Other Voices Weigh In On The Impeachment Hearings

Left: Devin Nunes, GOP Counsel Stephen Castor and Jim Jordan confer on first day of impeachment hearings. Right: Marie Yovonavitch enters the House Chamber to testify.

Below please find other voices, bloggers sounding off about this week's hearings:

Donald Trump | Impeachment | Nancy Pelosi | Ukraine

Nancy Pelosi Subtly Mocks Trump — and Sends a Big Hint about a Likely Article of Impeachment

Excerpt:

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly pounded home on Thursday the idea that “bribery” is a central charge in the impeachment inquiry surrounding President Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal during a briefing with reporters.

“The devastating testimony [on Wednesday] corroborated evidence of bribery uncovered in the inquiry and that the president abused power and violated his oath by threatening to withhold military aid and a White House meeting in exchange for an investigation into his political rival,” she said of the previous day’s pubic hearing. “A clear attempt of the president to give himself the advantage in the 2020 election. Doing so, as I’ve said to the president, jeopardized our national security, undermined our national security, jeopardized the integrity of our electoral system.”

She emphasized that “bribery” is listed in the Constitution as one of the two named impeachable offenses.

Donald Trump | Ukraine

Ambassador Yovanovitch, Once a Trump Target, May Become His Nightmare

by William Rivers Pitt | November 15, 2019 - 6:09am | 

Excerpt:

Read the transcript! The phone call was perfect! No quid pro quo!

This has been the deeply misleading and self-serving refrain of Donald Trump and his defenders regarding the now-infamous July 25 telephone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. In deploying this line of nonsense, they seek to convince all who might listen that the July 25 call is the only element of the scandal engulfing the White House.

On Friday, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch will have a golden opportunity to put that brazen misrepresentation to bed once and for all. For Yovanovitch, the story of Trump’s Ukraine extortion scheme did not begin when story first broke several weeks ago. It began for her at the end of last year, when she found out that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was taking an active interest in Ukraine, and in her.....

Marie Yovanovitch’s career-spanning professional integrity stood as an impediment to these intentions. If Giuliani was to effectively execute the plan to dragoon Ukraine into doing Trump’s political bidding, it was understood that an individual of Yovanovitch’s reputation would not stand for it. She had to be removed from the board … and so the whispers began....

Was Yovanovitch directly involved in the July 25 phone call, or in any aspect of Trump’s extortion scheme against the government in Ukraine? The answer is a definitive “no.” Yovanovitch, however, is living proof that Trump and his allies were up to some profoundly underhanded shenanigans many long months before that July 25 call, and those shenanigans not only cost Yovanovitch her post, but left her feeling that her own personal safety was in jeopardy

Impeachment | Media | Republicans

Impeachment Hearings Confirm Republican Party Is Detached from Reality. What Does the Press Do Now?

Eric Boehlert

Excerpt:

Republicans proudly advertised their radical ways during Wednesday's impeachment hearings into Donald Trump, wallowing in conspiracies and embracing debunked claims. The question now: How does the Beltway media cover a party that has aggressively removed itself from reality? How does the news business describe and treat a political party that routinely echoes the most unbelievable claims from Fox News and the darkest corners of the right-wing media?

The truth is, this is a decadeslong game of dare that Republicans have been playing with the press, as members of the party uniformly become more radical and more antidemocratic, and basically challenge the press to call them out, knowing full well it won't happen. That's because the Beltway press basically revolves around the central idea that there are two major competing parties in this country and that they are mirror opposites of each other. Republicans are just as conservative as Democrats are liberal. 

Republicans are just as serious as Democrats are. Republicans are just as fact-based and honorable as Democrats are. That false equivalency drives political coverage in this country, and has for decades.

Why this obsession? Because to concede that one party operates under a radically different set of guidelines (or no guidelines at all, in the case of the GOP), journalists have to do two things. They have to defend themselves against allegations of "liberal media bias," and they have to throw out the old, dependable rule book that allowed the press to lazily suggest that Republicans and Democrats function on the same plane, and therefore had to be treated similarly. 

Cody Fenwick

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Donald Trump | Impeachment | Ukraine

Here Are 5 Stunning Details from New Witness Testimony about Trump’s Damning Phone Call

Excerpt:

New testimony from State Department employee David Holmes given to the House Intelligence Committee on Friday in closed session confirmed a previous revelation that he had overheard President Donald Trump on a phone call discussing Ukrainian investigations, CNN reported.

