Mueller Report Delivered to Attorney General
The Friday news dump to beat all Friday news dumps.
NYT (“Mueller Delivers Report on Trump-Russia Investigation to Attorney General“):
The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has delivered a report on his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election to Attorney General William P. Barr, according to the Justice Department, bringing to a close an investigation that has consumed the nation and cast a shadow over President Trump for nearly two years.
Mr. Barr told congressional leaders in a letter late Friday that he may brief them within days on the special counsel’s findings. “I may be in a position to advise you of the special counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend,” he wrote in a letter to the leadership of the House and Senate Judiciary committees.
It is up to Mr. Barr how much of the report to share with Congress and, by extension, the American public. The House voted unanimously in March on a nonbinding resolution to make public the report’s findings, an indication of the deep support within both parties to air whatever evidence prosecutors uncovered.
Mr. Barr wrote that he “remained committed to as much transparency as possible and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review.” He also said that Justice Department officials never had to check Mr. Mueller because he proposed an inappropriate or unwarranted investigative step — an action that Mr. Barr would have been required to report to Congress under the regulations. His statement suggests that Mr. Mueller’s inquiry proceeded without political interference.
Well, we don’t know that. Indeed, President Trump’s numerous ranting tweets about Mueller and the investigation were certainly political and arguably constituted interference.
Beyond that, we don’t know much. I gather than no new indictments were issued but many have already been made public and several more are reportedly under seal.
The weekend should be interesting. Until we see the report or hear from Mueller himself, one presumes that Matt Borrs has it right: ” I definitely think the report I haven’t read supports the conclusions of the exact politics I hold and have been arguing for all this time. I love to be proven right!”
It’s hard to see how the Mueller report will change anybody’s mind about him. The crazy Louise Mensch stuff has pretty much vanished. Meanwhile, it’s been proven that Trump is easy to blackmail. Russian oligarchs are not porn stars you can buy off with a 100K and David Pecker. There’s already unprovable innuendo about his obviously suspicious behavior re: Russia and Putin. I don’t think Rod Rosenstein would have been offering up his opinion about this behavior if the report wasn’t going to cast a huge shadow over Trump. But there won’t be a smoking gun–just an endless series of coincidences which we already know about. The dummies will believe it’s the Clintons, obviously, but the rest of us will probably little more than we do now.
Then there’s the money…
Also, we have a justice department guideline that sitting presidents cannot be indicted.
So, lack of indictment at that level may not mean anything other than there is a justice department guideline that sitting presidents cannot be indicted.
I expect the report to be leaked if it is not made public. I hope the report is thorough and answers questions, so we can hopefully put this behind us (either with Trump exhonerated, or in an orange jump suit…)
My suspicion is that Trump is guilty as hell. If a thorough report is made public that shows he was merely a useful idiot, or entirely blameless, I will accept that.
@Gustopher:
Trump may well have been just a useful idiot. Putin is an evil guy, but he’s a hell of a lot smarter than Trump. He knows that Trump is a stupid, narcissistic, easily manipulated, and impulsive blabbermouth. Would you trust Trump with the details of any kind of scheme? He’d be be yelling about it on Twitter two minutes later.
I have stockpiled so much popcorn.
The crows coming home to roost will be well fed.
Guess the FISA warrant and IC did not deliver the goods.
Time to repost this from michael reynolds
In the net so far:
Flynn
Gates
Papadopolous
Cohen (actually him x2: separately, hush money to Daniels and also lying to Congress)
Manafort
Roger Stone is a Trump adjunct (and the likely conduit to Wikileak) unless he pulls a miracle Perry Mason Chewbacca defense is gonna be sportin’ orange soon. Corsi will soon be calculating “what is (8′ x 12′) / 2 in cubic feet” in his head.
@Paul L.:
Perception -1
A post so nice you cited it twice.
Shorter:
You got nothing. Never have, never will. You made fools of yourselves. Reynolds: Exhibit A.
Vox is not everyone’s cup of tea, but this a straight backgrounder on The Mueller report and what it will likely cover and what it won’t.
https://www.vox.com/2019/2/22/18176845/mueller-report-explained-trump-russia-investigation
Slightly snarkier, but nonetheless, more truthful recap:
https://splinternews.com/a-guide-to-the-mueller-investigation-for-anyone-whos-on-1832882135
Reports say no further indictments are forthcoming.
@Guarneri:
Well, they got a dozen senators running for president and the rest of the weekend to get seriously drunk. That’s not nothing.
@de stijl: that’s a good summary of what’s known right now. Personally, my favorite element of the whole thing is how Trump’s lawyers told Mueller that Trump couldn’t testify because he can’t stop lying.
