‘This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.' - A Yellow Wall Nightmare

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[_priapism]

It’s already in full swing again, and no one has an answer or solution.  Just look at the doctored Pelosi photos if you want proof.  I think we are royally fucked.  Social media is destroying what’s left of democracy in America.

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Mueller found no Trump collusion with Russia, not enough evidence for obstruction:

Wrong.

And I've got something just for this.















































#Resist

[Athos_131]

No one should be replying to you about this in your own cowardly, racist, gaslighting and blatantly wrong threads.

I'm glad you crawled out of your hole, now it's time to thoroughly embarrass your excuses with the truth like in this thread.

Thanks for finally posting!

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Post of bullshit regarding topics in this thread

That article was dated April 6.  The Mueller report wasn't released until April 18th.

Feel free to keep lying.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Amash accuses Barr of deliberately misrepresenting Mueller’s report to protect Trump

Rep. Justin Amash, the sole congressional Republican to call for President Trump’s impeachment, took aim at Attorney General William P. Barr on Tuesday, saying that he had deliberately misrepresented key aspects of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report “to further the president’s false narrative about the investigation.”

In more than two dozen tweets, Amash (Mich.) detailed multiple objections to how Barr had handled Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, starting with a memo to Congress in late March that summarized Mueller’s key findings and relayed that he decided not to pursue obstruction-of-justice charges against Trump.

“Barr has so far successfully used his position to sell the president’s false narrative to the American people,” Amash said in the final tweet of his thread. “This will continue if those who have read the report do not start pushing back on his misrepresentations and share the truth.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Amash’s tweets came just hours before he was scheduled to hold his first town hall meeting in his Michigan district since declaring on May 18 that Trump had “engaged in impeachable conduct” and becoming a pariah among his GOP colleagues.

Amash is already facing two primary challengers, and one of them, state Rep. Jim Lower, told The Washington Post that he raised $60,000 in his first eight days as a candidate. In an interview, Lower said he had not read Mueller’s report but agreed with the assessment of most Republicans that it ended questions about Trump’s conduct.

“Clearly the congressman is going to try to justify his impeachment position to the district tonight,” Lower said in a text message. “I don’t expect it to be well received with Republican primary voters. Those voters do not want the President to be impeached and they disagree with the Congressman’s conclusion. Throughout this primary campaign, I will be the voice for those voters!”

Amash’s initial tweets on impeachment drew the wrath of Trump, who said last week that the congressman has “been a loser for a long time.” Privately, Trump vented to associates about the Michigan lawmaker, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Amash, 39, has long been uniquely comfortable breaking with his party, citing his libertarian principles in regularly opposing GOP leaders on votes ranging from spending bills to the routine approval of the daily House journal.

[DeVos family ends financial support for Rep. Amash]

Last week, the wealthy DeVos family said through a spokesman that it was cutting off financial support for Amash. The Michigan-based family, which made its fortune running Amway, decided to stop donating to Amash before his most recent comments about the president, DeVos family spokesman Nick Wasmiller said in a statement.

“Family members have expressed increasing concerns about a lack of representation for their district, the Third Congressional, and I would say an inability to advance efforts connected to important policy matters,” he said.

In his tweets Tuesday, Amash took issue with the rationale Barr offered for not indicting Trump on obstruction charges before the Mueller report was publicly released.

“Mueller’s report says he chose not to decide whether Trump broke the law because there’s an official [Department of Justice] opinion that indicting a sitting president is unconstitutional, and because of concerns about impacting the president’s ability to govern and pre-empting possible impeachment,” Amash wrote.

“Barr’s letter doesn’t mention those issues when explaining why Mueller chose not to make a prosecutorial decision,” he continued. “He instead selectively quotes Mueller in a way that makes it sound — falsely — as if Mueller’s decision stemmed from legal/factual issues specific to Trump’s actions. But, in fact, Mueller finds considerable evidence that several of Trump’s actions detailed in the report meet the elements of obstruction.”

Amash also took issue with Barr’s declaration at a subsequent news conference that Mueller had found “no collusion” between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Barr implied that the investigation was “baseless,” Amash wrote.