Here are five stunning details about Holmes’ opening testimony, as revealed by CNN:

1. “Loves your ass”

Sondland reportedly told Trump that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “loves your ass” — a sign of just how self-obsessed the president is and how he expects those around him to be sycophantic.

2. “So, he’s gonna do the investigation?”

“So, he’s gonna do the investigation?” Trump then reportedly asked Sondland. Sondland replied “He’s gonna do it” and that Zelensky would do “anything you ask him to,” according to the CNN report.

This ties Trump directly to Sondland’s work pushing for the investigations in Ukraine. Existing evidence already showed that Trump was deeply involved in the effort, but Republicans have nevertheless tried to raise doubts about this claim. This testimony seems to undercut that argument even more.

3.”Give a shit about Ukraine”

CNN reported:

Holmes also confirmed Taylor’s testimony about the President’s thoughts on Ukraine, saying he asked Sondland “if it was true that the President did not ‘give a shit about Ukraine.’”
Holmes said Sondland responded Trump only cares about “big stuff.”

4. “The Bidens investigations”

In response to a question from Holmes, Sondland reportedly said that the “big stuff” was stuff that benefits Trump, “like the Biden investigation that Mr. Giuliani was pushing.”

This testimony is bad for both Sondland and Trump. Sondland previously testified that he didn’t realize the investigations he was pushing for in Ukraine would have involved the Bidens, which these claims seem to contradict. And it also bolsters the already strong case that Trump had no interest in corruption in Ukraine, as his defenders claim, but only in taking down a potential political opponent.

5. “I could hear the president’s voice through the earpiece of the phone.”

Holmes reportedly said he didn’t take notes on the conversation, but he remembered it clearly. And he also reported that Trump’s voice on the phone call was so loud he could hear what the president said, even though it wasn’t on speakerphone — which raises even more questions about the operational security of the call, which is already highly dubious.

Watch CNN’s Manu Raju report on the testimony:

Joan McCarter

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Donald Trump | Ukraine

New Witness Says Loudmouth Trump Asked about Zelensky, 'So, He's Gonna Do the Investigation?'

Excerpt:

David Holmes, a career foreign service officer serving in Ukraine, told a congressional panel behind closed doors that he was present when Donald Trump spoke on the phone with U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland about Sondland’s efforts to make Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky announce an investigation to Hunter Biden. Holmes opening statement, obtained by CNN, discloses that there are as many as three other witnesses to the call.

Sondland, Holmes and a few others were at a restaurant in Kyiv when the ambassador made the call to Trump. Trump apparently spoke so loudly that Sondland held the phone away from his ear and Holmes, and presumably the others, heard the conversation. In the call, Sondland told Trump that President Zelensky “loves your ass.”

Article V Constitutional Convention - Cause For Worry - Or A Big Yawn?

The latest concern - among a certain clique of cognoscenti in the media - is the Right succeeding in calling for (and getting)  a  "Convention of the states".

 The purpose?  To change the Constitution by adding new amendments.  The prime objective would most likely be to pass at least two  amendments near and dear to the Right's heart: 1) to permanently limit federal spending, i.e. via a "balanced budget" amendment, and 2) an extension of the 2nd amendment, to protect all assault weapon owners from gun control lefties.. Incredibly a minority on the left see the real threat: the poseur and traitor called Trump, i.e. Donnie Dotard.

As if Trump's blatant efforts to get foreign assistance to snatch another election  isn't enough we now face the prospect of an "Article V Constitutional Convention."  Technically, if such a convention emerged all hands ought to be on deck to remove Trump. In fact, the Right has a different agenda.

Clearly, even the most superficial observer can see the  existing structure of  the federal government is unable or unwilling to rescue the country from the abyss into which Trump's power-grabs have thrust us.  Look at how the power mad autocrat in the WH has smashed past every norm, every guardrail and flouted and dishonored his constitutional oath. He's done it not only to enrich himself  but to create a criminal syndicate accountable to no one but himself - capturing the DOJ,  the Pentagon, and now even the intel community (as the recent whistleblower revelation shows)

On Saturday, the walking, talking orange maggot had the audacity to embrace the parallels to the 2016 dumpster fire of an election campaign, and then predicted he'd win again in 2020.  If he does you can kiss this country's future goodbye because it will cease to be a representative democracy and become another proto-fascist, authoritarian state.  Especially as the Dems - despite being handed power in November, 2018 -   seem ill- prepared or equipped to counter the takeover.  Pelosi is convinced the 2020 election will get rid of the refuse, but she's dreaming. The Founders themselves never believed that B.S. especially if a confirmed demagogue and autocrat had seized power, or in Trump's case - stolen it via collusion/ conspiracy with a hostile foreign power.  James Madison himself, 11 years after the signing of the Declaration, feared the influence of a corrupt president, and an unwillingness of the House to check him. In such a case he intimated it "would be the end of the Republic".   We are very close to that threshold now.

