None of it means a damn thing.
A judge, or the Democrats or the investigation panel or the impeachment panel etc etc etc etc etc etc etc … ad infinitum … order these assholes to appear or testify or produce documents.
And they simply get ignored and get lied to and get gaslighted.
Unless they get SERIOUS and start arresting them for contempt and failure to comply, it’s just bullshit business as usual. Just a giant ratfuck.
The echoing voices of his parents, saying “Donald, you are a failure and no one will ever love you.”
Exactly. And Bill Barr is gambling that he can keep the ratfucking up as long as possible - and that he won’t suffer the same fate as John Mitchell and head to jail for 19 months.
It’s possible that Barr is right - that he can keep out of jail. I hope not.
Wonder how John Mitchell felt when he read the transcripts of Nixon musing on a plan to serve him up as bus food. “The Big Enchilada”, as I recall.
In some ways “the Mueller Report” is over, but in reality it is still one of the most explosive documents ever produced in US History, and I am firmly convinced that had it come out w/o 2 years of constant revelations as to its eventual contents, Trump would be out of office by now.
I revive this thread because 30-odd minutes ago (from when I started typing this), Buzzfeed began releasing documents received via FOIA requests, these requests based upon citations found in the Mueller Report:
(emphasis mine, JT)
You can find the documents here:
For citation purposes, it may be best to link to specific tweets from journalists who are reading these documents. Like this one:
To make sure the above is clear:
Once a month, for 8 straight years.
The Mueller Report is going to be like the Blue Wave… really hyped, but when it happened people were like “is that all there is?”… and then, over time, a dawning realization that this was, truly, as big as hyped and maybe even more so.
I’m sorry, I just noticed… Paul Manafort said he briefed Sean Hannity on his activities as well!
JohnT, I so hope what you say comes to fruition. Anyone who actually reads the Mueller report understands how terribly devastating it is and how corrupt William Barr is to have misrepresented its contents.
I’ve often wondered how Mueller feels about having the big knife slipped between his ribs by his “friend.” The Mueller report is a very damning document, borne of an Herculean effort revealing not only the total corruption of Trump, but many of those who work within his sphere of influence.
Thank fuck for Buzzfeed. The truth will out.
I guess the best thing that can be said is the DOJ isn’t willing to cross a direct order of the court. (Yet.) Cold comfort.
Sorry, I mislaid my program. Who was the friend who slipped a big knife between Mueller’s ribs again?
Assuming Barr.
Oh, yeah, thanks.
He’s seemed pretty stoical about it in public statements and Congressional testimony, though.
Here’s Empty Wheel’s running analysis of the documents:
Yes, Barr. It was said Barr and Mueller were close friends before all this. Mueller did seem stoic, but that’s because it’s his nature to follow process and not badmouth his superiors. In truth, he was about as worked up about it as one could expect him to reveal publicly. That he even went against Barr to make his public statement was extraordinary.
Reading through this, even assuming the DOJ had time to sort through and give us the least damning info (which I doubt, given the volumes), it is extremely difficult to argue against the proposition that Robert Mueller did everything in his power to avoid concluding that all this activity was being conducted with Trump’s knowledge, support, and guidance.
In short, no matter how damning the Mueller report is… and these 302’s are… it’s arguable that Mueller was pulling his punches in favor of Donald Trump.
I guess it’s arguable, but I don’t think so. Would have been easier to just not find the damning information in the first place.
There is stronger language than “we could not exonerate this President”, which is… IIRC… as far as Mueller would go.
Sure there is, but I guess I come at it from a different perspective.
Having worked from within a bureaucracy for many years with many of the same constraints of non-partisan process imposed, I can understand how hard it was for Mueller to step outside this mandate of his service. He was Director of the FBI for 12 years, FFS. Process and obeying the chain of command is everything. He believes if you don’t strictly color within the lines of the rule of law, you slip quickly into anarchy.
He also disseminated the information he garnered during his investigation far and wide. We’re seeing some of the results of that now at SDNY. But again, Barr is a corrupt motherfucker and no one counted on that. He has maybe taken steps to smother those spin-off investigations. Did you see it coming? I didn’t. I mean, I knew Barr did some ugly things during Iran-Contra, but nothing in his background foreshadowed how utterly lawless and corrupt he is today. I refuse to blame Mueller for following well-established legal practices when it was Barr who acted corruptly.
I see a lot of people who remain constrained by legal process and suffer for it. Hillary expected people would play by the rules in the 2016 election. House Democrats expected the Trump “administration” would play by the rules during their investigation, complying with subpoenas and summons. Mueller expected Barr to play by the rules when he submitted his report. All of these people have suffered in the court of public opinion for having obeyed the rule of law while others who should have did not. Is that a reason to abandon it now? Personally, I don’t think so.
Here is a good, easy-to-understand distillation of what was learned from the first FOIA release of the unredacted 302s from Mueller’s report. (Good old Reuters)
As suspected, it appears the RNC was far more involved in the Russian subversion of the 2016 election than has been publicly known before.
It’s also worth remembering that Trump has been asserting all along that Manafort only worked for the campaign for a few months, he barely knew him, he wasn’t that important, and so on. Clearly Manafort was hanging around the campaign a lot longer than most of us knew.
Yeah, I’m pretty pissed off at Robert “If we had found that the President did not rob the bank at gunpoint we would’ve said so” Mueller. I’m thinking he was in the bag for Trump all along. And now that Trump and the DOJ are trying to discredit the Russian interference conclusion, it’s like that asshole has dropped off the face of the earth.
There’s good stuff in the Mueller report. And I think Mueller knew that the best way to bury that stuff was to hide it inside an 800 page document that was so deliberately boring that no one could possibly read it. Then answer every question you are asked with “It’s somewhere in my report”. So I think Mueller has, by omission, has weighed in pretty solidly on the “Better Russian than Democrat” side of the equation.
Really? Huh. So you think he’s complicit? Never went down that trail myself.