“In truth, Mueller’s report describes concerning contacts between members of Trump’s campaign and people in or connected to the Russian government,” Amash wrote. “It’s wrong to suggest that the fact that Mueller did not choose to indict anyone for this means there wasn’t a basis to investigate whether it amounted to a crime or ‘collusion,’ or whether it was in fact part of Russia’s efforts to help Trump’s candidacy.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Mueller drew up obstruction indictment against Trump, Michael Wolff book says

A new book from Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff says special counsel Robert Mueller drew up a three-count obstruction of justice indictment against Donald Trump before deciding to shelve it – an explosive claim which a spokesman for Mueller flatly denied.

The stunning revelation is contained in Siege: Trump Under Fire, which will be published a week from now, on 4 June. It is the sequel to Fire and Fury, Wolff’s bestseller on the first year of the Trump presidency which was published in 2018.

The Guardian obtained a copy of Siege and viewed the documents concerned.

In an author’s note, Wolff states that his findings on the Mueller investigation are “based on internal documents given to me by sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel”.

But Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, told the Guardian: “The documents that you’ve described do not exist.”

Questions over the provenance of the documents will only add to controversy and debate around the launch of Wolff’s eagerly awaited new book.

Fire and Fury shone a harsh spotlight on dysfunction within the Trump White House and engendered huge controversy after the Guardian broke news of its contents. Many of Wolff’s assertions were confirmed by later works, among them Fear: Trump in the White House by the Watergate reporter Bob Woodward. The book prompted the banishment of the Trump adviser and Wolff source Stephen Bannon, who also lost his place at Breitbart News. It sold close to 5 million copies.

Mueller was appointed in May 2017 to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, links between Trump aides and Moscow and potential obstruction of justice by the president.

Mueller’s final report was handed to the attorney general, William Barr, on 22 March this year and made public in redacted form on 18 April. Mueller did not find a conspiracy between Trump and Russia but did lay out 11 possible instances of obstruction of justice, indicating Congress should decide what came next.

Barr said he had judged the instances of possible obstruction not to be conclusive. Trump and his supporters have claimed total exoneration. Democrats in Congress are weighing whether impeachment is merited.

And yet Wolff reports that Mueller’s office drew up a three-count outline of the president’s alleged abuses, under the title “United States of America against Donald J Trump, Defendant”. The document sat on the special counsel’s desk, Wolff writes, for almost a year.

According to a document seen by the Guardian, the first count, under Title 18, United States code, Section 1505, charged the president with corruptly – or by threats of force or threatening communication – influencing, obstructing or impeding a pending proceeding before a department or agency of the United States.

The second count, under section 1512, charged the president with tampering with a witness, victim or informant.

The third count, under section 1513, charged the president with retaliating against a witness, victim or informant.

The document is the most significant aspect of Wolff’s new book.

Wolff writes that the draft indictment he examines says Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice “began on the seventh day of his administration, tracing the line of obstruction from National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s lies to the FBI about his contacts with Russian representatives, to the president’s efforts to have FBI director James Comey protect Flynn, to Comey’s firing, to the president’s efforts to interfere with the special counsel’s investigation, to his attempt to cover up his son and son-in-law’s meeting with Russian governmental agents, to his moves to interfere with Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe’s testimony …”

The draft indictment, Wolff writes, also spelled out what Mueller considered to be the overriding theme of Trump’s presidency: the “extraordinary lengths” taken “to protect himself from legal scrutiny and accountability, and to undermine the official panels investigating his actions”.

According to Wolff, Mueller endured tortured deliberations over whether to charge the president, and even more tortured deliberations over the president’s power to dismiss him or his boss, the then deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. Mueller ultimately demurred, Wolff writes, but his team’s work gave rise to as many as 13 other investigations that led to cooperating witness plea deals from Michael Cohen, David Pecker of American Media and Trump Organization accountant Allen Weisselberg.

“The Jews always flip,” was Trump’s comment on those deals, according to Wolff.

In one of many echoes of Fire and Fury, such shocking remarks by Trump are salted throughout Siege.

The justice department’s Office of Legal Counsel had said a sitting president could not be indicted. According to Wolff, Mueller’s team drew up both the three-count indictment of Trump and a draft memorandum of law opposing an anticipated motion to dismiss.

In his 448-page redacted final report the special counsel briefly noted that his office had concluded it would accept previous justice department guidance that it did not have the power to prosecute a sitting president.

The draft memorandum quoted by Wolff argues that nowhere does the law say the president cannot be indicted and nowhere is the president accorded a dif­ferent status under the law than other federal officials, all of whom can be indicted, convicted and impeached.