 Meanwhile, House Dems  have  been brought to their knees with gestures of empty futility and impotence, e.g. hollow show hearings, endless court battles.  All this no thanks to a seemingly senile Nancy Pelosi unwilling to use the only tool left in the Constitutional toolbox: impeachment.  She argues that she has "no choice" as her more conservative caucus members blanch at the notion of impeachment as it will cost them their jobs. Do you think former D-House leader Tip O'Neill would have accepted or countenanced that blather with the nation and party facing a political emergency? Hell no! He'd have banged heads together to have them fall in line to do the right thing, which is to lay down a marker that this lawless behavior will not be normalized - or set a damning precedent.

The battle against the Trump syndicate, of course, isn't the  only issue causing crisis level angst in the nation. So also are the expanding deficit - now approaching $2 trillion,  immigration and the need for immigration reform, as well as pushes for more gun control in the wake of so many mass shootings - and dozens that have been nipped in the bud you never heard about.  Because co-workers,  relatives or friends reported the miscreant.

All of which has led to the yen to seek drastic solutions.  Given gridlock in D.C. - thanks to "Moscow Mitch" sitting on dozens of bills, it is curious that the Right and its minions are pushing for the most extreme remedies to gain some form of movement.

According to the Right's   nabobs and political blowhards,  like TX governor Greg Abbott - who has a pathological fear of the federal gov't taking away his guns-  the only thing left is to put the decisions to the  states, i.e. employing Article V of the Constitution.  Thereby,   these political iconoclasts imagine they can call an "Article V" Convention of States to propose to the country amendments to reverse our decline.   Again, for the most part this "decline" is imagined as being derived from the excesses of the "socialist left" - whether the Green New Deal proposals, Medicare for all, or stopping border incarcerations.  In other words, reverse the decline of the white nativist, nationalist clique which has dominated for over 250 years.

Fortunately, while a growing number of nativists and 2nd amendment fetishists believe that the federal government has gone rogue, there is disagreement about the utility (and wisdom)  of calling a Convention of States to  rein it back in.  As  there damned well should be.   For one thing, any Convention of States  wastes precious time and resources in pursuit of an unrealizable goal.  Let me rephrase that: About as realizable as getting Mitch McConnell to finally bring to the floor all the dozens of bills  (passed by the House) now sitting and rotting in the Senate

 Furthermore, there is a historical basis  to this rational skepticism. Despite being included as an element of the original Constitution, a Convention of States has never occurred in American history, and for good reason: It takes 2/3 of the states (34) to call a Convention to begin with, and it takes 3/4 of the states (38) to ratify any amendment. These are tall orders, and for proof, just look at how long it's taken to get an equal rights amendment (ERA) passed.  Let's also recall that the Constitution  itself was passed by supermajorities, so little wonder it requires supermajorities to ratify amendments.  After all, you are de facto altering this noble document - perhaps in perpetuity.

A more remote objection is that a Convention of States - say if even partially successful i.e. in making the first round 'cut' -  could become a “runaway convention.” In that case, we can imagine rogue delegates,  say  2nd amendment freaks,  hijacking the agenda to ram home their demands..  This is a totally plausible outcome especially after state applications hit the target of 34.  Then  the rogues only need the.complicity of the U.S. Congress (stacked with Repukes).


According to one take in a recent article on FORBES:

"This is a reasonable fear, but here’s why there is no cause for worry: Consider where the logic leads from the correct “long-shot” description of the Convention of States. If 34 state legislatures actually were to formally agree on a Convention call, it would be the first time in history. When we reflect on the magnitude of such an accomplishment—all the coalitions formed in each state and across the country, the massive increase in public awareness of the crisis that would result, and the effect of all this on public opinion and voting behavior—we see that the well-intentioned concerns of those fearing a runaway convention miss the mark. They miss the effect on the U.S. Congress, the Executive Branch, and the U.S. Supreme Court of such an unprecedented popular movement. Faced with an historic uprising by We The People, unscrupulous delegates and/or Congress would be unable to pull strings from behind closed doors without exciting a national uproar."

