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

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The Mueller Report Demands an Impeachment Inquiry

Here is, as Bill Barr might call it, “the bottom line”: The Mueller Report describes, in excruciating detail and with relatively few redactions, a candidate and a campaign aware of the existence of a plot by a hostile foreign government to criminally interfere in the U.S. election for the purpose of supporting that candidate’s side. It describes a candidate and a campaign who welcomed the efforts and delighted in the assistance. It describes a candidate and a campaign who brazenly and serially lied to the American people about the existence of the foreign conspiracy and their contacts with it. And yet, it does not find evidence to support a charge of criminal conspiracy, which requires not just a shared purpose but a meeting of the minds.

Here is the other bottom line: The Mueller Report describes a president who, on numerous occasions, engaged in conduct calculated to hinder a federal investigation. It finds ample evidence that at least a portion of that conduct met all of the statutory elements of criminal obstruction of justice. In some of the instances in which all of the statutory elements of obstruction are met, the report finds no persuasive constitutional or factual defenses. And yet, it declines to render a judgment on whether the president has committed a crime.

Now, the House must decide what to do with these facts. If it wants to actually confront the substance of the report, it will introduce a resolution to begin an impeachment inquiry.

So far, House members haven’t shown much appetite to do so. Republicans seem prepared to just put this unpleasantness behind them—at least those who aren’t launching crusades to “investigate the investigators.” On the Democratic side, there is a clear reticence in the  leadership to initiate impeachment proceedings that might politically backfire. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer even suggested shortly after the report came out that his party should instead focus on the 2020 election, though he later walked those statements back. There are a few exceptions—for example, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said she’d sign onto a previously introduced impeachment resolution. And on the other side of the Hill, 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared that members of Congress should “do their constitutional duty” in initiating impeachment proceedings. But by and large the response has been muted.

The problem with this approach is that, under the current system, the options for checking a president who abuses his power to the degree that Trump has are functionally impeachment proceedings or nothing.

There are many factors here, but the main culprit is the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)’s 2000 memo against the indictment of a sitting president—which itself builds on a 1973 OLC memo, drafted during Watergate, which reached the same conclusion.

The 2000 memo played a key role in shaping Mueller’s decision not to reach a traditional prosecutorial judgment on the issue of presidential obstruction of justice. But while it was reasonable for the special counsel’s office to consider itself bound by OLC’s reasoning, it produces a baffling end result: Mueller is barred, as he understands it, from reaching the point in his analysis at which he would make a call as to prosecution or declination of obstruction. Indeed, he will not even say explicitly whether he believes that the president has committed crimes. He is clear, however, that if he could exonerate Trump on the basis of the available evidence, he would do so. And he isn’t doing so. This means that, by Mueller’s read, it is only possible for an investigation to exonerate the president consistent with the OLC memo—he cannot be charged and uncharged crimes must remain unspoken.

Mueller’s solution is to pass the question to Congress. He isn’t especially subtle in doing so. He notes that “a federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would … potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct,” then flags in a footnote the Constitution’s clauses on impeachment and the OLC opinion’s discussion of the “relationship between impeachment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.” In other words, he is saying that while he is not permitted to determine if the president committed a crime, Congress can judge the president’s conduct itself.

The relevant section of the OLC memo reasons that “the constitutionally specified impeachment process ensures that the immunity would not place the President ‘above the law.’” This is worth dwelling on: the Office of Legal Counsel found that ruling out presidential liability for criminal conduct was not a threat to the rule of law because of the availability of impeachment as a remedy. But if impeachment is presumptively off the table in the face of facts as extreme as those the Mueller Report contains, then it’s reasonable to ask whether impeachment is truly available at all where members of the president’s party in the Senate comprise a sufficient number to block removal. In other words, does the current situation prove that impeachment is not the capacity of one branch to check another but rather a crude measure of party votes? If so, it would seem that the OLC’s reasoning falls apart—at least in practical, if not theoretical, terms.

Currently, there are bad incentives on both sides of the aisle. Republicans don’t want to touch the matter because the president is a member of their party. His agenda aligns with theirs on many issues, and they fear angering his base in a way that might imperil their own reelection. Democrats, on the other hand, are worried that initiating impeachment proceedings will offer the president a rallying point for his base, and allow Republicans to paint them as fanatics out to get Trump at all costs. Besides, the thinking goes, Democratic base voters want to discuss policy issues that impact their lives, not perseverate on the many president’s sins.

The problem is that impeachment isn’t a purely political matter—though certainly it is political in part. It’s a constitutional expression of the separation of powers, of Congress’s ability to check a chief executive overrunning the bounds of his power. It’s also, under the OLC memo, the only release valve in the constitutional structure for the urgent and mounting pressure of an executive who may have committed serious wrongdoing. To say that the appropriate course is to simply wait for the next presidential election in 18 months, is to offer a judgment that—even in light of his conduct as described by Mueller—Trump is not truly unfit for the office. It is to say he is no different from, say, Vice President Mike Pence, who would take his place, or any other Republican for that matter. It is to say that what matters is winning elections, even if it risks further institutional harms.

There is a danger to this mode of thinking, which is that Democrats should tolerate the institutional harms that would come from not initiating a serious impeachment inquiry because what really matters is winning the 2020 election. When you convince yourself that the best way to safeguard the republic is for your side to win, it gets tempting to tolerate all kinds of intolerable things. It is the precise calculus many congressional Republicans have made in supporting Trump despite his degradations of his office. The Constitution does not mandate that Congress initiate impeachment proceedings each time it is faced with an impeachable offense—but that doesn’t let Congress off the hook in carrying out its constitutional responsibilities, either. Each member swears an oath to defend the Constitution and “well and faithfully” execute the duties of her office.

Though hard questions remain about whether President Trump should be impeached and whether the evidence would be sufficient for the Senate to convict him, these are not questions that need to be answered at this stage. Congress’s responsibility at this point is to begin an impeachment inquiry as a means of finding an answer to them. And Mueller has provided more than enough information to justify initiating an inquiry: the report sets out evidence of possible criminal wrongdoing by the president during his time in office related to abuse of power, which is at the dead center of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” impeachment is designed to check. Though most scholars agree that violating the law is not necessary for impeachment, Congress included allegations of such conduct in articles of impeachment against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton—all three times the legislature seriously contemplated impeaching the president. In Nixon and Clinton’s case, the articles specifically concerned criminal behavior, including obstruction of justice. What’s more, the Mueller report itself suggests a possible hook for impeachment in indicating that the “corrupt intent” necessary for an obstruction offense would also violate the president’s obligation to “faithfully execute” the laws under the Take Care Clause.

In the face of this evidence, for Congress to not even consider impeachment as a matter of serious inquiry is to declare that the legislature is not interested in its carrying out its institutional obligations as a coordinate branch of government.

The House judiciary committee would be charged with the responsibility of overseeing impeachment proceedings. But so far, Chairman Jerry Nadler has focused his energy on issuing subpoenas to the Justice Department in order to obtain the full, unredacted report—requests that the Justice Department is now batting back, and which seem likely to lead to a protracted political fight between the department and Capitol Hill. It’s all well and good for Congress to want to see an unredacted copy of the document Mueller put together. At this point, though, the decision to focus energy over redactions risks distracting from the devastating material already on the table. It’s another variation of Congress’s insistence on delaying any decision on impeachment until Mueller had issued his report—a way of kicking the can down the road and punting the hard decisions to a future date, this time to whenever the committee peels back the report’s remaining redactions.

But Congress cannot forestall the inevitable forever. Eventually it will face the task the Constitution commits to the legislative branch, which is to render a judgment. In the wake of Mueller revelations, to not act is to accept the president’s conduct as tolerable—be it for 18 more months or four more years.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

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[Athos_131]

Giuliani Attacks McGahn’s Account to Mueller

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, attacked the credibility of a former White House counsel on Friday, saying his account of how Mr. Trump told him to remove the special counsel was inaccurate.

Mr. Giuliani’s statement was the most extensive pushback by the president’s lawyers against the former counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, who cooperated extensively with the special counsel’s investigators. The report detailing the findings of the investigation, released on Thursday, also included several damning examples of how Mr. Trump tried to interfere with the investigation, like Mr. McGahn’s account.

“It can’t be taken at face value,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview. “It could be the product of an inaccurate recollection or could be the product of something else.”

Mr. McGahn’s lawyer, William A. Burck, pushed back on Mr. Giuliani’s attack.

“It’s a mystery why Rudy Giuliani feels the need to relitigate incidents the attorney general and deputy attorney general have concluded were not obstruction,” Mr. Burck said. “But they are accurately described in the report.”

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, examined a wide range of actions that Mr. Trump took as president that could be considered obstruction of justice. Investigators relied heavily on Mr. McGahn, who provided detailed accounts of what Mr. Trump did and said behind closed doors as he tried to maintain control over the Russia investigation.

Among the damaging episodes was one based largely on Mr. McGahn that laid out how Mr. Trump told him in June 2017 to have Mr. Mueller ousted because he had several conflict of interest issues. Mr. McGahn believed the conflicts had little merit and told senior White House officials that he was going to resign instead of carrying out Mr. Trump’s order.

Mr. Giuliani said that the president never asked Mr. McGahn to have Mr. Mueller removed, adding that Mr. Trump was simply venting about his frustrations with the special counsel’s investigation, which had cast a cloud over his presidency.

“If it were subject to cross-examination or analysis, it would be a different version,” Mr. Giuliani said.

On the day Mr. McGahn threatened to quit, Mr. Burck told him to hold back on telling other White House officials about what the president was asking him to do. Mr. Burck wanted to stop Mr. McGahn from roping other White House officials into the obstruction of justice investigation and from creating the impression that Mr. McGahn was willing to help Mr. Trump oust Mr. Mueller.

Because Mr. McGahn mainly discussed the issue with Mr. Burck, there are not many witnesses to back him up. In an effort to substantiate Mr. McGahn’s credibility, Mr. Mueller’s team obtained Mr. McGahn’s phone records from the episode. Although Mr. McGahn told investigators that there were two conversations he had with Mr. Trump, the records show only one call, according the report.

“While McGahn was not certain of the specific dates of the calls,” the report said, “McGahn was confident that he had at least two phone conversations with the president in which the president directed him to call the acting attorney general to have the special counsel removed.”

The report said that investigators accepted Mr. McGahn’s account because he was “a credible witness with no motive to lie or exaggerate given the position he held in the White House.”

In attacking Mr. McGahn, Mr. Giuliani went further than the president had earlier Friday, when he walked up to the line of calling Mr. McGahn out on Twitter. Mr. Trump posted that “statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue.”

“Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed,” the president tweeted.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Giuliani: 'There's nothing wrong with taking information from Russians'

Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani said while he would have advised the Trump campaign to avoid Russian help, he thought there was nothing wrong with a campaign taking information from Russia.

"There's nothing wrong with taking information from Russians," Giuliani said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."

Asked by CNN's Jake Tapper if he would have taken information from a foreign source, Giuliani said, "I probably wouldn't."

"I wasn't asked," Giuliani said. "I would have advised, just out of excess of caution, don't do it."

Giuliani's comments came in an extended rebuttal to Utah GOP Sen. Mitt Romney, who issued a statement Friday saying he was "sickened" by the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller's recently released report.

The former New York mayor -- and 2008 presidential candidate in a GOP field that included Romney -- said Romney should "stop the bull," but conceded he did not know that Romney accepted information from foreign sources.

