My primary problem with Mueller ISN’T that he didn’t come down harder on Trump. My issue at this time is that he didn’t push harder to communicate the extent and seriousness of the Russian election interference in general.
If anything, the focus on Trump detracted from the other, more important issues regarding Russian interference. Because the special prosecutor’s investigation DID look into the mechanics of the vast election interference machine. And he laid it all out.
And then he forgot about it. The investigation was written off as an insignificant sham from the right because no one “got Trump”. The left cried foul because no one “got Trump”.
No one paid any attention to what they did get. And now I’m watching TV. There is a congressional hearing happening. And the subject of election interference is key to these hearings. And there are lots of people claiming that Ukraine helped Clinton and the Democrats frame Russia in order to steal an election. This narrative is the product of Russian disinformation and it’s gaining traction.
This narrative is dangerous to the national security of this country and the security of the world. I found the testimonies of our national security advisers very compelling, especially as these Russia and Eastern European experts described the pervasive intrusion of their computers and communications that they constantly deal with. Yet, just now, some Republican said something to the effect of Ukrainian interference to be just as bad as the Russian interference.
What did the Ukrainians do to politically hurt Trump? Well, apparently when candidate Trump proposed giving the Crimean peninsula to Russia, a government official wrote an Op-Ed strongly disagreeing with that position.
It’s like we never paid our taxpayer dollars to investigate the interference. And the silence from those investigators is deafening. And I kind of wonder why the DOJ and private citizen Mueller aren’t defending the results of their investigation. Actually, I know why the DOJ isn’t, because Barr is corrupt. But I think Mueller is in a unique position with regards to having full and complete knowledge of the mechanics of Russian interference and his silence is deafening.
Andrew Weissmann, “legendary prosecutor” of Mueller’s team, was on The Beat with Ari Melber on MSNBC to discuss today’s impeachment hearing. Melber also said that Weissmann was joining NBC News and MSNBC as a legal analyst, so we might come to hear more from him about the Mueller investigation.
Found guilty on all 7 counts. They didn’t deliberate very long, either. Good verdict.
Also ties Trump directly to the Wikileaks release of Russian illegally-obtained emails. Not exactly a big secret to anyone actually following the evidence, but nice to have it unequivocally confirmed.
These are more heavily redacted than the last batch. I believe that the key things to look for are the redaction reasons. b5 (as I understand it) means that the redacted materials are being used in some court proceedings. b7A and b7B (again, as I understand it) are things that could end up being used against someone in a court or as part of an immunity deal, etc.
On that basis, having read to page 39, I would vote that Jay Sekulow is currently the subject of a court proceeding.
Based on the sheer volume of b5 material in the Hope Hicks interview (ending page 86), I think we either need to assume that she’s flipped on someone or that she’s in legal peril.
The matters that seem to be being discussed, in the small amount of non-redacted text, seem relatively benign - just discussions of how to spin doctor stuff. Spin doctoring is not a crime. Nothing that the text shows would lead one to believe that the redacted materials would cover anything other than more of that.
A month or two back, I believe, I saw an article saying that Hicks was trying to get back into the White House as an employee. That makes it unlikely that she has flipped on Trump or anyone who Trump still likes.
Based on the above, my guess would be that she lied to the Feds in her testimony and she’s involved in legal proceedings on that front. Her testimony is all redacted because the entire testimony is considered a crime. The gaps only exist because they were already made public in the Mueller Report.
That she hasn’t been accepted back into the White House makes me suspect that they don’t think she’s going to be around long enough to be worth taking in - i.e. she’s not likely to win her case and might just use her access to gain something that she can use to trade with the Feds.
From the b5’s in Rosenstein’s testimony, it looks like there’s a legal proceeding on the matter of how the FBI Director was appointed, following Comey’s firing.
Given that there’s a big blurb about Mueller and how he was considered for FBI Director and that is all unredacted, Trump’s thing about Mueller having a conflict of interest or spying on him during the interview doesn’t seem to be the subject of this case.
If there were some corrupt activities to install someone crooked into the position of FBI Director, I would expect it to either have counted as part of the obstruction case against Trump in the Mueller Report, or to have been put down as a future case to try and file against Trump, once he’s out of office. It’s not the former and, since this is a b5 matter not a b7, we know that it’s currently in litigation and not being held back for a later date.
Chris Christie and Corey Lewandowski both talk about the specifics of the firing of James Comey. In both, we see our friend, b5.
While it’s not impossible that they might a perjury case open against them, given the subject matter, I’d lean towards their testimony being actively used against the principal actors in Trump’s obstruction of justice: Jay Seculow and others (Eisenburg?) on the Trump legal team.
The section on Bruce Ohr doesn’t reveal much, but it does notably contain a few b7A’s. That would indicate that either a few things from Simpson/Steele were confirmed as true or that the government is trying to put together a case against Simpson and Steele.
It would seem to indicate that Steele knew about the Alpha Bank connection to Trump Tower before it was general knowledge. And we might note that the Steele Dossier has a section on Alpha that does not reference Trump at all (which is rather strange for a document intended to destroy Trump), so it seems likely that there was more on the subject that never was reported by BuzzFeed or anyone.
Given that they aren’t hackers, it’s a curious question who would have put Steele or Simpson onto the subject.
The story for Democrats is simple. The president cheated in the 2016 election. He tried to cheat in the 2020 election but got caught. He has said that he intends to continue to cheat in the 2020 election. And he went to a lot of effort to cover all of this up. The impeachment clause is specifically in there to deal with situations like this where removing a president by election is insufficient.