But I am not so confident.   Mainly because "we the People" are now literally shell shocked by the tidal wave of Trump's antics, chaos, plots and lawlessness and the unwillingness of  the existing  so -called "equal branch" of  constitutional government to stop him.  National uproar?  I can't see it.  What we have now is an enervated and  psychologically besieged population without the energy or inclination to initiate an uproar far less sustain it.  As blogger William Rivers Pitt put it in a recent blog on Trump rolling back emissions standards:

"For many millions of people, the ceaseless vicissitudes of the Donald Trump experience, the serial humiliations, degradations and compounded outrages, leave us baffled in our efforts to simply get through the day. Trump is our collective Cousin Francis, and we are all sinking slowly."

So whereas one ought to expect to see mass national protests on a similar  scale to those in Hong Kong, it just won't happen unless something radically changes. Or the mass of citizens are able to tend to the minutiae of their daily lives as well as pay attention to the atrocities on the national scene. SO far, it isn't evident enough can.

Hence, I'm more  encouraged by the theoretical technical barriers to any rogue push for amendments.  First, any ratification of a feared rogue amendment would take 38 states. That's a high threshold.  It means that merely 13 states can veto any amendment. Does anyone believe that there are not 13 states in the Union that would block any amendments but those called for by the 34 states to rein in the federal government? If we cannot count on there being constitutional fidelity in even this small number of states, we would be forced to concede that America’s experiment in self-government has already failed To ensure that it does not fail in his own narrow perspective,  Governor Abbott has issued his call for a Convention of the states. He fears the people less than he does the federal government. He worries less over a runaway convention than over our runaway federal government.  But that means he'd more likely enable rogue amendments to come to life  - to the detriment of every citizen.

The most strident critics also neglect the historical evidence that demonstrates calling a Convention of States can “fail” and still succeed. There have been instances in our past where states began movements calling for constitutional amendments, then the U.S. Congress, jealous of its prerogatives, has “taken over” by proposing the amendments itself. (Under the Constitution, either 2/3 of the states or 2/3 of both houses of Congress can call for amendments.)

If such congressional action again preempts the current call for a Convention of States, the states can lose and still win, for the requested amendments may see the light of constitutional day.

My take, for what it's worth, is that it's best to let Constitutional  Article V 'sleeping dogs'  lie and not go down that path at all.  Yes, things are glitchy now with partisan gridlock and a loose cannon fool occupying the White House.  But picking up a loaded constitutional 'gun' and spinning the chamber in Article V roulette is not the optimal way to resolve things.

See Also:

Donald Trump | Joe Biden

The Trump "Whistleblower" Situation Is Very Dangerous for Democracy (and for the Democrats)

Other Voices On The Barr Version Of The Mueller Report

Other voices commenting on AG William Barr's 4 -page summary take on the Mueller Report. (Warning: Not for the politically squeamish!)

Donald Trump

Trump, 1; Justice, 0 — for Now

by P.M. Carpenter | March 26, 2019 - 6:45am | permalink

Excerpt:

I'm still mired in the inescapable epic of Donald J. Trump, Attorney General William Barr and Special Counsel Bob Mueller. For two years we've watched on the screen and read in B & W mounting evidence of Trump Inc.'s multiple ties with Russian intelligence, shady hackers and WikiLeaks' mediation, in addition to evidence of the president's nearly countless obstructions of justice.

Yet in less than two days, Barr both read Mueller's evidentiary submission (of possibly immense length) and wrote a four-page, single-spaced letter to Congress, neatly disclosing that all, after all, is well: The astoundingly criminal Mr. Trump is blameless. This came as even bigger news than the facts that Donald had spooned with Vladimir and has lied about it repeatedly ever since.

Larry Beinhart

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Robert Mueller

Robert Mueller Has Been Inducted into the 'Chickenshit Club'

Excerpt:

The "chickenshit club" is a phrase coined by James Comey after he was US attorney for the Southern District of New York back in 2002. The title means he was head of an office of over 200 assistant US attorneys. Several months into his job, Comey, who would later head the FBI for four years before being dismissed by US President Donald Trump in 2017 in what some saw as an obstruction-of-justice move, called a staff meeting.

As reported by Jesse Eisinger in his book, The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives, "Comey asked the seated prosecutors a question, 'Who here has never had an acquittal or a hung jury. Please raise your hand.' The go-getters and resume builders in the office were ready. This group thought themselves the best trial lawyers in the country. Hands shot up. Backs straightened in preparation for praise. Comey looked at his flock with approbation. 'You are members of what we like to call the Chickensh** Club'."

