A Thread for the Mueller Investigation Results and Outcomes (Part 1)

[DesertDog]

@Sherrerd

It’s true, I unfairly maligned Trump fans by guessing their limit was two syllables, when it was actually three.

We’re real smart!! We’re real smart!! We’re real smart!!!

Maybe we can get them to four syllables.

@dasmoocher

Probably more like “We’s real smart!!!”

Sounds too much like what a nig—, um, col—, um, librul would say.

[kaylasdad99]

Randy Rainbow weighs in on Barr’s release of the report. About time, I say.

[jasg]

A new article from Benjamin Wittes is up at The Atlantic. Five Things I Learned From the Mueller Report

For what it’s worth, here’s what I see in the story Mueller has told on Trump engagement with the Russians over the hacking. I see a group of people for whom partisan polarization wholly and completely defeated patriotism. I see a group of people so completely convinced Hillary Clinton was the enemy that they were willing to make common cause with an actual adversary power who was attacking their country to defeat her.

[ThelmaLou]

@jasg

A new article from Benjamin Wittes is up at The Atlantic. [Mueller Report Says Trump Committed Crimes - The Atlantic"]Five Things I Learned From the Mueller Report](https://[INDENT)

That’s a great article. Well worth reading. These are the points, and each one is explained in great detail. What follows are the merest snippets of a very long and detailed article. Bold is in the original.

Here are five conclusions I drew from the exercise:

The president committed crimes.
There is no way around it. Attorney General William Barr’s efforts to clear President Donald Trump, both in his original letter and in his press conference the morning of the report’s release, are wholly unconvincing when you actually spend time with the document itself.

**The president also committed impeachable offenses. **
Crimes and impeachable offenses are not the same thing, though they are overlapping categories. Some of the most obviously impeachable offenses described in the Mueller report are likely criminal as well. Some may not be. If I were a member of Congress, I would be thinking about which portions of the report describe, in my opinion, the most unacceptable abuses of power. A few stand out to me.
[INDENT]*The first is the circumstances of, and run-up to, the firing of former FBI Director James Comey.
*Ditto the effort to get Sessions to investigate Hillary Clinton.
*A third example is the president’s public dance with Paul Manafort, in which he dangled the possibility of a pardon and praised Manafort’s bravery for not “flipping,” and in which his private counsel allegedly suggested that Manafort would be taken care of.
[/INDENT]

Trump was not complicit in the Russian social-media conspiracy.
Separating the wheat from the chaff is important, so let’s do so. While Trump has a great deal to answer for, Mueller unambiguously clears him—clears in the true sense of the word—of involvement in Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. election by means of the Internet Research Agency’s social-media campaign.

Trump’s complicity in the Russian hacking operation and his campaign’s contacts with the Russians present a more complicated picture.
No, Mueller does not appear to have developed evidence that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was involved in the hacking operation itself. And no, the investigation did not find a criminal conspiracy in the veritable blizzard of contacts between Trumpworld and the Russians. But this is an ugly story for Trump.

Here’s the key point: If there wasn’t collusion on the hacking, it sure wasn’t for lack of trying. Indeed, the Mueller report makes clear that Trump personally ordered an attempt to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails; and people associated with the campaign pursued this believing they were dealing with Russian hackers. Trump also personally engaged in discussions about coordinating public-relations strategy around WikiLeaks releases of hacked emails. At least one person associated with the campaign was in touch directly with the Guccifer 2.0 persona—which is to say with Russian military intelligence. And Donald Trump Jr. was directly in touch with WikiLeaks—from whom he obtained a password to a hacked database.

**The counterintelligence dimensions of the entire affair remain a mystery. **
Because the Mueller investigation was born out of a counterintelligence investigation, there has been an enduring impression that it had both criminal and counterintelligence elements. I have assumed this myself at times. How these two very different missions integrated within the Mueller probe has been much discussed. The Mueller report answers this question, and the answer is actually striking—and from my point of view alarming: The Mueller investigation was a criminal probe. Full stop.

It was not a counterintelligence probe. Mueller both says this directly and also describes how the counterintelligence equities were handled. Here’s how Mueller describes his investigation: “Like a U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Special Counsel’s Office considered a range of classified and unclassified information available to the FBI in the course of the Office’s Russia investigation, and the Office structured that work around evidence for possible use in prosecutions of federal crimes.” A counterintelligence investigation is not structured around evidence for possible use in prosecutions of federal crimes.

Mueller then answers the question of what happened to the counterintelligence components of the investigation: The FBI took responsibility for them. “From its inception,” Mueller writes, “the Office recognized that its investigation could identify foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information relevant to the FBI’s broader national security mission. FBI personnel who assisted the Office established procedures to identify and convey such information to the FBI.”

[JohnT]

Rosenstein resigns.

Rebecca Ballhaus

[Jack_Batty]

ninja’d – here’s the WaPolink anyway.

[JohnT]

My ninja skills are guaranteed to drive one…

(••)
( ••)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)

… batty.