Romney, in his statement Friday, said he took issue with both the dishonesty documented in the Mueller report and that "fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia."

"Reading the report is a sobering revelation of how far we have strayed from the aspirations and principles of the founders," Romney said.

Former US Attorney Preet Bharara, a CNN legal analyst, said in a separate interview during the same program that he hoped Giuliani would retract his statement.

"The idea that it is OK, separate and apart from it being a criminal offense, that we should be telling future candidates in the run-up to an election in 2020 that if an adversary, a foreign adversary, is offering information against a political opponent, that it's okay and right and proper and American and patriotic, it seems he's saying, to take that information and that's okay -- that's an extraordinary statement and I would hope he would retract it," Bharara said.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The Mueller Report Is a Challenge for Democracy to Solve

It would be hard to imagine a scenario that casts harsher light on the limits of American governance than the aftermath of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s report—or one that demonstrates how lucky the country is that he chose to make the resulting mess a problem for democracy to solve.

Mature democracies must balance two contending imperatives. One is to permit regular and serious monitoring of government, especially the executive with its ever-expanding authorities. The other is to keep that monitoring from becoming just another mode of political opposition. This is especially fraught at a moment across the world in which political elites—inside and outside of government—are repeatedly scandalized by choices the people seem to be making at the ballot boxes. What if we creatively interpret Mueller’s handiwork as responding to precisely this dilemma?

In recent decades, Congress has mostly failed to create a durable monitoring regime. The 9/11 Commission—created by Congress by statute and with presidential approval to assess the failures that led to so much exposure to terrorist attack—is a rare counterexample to dithering, in part because it had bipartisan and cross-branch support. But since Watergate, Congress’s other attempts to learn the truth of various unsavory episodes itself have been spotty and uneven, especially when politics are polarized and truth is in the eye of the beholder. And so the country has regularly turned to special counsels, operating under different models of authority, to shine a light where the public needs illumination and when journalism is not enough.

The trouble is that special counsels, not least when they take seriously their charge of smoking out crimes, are not well situated to assess broader patterns of governance. And if they are partisan and reckless, like Ken Starr in his endless and wayward hunt for Bill Clinton’s criminality, they can suck up years of the country’s time (and spend a lot of its money) while bringing democratic self-governance to a screeching halt. Worst of all is the risk that the need to investigate criminal activity, sometimes at the highest levels, will become a pretext for opponents of a democratically elected president to thwart the people’s will. Audiences and commentators pining for two years for an easy out to Donald Trump’s presidency through a Mueller ex machina—even if many came to understand long ago that his report would never provide it—demonstrate that this risk is hardly a minor one.

In this situation, Mueller’s genius was to recognize, after he thoroughly investigated the matter, that sticking closely to what he could criminally charge would primarily expose not the president but the country’s failure to devise better institutions for such situations

True, the bumbling charlatan of a president received Russian help throughout the campaign and his associates sidled up to Russian contacts, even if they were not competent to organize a serious conspiracy. The fact remains, of course, that bots hardly caused 60 million Americans to vote for Trump. It is also debatable how much they helped assemble the necessary voters in swing states, who need better parties and more plausible programs if they are not going to repeat their feckless behavior. Nor do Mueller’s revelations alter the reality that, in post-truth times, the Russia hack of the Democratic National Committee—though illegal in origins—revealed disturbing facts.

The already much-debated obstruction section of Mueller’s report is brilliantly constructed to allow various interpretations of what precisely the prosecutor thought when it comes to the president’s malfeasance. Mueller leaves it open to Congress to decide whether to impeach the president for obstruction of justice (or more if it can, especially since no federal official in American history has ever been impeached for obstruction alone). And, whatever his intentions, Mueller also allowed for Attorney General William Barr to conclude that one reason for Trump’s erratic and excessive attempts to put a stop to the investigation after it launched was that it was indeed shot through with the appearance and reality of partisans cheering it on and undermining the people’s choice – what Barr called the “sincere belief that the investigation was … propelled by his political opponents.” Neither Barr’s letter, nor the report itself, appears to have changed many people’s minds. And this suggests that Mueller was wise to conclude that the facts before him could not end polarization, but instead would only provide fodder for both sides.

Mueller probably flinched at outright identifying illegality on the president’s part or recommending impeachment, since the very job he was sent to do brought him to the brink of a fearful step in a democracy, even for a hard-bitten prosecutor. But perhaps he also saw opportunity in  the very fact that his report was going to be sucked into a partisan maelstrom. If you cannot acknowledge that it is enormously difficult for governance both to allow investigating elected authorities and to keep investigations from becoming politics by other means, then you are a partisan on one side or the other, uninterested in balancing these contending needs and finding better institutions for the future. Mueller’s approach was to leave the country to work it out, or live with the sad result.

Democrats in Congress could investigate further—or even just impeach Trump based on what Mueller revealed. But it is doubtful any Republicans will join either cause, for better or worse. More important, if Congressional sequels provide continuing distraction from the crying need in both parties to reorient themselves, it would be a tragedy. Mueller’s report can be read as an impeachment referral, but it is as much or more an act of democracy promotion, especially since impeachment is unlikely to achieve more than entrenchment of enmity and distraction from policy.

The power to arraign the president reflects the genuine risk of bad executive behavior. But treating the tools of constitutional governance—on however high-minded a principle—as an attack on political enemies as a pretext for avoiding hard looks at the policies that divide Americans is equally risky. So many already voted for Trump in full knowledge of his actions and character that it is unlikely that further emphasis on his corruption is a viable electoral strategy. Only finding out what a majority of voters really cares about is. This isn’t to say that there are no imaginable circumstances in which the best path would be to impeach or even indict the president. But Mueller appears to have concluded that the future of the country does not depend so much on doing so this time as on letting democracy do its work when it comes to Trump, and doing better in the future with squaring the circle of accountability and partisanship.

We can count ourselves fortunate that Mueller left us where we always ought to have known we are. Americans have a democracy, not only if we can keep it safe from threats, but also if we want to practice it by engaging with our fellow citizens. We also have a governance problem when it comes to those who win power along the way, if we ever want to solve it.

#Resist

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#Resist

[psiberzerker]

'There's nothing wrong with taking information from Russians'

No, but taking Intelligence from Putin over our own Intelligence when he says that there's totally no interference from his end smacks of a Conflict of Interest.  Even if you're deluded enough to take Trump's word for Putin's word for Russian Intelligence, you have to think that Our agencies are more invested in Our security than Oligarchs in bed with Russian mobsters, and hackers.

Consider the source.  Consider sources overseas like that with Our sources, but where they conflict, I'm going to stick with the side with a vested interest in Our security, over a president that continues to side with our Enemy's.

[Athos_131]

As Russia probe began, Trump called on spy chiefs for help

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two months before special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed in the spring of 2017, President Donald Trump picked up the phone and called the head of the largest U.S. intelligence agency. Trump told Mike Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, that news stories alleging that Trump’s 2016 White House campaign had ties to Russia were false and the president asked whether Rogers could do anything to counter them.

Rogers and his deputy Richard Ledgett, who was present for the call, were taken aback.

Afterward, Ledgett wrote a memo about the conversation and Trump’s request. He and Rogers signed it and stashed it in a safe. Ledgett said it was the “most unusual thing he had experienced in 40 years of government service.”

Trump’s outreach to Rogers, who retired last year, and other top intelligence officials stands in sharp contrast to his public, combative stance toward his intelligence agencies. At the time of the call, Trump was just some 60 days into his presidency, but he already had managed to alienate large parts of the intelligence apparatus with comments denigrating the profession.

Since then, Trump only has dug in. He said at a news conference in Helsinki after his 2017 summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin that he gave weight to Putin’s denial that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, despite the firm conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that it had. “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia, Trump said. And earlier this year, Trump called national security assessments “naive,” tweeting “perhaps intelligence should go back to school.”

Yet in moments of concern as Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election got underway, Trump turned to his spy chiefs for help.

The phone call to Rogers on March 26, 2017, came only weeks after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had angered Trump by stepping aside from the investigation. James Comey, the FBI director who would be fired that May, had just told Congress that the FBI was not only investigating Russian meddling in the election, but also possible links or coordination between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

The call to Rogers and others like it were uncovered by Mueller as he investigated possible obstruction. In his 448-page report released Thursday, Mueller concluded that while Trump attempted to seize control of the Russia investigation and bring it to a halt, the president was ultimately thwarted by those around him.

The special counsel said the evidence did not establish that Trump asked or directed intelligence officials to “stop or interfere with the FBI’s Russia investigation.” The requests to those officials, Mueller said, “were not interpreted by the officials who received them as directives to improperly interfere with the investigation.”

During the call to Rogers, the president “expressed frustration with the Russia investigation, saying that it made relations with the Russians difficult,” according to the report.

Trump said news stories linking him with Russia were not true and he asked Rogers “if he could do anything to refute the stories.” Even though Rogers signed the memo about the conversation and put it in a safe, he told investigators he did not think Trump was giving him an order.

Trump made a number of similar requests of other top intelligence officials.

On March 22, 2017, Trump asked then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo and National Intelligence Director Dan Coats to stay behind after a meeting at the White House to ask if the men could “say publicly that no link existed between him and Russia,” the report said.

In two other instances, the president began meetings to discuss sensitive intelligence matters by stating he hoped a media statement could be issued saying there was no collusion with Russia.

After Trump repeatedly brought up the Russia investigation with his national intelligence director, “Coats said he finally told the President that Coats’s job was to provide intelligence and not get involved in investigations,” the report said.

Pompeo recalled that Trump regularly urged officials to get the word out that he had not done anything wrong related to Russia. But Pompeo, now secretary of state, said he had no recollection of being asked to stay behind after the March 22 meeting, according to the report.

Coats told Mueller’s investigators that Trump never asked him to speak with Comey about the FBI investigation. But other employees within Coats’ office had different recollections of how Coats described the meeting immediately after it occurred.

According to the report, senior staffer Michael Dempsey “said that Coats described the president’s comments as falling ‘somewhere between musing about hating the investigation’ and wanting Coats to ‘do something to stop it.’ Dempsey said Coats made it clear that he would not get involved with an ongoing FBI investigation.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

If Impeaching Trump Is Pointless, Then Bipartisanship Is Worthless

The president of the United States routinely orders his subordinates to subvert the law. He believes that the Justice Department should comport itself as his personal detective agency — and that the attorney general’s first responsibility is to protect the White House from legal accountability. And he has used one of his office’s most extraordinary powers — the authority to pardon convicted criminals — to undermine a federal investigation.

These realities were already apparent before Robert Mueller’s report was released Thursday. But they have now been formally confirmed by federal law enforcement. The branch of government responsible for enforcing the rule of law is led by a man with contempt for that very concept. Congress’s constitutional obligation in this circumstance is unambiguous. The president swore to “faithfully execute” the duties of his office. He has not. Thus, Congress should evict him from that office.

This would be true even if Donald Trump displayed no inclination to persist in his lawlessness. But he is displaying the opposite. Impeachment is therefore required not merely to punish the president for his past indiscretions — or to deter a future president from emulating them — but to halt the rampage of a serial offender. During his press conference (and/or lurid apologia for the president) on Thursday, Attorney General William Barr suggested that Trump’s various attempts to undermine the Russia investigation were understandable responses to an unprecedented situation. But the president does not defy the law exclusively in self-defense. Just this month, Trump fired the secretary of Homeland Security because she refused to entertain extralegal options for deterring undocumented immigration. More audaciously, the president also (reportedly) instructed Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan to deny Central American families their legal right to seek asylum — and promised to pardon the CBP chief should anyone try to hold him accountable for this crime.