Prosecutors who had never lost a case were prosecutors who had never dared to take tough cases. White collar cases are the toughest to make and there are multiple reasons for this. They tend to take place in linguistic fogs. Instead of money taken at the point of a gun, it's taken by promises and claims that can be made to appear as merely over-ambitious, misunderstandings of complex rules, just careless, or actually made by underlings.

Donald Trump has been playing those games his whole life in white-collar crime court cases he has faced, as did his father before him, as have his children, his foundation, his company, and his associates. Rich white collar defendants have lots of money for their defences. Money throws enough muck around the courtroom to befuddle jurors and bedazzle judges so much that they throw their hands up inconclusively.

If a wealthy white-collar person is convicted, expect their attorneys to appeal. In recent decades the Supreme Court has reversed very solid white collar convictions and federal appeals courts have followed that lead. These have given very clear signals to prosecutors.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent out clear - though silent - signals before the release of the report that he had joined the chickensh** club. He didn't indict Donald Trump, Jr and Jared Kushner for possible offences they may have committed, like lying to Congress and failing to disclose foreign contacts, and then interview them, if they were to be charged. That would have set up an interview with the president himself.

Donald Trump

We Are So Utterly and Entirely Fucked

by Jaime O'Neill | March 26, 2019 - 7:00am | permalink

Excerpt:

There is, in fact, nowhere to look that isn't dark. As we all try to absorb the deep disappointment of the Mueller Report, it feels more and more like our country has experienced a hostile takeover, a coup that was unfolding in the late summer and fall of 2016 when we were all being told that, though he was a Republican, FBI Director James Comey was a guy with impeccably impartial standards, a comic book model of probity, honor, and adherence to truth, justice, and the American Way, a man who made Superman look a little shaky in his sense of right and wrong. But then Comey did that thing he did when he violated FBI protocol, first by announcing that the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email was being shut down for lack of evidence of wrongdoing, then adding an editorial opinion, stating that in his view, she'd acted recklessly and exercised poor judgment. But that was in June of 2016. In October as the election drew near, he strode forth once more to tell the nation that the investigation into Hillary's emails was being reopened. By nearly all accounts, that act sealed the election for Trump, even as the Comey was withholding the information that an investigation was already underway into the Trump campaign's connections with Russian operatives working to deliver the election to the man they wanted to see become the President of the United States.

From then on, the attempts to hide the truth and obstruct justice became ever more obvious, ever more blatant, ever more open and in plain sight. From the interview with Lester Holt in which Trump said getting the Russian thing off his back was the reason he fired Comey, to the constant denigration of Jeff Session, Trump's hand-picked and deep-dyed racist Attorney General who was insufficiently willing to define the AG's office as being Trump's personal law firm, to the daily Big Lie the Republicans were telling with such determined repetitions: "There was no collusion.

Despite the meetings, the indictments, the money changing hands that enriched Manafort, Trump's campaign manager, to the determination of so many to evade the truth, the "no collusion" mantra was sounded again and again. The word "collusion" was heard ever day, mostly in those denials, but the collusion seemed to be everywhere, not just with Russians, but with the news media that had given Trump so much free air time, that had spent so much time talking about Hillary Clinton's emails, and far too little time airing details of Trump's shady business deals, his inexplicably easy loans from Deutsche Bank, or the host of sexual abuse allegations against him, some of which he seemed to acknowledge, unwittingly, when he was caught on tape bragging to Billy Bush about his pussy grabbing proclivities, or his locker room talk with Howard Stern, radio douchebag.

And, despite daily assaults on our national sense of decency, honesty, class, or dignity, we were told to pin our hopes on Robert Mueller, the pillar of all that was good, right, true, and righteous left in the United States of America. Look up "rectitude" in the dictionary, and there was his picture. Look up Boy Scout, and you'd be told to "see, Mueller, Robert." Look up "hero," and there he was again, with his long face just oozing probity and integrity and gravitas.

He was the bulwark. He was going to save our sorry asses. He was the guy the media had meant to describe when they were saying all those great things about the sainted James Comey. He was the fearless guy who was going to get to the truth. He was, at last, the one goddamned Republican we could trust to put the nation ahead of even the softest whisper of partisanship.

....What took Robert Mueller and his team some 22 months to gather and write took Bill Barr less than a weekend to read and digest, at which time he offered us all a four-page summary concluding that there really wasn't much to see there, that there wasn't much the public needed to know in that undisclosed number of pages that constituted the full report, and that the Republicans could begin to plan how to spend all the loot that would soon flood in for Trump's 2nd Inaugural shindig.

