is after all one of two sides.
Ignore Republicans is my point.
Republicans know well they can say literally any obvious evidence-free lie they want, and the lie will be dutifully served up in major media outlets, with polite skepticism no more than a tasteful optional dipping area on the side of the plate.
[…]
Acting as if the investigation has done anything but expose an utterly corrupt administration and a thoroughly complicit political party can be taken as evidence of bad faith.
Don’t debate it
Debating elevates the nonsense to the level of truth
Ignore Republicans is my point"
I’m not willing to credit Trump’s own Attorney General with an honest interpretation of the report, and I still think we need to see the whole thing. But it seems pretty clear that this isn’t going to be the turning of the tables that so many liberals and lefties hoped for. That’s pretty much exactly what I’ve worried about since the probe began.
I’ve hardly weighed in on the Mueller investigation at all over the past couple of years, precisely because I thought that all of the gee-whiz hypotheticals and the rampant speculation and the breathless anticipation on the part of the media and the public were incredibly premature and largely unproductive. One of my few observations on the matter came in January of last year, in this very thread, when we were discussing a Saturday Night Live sketch where Kate McKinnon played Robert Mueller:
I was never confident that Trump himself would be found to have committed an indictable or an impeachable offense. For me, this whole issue was always likely to be won and lost in the realm of politics, and even if the full report is released, and even if it shows a whole bunch of sleazy and unethical behavior on the president’s part, that’s simply not going to change the mind of the vast majority of the people who support him. We’ve seen that time and again during the campaign, and during his presidency. As long as he’s lying in ways that they find appealing, and as long as he’s sticking it to the “libtards” and the “cucks” and the “social justice warriors,” Trump’s supporters will have his back.
Unfortunately, now that so many liberals, in the media and in the nation generally, have spent months and months hyping the investigation as the potential smoking gun that would bring down the presidency, those people are going to have to live with a massive sense of deflation and recognize that defeating Trump and the Republicans will require old-fashioned grind-out-the-policy and get-out-the-vote politics.
[Looks back at the past midterms]
I think many of them can ruminate about that and walk to the polls at the same time. And I say that as a guy that also did not see much coming out of this against Trump because I did pay attention at what the focus of the investigation really was. However, since I had low hopes, it has been nice to see how much it was established that Trump is an incompetent judge of people when selecting staff members. Nice in the sense that finding that he is an idiot is better than finding that he is a traitor, but still a demonstration of the sorry state of the Republican party.
And since that lesson has been lost to Trump, I foresee even more scandals and gross incompetency coming up.
No doubt. I’m not arguing that hanging one’s hopes on Mueller and voting are mutually exclusive. But there has been a sense, among many liberals and lefties (including my own friends) that this investigation would somehow provide a shortcut, and would save us all from the need to do the hard work of policy formulation and coalition building.
It’s okay if a Republican president does it in public.
**Trump’s Shamelessness Was Outside Mueller’s Jurisdiction **
Well some of us just wanted to see justice served. And much more importantly, send a message that we will not stand for criminals in the White House. I wasn’t looking for a shortcut.
Well sure, but to counter, how many of the (so far) 2020 Democratic candidates have been running on a “Go Mueller/anti-Trump” platform and how many have been running so far on health care, taxation, climate change, social issues, etc?
Sure, I’m guessing they’d all appreciate the boost from a particular outcome, but the actual Dems (and not the familiar stereotypical liberal putting all their hope into the Mueller basket) appear to be taking this in stride and doing what they’ve already been doing for the last couple years, which is focusing on policy and working on voter engagement.
bon appétit
So much for the days of J. Edgar Hoover, when even the POTUS quaked in his boots. Trump taunted and lambasted the FBI and DoJ without any fear of it blowing up in his face. All he’s really guilty of is having a big mouth, and he’s built his career on fighting off detractors. No doubt he’s going to gloat big time over this and exploit the fact that Democrats no longer have the leverage of the Mueller report.
Drat! I’m afraid that this result will give enough of a boost to the idiot-in-chief to get him a second term. I sure hope not!
That Manafort’s notes from the Veselnitskaya meeting seemed to be talking about figuring out how to move money into the GOP.
There are probably a few others, but harder to identify.
We were all primed from the last two years into thinking about THE Mueller report. A one-off verdict. Nobody has the stamina or patience to tune into a protracted investigation about the protracted investigation.
God democrats are just SO pathetic. It’s getting me down. Why can’t they just fucking compete? There is no technicality buried in some report that’s going to get people fired up.
Don’t forget that the primary directive that Mueller was following was to determine if there was Russian interference in the election. Everything else was secondary, and the report is likely written based on the conclusions about Russian interference. Any evidence of other crimes may have been passed on to other jurisdictions rather than be acted upon in his report.
Count on it. 
I rewatched All the President’s Men **again **last night (while sucking my thumb). It reminded me that Nixon was elected to a second term by a landslide while the Watergate investigation was already underway. But he didn’t finish that term…