The document says: “The Impeachment Judgment Clause, which applies equally to all civil officers including the president … takes for granted … that an officer may be subject to indictment and prosecution before impeachment. If it did not, the clause would be creating, for civil officers, precisely the immunity the Framers rejected.”

The memorandum rejected the argument that the burden of a criminal process on the president would interfere with his ability to carry out his duties.

Of Mueller’s thinking, Wolff writes that as a former FBI director, he “had not risen to the highest levels of the federal government by misconstruing the limits of bureaucratic power”, and had therefore continually weighed the odds with his staff about whether the president would fire them. Thus, Wolff writes, “the very existence of the special counsel’s investigation had in a sense become the paramount issue of the investigation itself”.

According to Wolff, a memo circulated internally asked: “Can President Trump order [then attorney general Jeff] Sessions to withdraw the special counsel regulations (and fire him if he doesn’t)?

“The short answer is yes.”

Mueller’s team also believed Trump could have fired Mueller directly, Wolff says, “arguing that the special counsel regulations are unconstitutional insofar as they limit his ability to fire the special counsel”.

Trump has claimed to have had the right to fire Mueller, but he has also denied Don McGahn’s testimony to Mueller that he was ordered to do so. Trump is now seeking to stop the former White House counsel testifying to Congress.

In another memo quoted by Wolff, Mueller’s staff wondered what would happen to the special counsel’s office, staff, records, pending investigations and grand juries reviewing evidence if Mueller was fired.

To preserve their work, Wolff writes, they decided to share grand jury materials with fellow prosecutors. That process led, for example, to the investigation into Cohen being handed to the southern district of New York.

In the end, Wolff writes, Mueller concluded that “the truth of the matter was straightforward: that while the president had the support of the majority party, he had the winning hand.

“Robert Mueller, the stoic marine, had revealed himself over the course of the nearly two-year investigation to his colleagues and staff to be quite a Hamlet figure. Or, less dramatically, a cautious and indecisive bureaucrat.”

Caught, Wolff says, between wanting to use his full authority and worrying that he had no authority, Mueller went against the will of many of his staff when he chose not to attempt to force Trump to be interviewed in person. Ultimately, he also concluded he could not move to prosecute a sitting president.

Perhaps surprisingly given his fate after Fire and Fury, Bannon is quoted extensively in Siege. His view of Mueller’s two year investigation into claims of collusion and obstruction of justice: “Never send a marine to do a hit man’s job.”

Wolff’s conclusion is a sobering one.

“In a way,” he writes, “Robert Mueller had come to accept the dialectical premise of Donald Trump – that Trump is Trump.

“Bob Mueller threw up his hands. Surprisingly, he found himself in agreement with the greater White House: Donald Trump was the president, and, for better or for worse, what you saw was what you got – and what the country voted for.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Mueller says accusing Trump of a crime ‘not an option’ under Justice Dept. guidelines

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III announced Wednesday he was closing his office and offered his first public comments on the results of his work, asserting that Justice Department legal guidance prevented him from accusing President Trump of a crime and noting cryptically that the Constitution “requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse the president of wrongdoing.”

Standing alone on stage in a room used for press conferences on the Justice Department’s seventh floor, Mueller reiterated much of what was detailed in his report and sought to explain his decision-making process. He noted that his team found “insufficient evidence” to accuse Trump’s campaign of conspiring with Russia to tilt the 2016 election, but emphasized they did not make a similar determination on whether the president obstructed justice.

“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime,” Mueller said, “we would have said so.”

In a tweet after the press conference, Trump said, “Nothing changes from the Mueller Report. There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent. The case is closed! Thank you.”

Likely to the dismay of lawmakers, Mueller said any congressional testimony he would provide would not go beyond his 448-page report.

“We chose those words carefully, and the work speaks for itself, and the report is my testimony,” Mueller said.

It was the first time he has sought to explain his work since the release last month of his report. Mueller said he was “speaking out today because our investigation is complete.”

“We are formally closing the special counsel’s office and, as well, I am resigning from the Department of Justice to return to private life,” Mueller said.

He took no questions.

Mueller’s report said his team did not find Trump or his associates conspired with Russia to influence the election, but notably decided not to reach a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice.

Mueller’s team wrote that Justice Department legal guidance prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president prevented prosecutors from accusing the commander in chief of a crime even in a private report.

The non-decision has roiled Washington — with Trump declaring complete vindication even as hundreds of former federal prosecutors say that Mueller laid out sufficient evidence in his report to make an obstruction case.