Donald Trump | Robert Mueller | William Barr

The “Barr Summary” Is Meaningless. Release the Entire Report.

by William Rivers Pitt | March 26, 2019 - 6:24am | permalink

Excerpt:

From the moment the Mueller investigation began to the moment Attorney General William Barr released his “summary” of Mueller’s labors, Donald Trump acted like the guiltiest man on Earth. His efforts to obstruct the inquiry were egregious, vocal and constant, his denials facile and unconvincing in their serial repetitions. His now-notorious Twitter eruption the weekend before the report’s conclusion was every inch the child frantically deflecting blame after pushing his sister down the stairs.

The third week in January of this year provided a perfect example of the phenomenon when it was revealed that Trump made a habit of confiscating the translators’ notes after every meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin before swearing the translators to absolute secrecy. This was unprecedented behavior with potentially staggering implications, and never mind the hypocrisy; had Barack Obama done something similar during his tenure, the outrage on the right would have been visible from space. With Trump, however, it was business as usual.

The announced completion of Robert Mueller’s investigation on Friday launched a 48-hour period of media mayhem not seen since a certain white Bronco was on the loose in California 25 years ago. Those who were expecting a detailed impeachment map to be immediately revealed endured a number of existential crises after exposing themselves to the television coverage. DEAR GOD WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN was the going media refrain, and no answers were forthcoming until the attorney general released his review on Sunday afternoon.

To the astonished horror of millions, Barr’s very short “summary” announced that Mueller had found no evidence of collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and agents of the Russian government. Barr further announced that the report contained no actionable evidence to support charges of obstruction of justice against the president. No new indictments would be forthcoming from Mueller’s end of the pool.

Only one scant sentence out of Barr’s entire four-page letter — “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” — serves to correctly note that Mueller did not exonerate Trump from wrongdoing. More ominously, Mueller’s office refused to endorse the conclusions reached in Barr’s letter. Perhaps they are playing it with their usual caution, but such an endorsement would have ended the discussion with a resounding thud.

After the initial shock wore off, anger flooded the feed. “Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population,” writes Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi, “a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn’t prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There’s an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and…. Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse.”

Much respect to Matt — I’m a definite fan — but this journalist is going there, because something reeks. If the moment arrives when crow must be eaten, I will devour my fair portion because it is the writer’s lot to say so when they have been wrong at the top of their lungs. We are not there yet, and Taibbi himself accidently explained why. “There will be people protesting,” he wrote. “The Mueller report doesn’t prove anything!” Here’s the problem: We are not talking about the Mueller report. We don’t know what’s in the Mueller report. All we have to go on is the word of William Barr, and speaking personally, that simply isn’t good enough.

Robert Mueller | William Barr

A Conclusion Without a Report

by Marc Ash | March 26, 2019 - 5:53am | permalink

— from Reader Supported News

Attorney General William Barr stood before reporters and beside Donald Trump in the Oval Office on March 15th and said with unqualified certainty that the president’s Declaration of an Emergency at the U.S./Mexican border was not only constitutionally legal but absolutely justified by the circumstances there. It seemed a statement tailored to support the conclusion Trump sought and the political outcome Trump wanted.

Sunday’s carefully worded summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report by Attorney General Barr seems to pursue the same outcome.

The attorney general’s summary does a far better job of supporting Trump’s assertions and talking points than shedding any real light on the substance of the special counsel’s actual report.

If the attorney general’s objective was to preempt that spin cycle and create political ammunition for the White House in advance of the actual report being made available to Congress or the public, this summary seems ideally suited to for that express purpose.

What does Mueller’s report actually say? We are still not permitted to know. Mueller’s report is still the same mystery, the same enigma it has been for two years.

Congress and the public must be allowed to view the special counsel’s report, in its entirety. Not an avowed Trump loyalist’s interpretation of the report.

The Mueller Report: There is no substitute.

See Also:

Donald Trump | Russia

Russia Got the Useful Idiot It Wanted in the White House. Don’t Stop Fighting to Reclaim America.

AND:

Donald Trump | Robert Mueller

Robert Mueller’s ‘Most Enduring Legacy’ May Be the Most Frightening Part of His Final Report

AND:

Marjorie Cohn

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Donald Trump | Robert Mueller

Mueller Didn’t Exonerate Trump of Obstruction of Justice

by Marjorie Cohn | March 28, 2019 - 6:45am | permalink