Mueller Investigation Part 2: Release The Report

[Howl]

For y'all literary types, this is the best twitter thread ever in the history of twitter threads:  Barr letter plot summaries through the lens of the Classics. 

 

[CTRLZero]

13 minutes ago, Howl said:

this is the best twitter thread ever in the history of twitter threads

Exquisite, thank you!  And not only for literary types.  I especially liked the movie clip of the Mueller report being stored in a government warehouse, ala the Ark of the Covenant.  ?

[Howl]

Lots of tweeters pointing out that almost certainly Mueller led the report with an executive summary of the results of the investigation, which Barr, of course, did not release.  

[fraurosena]

I'm sorry, Bill Kristol, but that's a contradictio in terminis. If the report doesn't exonerate him, then that in and of itself is grounds for impeachment.

Impeachment, I seem to have to remind you, is not removing the presidunce. It's investigating him to see if there are grounds for removal by Congress. 

[Howl]

8 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Impeachment, I seem to have to remind you, is not removing the presidunce. It's investigating him to see if there are grounds for removal by Congress. 

I think that it was a horrible misstep on the part of the Democrats to not start immediately investigating whether impeachable offenses have taken place.   With GOP Trumpeting the "total exoneration!" line from the Mueller Report, any Democratic moves to begin the initial investigations into impeachable offenses have been totally defanged. 

[fraurosena]

Huh. If it was such a phony and fraudulent investigation, why are you so jubilant about Barr's summary of the results?

[GreyhoundFan]

 

I love Kate as Rudy, rising as if from a coffin.

[fraurosena]

Something to keep in mind when you hear about the Mueller report.

 

[fraurosena]

Nadler has had enough of Barr's prevarication and is going to subpoena the report.

 

[Howl]

One part of the long con may be to lie about the length of the report to mask the huge volume of redactions.  Also note the "mid April" date for the redacted report.  I'm certain it's just a coincidence that Congress will be in recess (state work period) from April 15 to April 26.  

There will be an epic court battle to come over releasing the report to Congress.  Republicans will see if their efforts long con to stack the courts in their favor will bear fruit.  The other part of the long con is to drag this out until after 2020. 

Edited April 3, 2019 by Howl

[fraurosena]

Even if the Mueller report were to be released to Congress today, that does not mean that impeachment procedures will be started soon. First that whole, incredibly lengthy report will have to be read, scrutinized, analyzed and interpreted. That will take months. Then the decision to impeach or not will have to be decided. By then, if things go incredibly fast, at the very soonest, impeachment procedures could be started in the fall. But we all know it won't be released any time soon. So impeachment starting this fall is improbable, and a more realistic prognosis is the beginning of next year.

Add to that, that these procedures are a lengthy business, that can take months and months to conclude. Optimistically, it will be well into next year before any decision to remove the presidunce from office could be made. If things go really fast (not likely) and the presidunce is removed from office before the elections, that would mean that Pence would step in to take his place. And no matter what we think of him, we have to admit that Pence is eminently more electable than the presidunce. He's not hated as much as Trump, he doesn't rile voters as much, so the blue wave that is almost assured because people want to get rid of Trump, could falter and diminish (somewhat at least) if Pence were president at the time of the elections. It's not for nothing that Pelosi was rather ambivalent about impeaching. It wouldn't be surprising to me if the Dems hold off on impeachment until after the elections next year, precisely for those reasons. 

[GreyhoundFan]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Add to that, that these procedures are a lengthy business, that can take months and months to conclude. Optimistically, it will be well into next year before any decision to remove the presidunce from office could be made.

I can't imagine any circumstance where he will be removed. Even if the house impeaches him, there is no way that the senate, especially under McTurtle, will get 67 votes to remove him.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Some on Mueller’s Team See Their Findings as More Damaging for Trump Than Barr Revealed"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

At stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public.

Mr. Barr has said he will move quickly to release the nearly 400-page report but needs time to scrub out confidential information. The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation. Mr. Barr only briefly cited the special counsel’s work in his letter.

However, the special counsel’s office never asked Mr. Barr to release the summaries soon after he received the report, a person familiar with the investigation said. And the Justice Department quickly determined that the summaries contain sensitive information, like classified material, secret grand-jury testimony and information related to current federal investigations that must remain confidential, according to two government officials.

Mr. Barr was also wary of departing from Justice Department practice not to disclose derogatory details in closing an investigation, according to two government officials familiar with Mr. Barr’s thinking. They pointed to the decision by James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, to harshly criticize Hillary Clinton in 2016 while announcing that he was recommending no charges in the inquiry into her email practices.

The officials and others interviewed declined to flesh out why some of the special counsel’s investigators viewed their findings as potentially more damaging for the president than Mr. Barr explained, although the report is believed to examine Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the investigation. It was unclear how much discussion Mr. Mueller and his investigators had with senior Justice Department officials about how their findings would be made public. It was also unclear how widespread the vexation is among the special counsel team, which included 19 lawyers, about 40 F.B.I. agents and other personnel.

At the same time, Mr. Barr and his advisers have expressed their own frustrations about Mr. Mueller and his team. Mr. Barr and other Justice Department officials believe the special counsel’s investigators fell short of their task by declining to decide whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed the inquiry, according to the two government officials. After Mr. Mueller made no judgment on the obstruction matter, Mr. Barr stepped in to declare that he had cleared Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.

Representatives for the Justice Department and the special counsel declined to comment on Wednesday on views inside both Mr. Mueller’s office and the Justice Department. They pointed to departmental regulations requiring Mr. Mueller to file a confidential report to the attorney general detailing prosecution decisions and to Mr. Barr’s separate vow to send a redacted version of that report to Congress. Under the regulations, Mr. Barr can publicly release as much of the document as he deems appropriate.

A debate over how the special counsel’s conclusions are represented has played out in public as well as in recent weeks, with Democrats in Congress accusing Mr. Barr of intervening to color the outcome of the investigation in the president’s favor.

In his letter to Congress outlining the report’s chief conclusions, Mr. Barr said that Mr. Mueller found no conspiracy between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia’s 2016 election interference. While Mr. Mueller made no decision on his other main question, whether the president illegally obstructed the inquiry, he explicitly stopped short of exonerating Mr. Trump.

Mr. Mueller’s decision to skip a prosecutorial judgment “leaves it to the attorney general to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime,” Mr. Barr wrote. He and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, decided that the evidence was insufficient to conclude that Mr. Trump had committed an obstruction offense.

Mr. Barr has come under criticism for sharing so little. But according to officials familiar with the attorney general’s thinking, he and his aides limited the details they revealed because they were worried about wading into political territory. Mr. Barr and his advisers expressed concern that if they included derogatory information about Mr. Trump while clearing him, they would face a storm of criticism like what Mr. Comey endured in the Clinton investigation.

Legal experts attacked Mr. Comey at the time for violating Justice Department practice to keep confidential any negative information about anyone uncovered during investigations. The practice exists to keep from unfairly sullying people’s reputations without giving them a chance to respond in court.

Mr. Rosenstein cited the handling of the Clinton case in a memo the White House used to rationalize Mr. Trump’s firing of Mr. Comey.

Though it was not clear what findings the special counsel’s investigators viewed as troubling for the president, Mr. Barr has suggested that Mr. Mueller may have found evidence of malfeasance in investigating possible obstruction of justice. “The report sets out evidence on both sides of the question,” Mr. Barr wrote in his March 24 letter.

Mr. Mueller examined Mr. Trump’s attempts to maintain control over the investigation, including his firing of Mr. Comey and his attempt to oust Mr. Mueller and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to install a loyalist to oversee the inquiry.

The fallout from Mr. Barr’s letter outlining the Russia investigation’s main findings overshadowed his intent to make public as much of the entire report as possible, a goal he has stressed since his confirmation hearing in January. He reiterated to lawmakers on Friday that he wanted both Congress and the public to read the report and said that the department would by mid-April furnish a version with sensitive material blacked out. He offered to testify on Capitol Hill soon after turning over the report.

Mr. Barr, who took office in February, has shown flashes of frustration over how the unveiling of the investigation’s findings has unfolded. In his follow-up letter to lawmakers on Friday, he chafed at how the news media and some lawmakers had characterized his March 24 letter.

Mr. Barr and Mr. Mueller have been friends for 30 years, and Mr. Barr said during his confirmation hearing in January that he trusted Mr. Mueller to conduct an impartial investigation. He said he told Mr. Trump that Mr. Mueller was a “straight shooter who should be dealt with as such.” Mr. Mueller served as the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division when Mr. Barr was attorney general under George Bush, and their families are friends.

Mr. Barr’s promises of transparency have done little to appease Democrats who control the House. The House Judiciary Committee voted on Wednesday to let its chairman use a subpoena to try to compel Mr. Barr to hand over a full copy of the Mueller report and its underlying evidence to Congress. The chairman, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, has not said when he will use the subpoena, but made clear on Wednesday that he did not trust Mr. Barr’s characterization of what Mr. Mueller’s team found.

“The Constitution charges Congress with holding the president accountable for alleged official misconduct,” Mr. Nadler said. “That job requires us to evaluate the evidence for ourselves — not the attorney general’s summary, not a substantially redacted synopsis, but the full report and the underlying evidence.”

Republicans, who have embraced Mr. Barr’s letter clearing Mr. Trump, have accused the Democrats of trying to prolong the cloud over his presidency and urged them to move on.

Mr. Trump has fully embraced Mr. Barr’s version of events. For days, he has pronounced the outcome of the investigation a “complete and total exoneration” and called for the Justice Department and his allies on Capitol Hill to investigate and hold accountable those responsible for opening the inquiry.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Howl]

So I go to the gym, get home and find out from Twitter that the Team Mueller had already written a releasable summary for each section of the report -- that's right, structured to be released directly to us, the US citizenry -- that's right: no classified or grand jury testimony.

From CNN: 

Quote

Both news outlets [WaPo, NYT] noted that Mueller's team had prepared its own summaries of the report, expecting that they would be publicly released and were disappointed when they weren't.

From WaPo:

Quote

The Mueller team is reportedly saying it wrote summaries for each section, which it believed Barr could release immediately and without a need to redact. Instead, he chose to summarize the report almost completely in his own words and didn’t even include complete sentences from Mueller’s report.

F**k William Barr.  The Mueller people are professionals; they know to elide grand jury testimony and classified information from their testimony, so be assured that this is most certainly NOT included in their summaries.  What is being redacted is ANYTHING DAMAGING to TRUMPY, JaVanka, Fredo & Fredo in particular and Repulicans in general. 

Team Mueller members are also getting restless; apparently some of them have discussed how pissed off they are at Barr's blatant mis-characterization of their hard work.  Some have left the investigation and moved on to work elsewhere. 

Shit's gonna get real and something is gonna blow in the next, oh, maybe 48 hours. 

 

Edited April 4, 2019 by Howl

[formergothardite]

7 minutes ago, Howl said:

Shit's gonna get real and something is gonna blow in the next, oh, maybe 48 hours.

I will not be shocked if parts of the report are released. It is pretty obvious that the report makes Trump look bad and Barr is figuring out a way to hide that. 

[Howl]

3 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

I will not be shocked if parts of the report are released. It is pretty obvious that the report makes Trump look bad and Barr is figuring out a way to hide that. 

Yes, exactly.  I just edited my post above to note that everything being redacted by Barr is just something that, as you note, is damaging to the Trump brand and Trump's family and associates.  DoD just put out a statement in suppport of Barr and how there's just so much in the summaries, something almost on every page!, that has be to redacted. 

Barr is now a made man; he's as corrupt as they come. I just have a sense that many of us share, that something major and damning is going to be released. 

[Howl]

@AmazonGrace, apologies for (upthread) posting information that you had just posted on the summaries in the Mueller Report!  

Things continue to get more interesting and the House Dem's continue to use increasingly more sophisticated strategy to get what they need.  This also means they are bypassing calling Mueller to testify, but that could still happen, once they have these documents. 

Waiting on Barr's response.  Interesting that this is happening on a Friday. 

 

 

[fraurosena]

I first read this as ‘Trump attorney, General Barr’.

Apart from the ‘general’ part, I don’t think it’s that far from the truth.

Speaking of truth, how much of it do you think will be revealed in this testimony? Will he also suddenly be struck by the ‘I don’t recall’ affliction like his predecessor? Or will he straight up lie, like his boss?

 

[smittykins]

One from Column A, one from Column B.

[Howl]

He'll say a lot without saying anything. 

This will buy time as the Republicans further develop their legal and media strategies, including  pounding the "total exoneration" narrative, obfuscating, not complying with subpoenas and filing law suits.  "Contempt of court" may take on an entirely new meaning. 

Republicans are doing some very careful accounting of how much they can get away with, and the legal strategies to be deployed to keep the Mueller Report under wraps until after the 2020 election. 

Putting on my snark face here, but we know Barr has a job to do as  a Trumpy loyalist first and foremost,  so he may just plead attorney-client privilege. ?

 

Edited April 6, 2019 by Howl

[fraurosena]

I have another Dutch saying for you: Barr is 'sitting there with his mouth full of teeth' when questioned on the statements in his own summary .

 

[fraurosena]

Unsurprising but still shocking.

It's time Mueller is called to testify. And let him take his report with him while he's at it, don't you think?

Seriously, is there any reason why Mueller can't give the report to Congress himself? Especially since it's pretty darn clear that Barr is compromised...

[fraurosena]

Now I want to see both the redacted and unredacted reports, just for comparison. Because that would be completely new evidence of obstruction of justice by the presidunce, aided and abetted by Barr.

[Howl]

This is starting to feel like an episode of Twilight Zone. 

Again, people are going around like, What if Barr this? What if Barr that? Like some people still don't realize that Barr was put into place to do EXACTLY what he's doing now, which is protect the Trump administration.  He did it before with Iran-Contra. 

Barr is Trump's made man.  He has no redeeming values; he's not going to be directed by his better angels or some inner moral code, because he has none.  It won't get better, it will only get worse. 

 And one more thing.  Barr's son-in-law is now in the White House Counsel's Office.  His daughter has taken a position at the financial crimes arm of Treasury. 

This article, posted on Feb 19, 2019, just after Barr was confirmed, pretty much foresaw what's going on now: 

Bill Barr To Become Caporegime With Own Family Within Trump Crime Family   Daughter and son-in-law to take key positions protecting Trump from ever facing justice.