On Wednesday, Mueller sought to explain his thinking more fully. A president, he said, “cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional.” And he noted, “Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that, too, is prohibited.”

“Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider,” Mueller said.

But Mueller said his team was still allowed to investigate Trump because it was possible others could be charged. He did not say what they might have done if the law allowed a president to be charged, but hinted that lawmakers could still pursue the matter.

The White House was notified Tuesday night that Mueller planned to make the statement, according to a senior White House official.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Mueller was pointed: His report doesn’t say what Trump and Barr have claimed

At two points in his statement Wednesday delineating the results of his Russia investigation, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III pointed to the long report his team wrote as the ultimate authority on what was found.

“It is important that the office’s written work speak for itself,” he said at the outset of his comments. Later, he said that he didn’t plan to testify before Congress, using a similar argument.

“Any testimony from this office,” he said, “would not go beyond our report. It contains our findings and analysis and the reasons for the decisions we made. We chose those words carefully and the work speaks for itself.”

The report, he added, was his testimony.

On the surface, this seems almost deflating: Mueller, after staying silent for so many months, is now simply going to point to the report that anyone can read? But as the immediate reaction to his comments made clear, there was enormous utility in his approaching the statement in this way.

Most people haven’t read the report and have relied on summaries in the news media or from Attorney General William P. Barr to guide their understanding of it. Barr’s position was clear from the first four-page letter he offered publicly. Mueller didn’t find a chargeable conspiracy by members of the Trump campaign to work with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential campaign and, by his own assessment, the potentially obstructive acts that Donald Trump undertook weren’t criminal. In his news conference before the report was released, Barr stated flatly that “no collusion” had taken place.

Each of those assertions was celebrated by Barr’s boss, President Trump. Trump summarized Mueller’s findings in an inaccurate four-word statement: No collusion, no obstruction. But each of Barr’s assertions also diverged from what the report said.

What Mueller did Wednesday was essentially hold up the report and point at it, telling America what it contained. By doing so, we have for the first time heard a member of the executive branch convey the report’s findings accurately — in a way that Americans and the media would be hard-pressed to misinterpret.

Mueller noted that his team indicted more than two dozen Russians in connection with their alleged roles in hacking Democratic networks and accounts and with trying to interfere in the campaign via social media. But instead of saying that there was “no collusion” by the Trump team with that effort — a term that the report itself explicitly rejected in its consideration of what happened — Mueller explained what his investigators found in more nuanced terms.

The first volume of his report, he said, “includes a discussion of the Trump campaign’s response to this activity as well as our conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy.”

Insufficient evidence, of course, is not a lack of evidence. Again, this distinction exists within the report, but it’s not how Trump or Barr presented Mueller’s findings.

The second volume of the report assesses Trump’s efforts to undermine Mueller’s investigation. Here, Mueller spoke at length.

“Under long-standing department policy a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office,” Mueller said. “That is unconstitutional, even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view. That too is prohibited. The special counsel’s office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation it was bound by that department policy."

“Charging the president with a crime,” he continued, “was therefore not an option we could consider.”

This conflicts with what Barr said in that news conference before the report was released publicly. The attorney general was asked at that point if the opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (referred to by Mueller above) was the reason Mueller didn’t charge Trump with a crime.

“He — he was not saying that but for the OLC opinion he would have found a crime,” Barr said. “He made it clear that he had not made the determination that there was a crime.”

Because of the boundaries established by that opinion, Mueller said on Wednesday, “we concluded that we not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime.” In fact, the report says, his team would have exonerated Trump on obstruction charges if it could.

It couldn’t.

Mueller, in his statement on Wednesday, explained how the OLC opinion guided their work. First, he said, the opinion allows for an investigation of a sitting president in order to preserve evidence. Second, it points to the existence of other mechanisms for accusing sitting presidents of crimes.

It’s easy to read between the lines here, though Mueller was still not direct. Among the other mechanisms are, of course, impeachment. Mueller noted that preserving evidence could be useful to charge co-conspirators “among other things.” An impeachment trial is, in fact, another thing.

For two months, the special counsel has seen others, Barr and Trump included, try to frame his work in a particular way. He pointedly stated that he didn’t question Barr’s “good faith” in releasing the full report, begging the question of points at which his confidence in Barr’s efforts was less robust. He apparently hoped that the release of the report would stand in contrast to the Barr-Trump framing (as was made clear in his letter to Barr), but that wasn’t borne out.