[Sage_Rat]

@ThelmaLou

That’s a great article. Well worth reading. These are the points, and each one is explained in great detail. What follows are the merest snippets of a very long and detailed article. Bold is in the original.

I would vote that the report is far more damning than Wittes describes, but that’s all sort of irrelevant:

How Popular Is Donald Trump?

Facts and reason are not the driving power of the day.

[ThelmaLou]

@Sage_Rat

I would vote that the report is far more damning than Wittes describes, but that’s all sort of irrelevant:

How Popular Is Donald Trump? | FiveThirtyEight

Facts and reason are not the driving power of the day.

Well, his conclusions that thump committed crimes as well as impeachable offenses AND “If there wasn’t collusion on the hacking, it sure wasn’t for lack of trying,” don’t exactly qualify as soft-pedaling, amirite?

[Sherrerd]

@DesertDog

Maybe we can get them to four syllables.

Needs the fire effect to really get it across. (Classic line-reading by Castellaneta!)

@dasmoocher

Probably more like “We’s real smart!!!”

@DesertDog

Sounds too much like what a nig—, um, col—, um, librul would say.

Well, in any case, I’m sure they all glory in their very, very large a-brains.

- YouTube

[DesertDog]

@Sherrerd

Well, in any case, I’m sure they all glory in their very, very large a-brains.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trBvRP-lfik

That’s it! They’re so smart 'cause they got two brains. Their A brain in their head and their B brain in their butt, like a stegosaurus.

It’s why they do so much talking out their collective ass.

[Skywatcher]

Trump sues Deutsche Bank and Capital One over Democrat subpoenas; Deutsche Bank essentially tells Trump, “Take your suit and shove it.”

[JohnT]

What’s in YOUR wallet, Donnie?

[Aspenglow]

@Skywatcher

Trump sues Deutsche Bank and Capital One over Democrat subpoenas; Deutsche Bank essentially tells Trump, “Take your suit and shove it.”

That’s great. I hope what they really meant was, “Too late.”

[JohnT]

Andrew Desiderio

Part of filing which details what DB is supposed to hand over.

TLDR: It’s a lot.

[Gyrate]

@Skywatcher

Trump sues Deutsche Bank and Capital One over Democrat subpoenas; Deutsche Bank essentially tells Trump, “Take your suit and shove it.”

IANAL but I don’t think you can sue someone into ignoring a legal subpoena.

The filing says the subpoenas “have no legitimate or lawful purpose”.

“[They] were issued to harass President Donald J. Trump, to rummage through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses, and the private information of the president and his family,” it alleges.

It adds: “No grounds exist to establish any purpose other than a political one.”

The filing also says that Democrats are hoping “they will stumble upon something they can expose publicly and use as a political tool against the President”.

Look, if the Democrats wanted to conduct a legitimate investigation into the private affairs of the President and his family, they should have done it the right way: by sending Joe Arpaio to Hawaii using taxpayer funds, spending months announcing that he’s found amazing things, and then never mentioning it again.

[Skywatcher]

nvm

[Buck_Godot]

@Skywatcher

Trump sues Deutsche Bank and Capital One over Democrat subpoenas; Deutsche Bank essentially tells Trump, “Take your suit and shove it.”

There is a lot of wiggle room in their statement. By specifying “authorized investigations” it leaves room for a court to determine the the Congressional investigation was frivolous and so not “authorized”.

Sooner or later we will see the extent to which the Supreme court views itself as the legal representatives of the Republican party.

[John_Stamos_Left_Ear]

@Buck_Godot

There is a lot of wiggle room in their statement. By specifying “authorized investigations” it leaves room for a court to determine the the Congressional investigation was frivolous and so not “authorized”.

Except that the Supreme Court already decided that the court’s shouldn’t get involved in deciding what is “frivolous.” Rachel Maddow discussed this a week ago. It was when the Senate subpoenaed a bank for the financial records of an antiwar group:

That case ended up going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and it was decided in 1975 and ended up being sort of a landmark Supreme Court case. It now recognizes law when it comes to subpoenas from Congress, and the grounds on which you might challenge a subpoena from Congress. Or you might resist one or you might decry one as improper and thereby get out of having to respond to it.

And the reason it is seen as a foundational case in that regard is because the U.S. Servicemens Fund, the group that was funding the G.I. coffee houses, part of anti-war movement, they lost that case in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled as long as the Congress is performing its legislative duty, which necessarily includes investigations relating to all sorts of things, including the functioning of the Armed Services or any part of the U.S. government, as long as they are pursuing a legislative duty, then the question of why Congress is undertaking any particular investigation or issuing any particular subpoena, its none of the court`s business.

It’s actually interesting because as the link goes into, the guy in the senate was a virulent racist and his committee would soon be broken up and it was very probable that he was indeed subpoenaing the bank for flimsy reasons yet the court - including Thurgood Marshall - still felt that their role was not to get into those issues, and for good reason.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

Exactly which recent events have inspired your confidence that “respect for US law, the Constitution and American tradition” is the primary motivation of the GOP? :dubious: