The Trump thread: All things Donald

[Athos_131]

The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks. Based on these activities, the Special Counsel brought criminal charges against a number of Russian military officers for conspiring to hack into computers in the United States for purposes of influencing the election.

Well which is it?

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Barr’s Declaration on Trump Puts Justice Dept. Back in Political Crucible

WASHINGTON — William P. Barr was a lawyer in private practice in June when he wrote an unsolicited memo to the Justice Department that was sharply skeptical of the special counsel’s inquiry into whether President Trump illegally obstructed justice.

Nine months later, Mr. Trump is cleared of that offense, and he has Mr. Barr, his new attorney general, to thank.

Mr. Barr’s decision to declare that evidence fell short of proving Mr. Trump illegally obstructed the Russia inquiry was an extraordinary outcome to a narrative that has unspooled over nearly two years. Robert S. Mueller III was appointed as special counsel to remove the threat of political interference from an investigation involving the president, but he reached no conclusion on the key question of whether Mr. Trump committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.

Mr. Barr stepped in to make the determination, bringing the specter of politics back into the case. Senior Justice Department officials defended his decision as prudent and within his purview, but it reignited a debate about the role of American law enforcement in politically charged federal investigations that has roiled since James B. Comey, as F.B.I. director in 2016, excoriated Hillary Clinton even in announcing that he was recommending she not be charged over her handling of classified emails.

Democrats seized on Mr. Barr’s move, portraying it as a hasty and dubious intervention by a man who had taken over the Justice Department pledging to defend its independence, but ended up clearing a president who installed him in the post just last month. Mr. Mueller submitted his report about 48 hours before Mr. Barr wrote to lawmakers informing them that he and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, had concluded that investigators lacked evidence that the president had illegally obstructed justice, though Mr. Mueller stopped short of exonerating the president.

“His hostility to the prospect of obstruction charges against the president has been now met with what seems to be a fairly rapid decision by him to squelch a case that obviously Bob Mueller found at least plausible,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and a former federal prosecutor.

The chairmen of six House committees sent Mr. Barr a letter Monday evening demanding access to Mr. Mueller’s full report by April 2 and the underlying evidence shortly thereafter. “Your four-page summary of the special counsel’s review is not sufficient for Congress, as a coequal branch of government, to perform critical work,” they wrote.

The senior Justice Department officials pushed back. Mr. Mueller and two of his deputies told the attorney general on March 5 that he had no intention of deciding on the obstruction issue, according to an official familiar with the discussion. That gave Mr. Barr time to digest the facts along with Mr. Rosenstein, whom the special counsel’s office regularly briefed.

The officials also said the Justice Department applied no pressure on Mr. Mueller as he drew conclusions in the Russia investigation.

Mr. Barr made the “right call,” said Robert W. Ray, the former independent counsel for the Whitewater investigation who took over after Ken Starr stepped down. Since the statute that created independent counsels no longer exists, he said, it is the proper role of the attorney general to render a judgment on such a momentous and novel question.

“We depend on Bob Mueller to gather the information to make that judgment, but in a close call where there are significant both factual and legal hurdles to tackling the president, I think it is important for the department to speak with one voice, and that one voice is the voice of the attorney general,” he said.

Mr. Barr took over at a Justice Department that was still reeling from extraordinary moves by its leaders in recent years, including Mr. Comey’s defiance of longstanding policy to publicly criticize Mrs. Clinton while also declaring that “no reasonable prosecutor” would charge her with a crime as he closed an investigation into the matter.

Mr. Comey’s break with department policy was the subject of a blistering inspector general report, and Mrs. Clinton’s supporters believed that his public statements — and later move to reopen the email investigation days before the election — contributed to her loss to Mr. Trump.

Current and former Justice Department lawyers, including Mr. Barr and Mr. Rosenstein, had sharply criticized Mr. Comey’s handling of the case.

Mr. Mueller’s report arrived at the Justice Department on Friday, when a member of Mr. Mueller’s security team delivered a few hard copies of the team’s confidential findings to Mr. Rosenstein’s office. Those reports were immediately given to Mr. Barr, who began to read.

Over the next two days, he and Mr. Rosenstein met with a small group of aides, including Edward O’Callaghan, Mr. Rosenstein’s top deputy, and Steven A. Engel, the head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

In his letter, Mr. Barr said Mr. Mueller had concluded that the evidence did not show that Mr. Trump or anyone involved with his campaign could be prosecuted for conspiring with the Russian government in its election interference operation — a determination that Mr. Mueller and his deputies had relayed during their March 5 briefing.

But the special counsel had been far more equivocal about whether Mr. Trump had illegally sought to obstruct that investigation, Mr. Barr wrote.

The special counsel’s team examined a pattern of behavior by Mr. Trump that raised questions about whether he obstructed justice, including urging Mr. Comey in February 2017 to drop an investigation into Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; the president’s firing of Mr. Comey; and his appearing to dangle pardons at potential witnesses in the Russia investigation.

Mr. Barr said Mr. Mueller had laid out evidence and arguments both for and against the proposition that Mr. Trump committed obstruction but gave no details of the special counsel’s analysis.

It is not clear from Mr. Barr’s letter whether Mr. Mueller had wanted the attorney general to make the final decision on the obstruction issue, or whether he intended for Congress to absorb the evidence without a prejudgment by law enforcement.

While Mr. Barr did not detail his reasoning for deciding on the case, he appeared to be focusing on the question of whether investigators could prove Mr. Trump had “corrupt intent” in instances where the available evidence about his motivations was ambiguous. Obstruction cases often turn on whether prosecutors can prove that someone acted with an illegitimate motive.

Mr. Barr noted that Mr. Mueller had said there was insufficient evidence to prove any underlying offense of conspiring with Russia, and that “the absence of such evidence bears upon the president’s intent.”

But in narrowly focusing on a lack of evidence that the Trump campaign reached any agreement with the Russian government on sabotaging the election, legal experts said, Mr. Barr left out other reasons the president may have had for wanting to stymie a wide-ranging investigation: It could uncover other crimes and embarrassing facts.

Indeed, it did. The special counsel investigation uncovered a scheme between the president and his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen to violate campaign finance laws by paying hush money to an adult-film actress who alleged an affair with Mr. Trump, which he denies. Other matters related to the president that spun off from the special counsel’s work remain under scrutiny, including financial dealings by his inaugural committee and family business.

The special counsel’s inquiry also led to several of the president’s associates or campaign aides facing criminal charges and brought to light other potentially embarrassing information, including a detailed account of how Russia carried out two covert operations to aid his campaign.

Moreover, Mr. Barr’s suggestion that it could be hard to prove the president acted with a bad motive was at odds with his own previous writings. He has suggested that a president’s use of executive powers are beyond the reach of criminal law — regardless of motive.

In the 19-page memo Mr. Barr wrote unsolicited for the Trump administration last year, he argued that Mr. Mueller ought not be permitted to question Mr. Trump about several actions that he had taken as president that prompted accusations of obstruction.

Mr. Barr contended that a federal law against obstruction of justice should not be interpreted as applying to a president’s exercise of his constitutional authorities — such as to direct the Justice Department to close a case, to fire a subordinate or to pardon someone — as opposed to more familiar ways of impeding an investigation like destroying evidence or suborning perjury.

His argument in part rested on his broad theory of presidential power. But he also worried about the prospect of a world in which every time the Justice Department exercised prosecutorial discretion or changed a prosecutorial team in a controversial case, critics could raise accusations of improper motive and call for a criminal inquiry.

Citing Mr. Barr’s memo as a reason to question his motive in pronouncing Mr. Trump cleared of obstruction, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said he will call the attorney general to testify.

“The attorney general’s comments make it clear that Congress must step in to get the truth and provide full transparency to the American people,” Mr. Nadler said. “We cannot simply rely on what may be a hasty partisan interpretation of the facts.”

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

#Resist

Okay, just to be clear because Pronoun Game.  When he says "I didn't do it," he's talking about Putin, right?

Did he have someone else do it?  It doesn't matter if it was Putin, or some underground Russian Hackers, and Putin just didn't put a stop to it.  I seriously doubt the went in, and personally made ads for Facebook, and bought their user data to build a database to specifically target the people, and groups that were most susceptible to White Nationalist Propaganda.

So, "Duh."  Obviously he didn't do it, but you mean to tell me that Putin didn't know about it?  Okay, fine, it doesn't really make a damned bit of difference whether you sold out the country to the Premier or the Russian Mafia.

[Athos_131]

Unpacking the Obstruction of Justice Mystery in the Barr Letter

On March 24, Attorney General William Barr sent a letter to Congress that summarized the “principal conclusions” of the report filed the previous week by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The first of those conclusions—that the special counsel “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”—has been widely seen as a vindication of President Trump’s claim of “no collusion.” There are a few ambiguities, as my Lawfare colleague Robert Litt has pointed out, but in the main this part of Barr’s summary seems fairly definitive.

But Barr’s letter is far more nuanced (dare I say, unclear?) in its description of Mueller’s investigation into obstruction of justice, leaving some mysteries that need to be unpacked.

Traditional Prosecutorial Judgment

The Barr letter says that Mueller “considered whether to evaluate the obstruction conduct under Department standards governing prosecution and declination decisions but ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment.” What does this mean?

Well, first and foremost it is worth understanding what the Justice Department’s traditional standards are. They can be found in the Principles of Federal Prosecution, a manual created by the department to guide its employees in the exercise of their discretion. As the principles put it in § 9-27.220, the

attorney for the government should commence or recommend federal prosecution if he/she believes that the person’'s conduct constitutes a federal offense, and that the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction, unless (1) the prosecution would serve no substantial federal interest; (2) the person is subject to effective prosecution in another jurisdiction; or (3) there exists an adequate non-criminal alternative to prosecution.

So, a traditional evaluation begins with the obvious question: Can the government prove the case in court and obtain and sustain a conviction? Without that first assessment, the evaluation naturally comes to an end. But even if a conviction could be obtained, the prosecutor is also required to ask whether the effort will serve a “substantial federal interest.”

And, that phrase is, in turn, defined with some degree of particularity. Prosecutors must consider:

Federal law enforcement priorities, including any federal law enforcement initiatives or operations aimed at accomplishing those priorities;
The nature and seriousness of the offense;
The deterrent effect of prosecution;
The person’s culpability in connection with the offense;
The person’s history with respect to criminal activity;
The person’s willingness to cooperate in the investigation or prosecution of others;
The person’s personal circumstances;
The interests of any victims; and
The probable sentence or other consequences if the person is convicted.

The criteria of “effective prosecution in another jurisdiction” and “adequate non-criminal alternative to prosecution” are likewise defined, though they are rather more self-explanatory. There is, naturally, some ambiguity (is impeachment an “adequate non-criminal alternative”?), but, in sum, these principles define how a prosecutor goes about making a decision to charge or decline a case.

What, then, could it possibly mean that Mueller decided not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment? Might it be that he didn’t assess whether or not he had a strong enough case? Surely not—after all, he made precisely that determination with respect to the portion of his investigation concerning possible conspiracy and coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. So he knows how to make that judgment and likely did so in the obstruction case as well—though exactly what he concluded is not clear. We should also surmise that Mueller made an overall prosecutorial judgment (or at least a tentative one), because Barr hints strongly that Mueller made that type of assessment in the obstruction case as well.

I strongly suspect that Mueller’s prosecutorial judgment was not definitive but it was sufficiently plausible, and that Mueller did not stop at that first step. Rather, Barr may be signaling that, in declining to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, Mueller declined to judge whether or not prosecuting the president would serve a substantial federal interest.

If my speculation is correct, you can see why Mueller might do so. He might have thought the decision is above his pay grade. He might have thought that the situation was so unique that he was incapable of judging it well. Or he might have thought that Congress, rather than the executive, would be the proper decision maker. One thing this does hint at, though, is that Mueller directly faced the question of whether prosecution would be “worth it”—and that, in turn, suggests that he was at least tentatively of the view that he had passed the first hurdle and could, if pressed, make a case to obtain and sustain a conviction. If he did not think he had the evidence, then the second-order question of federal interests never would have arisen.

Difficult Issues

Next Barr writes that the Mueller report “leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as difficult issues of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction.” What might this mean, and what might those difficult issues be?

This is the heart of the matter. Again, I am speculating, but the indications are pretty solid that Mueller considered at least two difficult legal issues in assessing the president’s allegedly obstructive conduct. Indeed, he would have been remiss not to have considered them.

The first, of course, is whether or not a sitting president may be indicted. That question, by itself, is sufficiently difficult that Mueller may well have forgone his normal prosecutorial analysis of federal interests on that basis alone. If I were guessing, I would theorize that, when the Mueller report is made public, that legal question will play a prominent role in his analysis—a prominence that is elided in the Barr letter.

The second legal issue is one that Barr is familiar with and has already opined on—the question of whether a president may obstruct justice by taking an official act (such as, say, firing an FBI director). There is good reason to think that Barr’s assessment is legally incorrect, but Mueller, as a dutiful subordinate, was no doubt aware of Barr’s thinking and obliged to take it into account in assessing his own case. He certainly could not simply posit “ahh … the old man is wrong” and go ahead willy-nilly.

The factual challenges are, if anything, even more pronounced. First, and foremost, obstruction is an intent crime. The same act done for a lawful intent (say, firing James Comey to repair FBI management) is a crime if done with mal-intent (say, to thwart an investigation). Here, Mueller was not able to secure the president’s testimony—a decision that is itself worthy of lengthy discussion, but for my purposes here is a given—and thus was denied the best direct evidence of the president’s intent. More to the point, it is highly likely that Trump acted with a mixture of motives—and with motives that were ever-changing across the timeline of his activity. This is often true of many defendants, but it seems especially true of Trump, whose situational approach to his own motivation is a product of his unique character. That is not a good start to proving intentional obstruction.

Second, obstruction is harder to prove when there is no indictable underlying crime. Not impossible, but harder—the obvious response is “Why would I obstruct when I didn’t do anything wrong in the first instance?” As Barr put it in his letter: “The Special Counsel recognized that the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference, and that, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction.” That’s a challenging barrier to prosecution.

Third, an obstruction case is difficult when the prosecution is dealing with damaged witnesses—that is, witnesses who have previously been convicted of lying (some even after pleading guilty) or who are likely to lie to defend Trump out of loyalty to him. Who are some of the other people who might be able to testify to Trump’s intent? Paul Manafort? Michael Flynn? Both are suspect because of their prior criminal pleas (and, in Manafort’s case, his postplea conduct). How about Donald Trump Jr. or Jared Kushner? Good luck getting truthful testimony from them. It’s hard getting children to testify against parents generally. It will be doubly hard in the context of this highly charged (and, in their view, politicized) context.

Fourth, and finally, many of the president’s actions took place (as Barr notes) in public view. This is not, of course, determinative, but again it does tend to negate intent, since the obvious response is, “If I thought it was obstruction, would I have done it on television?” Of course, a cagey criminal could game the system by obstructing in public, knowing that it weakens the prosecutor’s factual case. But the burden of proof lies with the prosecutor—and so that caginess is just a realistic assessment of how difficult proof beyond a reasonable doubt is or can be in contested cases. Here, as I said once before, it is likely that the president’s best defense to an obstruction charge is that he is ignorant of the law and of his role in the government.

The Role of the Attorney General

Finally, Barr writes that Mueller’s silence “leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.” It is by no means clear why that is so. Nothing in the Justice Department’s principles requires that Barr make that determination. Indeed, the principles seem to lean in the other direction, providing for internal communications of declination decisions, rather than public expressions of a determination. The applicable principle says:

Whenever an attorney for the government declines to commence or recommend federal prosecution, he/she should ensure that his/her decision and the reasons therefore are communicated to the investigating agency involved and to any other interested agency, and are also reflected in the office files to ensure an adequate record of disposition of matters that are brought to the attention of the government attorney for possible criminal prosecution, but that do not result in federal prosecution. When prosecution is declined in serious cases on the understanding that action will be taken by other authorities, appropriate steps should be taken to ensure that the matter receives their attention.

On this reading, it would have been perfectly acceptable for Barr to have said something like: “As the Special Counsel did, I have declined to determine the substantive merits of the case for obstruction charges. I do so in the expectation that action relating to those circumstances will be taken by other authorities (namely, those in Congress).”

That Barr thought it necessary to reach out and determine a matter that Mueller chose not to is the single most problematic aspect of his action. And not until the substance of Mueller’s report becomes public will it be possible to adequately judge Barr’s actions.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The Critical Part of Mueller’s Report That Barr Didn’t Mention

On Sunday afternoon, Attorney General Bill Barr presented a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusions that contained a few sentences from Mueller’s final report, one of which directly addressed the question of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” In a footnote, Barr explained that Mueller had defined “coordination” as an “agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump campaign and the Russian government on election interference.”

Mueller’s full report has not been made available to the public yet, so it’s not clear whether it sets forth everything the special counsel’s office learned over the course of its nearly two-year investigation—including findings about conduct that was perhaps objectionable but not criminal—or whether it is more tailored and explains only Mueller’s prosecution and declination decisions. But national-security and intelligence experts tell me that Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump or his campaign team with a conspiracy is far from dispositive, and that the underlying evidence the special counsel amassed over two years could prove as useful as a conspiracy charge to understanding the full scope of Russia’s election interference in 2016.

“As described by Barr, at least, Mueller’s report was very focused on criminal-law standards and processes,” said David Kris, a founder of Culper Partners, who served as the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division under former President Barack Obama. “We won’t know for sure if that is the case, and if it is the case, why Mueller confined himself in that way, until we see the full report.” Kris noted, however, that “there is no question that a counterintelligence investigation would have a wider aperture than a strict criminal inquiry as applied here, and would be concerned, for example, with the motivations and any sub-criminal misconduct of the principal actors.”

A counterintelligence probe, he added, would ask more than whether the evidence collected is sufficient to obtain a criminal conviction—it could provide necessary information to the public about why the president is making certain policy decisions. “The American people rightly should expect more from their public servants than merely avoiding criminal liability,” Kris said.

A spokesman for the House Intelligence Committee said in a statement on Monday that in light of Barr’s memo “and our need to understand Special Counsel Mueller’s areas of inquiry and evidence his office uncovered, we are working in parallel with other Committees to bring in senior officials from the DOJ, FBI and SCO to ensure that our Committee is fully and currently informed about the SCO’s investigation, including all counterintelligence information.”

In May 2017, just after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, the FBI launched a full counterintelligence investigation into the president to determine whether he was acting as a Russian agent. “We were concerned, and we felt like we had credible, articulable facts to indicate that a threat to national security may exist,” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe explained to me last month. It’s still not clear what became of that counterintelligence probe after Mueller was appointed, and Barr did not indicate in his four-page summary how far the special counsel pursued it.

Jeremy Bash, who served as chief of staff at the Defense Department and the CIA under Obama, said he believes Mueller’s “core focus” was to determine whether or not federal criminal laws were violated. “If Mueller interpreted his mandate as a criminal one, the decision to pursue the investigation as such is something he will have to explain to Congress,” Bash said.

Mueller’s mandate, given to him by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, empowered him to investigate not only any “coordination” between the campaign and Russia, but any “links” between them as well. Barr’s summary does not describe how Mueller investigated or came to explain the many interactions the campaign had with various Russians during the election.

Even so, Bash said, it’s an “immense challenge” to envision how a counterintelligence investigation targeting the president himself would have played out. “Normally, the bureau would investigate, and if criminal matters were involved, they’d ask prosecutors to get involved,” he said. “But if it is just a matter of there being a national-security threat, the FBI would report to the director of national intelligence, who would then report to the president. But what if the president is the threat? We don’t have a playbook for this.”

Generally speaking, the wide aperture afforded by a counterintelligence investigation might be key to understanding some of the biggest lingering mysteries of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians in 2016—mysteries that, if solved, could explain the president’s continued deference toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and skepticism about his conduct on the part of the U.S. intelligence community.

For example, was the fact that Trump pursued a multimillion-dollar real-estate deal in Moscow during the election—and failed to disclose the deal to the public—enough for the Russians to compromise him? Why did the administration attempt to lift the sanctions on Russia early on in Trump’s tenure, even after it had been revealed that Russia had attacked the 2016 election? And what about the internal campaign polling data that Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, gave to the suspected Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik in August 2016—an episode that, according to one of the top prosecutors on Mueller’s team, went “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating”?

Mueller apparently determined that none of that evidence was enough to establish that a criminal conspiracy had occurred, which is fairly unsurprising if you know Bob Mueller, said John McLaughlin, the former acting director of the CIA who served under former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime.

Mueller “always noted that the term evidence meant something different to intelligence analysts who had to work with a variety of sources of varying reliability, whereas an FBI officer needed something so unassailable as to work in a court prosecution,” McLaughlin told me, referring to the conversations he had with Mueller while he was FBI director. But as former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who now hosts the Intelligence Matters podcast, told me, “We still do not understand why President Trump has this affinity for Putin. What happened yesterday is Mueller took one possibility off the table—that there was a criminal conspiracy. But we still don’t know what is going on between these two leaders, and what is driving this relationship.”

It would once have been unthinkable to even contemplate that a sitting president was putting the interests of a hostile foreign power above those of the United States. But Trump’s consistent praise of Putin, his pursuit of a massive real-estate deal in Moscow while Russia was waging a hacking and disinformation campaign against the United States in 2016, and the secrecy that continues to surround his conversations with his Russian counterpart have given some in the national-security community, including many leading Democrats, pause.

Trump took the extraordinary step of confiscating his interpreter’s notes after his first private meeting with Putin in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, according to The Washington Post, and demanded that the interpreter refrain from discussing the meeting with members of his own administration. In Helsinki, Finland, one year later, Trump insisted on meeting with Putin with no American advisers or aides present.

Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, said he “never envisioned” that Mueller would bring a conspiracy charge—and that focusing on the absence of criminal indictments for conspiracy is unproductive. “If all we do is apply criminal standards to investigative findings, we are missing the point,” Figliuzzi told me. He noted that the vast majority of counterintelligence cases never result in criminal prosecution. Instead, he said, “they’re about determining the degree to which a foreign power has targeted, compromised, or recruited” the subject. “This thing started as a counterintelligence investigation,” Figliuzzi said, “and it needs to end as a counterintelligence investigation.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Relax, Trump only behaves like a Russian agent

What a weekend. It began with President Donald Trump walking free after special counsel Robert Mueller turned in his report on Russian tampering with our elections and ended with the arrest of anti-Trump lawyer Michael Avenatti.

The coincidence of those two events offers intriguing evidence in my view that, barring some earthly conspiracy, the Almighty has a sense of humor.

Unfortunately in this case, the laugh is on those of us who thought with undue certainty that Mueller’s investigation of alleged obstruction of justice and collusion by Trump and his presidential campaign with Russians would conclusively confirm some collusion.

The laugh also is on Avenatti, whose flamboyant legal representation of his now-former client, the stripper and porn director Stormy Daniels, made him a Trump nemesis and media star with enough popularity among anti-Trumpists to reveal that he was considering a presidential run.

That option probably closed with his arrest Monday on multiple charges, including an alleged attempt to extort more than $20 million from sports apparel giant Nike. He expects to be exonerated, he said later. Either way, I don’t think we’ll be hearing anymore talk of his possible presidential run.

But on the Trump side, we may never hear the end of collusion suspicions about Trump and counter-charges against Democrats and the news-commentary media, especially as long as the full Mueller report is kept secret in the attorney general’s office.

Nevertheless, after Trump was briefed on Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of the Russia investigation, Trump displayed his usual fondness for modesty and understatement.

Just kidding. Trump actually inflated the Mueller report’s partial exoneration as “a complete and total exoneration.”

That’s half-true. On the charge of collusion, Barr’s summary quotes Mueller as saying no evidence of conspiracy or coordination with Russians by Trump’s campaign was found, but that on the obstruction of justice charge, “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Nevertheless, Trump and other Republican leaders are calling for apologies and congressional hearings into the sources and evolution of the collusion accusation. No word about apologies from Trump and other Republicans for the two years in which many of them denigrated Mueller, a registered Republican, as a partisan hack.

Trump may fume and erupt like Mount Vesuvius with rage over the allegations, but he has only himself to blame for the clouds of suspicion over his head. He has misled us so much with his “truthful hyperbole,” to quote one of his books, that we the public often don’t know what to believe.

Now Mueller tells us that, no, Trump is not a foreign agent. He only behaves like one.

Examples abound. There was his open request during a nationally televised debate for Russia, “if you’re listening,” to release Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails, which hackers tried to release that same day.

And there was the Trump Tower meeting in New York that his son Donald Jr., his son-in-law and senior campaign adviser Jared Kushner, and other senior advisers to his campaign took with an emissary of the Russian government to get dirt on Clinton. Trump Jr. could breathe a sigh of relief. He remained largely untouched by Mueller despite questions about whether he tried to cover up that meeting — at the president’s direction.

And, remember, there was the conversation Kushner had with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition about setting up a secured communications channel through the Russian embassy.

And there were the jaw-dropping photos of Trump’s cheerful discussion of classified information during an Oval Office meeting in May 2017 with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Trump defended the disclosures the next day, declaring an "absolute right" to "share" intelligence with Russia.

And how about Trump telling reporters, as he stood next to Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, that he trusted Putin’s word more than our own intelligence community. I did not feel insulted or subverted when I heard later that FBI chiefs on their own had run an internal background check on Trump’s Russia contacts. I felt relieved.

Now that Mueller’s report is finished, we the public should be able to see it, even if parts must be redacted to maintain grand jury or national security secrets. Americans across party lines understand the value of transparency in our democratic republic. Secrecy only breeds more suspicions and conspiracy theories and weakened confidence in our institutions.

And now that Mueller confirms Russian intrusion in our elections, the Trump White House needs to join the rest of us in securing our votes. We face enough electoral challenges without having to worry about outside meddling too.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Five Trump trips to Mar-a-Lago would cover Betsy Devos’s proposed Special Olympics cuts

t’s not Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s fault that her department has to cut its budget. That’s a mandate coming down from her boss, President Trump.

But DeVos is the one to make specific recommendations about where those cuts should be made. On Tuesday, she appeared on Capitol Hill to defend them — including canceling out federal funding for the Special Olympics in next year’s budget.

“We had to make some difficult decisions with this budget,” DeVos told legislators, in defense of her proposals.

It’s worth putting those difficult decisions in context.

The Education Department budgeted $17,583,000 for the Special Olympics this fiscal year, an amount that obviously exceeds the average American’s annual income. It’s also an amount that constitutes about a tenth of the Special Olympics’ total budget.

It is also an amount that’s about equivalent to the cost of the president’s last five trips to Mar-a-Lago, a period that stretches back to Thanksgiving.

Last month, we reported on new data from the Government Accountability Office which determined that Trump’s trips to his private club in Florida cost taxpayers about $3.4 million apiece, largely as a function of transporting the president and support material to the state. Looking at it another way, the federal government had spent about as much on getting Trump to Mar-a-Lago by his second month in office as DeVos now wants to cut from supporting the Special Olympics.



That total, $17.6 million, is also only a small part of the Education Department budget. The department’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2020 is about $64 billion. If that total were the height of the world’s tallest building, the 2,722-foot Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the amount spent on the Special Olympics would be an 8-inch-tall stick standing beside it.

Trump’s aim is to cut the federal government broadly in an effort to reduce the growing budget deficit — itself in part a function of the 2017 tax bill that slashed corporate tax rates. To cut the budget means to cut a number of programs in a number of places.

But how does the proposed Special Olympics funding compare to the total budget? Let’s say that the federal budget of $4.7 trillion in fiscal year 2020 was a trip from New York City to Los Angeles. How far would the $17.6 million for the Special Olympics get you on that trip?

It would get you a little over 1 percent of the way across the George Washington Bridge in upper Manhattan. It would get you 48 feet.

When we noted that $17.6 million was far more than the normal American’s income, we didn’t point out that DeVos herself is not an average American. She’s one of the richest women in the country, with an estimated net worth that’s north of $1 billion.

In fact, according to the financial disclosure she filed when taking a job with the government, DeVos herself has no fewer than six investments that are valued at more than $25,000,000. She could sell her stake in the Orlando Magic and fund the Special Olympics for at least two years. (She has another 30 investments that are valued in the range from $5 million to $25 million.)

It took very little time for people — including athletes — to offer their thoughts on DeVos’s proposal. The Washington Post spoke with one athlete, Derek Schottle, who wants to compete in the Special Olympics and said he’s praying for the program.

During fiscal year 2018, corporate tax receipts were down $92 billion from the year prior, a function in part of the tax cuts Trump signed into law in December 2017. By increasing those receipts 0.02 percent, there would be enough to cover the amount DeVos wants to cut from the Special Olympics.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump's Legal Battle to Keep Blocking Critics on Twitter Doesn't Seem to Be Going So Hot

Last year, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that Donald Trump (a man whose unhinged tweeting has ranged from boosting neo-Nazi propaganda and slamming critics to worrying the military about nuclear war) could not block critics on Twitter, finding his feed is a public forum and that blocking his haters amounted to a violation of the First Amendment. Well, he’s still fighting that ruling in the appeals process, with the Justice Department defending the blocks before a three-judge panel in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday.

It doesn’t appear to be going so well for the president’s itchy blocking finger! According to reports in Bloomberg, the Washington Post, and CNN, the three judges in question seemed rather skeptical of the DOJ’s claim that what goes down on @realDonaldTrump is between the president and his Twitter enemies, rather than between the federal government and the U.S. populace. Instead, they seemed amenable to the plaintiffs, users who at one time or another were blocked by Trump, and are being represented in the suit by the Knight First Amendment Institute.

According to the Post, justices rolled off a number of recent Trump tweets including ones announcing new appointees, observations on North Korea, and ceremonial greetings from the White House. Judge Barrington D. Parker Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit asked, “Are you seriously urging us to believe the president isn’t acting in his official capacity when he’s tweeting?”