So, for the first time since he was appointed in May 2017, he decided to speak directly. In so doing, he was able to do what no one else from the Trump administration had yet done: Capture the public attention and use the moment to accurately and briefly convey what his investigation found and what his report said.

“It is important that the office’s written work speak for itself,” Mueller said. It was a warning that applied to his own comments — but also, obviously, those of his superiors.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Full Transcript of Mueller’s Statement on Russia Investigation

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here. Two years ago, the acting attorney general asked me to serve as special counsel and he created the special counsel’s office. The appointment order directed the office to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. This included investigating any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign.

Now, I have not spoken publicly during our investigation. I am speaking out today because our investigation is complete. The attorney general has made the report on our investigation largely public. We are formally closing the special counsel’s office, and as well, I’m resigning from the Department of Justice to return to private life. I’ll make a few remarks about the results of our work. But beyond these few remarks, it is important that the office’s written work speak for itself. Let me begin where the appointment order begins, and that is interference in the 2016 presidential election.

As alleged by the grand jury in an indictment, Russian intelligence officers who are part of the Russian military, launched a concerted attack on our political system. The indictment alleges that they used sophisticated cybertechniques to hack into computers and networks used by the Clinton campaign. They stole private information and then released that information through fake online identities and through the organization WikiLeaks.

The releases were designed and timed to interfere with our election and to damage a presidential candidate. And at the same time, as the grand jury alleged in a separate indictment, a private Russian entity engaged in a social media operation, where Russian citizens posed as Americans in order to influence an election. These indictments contain allegations, and we are not commenting on the guilt or the innocence of any specific defendant. Every defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

The indictments allege, and the other activities in our report describe, efforts to interfere in our political system. They needed to be investigated and understood. And that is among the reasons why the Department of Justice established our office. That is also a reason we investigated efforts to obstruct the investigation. The matters we investigated were of paramount importance. It was critical for us to obtain full and accurate information from every person we questioned. When a subject of an investigation obstructs that investigation or lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of their government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.

Let me say a word about the report. The report has two parts, addressing the two main issues we were asked to investigate. The first volume of the report details numerous efforts emanating from Russia to influence the election. This volume includes a discussion of the Trump campaign’s response to this activity, as well as our conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy. And in the second volume, the report describes the results and analysis of our obstruction of justice investigation involving the president.

The order appointing me special counsel authorized us to investigate actions that could obstruct the investigation. We conducted that investigation, and we kept the office of the acting attorney general apprised of the progress of our work. And as set forth in the report, after that investigation, if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.

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The introduction to the Volume II of our report explains that decision. It explains that under longstanding department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that, too, is prohibited. A special counsel’s office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider. The department’s written opinion explaining the policy makes several important points that further informed our handling of the obstruction investigation. Those points are summarized in our report, and I will describe two of them for you.

First, the opinion explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president, because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents available. Among other things, that evidence could be used if there were co-conspirators who could be charged now.

And second, the opinion says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing. And beyond department policy, we were guided by principles of fairness. It would be unfair to potentially — it would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.

So that was Justice Department policy. Those were the principles under which we operated. And from them, we concluded that we would not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime. That is the office’s final position, and we will not comment on any other conclusions or hypotheticals about the president. We conducted an independent criminal investigation and reported the results to the attorney general, as required by department regulations.

The attorney general then concluded that it was appropriate to provide our report to Congress and to the American people. At one point in time, I requested that certain portions of the report be released and the attorney general preferred to make — preferred to make the entire report public all at once and we appreciate that the attorney general made the report largely public. And I certainly do not question the attorney general’s good faith in that decision.

Now, I hope and expect this to be the only time that I will speak to you in this manner. I am making that decision myself. No one has told me whether I can or should testify or speak further about this matter. There has been discussion about an appearance before Congress. Any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report. It contains our findings and analysis and the reasons for the decisions we made. We chose those words carefully, and the work speaks for itself. And the report is my testimony. I would not provide information beyond that which is already public in any appearance before Congress. In addition, access to our underlying work product is being decided in a process that does not involve our office.

So beyond what I’ve said here today and what is contained in our written work, I do not believe it is appropriate for me to speak further about the investigation or to comment on the actions of the Justice Department or Congress. And it’s for that reason I will not be taking questions today, as well.