There is no defensible argument against impeaching this kind of president as a substantive matter. The only debate worth having concerns the political merits of such an endeavor.

House Democrats appear to believe that, in the present context, upholding their constitutional duty — by voting to remove a lawless president from office — would be politically unwise. Their reasoning goes something like this: Recent polls suggest a majority of the public wants Congress to “move on” from the Trump-Russia saga and opposes impeachment. Meanwhile, the impeachment process would eat up precious space in the legislative calendar, which could otherwise be used to hold public hearings on more politically resonant aspects of executive-branch malfeasance, and pass popular legislative proposals. And, most important, there is every reason to believe that a push for impeachment will end with the Senate acquitting the president. Which is to say: To the extent that the impeachment process would register at all with low-information swing voters, it would likely register as an unresolved partisan squabble. Trump’s malfeasance is surely a political asset for Democrats. But the president’s lawlessness isn’t subtle. Anyone who is willing and able to see that Trump is a crook already has. Better then to focus the party’s messaging on bread-and-butter issues that might speak to voters who are indifferent to Trump’s corruption.

I’m not sure that I accept this argument. But it strikes me as plausible. And if we stipulate that the president is a criminal (in spirit, if not legally provable fact) — and that Senate Republicans are, nevertheless, opposed to removing him from office — then the Democrats’ overriding civic obligation is to maximize the probability of their victory in 2020. All else being equal, it is more important to actually remove a would-be autocrat from office than to formally demonstrate one’s commitment to doing so.

All of this said, if House Democrats are taking the position that the Republican Party is so corrupt — and our system of checks and balances so obsolete — it isn’t even worth trying to uphold their constitutional responsibility to impeach a lawless president, then they need to acknowledge the radical implications of that stance.

If there is no bipartisan consensus on upholding the rule of law, then bipartisan consensus is not an end worth pursuing. If the Republican Party can’t be trusted to even consider putting its allegiance to lawfulness above its fealty to Donald Trump, then the GOP is a cancer on the body politic. And if our Constitution has brought us to the point where a non-democratically elected president can promise “Get Out of Jail Free” cards to anyone who violates laws he does not like — without facing any serious threat of removal from office — then our Constitution is obsolete and there is no cause for treating that document, or the established norms of our institutions, with reflexive reverence.

This is not an idle point. In recent weeks, many moderate Democratic senators have argued that their party should never abolish the legislative filibuster — because the Senate’s 60-vote threshold is a well-established institution that combats political polarization by forcing lawmakers to embrace bipartisan compromise. This argument fails on its own terms: The automatic 60-vote requirement for nearly all legislation is an invention of the 21st century, and its establishment has not coincided with a golden era of bipartisan compromise, but rather of gridlock and dysfunction.

But let’s ignore that for a minute. Let’s say the legislative filibuster (as it currently exists) is an age-old institution. Let’s say it effectively requires all major legislation to have some measure of bipartisan buy-in. If our established institutions have proved incapable of disciplining a president who disrespects the law, why should we presume the propriety of those institutions? And if there is no bipartisan consensus against allowing Republican presidents to flout the law, then what good is bipartisan consensus? Why should Democrats be compelled to forever and always give the GOP input on making laws when the two parties do not even share a commitment to the rule of law?

In other words, congressional Democrats’ fatalism about impeachment — and their reverence for institutional norms and the ideal of bipartisanship — are irreconcilable. And that has implications for much more than the debate over filibuster reform. It implies that commitment to small-r republican values requires prioritizing the GOP’s disempowerment over the preservation of institutional norms. If Democrats have the power to reduce the Republicans’ structural advantage in the Senate by granting statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico on a party-line vote, they must do this. If the conservative judges continue to abet the GOP’s efforts to insulate itself from popular rebuke through voter suppression and gerrymandering, then Democrats must be prepared to reform the judiciary.

Democrats can insist that impeachment is a hopeless cause. And they can sing paeans to congressional norms and bipartisan comity. But if they do both, they will confirm that their party is just another one of our republic’s failing institutions.

#Resist

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To Defend Against a Mercurial Boss, Trump Aides Wield the Pen as Shield

WASHINGTON — President Trump glanced around the room and noticed Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, then his national security adviser, with his head bent over a notebook, scribbling something down.

General McMaster was a prolific note-taker, recording details for later reference, a practice that hardly seemed unusual to someone in charge of a sprawling national security apparatus. But it enraged Mr. Trump, who one day, according to people in the room, finally snapped at his adviser.

“Why are you always writing in that book?” he demanded.

General McMaster mumbled an answer that no one could recall later, but suffice to say it did not satisfy the president. As the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, made clear last week, Mr. Trump has an allergy to written records of meetings and conversations, some of which have now come back to haunt him.

Time and again, Mr. Trump’s advisers took notes of their interactions with the president or drafted memos immediately afterward to maintain real-time records, in some cases simply to have an accurate understanding to do their jobs better, but in other cases for self-preservation. While aides in past administrations recognized that notes could become public and shied away from recording sensitive information in writing to protect the president, many of Mr. Trump’s aides took pen to paper to protect themselves from the president.

Cliff Sims, a former communications aide to Mr. Trump who wrote the book “Team of Vipers” about his time in the White House, said he and others took notes during meetings with the president to “ensure everyone was echoing his messaging” when they went out to speak for him in public.

“But I do think there’s also a pervasive sense in this White House that at some point you’re going to have to set the record straight or give your perspective on events that took place, or actions you took — or didn’t take — as the case may be,” Mr. Sims said on Sunday.

W. Neil Eggleston, who served as a lawyer for President Bill Clinton and as White House counsel to President Barack Obama, said taking notes in such jobs can be problematic because it creates a record that investigators or political foes can try to obtain and then distort for partisan gain.

“I didn’t take notes when I worked with either president,” he said. “But I thought that was protecting the president, not protecting me. This notion of people taking notes to make sure they’re not part of a criminal conspiracy, that’s something I had never considered. That’s the reason they took these notes. They took these notes to protect themselves.”

Keeping written records or even journals in the White House has been perilous for years, not just because of potential criminal exposure, but also because they can reveal political secrets or embarrassing private thoughts.

Under the Presidential Records Act, documents created in the White House generally must be preserved for archives, including emails, notes of meetings and telephone messages, making them eventually subject to public release to future historians. Events in recent decades made clear they could be forced into the open in real time, too. Both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush had their diaries examined by investigators during the Iran-contra affair.

Mr. Clinton’s team got an early taste of the danger when Joshua L. Steiner, the 28-year-old chief of staff to the Treasury secretary, had his diary made public during the Whitewater investigation in 1994, much to his chagrin since he never intended it to be a precise record. His experience chilled the desire by his colleagues to keep written records because the cost of disclosure and misinterpretation outweighed the benefits.

Indeed, Mr. Clinton himself opted against keeping a diary but found a way around the dilemma by having regular conversations with an old friend, the historian Taylor Branch, who in the car ride home afterward would tape himself recalling what the president had just told him. Likewise, George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Clinton’s senior adviser, dictated his experiences to a friend who would keep them for him.

In the Trump White House, officials not only have kept notes but at times secret audiotapes, as Omarosa Manigault Newman did before she was fired. She later made some of them public and wrote “Unhinged,” a scathing book of her own about Mr. Trump’s West Wing.

“The first time I worked in the White House, for the Clinton administration, we were reluctant to send as many emails or to document so many things,” she said on Sunday. “But in the Trump White House, it is a requirement that you document these things always to protect yourself.”

She said that after some conversations with Mr. Trump, she would go to the White House Counsel’s Office or quickly send an email describing what he requested so that there would be a record. She said she also recorded the requests in writing to the White House staff secretary so that there would be an official presidential record.

For aides, it was a recognition that they were working for a mercurial, truth-bending chief executive who often asked them to do things that crossed ethical or even legal lines, then denied it later. Other current or former advisers, though, said note-taking was often to protect themselves from their fellow aides, more than from the president.

In a White House riven by tribal infighting and given to prolific leaking as a means of waging those battles, notes became a way of guarding against manipulated versions of reality. Then some, of course, were expecting to write books once they left.

Either way, the practice contributed to a corrosive atmosphere of mistrust. As one former White House official put it, the “good guys” took notes to protect themselves, and the “bad guys” did it to make money.

Through a long career in business, Mr. Trump sought to keep people around him silent by requiring nondisclosure agreements. Some associates from that world nonetheless kept records to protect themselves, including Michael D. Cohen, his onetime personal attorney who taped a conversation with Mr. Trump about hush money for a Playboy model alleging a sexual affair with him.

Mr. Mueller’s report included a memorable scene in which the president upbraided his first White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, who was writing down what was said in meetings.

“What about these notes?” Mr. Trump asked. “Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.”

Mr. McGahn said he kept notes because he was a “real lawyer,” explaining that they were not a bad thing.

Mr. Trump was unmoved. “I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn,” he said. “He did not take notes.”

Mr. McGahn’s notes of the conversation about notes, of course, ended up in Mr. Mueller’s hands, as did his notes of times when Mr. Trump tried to order him to fire Mr. Mueller and later lie about it. After Mr. Mueller’s report was released last week, the president lashed out. “Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed,” he wrote on Twitter.

Among those whose notes or memos were obtained by Mr. Mueller were Paul Manafort and Corey Lewandowski, two of Mr. Trump’s campaign managers; George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the campaign; Reince Priebus, Mr. Trump’s first White House chief of staff, and John F. Kelly, his second; and Annie Donaldson, Mr. McGahn’s chief of staff.

Others included James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director fired by the president; Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the former director of the National Security Agency; Rob Porter, the former White House staff secretary; Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to the president; Jody Hunt, the former chief of staff to the attorney general; Tashina Gauhar, a Justice Department lawyer; and Mark Corallo, a former spokesman for the president’s private legal team.

Ms. Donaldson was known as a copious note-taker, whose constant documentation made colleagues anxious. Other aides said they were careful never to record anything while in the White House, but went home and wrote down conversations from earlier in the day to help store them in their memories — and then destroyed their notes before bed.

Mr. Lewandowski kept notes of one key conversation with Mr. Trump in his safe at home, “which he stated was his standard practice with sensitive items,” according to Mr. Mueller’s report. Admiral Rogers’s deputy was so stunned by a phone call that the two had with Mr. Trump about Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election that he memorialized it in a memo signed by both men and stored in a safe.

The reason Mr. Mueller wanted such documents was not particularly surprising. As his report said, “contemporaneous written notes can provide strong corroborating evidence.” Mr. Comey’s memos of his talks with Mr. Trump helped make the former F.B.I. director’s account more credible than the president’s, according to the report.

What was more surprising was that aides would make notes about conversations with the president that could, at least in theory, implicate Mr. Trump — and then continue working in the White House and making more notes of subsequent conversations.

“To create records of information that was quite harmful to the president, that is really remarkable,” Mr. Eggleston said. “And to do it and then stay on and continue to write them, is really something to me.”

#Resist

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Inside the special counsel’s long hunt to uncover whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia

On a cloudy day in early November, the last of conservative writer Jerome Corsi’s six marathon interviews with the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was about to begin. Sitting in a building in Southwest Washington, three prosecutors assigned to his case opened with a lecture.