Parker added that when Trump blocks someone on Twitter, he “subtracts from that discussion points of view the president doesn’t like. Why isn’t that a quintessential First Amendment violation?”

The Post wrote:

Lawyers for the blocked individuals say the case is not about Twitter, a private company, but about how Trump uses Twitter as president. He routinely takes to Twitter to announce government appointments and dismissals and his administration’s policies. Then-press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters in June 2017 that Trump’s tweets should be considered “official statements by the president.” The National Archives has said Trump’s tweets must be preserved as presidential records.

Per CNN, the attorneys for the DOJ conceded that the president uses his Twitter feed in an official capacity—itself a change from last year, when they insisted he was using it for personal reasons. But they still contend that when Trump mashes that block button, he is “doing so in his personal capacity.” Just because the president got elected does not make his Twtter account government property, they added. (As Slate noted, a DOJ attorney confirmed that it is in fact Trump himself who is blocking people, not his cronies.)

Judge Peter W. Hall responded that if that was the case, “It is curious to me that the Justice Department is here representing him... Your very presence here represents that [Twitter] is a public forum.”

According to the Post, Judge Christopher F. Droney suggested that while Twitter is a private company, Trump’s use of it is akin to the government renting a private space to host a town hall meeting—a scenario in which a government official could not ban a specific attendee just because they disliked what their points of view.

“How is that different from the blocking here?” Droney asked.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued at the Tuesday hearing that if government officials are allowed to block critics on social media, the ramifications could be huge.

“If the court were to hold that this kind of blocking is beyond the reach of the First Amendment, that would have implications far beyond this particular context,” Knight First Amendment Institute attorney Jameel Jaffer said, per Bloomberg. “It would seemingly apply to the @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts as well. It would probably apply to every government website that has a space for public comment. I think you would be opening the door to manipulation and distortion of those spaces.”

The judge in original case urged the Trump administration to reach a settlement, alluding to the fact that any court ruling would likely be precedent-setting. However, as the Post noted, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond, Virginia unanimously ruled in January that a local official could not block critics on a page she used in an official capacity.

In other words, this doesn’t seem to be going well for our burnt umber Tweeter-in-Chief. Sad!

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump’s Federal Reserve pick owes $75,000 in taxes, US government alleges

Stephen Moore, the conservative economics commentator chosen by Donald Trump for a seat on the Federal Reserve board, is being pursued by the US government for $75,000 in taxes that it alleges he owes.

A claim for the debt was filed against Moore by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in January last year at the circuit court in Montgomery county, Maryland, where Moore has a home.

Court records state that Moore, a former Trump presidential campaign adviser, owes the US $75,328 for taxes incurred in 2014. A court clerk confirmed the claim filed by the IRS had not yet been satisfied by Moore.

In a statement, Moore said he disputed the IRS claim. He said he was “eager to reach an agreement” with authorities but had been frustrated by bureaucracy at the revenue service.

“For several years I have been working through a dispute with the IRS, attempting to be returned what my attorneys and accountant believe were tax overpayments of tens of thousands of dollars,” Moore said.

Trump’s selection of Moore for an influential role at the world’s most powerful central bank has attracted sharp criticism. The president has said Moore, who must be confirmed by the US Senate, is “a very respected economist”.

But Greg Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard University who was a senior economic adviser to former president George W Bush, has said Moore “does not have the intellectual gravitas” for the job and urged senators to reject him.

He has been defended by Republicans including Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who on Monday dismissed Moore’s critics as “card-carrying members of the Beltway establishment”.

Moore, 59, is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative thinktank in Washington. He was formerly an adviser to the joint economic committee of the US Congress and to former president Ronald Reagan’s privatization commission. He previously worked for other Washington thinktanks such as the Club For Growth and the Cato Institute, and was a writer on economics at the Wall Street Journal.

Moore has long been been a strident advocate for reducing taxes and in 2017 hailed Trump’s tax cut as “death to Democrats”.

Trump is said to value Moore’s championing of his policies on television news channels. Moore last year published a celebratory book, Trumponomics, with the veteran economist Arthur Laffer, a former adviser to Reagan.

The Guardian reported last week that Moore created a controversial political group during the 2008 presidential election campaign with his friend Paul Erickson, a veteran Republican operative. Erickson has been indicted on federal charges of money laundering and tax fraud and his girlfriend, Maria Butina, pleaded guilty to working as a Russian agent.

Moore said in his statement on Wednesday: “It is an honor to have the opportunity to serve my country with distinction by being nominated for the Federal Reserve board and I am ready to move forward with confirmation.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Ex-Trump aide details president’s effort to cover up the Trump Tower meeting

The general sense one gets from an interview that Mark Corallo gave to ABC News’s “The Investigation" podcast is that he thought President Trump and his team were in over their heads.

Corallo served briefly as spokesman for Trump’s legal team, early in Trump’s presidency and, therefore, early in the investigations into possible coordination between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. On Sunday, Attorney General William P. Barr informed Congress that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had completed his work and did not find a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Corallo himself spoke with investigators from Mueller’s office, with questions focused on a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and a Russian attorney with ties to the Kremlin. This meeting was first reported in July 2017 by the New York Times and stemmed from an email Trump Jr. had received from an associate who pledged “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary" Clinton — information that purportedly came from the Russian government.

“When I was at the [Republican National Committee] during the 2000 campaign, you know, we had lawyers involved who understood, you know, what the bright lines were,” Corallo said of that outreach. “You know? Like we would have known if some, you know, some hostile foreign government approached us with dirt on the on the, on the opponent we would call the FBI, but we would have known that — they didn’t know that.” He described the campaign team as “novices," unaware of why the offer was fraught.

Mueller didn’t offer a finding on whether Trump had obstructed justice as he worked to push back on the broader Russia investigation, writing, according to Barr’s letter, that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Again, Corallo chalked that up to the Trump team’s naivete.

“I would like to believe that [Mueller’s team] looked at the facts and said well, these people didn’t even know how to obstruct,” Corallo said. “I think they were just trying to avoid embarrassment.”