@Teve:
Lawyers prefer not to be disbarred nor fired by their client. They hoe a narrow row.
By choice it should be noted.
Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare has a good post that conclusively states that we don’t know any more than we did yesterday.
Here are some factors of the Mueller “report”:
The report is released on Friday, March 22. Why is that significant? Think about what the nation’s attention is turned to. One of the most important sports days of the year as NCAA basketball bracket games get going full steam.
No more indictments? This thing fizzled out like a July firecracker in a thunderstorm.
Any member of Congress who approved this farce and voted for it … owes the American people an apology and some money.
There should be no more of these type of investigations. Any investigation should be approved by two thirds of the Congress and should be carried out by an independent committee, not politicians or career Washington bureaucrats. Mueller has a great military record, but he is a Washington insider and has political interests. Now I hear that Congress is planning more of these sort of shindigs. You can bet that these will go into every area and gather private information from every source of social media, communications, personal records, tax returns, memberships, school records. All levels of the people will be subject, not just Trump.
There is something else behind all of this.
*As my math teacher would say: “a big fat F:
“It’s all for nothing; all for nothing” (Martin Howe “High Noon”)
@Tyrell:
Dude…chillax. You and others on this site sure do seem to be freaking out over what you are calling a nothing burger.
We don’t even have to wait five years for that…it is already obvious that he is the worst president in American history…much of what Michael wrote is true, so thanks for double posting it again…
It is hardly surprising that someone who has regularly linked to a Russian propaganda website would draw this erroneous conclusion…
Awww…bless your heart, you contrarian you…
Wow, that’s the most truthful thing his lawyers have ever said…
@Tyrell:
OMFG. He said that.
Remember that when Nixon was named an unindicted co-conspirator, the fact was kept sealed and not released publicly for some time.
I’m not saying we can assume El Cheeto has been named an unindicted co-conspirator in any of the known criminal cases arising from the Mueller probe, or any of the indictments under seal, but we can’t assume that he has not been named one.
I wonder if he knows.
@Tyrell:
I think you lean towards Authoritarianism. Pretty clear, actually. Judging by your past commentary it was sure.
@de stijl: I was really going to focus on Trump’s international crime ring, the 37 indictments, Russian cyber attacks, Kushner’s scheming to give nuke technology to the dictators who bailed out his company, Chinese sex trafficking, Trump stealing from his own charity, tax fraud, bank fraud…
…but Duke vs. North Dakota State was on. A brilliant ruse by the Deep State 😡
So, both Rachel Maddow and Bill Kristol are on suicide watch?
(Snicker)
Genius.
I’ve waited almost two years, I can certainly wait a while longer before putting my foot in my mouth.
@Teve:
I got focused when the Gophers beat Louisville – the son beat the father. That’s one of those Greek plays, possibly I think, one of the good ones.
Trump’s legal Jeopardy goes far beyond Mueller
@Paul L.:
I stand by it.
You don’t know the story because you live in a bubble. Just wait. That’s all you have to do.
@Michael Reynolds: and you don’t?
@Michael Reynolds:
Say it twice. He might get it then. How does one respond when rando quotes major blockquote back at you months after the fact. Twice. Twice has to be worse, right?
Quoting one back at oneself can be super effective, but also super creepy. Dude just saved up a quote to deploy against you when he thought it would be most rhetorically effective. And then f*cked up and pasted it twice like a schlub and never noticed, thought they had the high ground, hit “Post Comment” did CTRL+V once more for luck and oopsie now you look like a stalker.
Paul L has been creepin’ and held onto that quote for a reason.
What we’re seeing in terms of reaction from Democrats as regards the Mueller report being released, reminds one of several different images.
# Marvin the Martian ( Where was the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!!)
# The Black Knight from Monty Python’s holy Grail…( “The Black Knight always triumphs!!! Have at you! I’ll bite your legs off!”)
# Captain Ahab… (All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.)
Will there be an admission of guilt and an apology coming from those who perpetrated and extended the life of this nearly three-year and 675 million-dollar hoax?
No.
As Reynolds has demonstrated for us, the ego of the defeated will not allow for apology here. Such an apology requires by definition an admission that they were wrong, and they will never admit is that the whole thing was a hoax, by and large one they were taken in by as well, albeit willingly.
It’s time for the country to heal. The problem is the cure. The only way to heal a cancer patient is to excise the cancer. That means there needs to be serious legal repercussions so this two-year-long 675 million dollar hoax perpetrated on the American people.
What needs to happen is heavy legal consequences for these things, a public reckoning. The image of the perpetrators of this hoax and those that the hoax protected, being frog marched off to the vertical bar hotel for a stay of many years.