For more than two months, they had been chasing tantalizing leads offered by Corsi, an associate of Trump confidant Roger Stone who had told them that the longtime GOP operative sought a back channel to WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign.

They had dispatched FBI agents around the country to interview potential witnesses, expending valuable government money and precious time — only to find themselves unable to untangle Corsi’s assertions that Stone knew in advance that WikiLeaks would be releasing emails stolen from the account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.

“No lies, hunches, wishes,” prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky lectured Corsi that day as they sat in a windowless conference room, according to notes taken by Corsi’s lawyer, David Gray. “Hopes do not equal facts. Don’t tell us what you think we want to hear.”

The Yale-educated former Supreme Court clerk pleaded with Corsi: It was “vitally important” that Corsi provide the “truth only,” Zelinsky said.

The trio of top prosecutors had spent weeks coaxing, cajoling and admonishing the conspiracy theorist as they pressed him to stick to facts and not reconstruct stories. At times, they had debated the nature of memory itself.

Once again that day, however, Corsi struggled to answer clearly questions about Stone and WikiLeaks — closing the door on an exhausting final chapter of Mueller’s nearly two-year hunt to determine whether anyone in Trump’s world had coordinated with Russia.

The investigation took the special counsel’s team down several meandering paths, propelled by discoveries of unusual interactions between Trump associates and Russians. Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had shared internal information with an employee assessed by the FBI to have Russian intelligence ties. Foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos was tipped off that the Russians had thousands of Clinton’s emails. Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer who he hoped would offer damaging information about Clinton.

[Mueller’s report paints a portrait of a campaign intrigued by Russian overtures]

In the end, Mueller’s final report, a redacted version of which was released by Attorney General William P. Barr on Thursday, laid out new details about the Russian effort to influence the 2016 campaign through social media and the hacking of Democratic emails, and it offered a rich portrait of Trump’s efforts as president to undermine the investigation and mislead the public.

The 448-page report also revealed the outcome of the long endeavor to determine the relationship between Trump associates and Russia: some unanswered mysteries, a lot of dead ends and, ultimately, a conclusion that the contacts they found did not establish a criminal conspiracy.

Stone has not been charged with serving as a conduit to WikiLeaks, which disseminated material stolen by Russians.

Instead, he was indicted in January for lying to Congress about his efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks. He has pleaded not guilty and has vehemently denied having any knowledge of what WikiLeaks held and the group’s exact plans. Stone has also denounced Corsi’s account as lies.

Corsi announced in November that he had rejected a deal to plead guilty to false statements and accused the special counsel’s office of trying to bully him into lying. He has not been charged with any crime.

A reconstruction of the laborious effort by Mueller’s team to determine whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia shows why it was often a maddeningly difficult task.

Their witnesses were not ideal. A few key players, prosecutors would contend, lied in interviews. Many were loyal to the president and echoed his rhetoric that Mueller’s team was acting in bad faith. Some used encrypted applications with disappearing messages that could not be reviewed. Others were overseas, unreachable to American investigators.

In some cases, their statements were only loosely tethered to the facts.

This account is based on interviews with people who interacted with Mueller’s team, court documents and new details laid out in the special counsel’s report. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.

Open to Russian help
It was the first item in the order that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein issued in May 2017 when he appointed Mueller as special counsel.

As part of his charge, Mueller would take over a preexisting FBI investigation into “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”

The inquiry had begun in late July 2016 after the Australian government contacted the FBI about Papadopoulos. Over drinks at a bar in London, the young Trump aide had confided to an Australian diplomat that the Russian government had thousands of Clinton emails that could damage her candidacy.

By the time Mueller was appointed, the FBI had interviewed Papadopoulos and, according to him, tried unsuccessfully to get him to travel to London and surreptitiously record a conversation with Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor who told him about the Clinton emails. In a 2017 interview with a British newspaper, Mifsud denied knowledge of the emails.

The FBI had also obtained a secret court order allowing them to monitor the communications of former Trump adviser Carter Page, who had traveled to Moscow during the heat of the campaign and interacted there with a Russian government official.

The work came against the backdrop of the publication of a research dossier prepared by a former British intelligence agent and funded by Clinton’s campaign, which claimed that Trump had engaged in a knowing conspiracy with Russia, which Trump dismissed as false.

The special counsel moved quickly on several fronts.

Weeks after Mueller was appointed, the FBI sent a search warrant to Google, scooping up Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s Gmail messages dating back to January 2016, court records show. His emails began to help investigators uncover the extent of his efforts to develop a Trump Tower project in Moscow — an attempt that persisted through much of the campaign, even as Trump publicly denied he had business ties in Russia, court filings show.

By July, Mueller’s team was delving into Trump Jr.’s meeting the previous summer with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, which had also been attended by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Manafort.

They started with a potentially neutral witness: the interpreter, interviewing him just four days after the New York Times broke the news of the meeting, according to the report.

Russian-born Anatoli Samochornov described to investigators what unfolded in the 20-minute meeting: Veselnitskaya raised the topic of Democratic donors who she alleged had broken Russian law. One of her associates then brought up a U.S. sanctions law against Russia and a ban on American adoptions of Russian children that the Kremlin had imposed in retaliation. Trump Jr. said there was little his father could do to address the issue, but said it could be revisited if Trump were elected.

In November 2017, prosecutors interviewed Ike Kaveladze, an employee of Aras Agalarov, the Russian billionaire who had hosted Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in 2013 in Moscow and requested the meeting through his son.

“They asked very targeted questions,” said Kaveladze, who had attended the meeting as the Agalarov representative. “I realized they had significant knowledge of the topic.”

Mueller’s team interviewed everyone who attended the meeting except Veselnitskaya, who is in Russia, and Trump Jr., who declined to participate voluntarily, they wrote. (It is unclear whether prosecutors attempted to subpoena the president’s son.)

The picture that was emerging was one of a campaign that was eager for Russia’s help at the same time the Kremlin had been working to elect Trump.

As 2017 stretched on, former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with the Russian ambassador during the transition. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying about his contacts with Mifsud and two Russians.

By July 2018, Mueller had charged 25 Russians with participating in two plots to influence the White House race.

But the special counsel still had not resolved whether Russia coordinated with Trump associates.

A possible break in the case
In September last year, Mueller’s team got a break. Manafort, who had been a central figure in the investigation from the start, agreed to plead guilty to financial crimes and failing to register as a foreign lobbyist for work he had conducted in Ukraine before leading the Trump campaign.

At last, prosecutors had access to a key member of Trump’s inner campaign circle who also had deep connections in Russia, including a business relationship with Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire with close ties to Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, told prosecutors that, as soon as Manafort joined the campaign, he had asked Gates to prepare memos describing his elevated new role for Deripaska and three leading Ukrainian politicians. Emails show Manafort tried to get a message to Deripaska to offer him private briefings about Trump’s effort. Manafort told investigators he never gave Deripaska such briefings.

Manafort’s liaison to the Russian aluminum magnate was his own longtime Russian employee, Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI had assessed had ties to Russian intelligence, according to the special counsel.

The report said Manafort also provided campaign polling data to Kilimnik, described to him a strategy to win the election for Trump by contesting traditionally Democratic-leaning Midwestern states and discussed with him a pro-Russian peace plan for Ukraine, a top foreign policy goal of the Kremlin. Manafort would later say he understood Trump’s sign-off, if elected, would be necessary to advance the plan.

Manafort’s cooperation meant prosecutors finally had a firsthand witness who could explain whether there was ever a suggestion of a trade-off: Russian assistance in the campaign in exchange for a Trump administration that supported pro-Russian policies.

On Sept. 11, 2018, Manafort sat for the first of 11 interviews with investigators. He also appeared twice before the grand jury.

But, prosecutors alleged, he did not tell them everything he knew. A federal judge agreed, ruling in February that Manafort had lied intentionally to prosecutors, particularly about his interactions with Kilimnik.

“It’s part of a pattern of requiring the Office of Special Counsel to pull teeth — withholding facts if he can get away with it,” U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson said during a February hearing.

In an email to The Washington Post last week, Kilimnik denied he had Russian intelligence ties and said he had not shared the polling information with anyone else. He said he had “absolutely . . . zero” to do with Russian interference.

Attention turns to Corsi
Meanwhile, several prosecutors on Mueller’s team were pursuing another intriguing subject: Stone, a decades-old friend of Trump who had worked briefly for the celebrity mogul’s campaign in 2015 and then continued to informally advise him.

During the campaign, Stone egged on WikiLeaks as the London-based group leaked materials prosecutors say were provided by Russian operatives to help elect Trump. Starting in early August 2016, Stone began bragging publicly that he had a way to communicate with Wiki­Leaks founder Julian Assange.

On Aug. 21, 2016 — six weeks before WikiLeaks published emails stolen from Podesta — Stone tweeted, “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel.”

The seemingly prescient and imperfectly phrased tweet did not mention WikiLeaks. But it led to suspicions by Podesta and others that Stone had been aware of WikiLeaks’ plans in advance.

For months, Mueller’s team sought to understand whether Stone shared information about WikiLeaks’ activities with the campaign, uncovering numerous examples of Trump’s deep interest in the Clinton emails.

At one point, during a drive to LaGuardia Airport, Trump told senior campaign official Gates that “more releases of damaging information would be coming,” Gates later told prosecutors.

Some in Trump’s orbit appeared to view Stone as having a hand in WikiLeaks’ activities. One person affiliated with a Trump campaign aide sent Stone a text message just after WikiLeaks published Podesta’s emails on Oct. 7. “Well done,” read the message, according to Stone’s eventual indictment, which did not identify the sender.

After the election, Stone vociferously and repeatedly denied that he had been in contact with Assange or had any heads-up about WikiLeaks’ plans. He said that he never discussed Wiki­Leaks with Trump and that his claims during the campaign were just boasts and exaggerations.

Likewise, in written answers prepared by his attorneys, Trump told prosecutors he did “not recall discussing WikiLeaks” with Stone or being aware of Stone discussing the subject with others on his campaign, according to the report.

In September 2017, Stone testified to the House Intelligence Committee that his public hints about WikiLeaks were based on vague tips he’d been given by a New York City radio host and comedian named Randy Credico, whom he described as an “intermediary” and “mutual friend” of Assange.

Credico has denied serving as a back channel for Stone. He said he didn’t become acquainted with Assange until the WikiLeaks founder appeared on his radio show on Aug. 25, 2016. Stone began talking publicly about having a line to WikiLeaks weeks earlier.

Did Stone have another source? Prosecutors wanted to find out.

They brought Credico — along with his small white therapy dog Bianca — to Washington to testify before the grand jury. They interviewed Kristin Davis, a close Stone friend once known as the “Manhattan Madam” because she used to run a prostitution business catering to wealthy New Yorkers. They issued a subpoena to Stone’s business assistant and held him in contempt of court when he refused to testify.

They then turned their attention to Corsi, a conservative author who had emailed with Stone about WikiLeaks during the campaign.

Corsi, 72, had at one point worked in financial services, but more recently had become a popular writer on the fringe right. He wrote a book in 2004 accusing former secretary of state John F. Kerry of lying about his Vietnam service and then became a leading proponent of the false theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, a topic over which he bonded with Trump.