But Corallo offered one of the most damning pieces of testimony suggesting that Trump and his team, including then-communications staffer Hope Hicks, had worked directly to mislead the public about the genesis of the Trump Tower meeting. Corallo also suggested to ABC News that Hicks had offered a different story to Mueller’s investigators.

The Times reached out to the White House in early July, while Trump was traveling back from Europe. The newspaper first reported that the meeting had taken place, later revealing the email chain in which Trump Jr. embraces the help of the Russian government.

In response to the Times’s initial outreach as it prepared its first story, two different responses were offered from Trump’s team. The first was drafted by Trump himself and given to the Times; it claimed that the Trump Tower meeting was “a short introductory meeting” predicated on the issue of adoption. (Trump said later that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin had discussed adoption when they met during Trump’s Europe visit. The issue is linked to sanctions imposed against Putin and Russia by President Barack Obama’s administration.)

The second was given by Corallo to Circa.

"We have learned from both our own investigation and public reports that the participants in the meeting misrepresented who they were and who they worked for,” Corallo’s statement said, connecting the Russian attorney to the firm Fusion GPS, which had also been involved in compiling the dossier of reports alleging collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Trump and Hicks were very angry about that second statement, Corallo told ABC.

“[M]y phone rings, and it’s Hope Hicks,” he said. “So, she just started laying into me. And, then she admitted that, yes, they had crafted this statement on Air Force One and that they’d handled it. You know, she said, I had the New York Times handled and I’m going — you did? You work in the White House. This is a private matter. This is not the president’s conduct of his office. This is matters to do with him as a private citizen, really, not even him. This has to do with his son, son-in-law and former campaign director. So, so I just I listened to her yell, and then I said, well, you know you’ve probably made yourself a witness in a federal criminal investigation. Way to go, young lady.”

He says that Hicks called again the next day, with Trump on the phone. No lawyers were included in the call.

“I was just very aware that without an attorney on the phone, there was no [attorney-client] privilege, not to mention the fact that there was no executive privilege, because I don’t work for the White House,” Corallo said. “They are creating risk unnecessarily. The idea that a 20-something press aide would put the president of the United States on the phone to talk about a federal criminal investigation, without his attorneys on the phone, to protect the privilege and that the president wasn’t aware of it was just astounding to me. And terrifying.”

Then, Corallo said, he pointed out that the statement offered by Trump Jr. was inaccurate and that, because it was inaccurate, the issue would blow up.

“I pointed out that the statement was inaccurate and that there were documents, that I understood there were documents that would prove that,” he said, referring to the email chain in which Trump Jr. was involved. “Hope Hicks replied to me when I, when I said, look there are, you know, there are documents. She said, well nobody’s ever going to see those documents. Which you know made my throat dry up immediately. And I just — at that point I just said, Mr. President we can’t talk about this anymore. You got to talk to your lawyers.”

Through her attorneys, Hicks has denied making this claim in the past. But Corallo suggests that she made the same claim to Mueller’s team.

Asked if the phone call and Hicks’s assertion came up when he was interviewed by Mueller’s team, Corallo said, “Oh, absolutely. They wanted to know, and they asked me, and they said, well, you know Miss Hicks says that that didn’t happen. And they asked me how sure I was, and I said 100 percent.” Her actions, he said, were “reckless.”

It’s likely that, even if Mueller believed Hicks had lied about the phone call with Corallo, there would not have been enough evidence to indict her.

Corallo had far more experience in handling political communications than Hicks or Trump. He described what he saw as their intent in offering Trump Jr.'s misleading statement.

“We can kill this in one day, it’s going to be a one-day story,” Corallo said, “and you know which led to me laughing at people thinking, Oh, sure, that’s a one-day story.”

But, again, Corallo suggested that this lack of sophistication may have been their salvation.

“I think that Bob Mueller realized that these were just people who were naive,” he said.

#Resist

[Lois]

Now Trump is again proving he is the worst President ever.

* Saying that Puerto Rico should not get anymore aid to recover from the hurricane (just because they did not kiss his ass after he threw some people paper towels to help with the clean up).

* Going after public education, cutting millions of dollars from blind schools and eliminating all funding from the special olympics.

* Going after medicare after pledging he would not cut it (campaign promise).

* Going after the ACA, that millions of Americans depend on or healthcare.

All he cares about is his vanity wall.  As he has demonstrated, putting his name on things is all he cares about.

[Jed_]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-military-wind-energy-fox-news-sean-hannity-russia-mueller-media-1377881%3famp=1


‘DONALD TRUMP IS GLAD THE U.S. IS NOT BEING POWERED BY WIND 'BECAUSE IT ONLY BLOWS SOMETIMES'’



Maybe the U.S. can be powered by Donald Trump, because he . . . . .

Fill in the blank for me folks!

[psiberzerker]

Maybe the U.S. can be powered by Donald Trump, because he . . .

Fill in the blanks:

Well, as an Energy solution, I would think that all the gas that comes out of that asshole is rich in methane, so maybe we can hook him up to a gas turbine?  It means taping an inlet nozzle in his mouth, and with a high bypass design, it might clear the air, too.

How's that?

I know, let's nominate Nancy Pelosi to the Energy Commission so she can personally write the Gag Order!

[Athos_131]

The problem that arises when you tell people facts don’t matter

I had to laugh, not only because this is a problem entirely of President Trump’s own making, but because it tells us political karma is alive and well. CNN reports:

Though President Donald Trump has claimed "complete and total exoneration" based on Attorney General William Barr's summary of special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, the American public disagrees, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS.

A majority (56%) says the President and his campaign have not been exonerated of collusion, but that what they’ve heard or read about the report shows collusion could not be proven. Fewer, 43%, say Trump and his team have been exonerated of collusion.

Well, Attorney General William P. Barr could release the whole report so people can read for themselves what Mueller wrote. Trump’s victory lap while Barr has intruded onto the special counsel’s and Congress’s turf — to exonerate the president — doesn’t sit well with a lot of voters, it seems.