Alas!, I fear what will happen is the charges from the left… (and in this I include the GOP establishment) …will get more crazy, we will see more Democrats foaming at the mouth. The volume on the left has been turned up to 11 for the past couple of years. History has shown us that every time they’ve lost like this, they turn the volume up still one more notch. Of course, that causes the charges to get more and more distorted, and more senseless.
But, such is today’s Democratic Party.
Here is a RadioHead cover of Ceremony. They super lean into the catharsis here. I like this a lot.
RadioHead: Ceremony (Joy Division / New Order cover)
https://youtu.be/cedNya7e8Uc
Not as much as the original*, but that’s a really good take. Joy Division had at least three takes on this, and New Order has at minimum two.
Ceremony is a really good song and is really fun to play. (is it right to feel that a really sad song is fun to play?)
@Tyrell: no, it’s not all for nothing. This was a politically-motivated action, and the bottom line is that its entire purpose was to create an illusion, and in that it’s been wildly successful.
If their little fishing expedition had actually managed to come up with something, that would have been sauce for the goose.
I’ve never paid much attention to RadioHead. They do have an awesome drummer.
They did well in their cover of Ceremony. Well done, lads.
—–
This is the canonical Joy Division version of Ceremony
https://youtu.be/cedNya7e8Uc
My first introduction was via the New Order 45 version. This is not that version, but this is really close: (also really good drummer)
https://youtu.be/fi33-cITS0s
@Eric Florack:
You’d been saving up. This was your magnus opus.
You went with three examples that were not applicable but apparently made sense in Florack world.
Then:
As Reynolds has demonstrated for us, the ego of the defeated will not allow for apology here.
If you want to ding someone, do it. I have no idea what the thing you said means: you set up Reynolds as the bad guy and therefore demonstrative of something …, and then went with:
Those words in that order sound semi bad-ass but mean nothing. I presume you’re trying to be bad ass, but that phrase is super ambiguous.
I presume you’re trying to be defiant and super Eff Y’all, but you failed at even being anywhere close to being on point.
I have high standards.
If you want to be salty, be effing good at it. You are not.
So now the RWNJ line is that the Mueller investigation cost “675 million?”
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2018/dec/14/how-much-mueller-investigation-costing-updated/
What a dumbass
@Bruce Henry: I thought it was weird that Mueller got to work in a stretch Lamborghini!
RadioHead’s new to me awesome drummer is Philip Selway and that dude kicks butt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Selway
Stephen Morris of Joy Division and New Order is superb. He is deity level drummer.
The Perfect Kiss by New Order. Percussion aplenty, and good stuff too.
https://youtu.be/x3XW6NLILqo
I cannot percuss. I am not the world’s shittiest drummer, but I’m really, really bad at it. It’s entirely possible that I was the planet’s second worst percussionist ever. Face it, I am the shittiest.
I cannot for the life of me keep a stable beat. I always speed up when I shouldn’t. And you have to manage both your feet and your hands to work rhythmically somehow together but not. I cannot do that. I will never be able to do that. People that can are are magic and blessed. Shine on!
I look at them in wonder. How can you do that?
@Bruce Henry: The Mueller investigation took 675 days. Florack just got confused because he huffs so much glue he’s been banned from the local Hobby Lobby.
@Teve: had you forgotten the FBI portion of the “investigation” before Mueller was appointed?
@Bruce Henry:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/05/31/muellers-investigation-cost-16-7-million-in-just-under-a-year-new-documents-show/
And by the way I trust Snopes about as far as I can throw Michael Moore.
About 12 years ago I gave Glenn Greenwald the title of being the least honest blogger in the ‘sphere. As far as I’m concerned that’s a position he still holds.
That said, even he has had enough of this Russia conspiracy nonsense…
@Eric Florack:
Greenwald is the de facto American front man for the FSB’s Wikileaks operation.
@Eric Florack: Don’t you think you might want to wait until someone has actually read this report before doing your little dance? Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t get the logic that if the report is finished, Trump is cleared.
@Eric Florack:
No, I don’t. In fact I spend a lot of my time ensuring that I’m not in a bubble. I read widely, I spend hours I don’t always have to spare taking on data. My Google Chrome start page has eight shortcuts: WaPo, NYT, Twitter, Daily Beast, Politico, Axios, Booman and OTB. My autofills include Real Clear Politics (for their selection of articles and the polls,) Five Thirty Eight, WSJ, BBC, The Hill, The Guardian, Haaretz, even Drudge, and many more that don’t come to mind.