Now, before I step away, I want to thank the attorneys, the F.B.I. agents, the analysts, the professional staff who helped us conduct this investigation in a fair and independent manner. These individuals who spent nearly two years with the special counsel’s office were of the highest integrity. And I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments, that there were multiple, systemic efforts to interfere in our election. And that allegation deserves the attention of every American. Thank you. Thank you for being here today.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Mueller speaks for the ‘only time.’ Many Americans didn’t hear an ending.

He was, as ever, stolid, serious, sober. He spoke in clipped, cautious sentences. He said he was not saying a single thing beyond what he’d written in his report.

Yet when Robert Swan Mueller III finally spoke Wednesday, breaking two years of silence, he delivered a nine-minute soliloquy that seemed as powerful an invitation to impeachment of the president as anyone has delivered to date.

The special counsel who examined Russia’s effort to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election repeatedly said that this was the end — his final act in a position from which he is now resigning, his last words about President Trump’s possible role in obstructing his investigation, his ultimate conclusion that there would be no criminal charges against Trump.

But Mueller’s statement, read with dampened expression, his eyes cast down at a script, sounded to many like a call to action — to Congress to consider his findings about Trump’s behavior and to the American people to pay closer attention to “multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election.”

Intent on going out on his own terms, Mueller insisted repeatedly that his report was his final word. “The report is my testimony,” he said, seeming to decline an invitation to testify to Congress. Yet he had clearly concluded that he needed to say something beyond what was in his 448 pages of written work. “I hope and expect this to be the only time that I will speak to you in this manner,” Mueller said.

But from the halls of Congress to millions of screens across the country, Mueller’s statement, delivered in a half-empty Justice Department briefing room, was received as anything but an ending.

In some quarters, there was a reflexive retreat to the battle stations of the past two years. Congressional Democrats heard Mueller punting the ball to them, for action on the obstruction charges that Mueller did not bring. The president, reacting by tweet, countered with a declaration: “There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent. The case is closed!”

On cable news, the nation’s separate perceptions of reality were reflected in dueling chyrons.

Fox News: “Mueller: There was insufficient evidence to charge broader conspiracy.”

CNN: “Mueller: ‘If we had confidence the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.’ ”

But many Americans, listening to live special reports across all media, heard Mueller say that although “a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office,” the Russians’ efforts to interfere in the 2016 election “deserves the attention of every American.”

Mueller, 74, was the adult in the room, sternly reminding the nation to step aside from the partisan fray and focus on the threat to democracy. He delivered his message in the way he has conducted his career — by the book, in a code designed to inform rather than inflame.

Anyone expecting the special counsel to let his hair down and speak from the heart about what he really thought of Trump did not know who Mueller is. A decorated Marine, a career prosecutor who wears a white shirt to work every day, Mueller rose through the government and became FBI director and a valued adviser to presidents of both parties not by speaking his mind but by proving his reserve.

Until now, Mueller had played the role of the sphinx of the capital. For two years, his silence flew in the face of a Washington political culture that feeds on jolts of Twitter adrenaline and cable cacophony. Mueller sightings were infrequent and frustratingly uncontroversial: Here he was at the Apple store getting his device fixed. There he was at Reagan National Airport’s infamously hectic Gate 35X, being totally calm. There were sightings at church on Sunday morning, at his favorite restaurant in American University Park, all empty calories.

For many months, the nation heard Mueller’s voice only through the imagination of Robert De Niro’s depiction of the special counsel as a humorless stiff on “Saturday Night Live.”

Now, when he finally spoke, Mueller did so in a voice thinned by age, but strong in its controlled rectitude. If Mueller’s words seemed opaque, if he appeared to be more concerned about following Justice Department rules than about seeking to hold an alleged lawbreaker-in-chief to account, he nonetheless sent his message with a clarity heard at both ends of the polarized field that is Trump’s America.

Mueller “today characterized the president as someone who committed crimes,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a candidate for president. Mueller’s message, Swalwell said, was that but for Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president, he would have indicted Trump.

“The ball is in our court, Congress,” tweeted Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), the lone House Republican to have concluded that Trump “engaged in impeachable conduct.”

Other Republicans agreed that, as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) put it, “the report speaks for itself,” interpreting the document through the president’s eyes: “The case is over,” Graham said. “A possible obstruction case was a hodgepodge of complicated facts and law.”

Speaking directly across from portraits of Trump, Vice President Pence and Attorney General William P. Barr, Mueller declared that he had provided all the clarity he could. The rest would remain with Congress. This would be his single and final statement. He seemed determined to demonstrate that he meant it.