On Aug. 28, 2018, two FBI agents banged on the door of Corsi’s New Jersey home, a grand jury subpoena in hand — kicking off a byzantine turn in the investigation.

After convening with Gray, a New Jersey attorney who had done legal work for his wife’s cleaning business, Corsi decided he would cooperate with prosecutors. He agreed to turn over his computers and passwords to his social media accounts and to sit for voluntary interviews.

But Corsi’s first meeting in September with prosecutors Zelinksy, Andrew Goldstein and Jeannie Rhee went quickly awry, Gray said in an interview with The Post.

Asked if he’d had anything to do with WikiLeaks during the campaign, Corsi issued a blanket denial. He claimed that he had told Stone during the campaign that trying to contact Assange was a bad idea that could subject them both to investigation, according to a draft court filing.

That wasn’t accurate.

By then, prosecutors had obtained emails showing that Corsi was in constant conversation with his friends and contacts, including Stone, throughout the final months of the campaign, speculating about Assange’s next moves, according to Gray.

On July 25, 2016 — a few days after WikiLeaks upset the Democratic National Convention by publishing internal Democratic Party emails — Stone emailed Corsi and asked him to get to Assange and find out what else the WikiLeaks founder held, according to a draft plea agreement Corsi released.

Corsi forwarded Stone’s note to Ted Malloch, an American author living in London who hoped to land a job with Trump and was eager to curry favor with his campaign, according to the draft filing.

According to the report, Malloch told prosecutors he never tried to reach Assange, who was living at the Ecuadoran Embassy. He declined to comment.

Eight days later, Corsi sent Stone an email hinting he had managed to pick up new intelligence on Assange: “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps.” He predicted one of WikiLeaks’ publications would come in October and referenced Podesta, according to the draft filing: “Time to let more than Podesta to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC.”

Corsi has said he was never in direct or indirect contact with Assange. He said he was exaggerating his knowledge to Stone.

“I’m convinced my memory is correct that I didn’t have a source that connected me to Assange,” he told The Post in November. “I really don’t think so.”

But prosecutors used his initial assertion that he declined Stone’s request to seek information from WikiLeaks as a cudgel, saying he could be charged with a crime for lying, Corsi described in a book he wrote about the experience called “Silent No More” that was published in December.

They pressed him to explain: Did he ever reach Assange? Did he tell Stone in advance that WikiLeaks had Podesta’s emails? Did he and Stone help WikiLeaks time the releases for maximum impact?

Gray said that he believed Corsi was trying to be honest, but he acknowledged his client’s answers were not always clear or consistent.

He said he decided to share details from Corsi’s sessions with prosecutors — including reading to The Post from contemporaneous notes — to try to help the public better understand how the clash between the special counsel’s office and witnesses like Corsi frustrated and extended the investigation.

Corsi, he noted, had sold thousands of books and built a fan base by cherry-picking facts to craft a desired narrative. For Corsi, this wasn’t lying, but salesmanship, picking “truthful facts woven in a way that you don’t have to worry about the things that are inconsistent,” Gray said.

The deeply fact-based prosecutors struggled to make sense of the conspiracy theorist and his evolving testimony.

“It’s their biggest nightmare,” Gray said. “The supposed best of the best were just frankly dumbfounded by the whole situation.”

'His answer had morphed'

Over sessions in September and October, Corsi offered information that appeared enticing but sketchy.

Corsi claimed he had figured out on his own in early August 2016 that WikiLeaks had Podesta’s emails. According to the report, Corsi told Malloch in August or September that Wiki­Leaks would be releasing Podesta’s emails and then the Trump campaign would be” in the driver’s seat.”

Corsi also told prosecutors he alerted Stone that Podesta’s emails were coming and believed Stone’s “barrel” tweet was based on his information, Corsi has said.

He claimed he and Stone had then crafted a “cover story” after the tweet to avoid tipping people off to their information — a research memo Corsi submitted to Stone with information about John and his brother Tony Podesta’s business ties to Russia.

Stone told Congress that conversations he’d had with Corsi about the memo were the basis for his tweet, even though the memo was dated Aug. 31, 2016 — 10 days after he posted his message on Twitter about Podesta.

Gray said prosecutors appeared skeptical of Corsi’s claim that he had merely divined on his own that WikiLeaks would be releasing Podesta’s emails after determining that they were not included in the cache of the Democratic Party emails the group released in July. (Podesta, after all, did not work for the DNC, and his emails were not kept on the party committee’s servers.)

Over and over, they asked Corsi who had told him WikiLeaks held Podesta’s emails and whether he’d communicated with Assange. At one meeting, Gray said Corsi seemed to concede another person might have “planted a seed” in his mind about what WikiLeaks held. Then he said that “maybe he heard it from somewhere,” Gray said.

“His answer had morphed a bit. It was concerning to me, and it was concerning to the prosecutors,” he said.

In his book, Corsi insisted the prosecutors confused and rattled him with their repetitive questioning. At one point, he said he told the trio: “It frustrates me that I can’t remember . . . Sometimes I can’t tell if I remembered or invented.’”

Corsi told The Post in an interview last week: “I did not go in to lie or deceive them.”

“I told them from the beginning that I couldn’t remember my 2016 conversations with the kind of precision they were going to demand,” he said, adding: “I’m not a human tape recorder.”

The group spent long hours in a windowless conference room, with the three prosecutors and half a dozen FBI agents arrayed on one side of the table and Gray and Corsi on the other.

At one point, Gray recalled that his eyes wandered to a whiteboard that covered one wall of the room. It appeared to have been only recently erased from an earlier meeting, and he could just barely make out what had been written there previously:

“Ukraine” it said faintly, underlined three times, an apparent reference to Manafort’s interviews, which were underway during that period. Beneath that were dollar figures tallying into the tens of millions.

A dead end in Texas
Among Corsi’s claims to prosecutors, according to Corsi’s book: that Stone had given him advance notice on Oct. 7, 2016, that The Post would be publishing a video in which Trump could be heard coarsely bragging about groping women.

Corsi said Stone had urged him to reach Assange and get him to release whatever he’d been holding back to counter the damaging video.

About a half-hour after The Post published a story about the video, WikiLeaks did, in fact, post the first tranche of thousands of Podesta emails.

If there was evidence that Stone played a role in the timing of the Podesta release, it would support the case that there was a conspiracy.

Stone has denied knowing anything about the tape in advance or playing a role in the timing of the Podesta release.

Corsi also told investigators that he believed he had played a role in getting WikiLeaks to release the Podesta emails — though he offered conflicting accounts about how he might have done so, according to the report.

Looking for corroborating evidence, with Corsi’s help, prosecutors constructed a detailed timeline of Corsi’s emails and phone calls in that period. They sought out Corsi’s contacts, looking for anyone who could be a go-between to WikiLeaks.

On Oct. 3, 2018, an FBI agent accompanied by a local sheriff’s deputy knocked on the back gate of the home of James and Joanne Moriarty in the Piney Woods, a rural region of eastern Texas.

The couple had lived in Libya before the 2011 fall of ruler Moammar Gaddafi and had served as sources for Corsi as he worked on articles about what he felt were the failures of the Obama administration in that country.

In the days leading up to the Oct. 7, 2016, WikiLeaks release, they communicated several times with Corsi about an article he was writing for the right-wing online outlet World Net Daily, James Moriarty told The Post.

Moriarty said he and his wife greeted the FBI agent coldly, first complaining that they did not see the agent as “any kind of good person” because he had come to their home wearing a weapon under his suit jacket.

Moriarty said they then spent three hours telling the agent about their experience in Libya, where he said they were detained by militants, and how they believed they had been relentlessly targeted by the U.S. government since they returned to Texas.

“The invasion of terrorists into the United States is real and present,” Moriarty said. “I told him about this and I told him that, now that he knows, he has to pass it along to other government agencies, including the White House, or he will be guilty of felonious acts.”

Moriarty said he and his wife ultimately consented to be interviewed. The agent spoke to them separately for a total of about 20 minutes. They both told the agent they had not connected Corsi to Assange.

The dead end in the Piney Woods was typical.

According to Mueller’s report, investigators could find “little corroboration” for Corsi’s claim that Stone had urged him to help spur the Podesta email release.

In one interview, Corsi suggested he might have publicly tweeted a message that he thought Assange would read.

“Our Office was unable to find evidence of any such tweets,” Mueller wrote.

Gray said the frustration of the prosecution team became obvious. At one meeting, Rhee, a former partner at the prominent law firm WilmerHale, began to raise her voice as Corsi insisted he clearly remembered a conversation he had with Malloch a few months earlier, but not a key conversation he had shortly afterward with Stone.

“That was six months ago,” she said, according to Gray’s notes.

“We find what you’re saying is lacking,” Zelinsky added.

By their final meeting on Nov. 2, 2018, the prosecutors made their concerns clear. They lectured Corsi for about 20 minutes about the need to stick to definite facts.

Then they started in again: Were you a source about WikiLeaks for Roger Stone?

Corsi, who had grown increasingly uncomfortable as the prosecutors spoke, had trouble answering clearly.

After about five minutes, the prosecutors declared they were done, Gray said.

Investigation's findings
By the end, Mueller’s team had uncovered a wide array of contacts between Trump’s orbit and Russia — contradicting post-election claims from Trump’s representatives that there had been none.

They did not find a crime to charge.

According to the report, prosecutors concluded that Page had formed relationships with Russian intelligence officials before the campaign and that he may have been targeted in 2016 by Russian officials because of his Trump campaign tie. They had trouble nailing down everything he did in Moscow during a July 2016 visit, they wrote.

But the investigation did not establish he coordinated with the Russian effort in 2016. After the report’s release, Page said he was not surprised, calling his Russia interactions a “big nothing­burger.”

Mueller’s team also analyzed whether Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer broke campaign finance law prohibiting foreign contributions. They determined they would not be able to prove it did. They also said they could find no connections between the meeting and other Russian efforts to interfere in the election.

Investigators struggled to determine the motive of Manafort’s contacts with Kilimnik, interactions that went “very much to the heart” of the special investigation, prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said in a court hearing in February.

They were hampered by not only his lies, according to the report, but his use of encrypted messaging apps. Mueller ultimately did not find sufficient evidence to prove that Manafort or any other Trump associate acted as an agent of the Russian government.

Stone is scheduled to go on trial in November for lying to Congress, obstructing an official proceeding and witness tampering over allegations he attempted to intimidate Credico.

Key details about his case were redacted from the report because of a gag order imposed by the judge, which has also limited what Stone can say in his defense. He is, however, selling T-shirts to fund his legal defense that read, “Roger Stone did nothing wrong!”

It is not clear why Mueller’s team did not file the false-statement charges they threatened against Corsi. Much of the report dealing with their interactions with him has also been redacted by the attorney general, citing possible harm to an ongoing investigation. The report does not specify whether the redactions are related to Stone’s case or other continuing matters.

Corsi said last week that the experience showed the probe was a “fraud from the start.” He said only a “criminal” would urge him to plead guilty to charges that could not be proved in court.

Gray said he believes it would be inappropriate to charge Corsi because he has a faulty memory and noted that prosecutors gave him extensive opportunities to amend their answers.

“They pushed and pushed,” he said. “But at the end of the day, they threw up their hands and said, ‘We can’t use any of this.’ ”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The Mueller report makes a damning case about Trump's dishonesty

WASHINGTON — The Mueller report makes a damning case about Trump’s dishonesty: One of the unmistakable takeaways after reading the Mueller report is how the president of the United States wasn’t honest with the American public when it came to Russia and the entire Russia probe.

During the 2016 campaign and afterward, Trump raised doubts that Russia really interfered in the election.

But as Mueller writes, “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”

Trump denied that Putin and Russia wanted him to win.

But as Mueller writes, “[T]he investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would be benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”

Trump said he had no business ties with Russia.

But as Mueller writes, “Between 2013 and June 2016, several employees of the Trump Organization, including then-president of the organization Donald J. Trump, pursued a Moscow deal with several Russian counterparties.”

Trump and his team said former FBI Director James Comey was fired because of his handling of the Clinton email investigation.

But as Mueller writes, “[T]he White House maintained that Comey should be discharged for mishandling the Hillary Clinton email investigation. But the president had decided to fire Comey before hearing from the Department of Justice.”

And Trump wasn’t forthcoming — especially early on — about that June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians.

As Mueller writes, “On several occasions, the president directed aides not to publicly disclose the emails setting up the June 9 meeting, suggesting the emails would not leak and that the number of lawyers with access to them should be limited.”

Bottom line: Almost every step of the way – during the campaign, during the investigation itself – the president and his allies weren’t being honest with the American people.

And outside of the questions about obstruction of justice and conspiracy/coordination/collusion, isn’t THIS dishonesty one of the biggest storylines out this entire Russia episode?

NORMALIZING FOREIGN ELECTION INTERFERENCE
On “Meet the Press” yesterday, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani normalized foreign election interference by defending Trump’s use of the WikiLeaks disclosures during the 2016 campaign, as NBC’s Ben Kamisar put it.

TODD: So it is now okay for political campaigns to work with material stolen by foreign adversaries?

GIULIANI: It depends on the stolen material. If the stolen material is -- first of all, was it all right for The New York Times and The Washington Post to print against the objections of the president…

Giuliani added on WikiLeaks: “They were putting out things that were true and very, very damaging to Hillary Clinton… It'd be like the Pentagon Papers. I mean, Pentagon Papers were stolen. They were stolen from the, from the, from the Department of Defense.”

One of the pragmatic reasons why Giuliani is making the WikiLeaks = Pentagon Papers argument is that the Roger Stone trial is coming, and this WikiLeaks story isn’t going away.

But also remember: Only one campaign/party had its emails stolen during the 2016.

Only one campaign/party weaponized those disclosures, even after the Obama administration said WikiLeaks was part of Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign.

And the 2016 election was decided by fewer than a combined 80,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

TWEET OF THE DAY

#Resist

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#Resist

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From 'total exoneration' to 'total bullsh**': Trump lingers on damning report

By the time President Donald Trump had passed through the prime rib buffet at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday to sit for dinner with family and a top aide, the damning picture Robert Mueller's report painted of his presidency had become clear.

Instead of the "total exoneration" Trump had proclaimed earlier, the report portrayed the President as deceitful and paranoid, encouraging his aides to withhold the truth and cross ethical lines in an attempt to thwart a probe into Russia's interference in US elections -- his "Achilles heel," according to one forthcoming adviser.

Perhaps more angering to a leader who detests weakness -- but doesn't necessarily mind an amoral reputation -- were the number of underlings shown ignoring his commands, privately scoffing at the "crazy sh**" he was requesting and working around him to avoid self-implication.

Now, those close to him say Trump is newly furious at the people -- most of whom no longer work for him -- whose extensive interviews with the special counsel's office created the epic depiction of an unscrupulous and chaotic White House. And he's seeking assurances from those who remain that his orders are being treated like those of a president, and not like suggestions from an intemperate but misguided supervisor.

"Because I never agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the 'Report' about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad)," Trump tweeted on Friday morning as he waited out a rainstorm in Florida before proceeding to his golf course for a round with conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Some current and former officials who accurately predicted that details in the Mueller report would be embarrassing for the White House are now questioning the legal strategy to fully cooperate with the Mueller investigation.

One official who sat down with the special counsel noted that they did so at the behest of the former White House legal team, John Dowd and Ty Cobb, who provided a wealth of documents and encouraged senior officials to be interviewed. It was because of these interviews with people closest to the President that Mueller and his team were able to get a cinematic look at the deceit and trickery taking place in the West Wing.

While these people are critical, the full cooperation was a strategy to make it hard for Mueller to push for an interview given all the information he was given. It was a strategy that worked, even if there is some political embarrassment.

The President was aware ahead of its public release what was contained in the Mueller report. Attorney General Bill Barr told reporters Thursday that both the White House counsel and Trump's personal legal team were given an opportunity to read the redacted version in the previous days.

Mounting anger

But Trump grew angry as he watched cable news coverage because, sources familiar with the matter said, a theme was emerging that vexed him: a portrait of a dishonest president who is regularly managed, restrained or ignored by his staff.

It was a sharp turn away from his earlier statements, which welcomed the report's findings on collusion and falsely claimed total exoneration. Hours before his Mar-a-Lago dinner, Trump insisted to a crowd on the tarmac in Florida the dark days of Mueller's special counsel investigation had ended.

"Game over, folks," he said over the sounds of a busy airport. "Now, it's back to work."
It's hard to tell, however, what Trump intends to head back to. Mueller's probe and Trump's constant focus on it have been the backdrop for all but a few months of the presidency, often diminishing whatever policy efforts have been orchestrated by officials or Republican lawmakers. The report depicts a President who for two years has been largely consumed by the Russia investigation, intent on short-circuiting it but repeatedly stymied in his efforts by aides.

A senior administration official told CNN's Jake Tapper that dynamic was "nothing surprising."

"That the President makes absurd demands of his staff and administration officials -- who are alarmed by them and reluctant to follow them -- is not only unsurprising but has become the norm," the official said.

Nevertheless, in the past Trump has resisted the idea that he is being controlled by those around him or that they are responsible for his successes. Sources familiar with how the West Wing operates said attempts to subvert the President's demands have not ceased now that the Mueller investigation is over. There have been instances in recent weeks where aides have slow walked or ignored Trump's directives, hoping he will forget he gave them.

What is clear is many of those who avoided carrying out Trump's demands related to Mueller's probe -- often, it seemed, in a bid to protect themselves from criminal wrongdoing -- are no longer employed by the White House. Instead, the aides who now surround the President appear less willing to write him off and more likely to encourage him to follow his gut.

Among those who have moved on: the White House counsel who refused Trump's demand to fire Mueller, the chief of staff and senior adviser who anxiously tried to retrieve a resignation letter from the attorney general, the staff secretary who declined Trump's order to gauge the loyalty of a Justice Department official, the attorney general who refused to un-recuse himself and the communications chief who seemed most expert in Trump's whims.

Even Steve Bannon, once viewed as the ultimate advocate for following Trump's instincts, is depicted in the report as a constraining force. In one instance, when the President tried to claim Mueller had a conflict of interest because of a membership dispute at a Trump golf club, Bannon wrote it off as "ridiculous and petty." Trump and Bannon parted ways in the summer of 2017 and have not reconciled since.

Instead, the most prominent aides who do remain are depicted in the report as the most dishonest. Press secretary Sarah Sanders, who was out the office when the report was released, is shown repeatedly misleading the press, a fact she attempted to downplay in morning television interviews on Friday.

"(Trump) has never asked me to break the law," she said on CBS. "When the President wants to do something and make a decision, he does it. He's not somebody who sit around and ponders. I think you guys have seen that day in and day out. One minute you're running stories saying the staff can't control him and the next minute everyone's saying thank God the staff could control him. You don't get to have it both ways."

Increasingly untethered

Among those who Trump dined with in Florida on Thursday was Mick Mulvaney, the chief of staff who still fills the role in an acting capacity but who, according to officials, has done less than either of his two predecessors to restrain Trump in his hardline instincts.

Indeed, since Mulvaney's tenure began at the start of the year, Trump has overseen the longest government shutdown in US history, a dramatic shakeup at the Department of Homeland Security, a sharp turn toward harsher policies on the border, a decision to ask a court to scrap the entire Affordable Care Act and a confusing dictate on North Korea sanctions that still has advisers scratching their heads.

People familiar with Mulvaney's style say those outcomes aren't necessarily his doing, but rather the result of a President newly empowered to follow his impulses without the restrictions placed on him by previous aides. Sources say the President has also come to rely on his chief of staff less than he did during the reign of Reince Priebus or John Kelly, when he would often call his top aide nearly a dozen times a day. Mulvaney has told colleagues there are days he barely hears from the President.

In his report, Mueller describes both of Mulvaney's predecessors -- Priebus and Kelly -- as working in at least some capacity to contain the damage of Trump's behavior. Priebus is shown making an urgent (and vaguely comic) effort to recover a resignation letter from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions that Trump had kept, believing it would amount to a "shock collar" on the Justice Department because it was not dated and aides feared Trump could employ it at his leisure.

Kelly told Mueller that when Trump wanted to meet with friends who encouraged his impulses, such as former campaign aide Corey Lewandowski, he tried to push them to the private residence "to create distance from the West Wing."

Trump soured on Priebus and Kelly long before he summarily terminated each of their tenures. So, too, had Trump grown wary of former White House counsel Don McGahn, who sat for more than 30 hours of testimony with Mueller's team. Trump grew irate again at his former aide late Thursday and into Friday.

In the report, Trump is described as having several tense encounters with McGahn during his White House tenure, including episodes when McGahn was prepared to resign rather than carry out Trump's demands.

McGahn described Trump asking him to do "crazy sh**," according to Priebus. Trump, meanwhile, deemed McGahn a "lying bastard" whose habit of taking contemporaneous notes raised suspicion. In an anecdote relayed in the report, Trump and McGahn went back-and-forth over the note-taking, which Trump insisted good lawyers -- such as his onetime counsel Roy Cohn -- never did.

Trump hadn't backed off that view by Friday morning, when he made clear on Twitter his frustrations at the report.

"Watch out for people that take so-called 'notes,' when the notes never existed until needed," the President wrote.

#Resist

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#Resist

[Athos_131]

What would Republicans do with a Mueller report? Build an impeachment case.

Imagine for a second that it’s 2014. Barack Obama is president of the United States. The attorney general is Eric Holder, and Republicans control Congress. Republican leaders have called on the attorney general to appoint a special counsel to investigate the IRS’ alleged targeting of conservative groups.

Now imagine what Republicans would have done if a special counsel had been appointed and the president had ordered his removal. Imagine what Republicans would have done if instead of releasing a full and complete copy of the special counsel’s report, the attorney general instead provided Congress and the American people with a four-page summary document. Imagine how Republicans would have reacted if they issued a subpoena for the report, and the attorney general responded by calling it “premature and unnecessary.”

Somehow, I don’t think Republicans would have exercised any form of restraint or encouraged the country to move on. And yet that’s exactly what they are doing right now, when the president happens to be Donald Trump. 

Hours after Attorney General William Barr released a redacted version of the Mueller report, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, called on Democrats to “read the special counsel’s report before jumping to conclusions,” and he declared that there was “no collusion” and “no obstruction.” Jordan further accused Democrats of “trying to get the president at all costs.”

As I read Jordan’s statement, I couldn’t help but think of the many times I heard him talk about the importance of vigilant presidential oversight when Obama was in office, Republicans controlled the House, and I was an adviser and spokesperson for Republicans on the House oversight panel. During this time, we issued more than 100 subpoenas to the Obama administration, held the attorney general in contempt of Congress, filed a lawsuit challenging the president’s use of executive privilege, and formed a special select committee to investigate what happened in  Benghazi, Libya.