This also what comes of making up a non-crime and then absolving oneself of it. Voters feel free to make up their own definition of “collusion” (e.g., meeting with Russians who are interfering with our election process) and free to believe there is evidence of their kind of collusion.

Moreover, this is how the obliteration of objective reality, a tool of Trump and authoritarian bullies the world over, comes back to haunt him. Partisans now reject any new information that doesn’t comport with their preferences. Since most Americans don’t like Trump, most prefer to believe he is guilty of something or another. More from CNN’s report: “At this point, without the full report having been released, just 13% say that Mueller’s findings will sway their decision about whom to support in 2020 either way, with 7% saying it makes them more apt to back the President, and 6% less likely to do so." It won’t even affect how they vote in 2020: "A combined 86% say that they had already figured out whether they would vote for or against Trump, or that the investigation won’t matter to them even though they are undecided now.”

It is also quite possible that voters blur the distinction between collusion and obstruction, the latter of which we learned from the snippet of Mueller’s report quoted by Barr — that Trump was explicitly not exonerated. (If only a fragment of bad news can reaffirm Trump’s conduct was just as voters expected, imagine the wealth of corroboration they would find in the full report.)

We also find it amusing that, once more, Trump confuses his own hunger for revenge, vindication and reaffirmation with good politics. An “exoneration” that isn’t an exoneration on obstruction and which, in any event, voters don’t believe, is not going to save him in 2020. However, once more running on abolishing the Affordable Care Act (throw in Medicare cuts!) as part of his base-pleasing politics is just the sort of thing that sunk Republicans in 2018 and may spell disaster for the party in 2020. For Trump, it’s all about him; for voters, it’s usually about them.

Democrats would be smart to start a 20-month campaign to make clear that Republicans, if reelected, will take away your health care and your aging parents’ health care as well. It’s a real no-brainer. I mean it would be like promising to cut support for the Special Olympics, or implementing tariffs that hurt farmers and workers in industries that use steel or aluminum. Oh, wait . . .

In any event, Trump’s reliance on Barr’s transparently political letter seems misplaced. A decent majority of voters don’t believe anything he says — even when he strays in the vicinity of the truth. Ah well, live by 9,000-plus lies, politically die by them.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Mueller Report Exceeds 300 Pages, Raising Questions About Four-Page Summary

WASHINGTON — The still-secret report on Russian interference in the 2016 election submitted by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, last week was more than 300 pages long, according to American officials with knowledge of it, a length that raises new questions about Attorney General William P. Barr’s four-page summary.

Mr. Barr wrote to Congress on Sunday offering what he called the “principal conclusions” of the report — including that Mr. Mueller had not found evidence that the Trump campaign took part in a conspiracy to undermine the election. But he had notably declined to publicly disclose its length.

The total of 300-plus pages suggests that Mr. Mueller went well beyond the kind of bare-bones summary required by the Justice Department regulation governing his appointment and detailed his conclusions at length. And it raises questions about what Mr. Barr might have left out of the four dense pages he sent Congress.

Democrats, who like all other lawmakers have not seen the report, have all but accused Mr. Barr of covering up damaging information it contains. They have specifically focused on an apparent difference between the views of Mr. Barr and Mr. Mueller on whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice. Democrats have demanded that the attorney general make the full report and evidence public.

The American officials spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss details of the report, titled “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.”

The Justice Department has continued to decline to publicly give an official page number, though a senior Justice Department official told reporters on the day it was received that the report was “comprehensive.”

Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, added the description “very substantial” after talking to Mr. Barr on Wednesday, although neither he nor any other member of Congress has seen it and he declined to give a page count. Andrew Napolitano, a legal analyst for Fox News and a favorite of Mr. Trump, caused a stir on Wednesday when he said multiple times on the air that the report was 700 pages.

A Justice Department spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

Other blockbuster government reports in recent decades have been lengthy. At 445 pages, the independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s report on President Bill Clinton had to be trucked to Capitol Hill in September 1998.

The 9/11 commission report ran 567 pages with notes on the circumstances and fallout of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Even the Justice Department inspector general seems to have outwritten Mr. Mueller of late. Michael E. Horowitz released a scathing 500-page report last summer on the F.B.I.’s handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state that preoccupied Congress for weeks.

Mr. Horowitz’s report on Mrs. Clinton’s emails was 568 pages.

By contrast, the Watergate “road map” sent to Congress by the grand jury investigating President Richard Nixon and his associates was only 62 pages. Sent to lawmakers in 1974, the court report was not unsealed by a federal judge and made public until last year.

Mr. Mueller probably collected and generated hundreds of thousands if not millions of pages of paper in his investigation. Congress has made clear it would eventually like access to all of them, but the Justice Department could have good reason to block some of their release, leaving it once again to the courts to determine who sees what.

Members of Mr. Barr and Mr. Mueller’s teams are currently reviewing the full report to redact information that they do not believe should be made public for intelligence or other reasons. Mr. Barr has told lawmakers in recent days that it will take weeks to make more of Mr. Mueller’s findings.

#Resist

[Katiebee]

Der Fuher is now trying to policitcally cleanse Congress.
Trump wants a sitting member of Congress to be forces out of office.
Authoritarianism is on the rise. It may come to manning the barricades.

[psiberzerker]

I'm sure if the Capitol building mysteriously burns down, his Attorney General won't be able to find any evidence that Il douche' is involved.

[_priapism]

RESEARCH SUGGESTS TRUMP'S ELECTION HAS BEEN DETRIMENTAL TO MANY AMERICANS' MENTAL HEALTH

[Athos_131]

RESEARCH SUGGESTS TRUMP'S ELECTION HAS BEEN DETRIMENTAL TO MANY AMERICANS' MENTAL HEALTH

I disagree.

Trumpers were crazy way before that.

#Resist

[Lois]

Der Fuher is now trying to policitcally cleanse Congress.
Trump wants a sitting member of Congress to be forces out of office.
Authoritarianism is on the rise. It may come to manning the barricades.

I think Trump should resign for doing everything he could to look guilty as fuck.  And the fact is, we still don't know if Trump conspired with Russia.  Mueller simply could not find sufficient evidence of conspiracy to indict him.