After Mueller finished, a reporter tried to elicit something beyond the written statement, but the special counsel said, “No questions,” turned, and strode out of the room.

#Resist

[Lois]

Not only do we need to impeach, but Congress needs to pass anti corruption  laws.

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

[Athos_131]

The most damaging part of Trump’s response to the Mueller report

One of the least discussed but perhaps most consequential comments by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during his appearance before reporters this week was his blunt counterintelligence assessment: “Russian intelligence officers, who are part of the Russian military, launched a concerted attack on our political system.”

Here’s why this judgment is so important: The U.S. military, backed by Mueller’s findings and those of the intelligence community, has responded by developing a tough new doctrine to counter cyberattacks by Russia and other rivals. The premise is that our adversaries are engaged in constant cyberassaults against us and that the United States should adopt a strategy of “persistent engagement.”

What this means, basically, is that the United States is now in a low-level state of cyberwar, constantly.

This military response to cyber­meddling is entirely independent of the usual headline-grabbing issues that surround Mueller’s report, or President Trump’s angry tweets about it, or whether the House of Representatives will launch an impeachment investigation into whether the president obstructed justice. Those political debates will continue, but meanwhile, the military is taking the offensive in dealing with the threat that surfaced so dramatically in the 2016 presidential election.

Driving this new strategy is U.S. Cyber Command, the nexus of the military’s efforts to combat and deter adversaries — from terrorist groups to Russia and China. It keeps a low profile, but it’s worth examining some of its basic policy statements to get a clearer picture of a conflict that most Americans don’t understand, even after more than two years of media fixation on issues surrounding Russian interference.

Cyber Command initially stated its new strategy in a 2018 directive that had the classically opaque title “Achieve and Maintain Cyberspace Superiority.” The central theme was that the military cyberwarriors would take the fight into enemy networks (and the gray zones in between): “We have learned we must stop attacks before they penetrate our cyber defenses or impair our military forces.”

Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of Cyber Command, added more detail during an interview with Joint Force Quarterly earlier this year. He explained the challenge of “defending forward” in the new state of persistent engagement: “How do we warn, how do we influence our adversaries, how do we position ourselves in case we have to achieve outcomes in the future? Acting is the concept of operating outside our borders, being outside our networks, to ensure that we understand what our adversaries are doing.”

The new doctrine was debated at a May 10 Cyberspace Strategy Symposium convened by Cyber Command at the National Defense University in Washington. The ground rules of the debate prohibit quoting any of the speakers by name, but various experts discussed the rules of the new, ongoing war in cyberspace and whether this continuous, invisible struggle will produce stability and deterrence, or not.

A senior U.S. military officer told the group that cyberwar means deploying U.S. teams abroad, sharing tradecraft and helping allies build resilience. He described persistent engagement as watching and stalking: “Never let your adversary have a moment to hide, breathe, stop.” As with any military operation, the goal would be “imposing cost,” he said. “Adversaries, until checked, will keep advancing.”

These are big, untested ideas, and a much-needed public discussion is just beginning about how these norms of persistent conflict will work. Michael P. Fischerkeller and Richard J. Harknett argued April 15 on Lawfare that what has emerged in cyberspace isn’t deterrence but “agreed competition,” with “a tacit agreement among states that they will actively pursue national interests through cyber operations . . . while carefully avoiding the equivalence of armed attack.”

James N. Miller and Neal A. Pollard countered on Lawfare that deterrence might work in this new domain, as a kind of “adaptive learning.” They cited published reports that Cyber Command disrupted Russian cyberwarriors before the 2018 midterm elections. They concluded: Risks to the United States “appear to have been reduced, with no apparent blowback or other immediate downsides.”

The bottom line, Miller and Pollard argued, is that “effective signaling through military actions . . . should ultimately reduce the risk for dangerous escalation.”

Reviewing this strategic debate, I worry that Russian actions in cyberspace look more like intelligence operations than strategic military activities. They exist in a semi-deniable, hard-to-attribute gray area. They’re closer to James Angleton’s “wilderness of mirrors” than Herman Kahn’s “escalation ladder.” If so, a military approach may not fit.

Of all Trump’s responses to the Mueller investigation, the most damaging may be the way he played down Russian covert intrusion in our elections and accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claims of innocence. Fortunately, Cyber Command isn’t making the same mistake.

#Resist