All the while, Republicans like Rep. Jordan defended and championed our aggressive brand of oversight. Speaking at a contempt hearing of an Obama administration official, Jordan boasted, “The only route to the truth is through theHouse of Representatives.”

GOP would be building an impeachment case
The Democrats who now run the House agree with 2014 Jim Jordan. They issued a subpoena on Friday “to the Department of Justice for the full version of the Mueller report and the underlying evidence.” Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, predictably declared the subpoena “wildly overbroad.”

Collins must have conveniently forgotten the 2012 words of Jordan, his Judiciary Committee colleague. While voting to hold Holder in contempt of Congress, Jordan asked, “How can you ignore the facts when you don’t get the facts? That’s what this is all about. … I just want to get the information.”

For anyone wondering how Republicans would have handled this kind of conflict when Obama was president, you don’t have to wonder; just review recent history. House Republicans spent two years investigating the terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi in 2011 and then saw fit to form a select committee, in part, because “the administration still does not respect the authority of Congress to provide proper oversight.”

I have no doubt that if Republicans had a Mueller-like investigation to work with, they would have unleashed dozens of hearings and subpoenas to examine every potential thread of wrongdoing and unethical conduct with the goal of building to impeachment proceedings of the president.

Hearings would be just the beginning. When the Obama administration defied a congressional subpoena, Jordan and other House Republicans filed a lawsuit and ultimately — more than three years later — won in federal court. Should Attorney General Barr now refuse to comply with the subpoena for the full, unredacted Mueller report and supporting documents and evidence, House Democrats should follow the same playbook their Republican colleagues used just a few years ago.

Republicans used to back checks and balances
Former Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy once said, "The notion that you can withhold information and documents from Congress no matter whether you are the party in power or not in power is wrong. Respect for the rule of law must mean something, irrespective of the vicissitudes of political cycles." Former Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith once argued that “when the administration repeatedly ignores constitutional and legal limits on the president’s power, it undermines the rule of law, with very real consequences.” Darrell Issa, my former boss and another former chairman of the Oversight Committee, released a report stating explicitly that “Congress is constitutionally obligated to provide thorough oversight of the executive branch.”

Should those statements by Republicans apply only when Republicans are overseeing a Democratic president? Obviously not.

What is happening now is bigger than obtaining a single document or report. The Trump administration is driving us toward an unprecedented constitutional showdown that threatens the very system of checks and balances Republicans used to champion. This is a battle to protect the constitutional right of Congress to exercise its oversight vigilance over the executive branch. It’s about protecting the foundation of our democracy and ensuring that no president or political party can willfully abandon the system our governance was built on. If we allow this bedrock of our Republic to crumble, then we are on the way to completely undoing our democracy. There will be no going back.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

A brutal Sunday for Trump

The full impact of Robert S. Mueller III’s report is beginning to register with both Democrats and President Trump’s apologists. If the Sunday shows were any guide, it’s going to be tough sledding for Trump’s spin squad.

Kellyanne Conway on ABC’s “This Week” chose simply to lie about the report. She denied the report left the decision on obstruction up to Congress. She danced away when presented with Trump’s explicit statement that he never wanted to fire Mueller and with the report’s findings that he told then-White House counsel Donald McGahn to fire Mueller. A small snippet of the exchange demonstrates her abject dishonesty in lying about a report documenting Trump’s lies:

[MARTHA] RADDATZ: I do want to talk about Russian interference, but I want to get a clear answer on Don McGahn. Do you believe Don McGahn when he says the president tried to get him to fire Bob Mueller?

CONWAY: I believe the president was frustrated about the investigation from the very beginning and knew it was ill-conceived. And I would remind everybody of something that gets zero coverage, which is, days before …

RADDATZ: Please answer that question, Kellyanne. It’s the only question …

CONWAY: You’ve got to ask Don McGahn and the president. I can only talk about …

RADDATZ: It is in the Mueller report and Don McGahn said he’s telling the truth, under oath …

CONWAY: I don’t believe — I don’t believe it amounts to obstruction of justice and if it had, then Mueller would have said this is obstruction of justice …

RADDATZ: But do you believe Don McGahn?

CONWAY: I believe that Don McGahn is an honorable attorney who stayed on the job 18 months after this alleged incident took place and that, if he were being asked to obstruct justice or violate the constitution or commit a crime — help to commit a crime by the president of the United States, he wouldn’t have stayed. I certainly wouldn’t stay. The president is — was rightly frustrated and trying to, like everybody else tries to do, make an ill-conceived, illegitimate investigation that’s produced no collusion, no criminal conspiracy, no indictment, no impeachment of this president.

He was trying to make it go away because he says, on page 61 — on page 61 of Volume 2 — people should read it — the — Mueller admits that the president is rightly frustrated that he thinks this ill-conceived investigation is going to affect his ability to go forward with foreign policy and his domestic agenda. He’s been under a cloud from day one even though on January 6 …

“Frustration” is no defense to obstruction of justice. In fact, it is a motive.

When guests behave as Conway did, it is best for the host to explicitly state the guest is not answering the question and/or is lying.

That’s what Fox News’s Chris Wallace did with Rudolph W. Giuliani when he tried to assert that Trump was exonerated on obstruction. (“But, Mayor, that’s not true. The Mueller report makes a clear, especially on the issue of … obstruction … that he’s leaving it to Congress.”)

At other times, the Trump team just attacked Mueller, whose work they were touting just days ago:

WALLACE: Obstruction of justice can be motivated by a desire to protect noncriminal personal interests to protect against investigations for underlying criminal liability falls into a gray area, or to avoid personal embarrassment.

Mueller says the injury to the justice system is just as great. It doesn't matter whether there was an underlying crime. It's still obstruction.

GIULIANI: Well, when did Mueller become god? Mueller says the injury to the justice system is still as great — there was no injury, by the way. We’re talking about an inchoate crime. We’re talking about something that didn’t happen.

And then there is the tactic of confessing to conduct that all but the Trump cult would consider to be a betrayal of one’s country and our democracy. On “Meet the Press,” Giuliani tried to condone using WikiLeaks, a Russian cut-out, to win the election:

CHUCK TODD:

Why did the president trumpet WikiLeaks so many times?

RUDY GIULIANI:

Because they were putting out things that were true and very, very damaging to Hillary Clinton. Of course, of course you would want things that are —

CHUCK TODD:

And you knew this was a — but you at the time even sort of knew that these were stolen by foreign —

RUDY GIULIANI:

I didn't.

CHUCK TODD:

— folks.

RUDY GIULIANI:

I did not. I knew WikiLeaks had them. It’d be like the Pentagon Papers. I mean, Pentagon Papers were stolen. They were stolen from the, from the, from the Department of Defense. My god, that’s horrible. During, during and about a war —

CHUCK TODD:

This is a foreign adversary though. This is a foreign adversary, someone who many —

RUDY GIULIANI:

What's the difference between a spy and a foreign adversary?

CHUCK TODD:

One works for the United States of America and one doesn't.

RUDY GIULIANI:

Well, wait a second. Wait a second.

CHUCK TODD:

Doesn't one work for the United States of America and one doesn't?

RUDY GIULIANI:

Clearly, stealing classified documents is theft. Now, there were overriding reasons for it, but it’s still theft. Legally, it’s the same thing. Morally, it’s the same thing. And the reality is, here’s the thing that’s really interesting about it. And I don’t want to dispute this too much. But everything they put out about Hillary Clinton was true. They didn’t make things up. They shouldn’t have stolen it. But the American people were just given more information about how deceptive, how manipulative her people and her campaign were. …

CHUCK TODD:

But in 2016, I'm just curious. In 2016, the intelligence services knew that WikiLeaks was not a journalistic enterprise anymore. It may have started that way. That it was serving as a front for essentially foreign adversary intelligence dumps.

RUDY GIULIANI:

Right.

CHUCK TODD:

Why did the president think it was ethical to essentially trumpet what WikiLeaks was doing?

RUDY GIULIANI:

Well, if I’m, if I’m — even in law enforcement, if I’m running an investigation and all of a sudden evidence is given to me about the criminality of the person I’m investigating, even if it comes from a, from a questionable source, I’m going to use that information. And there was nothing, nothing to suggest that this was manufactured evidence. Everything printed about —

CHUCK TODD: But does it bother you at all that a foreign adversary wanted to manipulate our elections?

RUDY GIULIANI:

Sure it does. Absolutely.

CHUCK TODD:

So why participate in helping in their manipulation?

RUDY GIULIANI:

Nobody's participating in it.

CHUCK TODD:

Trumpeting WikiLeaks is participating in it.

RUDY GIULIANI:

No, it is not. It is not. That’s not at all participating in it. …

But of course holding up the fruits of hacked material obtained by a Russian cut-out is “participating” in the plot, just as his campaign team attending a meeting in Trump Tower with the hope of getting dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russians constituted “participating” in a foreign government’s interference with our election.

Let’s not gloss over what Giuliani in essence is saying: Yeah, why not let a foreign power help him win?! (Someone should ask Trump if he intends to ask Russia to help him out again in 2020.) No, in a democracy we — not a foreign dictator — get to pick our leaders. (In case you think this might have been a slip of the tongue, Giuliani repeated this argument on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He told Jake Tapper that “there’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.”)

In short, Giuliani acknowledges that Trump, just as Mueller said in the report, eagerly looked to Russia to help win the presidency. If Trump really cannot acknowledge that such conduct is a betrayal of our sovereign country, he has no business being its president. It’s ironic for a president who was obsessed with Democrats’ trying to delegitimize his presidency to defend himself by acknowledging he looked to Russian hackers to win the election.

The administration is trapped in its own spin. Having claimed vindication by the report, Trump and his flunkies now must deny what is in it, avoid answering questions for which there is no good answer and/or deny that getting help from a hostile power betrays our country. That might get the administration through a news cycle or two, but at some point a significant majority of Americans may conclude Trump is a menace to our Constitution — to our sovereignty — and must be ejected before he can do more harm.

#Resist

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Trump plausibly committed impeachable offenses. A leading expert explains how.

After botching their initial response to the Mueller report, top Democrats are now seriously engaging the debate over whether the shocking scale of corruption, wrongdoing, contempt for our democracy, endless official deception and skirting of criminality that it documented merits — or indeed obligates — an impeachment inquiry.

In multiple TV appearances, the chairmen of three House committees suggested Mueller’s findings are “serious and damning” and normally would fall “within the realm of impeachable offenses," and that doing nothing could leave Trump “emboldened” and signal that “future presidents can engage in this kind of corruption without consequence.”

As Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.) indicated, the “consequential decision” Democrats now face is whether to confine themselves to “oversight hearings by the various committees," or to launch a “formal impeachment inquiry." Failure to do the latter could validate the idea that presidents are above accountability, no matter how corrupt or lawless.

Philip Bobbitt, the constitutional scholar at Columbia University, is among those who have wrestled most deeply with the complex questions raised by impeachment. He is the co-author of “Impeachment: A Handbook,” which republishes the famous commentary on impeachment by Yale law scholar Charles L. Black Jr. and concludes with Bobbitt’s own discourse on the topic.