I read history. I kill time watching YouTube videos on history, design, engineering, sociology, philosophy, even math and physics which for me ain’t easy. And of course I’ve been a political junkie for 48 years. Almost any time I express an opinion, I’ve already subjected it to rigorous cross-examination. And a big part of the reason I come here is to have James and Doug and Steven feed me ideas, concepts, which are then hashed out in comments by a bunch of very smart people and you.
It’s not just that I’m smarter than you are, Eric, I also work a hell of a lot harder at learning, at understanding. Like most things in life, if you’re going to be good at something you need some talent or ability, and then you pile on a bunch of work and self-discipline. I don’t know where people got the idea that lazy, ill-informed prejudice is as valid as knowledge-based reason, but just to be clear: you’re wrong. See, if let’s say @Kylopod writes something I know he (she?) puts a lot of thought into it. You? You vomit up whatever Rush or Breitbart or Hannity fed you. No wonder you think everyone’s in a bubble like you, Eric, you’re lazy. You’re lazy and you insist on trying to match wits with people who aren’t.
So: go do some work, Eric. Like a big boy. Go do the fcking work the rest of us do.
@wr:
That’s because you haven’t huffed enough paint. Might I suggest a ’95 Glidden semi-gloss?
@Gustopher: “… with Trump exhonerated”
Do you honestly believe that guys like Reynolds will ever accept the idea of Trump standing as exonerated? Really?
ETA: Shorter Seth Abramson: It’ll NEVER be over, just like Benghazi, just like her emails.
@Inhumans99: My prediction is that we have about 17 or so months during which we will be rehashing this nothingburger. Gonna be a lot of comments to skip over the next few months.
ETA: “I wonder if he knows?”
Epistemologically or metaphysically? Obviously no for the first (still sealed right now) but only a maybe even on the second.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
If he’s exonerated of course I’ll accept it. I have no choice but to accept reality.
@Eric Florack:
Noted leftist publication the Wall Street Journal that by last October the known cost of the investigation at $25 million. They note that the monthly cost is approximately $1.4 million a month.
https://www.wsj.com/video/mueller-investigation-674-days-and-other-numbers-to-remember/FFA14395-4195-4324-9080-DC3F70A34A16.html
BTW for comparison, by the end of it, the Clinton Investigation cost approximately $40 million. I’m sure you felt that money was well spent.
@Teve: March Madness: exactly what I will be fixated with also – television, computer website video feeds, and radio. I would venture to guess 80% or more of the people will be watching. That is a point I made about the timing of the Mueller “report” release.
Also, I have no idea where the WaPo is getting the $16.7 million in that article you linked to @Eric Florack. The two government docs (the two pdf reports) that they are drawing that number from list amounts significantly less than the WaPo says they do (perhaps they were revised down).
Additionally, later disclosures have set the cost of the investigation far lower based on other government docs (see the above WSJ report or https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/02/12/mueller-russia-investigation-costs/2736507002/ ).
Perhaps you could find another news source to back up your claim.
@mattbernius: Florack got his numbers confused. Between the date Mueller was appointed, May 17, 2017, and yesterday, March 22, 2019, was 675 days.
@mattbernius:
“I’m sure you felt that money was well spent.”
I’m sure bithead thinks it was very well spent. It gave the so-called liberal media enough reasons to attack Hillary and ignore Trumps far worse conduct to make sure Trump got elected.
@Eric Florack:
“Will there be an admission of guilt and an apology coming from those who perpetrated and extended the life of this nearly three-year and 675 million-dollar hoax?”
You first. I want 8 apologies from every Republican in Congress. One for each Benghazi investigation.
LOL Florack responds to proof his claim of $675 million was bogus with a link that says one year cost $16.7 million. That would make a 2 year investigation come in at around $33 million, or am I an innumerate idiot?
Oh, wait, no, that’s not me, it’s Florack.
@Teve:
Based on other posts in the thread it looks like he’s in his usual, I wrote something wrong but can’t admit it was wrong so let me move the goal posts by saying “I was always looping all related FBI investigations into a single number” (even though that’s not what the sources he was citing were doing).
@mattbernius: Nobody looks bad when they just make a mistake. We all make mistakes. But when you make an obvious mistake, and everybody can tell it’s a mistake, and you can tell it’s a mistake, and you refuse to admit it, and keep saying bullshit thing after bullshit thing to try to pretend it isn’t a mistake, that’s when you look bad.
@Michael Reynolds: I hope so, but I’ll believe it when I see it. I really just don’t think you’re likely to admit exoneration, and with this type of thing, there’s always a thread upon which to hold.
@Tyrell: “80% will be watching.”
Which would make the Second Round of the NCAA men’s tourney the highest rated show ever in the history of television. I like hyperbole as much as anyone, but gimme a break here.