I spoke to Bobbitt at length about the latest revelations. The upshot: Bobbitt now believes it’s “plausible” that Trump committed impeachable offenses and that the House of Representatives is obligated to proceed from this premise.

This does not necessarily mean launching a formal impeachment inquiry right this moment. But it does mean that the next phase of the House’s response must functionally embody an acknowledgment that Trump’s now-known conduct very well may constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors," ultimately rendering an impeachment inquiry obligatory.

Coming from Bobbitt, this is notable, because he has long maintained that impeachment must be reserved only for the most extraordinary cases and (as his book argues) that we must approach the question of whether conduct is impeachable with extreme caution.

Bobbitt’s book engages deeply on what constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It concludes that “careful, patient inquiry” must denote a pattern of “wanton constitutional dereliction” and establish acts of misconduct that badly undermine the very “legitimacy” of the government and “seriously threaten the order of political society."

In our conversation, Bobbitt elaborated. He noted that the Constitution reserves impeachment for “treason” and “bribery” or “other high crimes and misdemeanors," and added that we can understand the latter from that juxtaposition:

We’re aided immensely by Alexander Hamilton’s discussion of these matters in The Federalist Papers. He writes that what treason and bribery have in common in the impeachment context is that they are political crimes. They strike at the functioning and legitimacy at the government itself. They are not common crimes. They are “high” crimes.

Thus, Bobbitt argued, in evaluating what we’ve learned of Trump’s conduct:

The initial inquiry is whether the acts of the president have struck at the processes underlying government itself.

In attempting to answer that question, Bobbitt pointed out, both Trump’s obstructive efforts and his response to Russian sabotage of our democracy should raise serious concerns.

On the first, it’s key to understand the situation as a kind of three-legged stool. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did not indict, due to Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. At the same time, he also declared that presidents are not immune to obstruction statutes if they interfere with law enforcement processes with “corrupt intent.” Finally, Mueller amassed extensive evidence suggesting that Trump did in fact violate those statutes corruptly, while conspicuously declining to exonerate him of those violations — something he could have done if he believed Trump did not commit them.

Taken all together, then, what Mueller told us is that Trump can and very likely did break the law extensively and that he cannot be held legally accountable for it while in office.

In our interview, Bobbitt described the implications of all this for impeachment this way:

Mueller depicts an executive branch that is using the levers of his constitutional power in a corrupt way. It’s not that a president can’t determine whom to prosecute or investigate, or give advice to members of the executive to shape their testimony at legislative hearings. It’s that he can’t do so with the intent to frustrate the investigation of his own culpability. We certainly have ample evidence that suggests this what he was trying to do.

What’s more, this obstructive conduct can be directly tied to the other element of the case against Trump: his response to Russian electoral sabotage. Importantly, Trump did not merely seek to derail an investigation into his campaign’s conspiracy with that Russian sabotage — that is, into his own conduct.

Rather, Trump also sought to derail a full accounting of the Russian attack on our political system, separate and apart from whether his own campaign conspired with it. He did this because acknowledging the sabotage would detract from the greatness of his victory, which also led him to fail to marshal a serious response to the next round of interference.

Bobbitt explained the relevance of those facts to the impeachment question this way:

The real problem isn’t just cooperating with the Russians, or just impeding an investigation into that cooperation. It’s impeding an investigation to stop a determination of what Russia did, why, and how they did it. Because this is not over. It’s going to happen again, not just in our country. In many countries.

The exposure of the country to very damaging political intelligence techniques, for the venal reason of not diminishing the status of your victory — would that be a high crime and misdemeanor? It certainly would.

When I asked Bobbitt directly whether it’s plausible that Trump committed impeachable offenses, he replied:

It’s plausible. Because there seems to be such a pattern of widely reported events. The resignations of so many of his own appointed Cabinet officials and White House staff are troubling. They seem to have taken themselves out, or have been taken out, because they would not do what they regard as unlawful things.

Bobbitt, however, is not arguing for a formal impeachment inquiry right at this moment. He told me he’s arguing for “pre-impeachment hearings” that flesh out as much additional information as possible within the framework of what Mueller has now told us:

You can take the Mueller report as an invitation to impeachment. It certainly does not count the other way: It’s not a report that closes the book on impeachment. But I think it would be wise to proceed along several investigative fronts rather than to begin with the bludgeon of an impeachment hearing.

A broad-based series of hearings is the next step. But you can’t appear to have made up your mind that we should go forward with impeachment. You have to give the country a chance to come together.

We can debate endlessly whether anything could get the country to come together on any of this, but that approach — both aggressive and sober, as E.J. Dionne Jr. puts it — appears to be the one Democrats are now taking.

That’s a step in the right direction away from their previous posture, which appeared premised on the idea that the pressure to initiate an impeachment inquiry would somehow dissipate. One thing is clear: Democrats now appear to recognize the profound complexity and momentousness of the dilemma they face.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Constraints on presidency being redefined in Trump era, report fallout shows

President Trump repeatedly tried to undermine the Russia investigation, but the special counsel overseeing the probe declined to say whether he broke the law — and the attorney general declared that he had committed no crime.

Trump’s campaign showed a willingness to work with a foreign power — something his personal lawyer now insists is perfectly okay.

And Trump has furiously rejected congressional scrutiny of his presidency — taking the unprecedented step Monday of suing a Democratic committee chairman to block a subpoena for his financial records.

The events of the past week, following the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s dramatic 448-page report, are threatening to redefine the legal and ethical standards that have long served as constraints on the American presidency. And they suggest that few, if any, of the traditional guardrails that have kept Trump’s predecessors in check remain for this president and possibly those who will follow him.

“The most disturbing part of the picture that’s been drawn about norms is, there is now a crumbling consensus about what they are,” said Bob Bauer, White House counsel under President Barack Obama. “The Republican defense of Trump has muddied the congressional response, so it now appears that even a president who is a chronic liar, who tried to obstruct justice, who instructed his White House counsel to fabricate evidence, has not apparently conducted himself in a way that everybody can agree violates the norms.”

Democrats had hoped that Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election would serve as a check on what they view as Trump’s rampant abuse of power. But Mueller’s team found there was no conspiracy between Moscow and the campaign while concluding that it could not render a judgment on whether Trump criminally obstructed justice because of government guidelines about indicting a sitting president.

This left an emboldened Trump to proclaim “complete and total EXONERATION” despite the report’s numerous details of the president’s efforts to end or stymie Mueller’s investigation.

Trump’s aides and supporters have brushed off the details in Mueller’s report that show the president tried to stop or stymie the special counsel’s investigation, with even Attorney General William P. Barr describing Trump’s actions as understandable given his anger over the probe.

They have portrayed Democrats as sore losers for refusing to accept that Mueller did not declare Trump had committed any crimes.

But the aftermath of Mueller’s report, as well as Congress’s overall inability to help serve as a check on Trump, has potentially created a precedent in which it remains unclear where the current lines are on presidential behavior.

Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director, said that the combination of an attorney general who “comes at this from a legal philosophy of very broad executive powers” and a president who “is more interested in an imperial presidency” has created a troubling dynamic “where we may have three equal branches of government but one branch — the executive one — is more equal than the others.”

Nick Akerman, a former federal prosecutor who served as a member of the Watergate prosecution team, also criticized Barr for stepping in to declare no crime had been committed when Mueller’s report seemed to leave this decision up to Congress.

“It’s problematic because you’ve got a renegade attorney general who’s basically doing everything he can to twist the law, to make it sound like what Trump did is not a crime,” Akerman said. “It makes it a lot harder for somebody else, after Trump leaves office, to prosecute him based on the facts Mueller has found — that he obstructed justice.”

On Sunday, Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani seemed to further define downward acceptable presidential conduct, telling CNN’s “State of the Union” that “there’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians” — a government the intelligence community and Mueller have concluded interfered in the election to sow discord in the United States.

He said the issue was not one of “immorality,” arguing that nearly every presidential campaign in history has engaged in some sort of immoral or unethical behavior. But, he added, he personally would have advised against accepting information from the Russians, “just out of an excess of caution.”

The repercussions of Mueller’s report, as well as the unabashed victory lap by Trump and his allies, have created a particular conundrum for Democrats, who are still grappling with the politically fraught question of whether to move forward with impeachment proceedings that are almost certain to die in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was the first major Democratic presidential candidate to call for Trump’s impeachment, in a series of Twitter posts on Friday.

“To ignore a President’s repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own disloyal behavior would inflict great and lasting damage on this country, and it would suggest that both the current and future Presidents would be free to abuse their power in similar ways,” she wrote.

But Democrats generally remain mixed on how to proceed. Many are reluctant to waste political capital on a mission — impeaching Trump — they think has little chance for success. But they are also mindful that by not condemning the president’s behavior, they may be seen as tacitly condoning it and helping lower the standards for future occupants of the Oval Office.

“I think even if we did not win, possibly, if there were not impeachment, I think history would smile upon us for standing up for the Constitution,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) said Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” while noting he was not yet ready to begin impeachment proceedings.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told her members Monday night that leaders had no immediate plans to open impeachment proceedings but would continue to investigate Trump, according to officials on the conference call.

White House aides said they think the report will cause little long-term political damage because most of the damaging stories were already known — and that even some of the president’s most ardent supporters do not view him as a paragon of morality.

Several advisers added that they expect Mueller’s conclusions to cost Trump few votes.

“I don’t think there was a whole lot of information that was new that had not been reported on previously or discussed in a public setting,” said Raj Shah, a former White House spokesman who now advises the campaign. “It almost seemed like the summary of the last two years of the public debate. I don’t think this report gives any momentum to those who want to see the president impeached.”

Shah added that Trump voters are unlikely to punish the president for fighting back against Mueller’s probe. “The broad notion that the president was disgruntled with and unhappy with an investigation targeting his legitimacy out of the gate — they afford him the right to be upset about it,” he said.

Mueller’s finding that there was no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia has now become a key talking point heading into Trump’s reelection bid, with his political apparatus planning to target both the investigators and the news media that covered the investigation.

Trump has told White House aides that they should expect continued subpoenas and calls for testimony on Capitol Hill, and that he hopes to use that to portray the Democrats as overzealous partisans. And, unlike during Mueller’s investigation, the president is unlikely to allow all of his current and former aides to testify publicly, according to White House officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The White House has already made clear that it plans to fight nearly every request for documents and testimony from Democratic committees, and a senior White House official said the report allows the administration to be more emboldened in pushing back against House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and other congressional investigators.

Current and former aides say they do not expect Trump to change his behavior, saying he is unlikely to be responsive to anything other than political pain in the form of a real revolt by Republican leadership or a sharp drop in poll numbers.

George Conway, a Republican lawyer and frequent Trump critic who is married to one of the president’s senior advisers, said that Trump may soon feel political repercussions, arguing he should be performing better in public opinion polls given the strength of the economy.

“Everybody knows that there is not this overwhelming urge and supermajority of public support to remove this guy from office,” Conway said. “He is his own worst enemy. He’s the reason he’s not at 50 or 55 percent-plus with the economy going the way it is. That tells you something about how damaging this has been to him.”

Trump was showing no signs of backing down on Monday. Asked at the White House Easter Egg Roll whether he was worried about impeachment, he replied, “Not even a little bit.”

And pressed on the portrait that emerges in the Mueller report, of White House aides disregarding his directives and at times working to scuttle his most dangerous impulses, the president was adamant.

“Nobody disobeys my orders,” Trump said.

#Resist