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Breaking: AG Barr Delivers Mueller Summary Report to Congress
Attorney General William Barr sent his summary of the Mueller Investigation to Congress Sunday. You can read a PDF of the document here. The letter recounts the full Mueller report, dividing it into two parts: possible Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, and obstruction of justice. Regarding the first, Barr writes:
The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Concerning the second issue, obstruction, Barr writes:
After making a “thorough factual investigation” into these matters, the Special Counsel considered whether to evaluate the conduct under Department standards governing prosecution and declination decisions but ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction…. The Special Counsel states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Barr concludes by addressing the release of the full Mueller report: “[M]y goal and intent is to release as much of the Special Counsel’s report as I can consistent with applicable law, regulations, and Departmental policies.”
Published in Law, Politics
I was never a Mueller fan but I never expected that he would become a Putin stooge. Thank God, Jerry Nadler and Rachel Maddox are still on the case.
Jon, that was really, really fast for you to put the PDF on a Hyperlink. Since this letter has been released to the press, I suggest that you post that 4 page PDF, and not just the Hyperlink.
If I read it correctly, it sounds like AG Barr has left no room for doubt. I suspect that the Dems were going to leap on what seemed to be openings, but I think he has stopped them in their tracks. Of course, I’m sure they will attack anyway–why waste 80 searches for information?!
Dude. Just click.
But AG Barr says that it would then be up to him to decide if there was “sufficient evidence to pursue obstruction of justice.” He says there’s not. Doesn’t that mean another door slams shut on the Dems?
There’s the thrown bone. Ridiculous.
If there’s no crime, what “justice” is there to obstruct? Weak. Pathetic.
As I predicted, once Mueller and his team of Democratic operatives could find nothing to support the collusion hoax (and if they found nothing, there really is nothing) they still needed to leave a stink bomb behind to let their Democratic allies and the Kristol Gang spin this out for a couple of more years, so on obstruction of justice we get this tortured verbiage “while this report does not conclude the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” I can just see Jim Acosta saying, “Mr President, we demand that you prove you did not beat your wife!“
Pretty much.
Far from it. Mueller’s intent was to open the door for the Democrats, regardless of Barr’s action. It is the predicate they needed for further House investigations leading to impeachment.
That just proves Putin owns Barr.
Haven’t they said they don’t need no stinking crime? The House is going to pursue him because… racist… we haven’t seen his tax returns… he paid off a hooker with money he could have used to self-finance his campaign!
I think (hope) they’ll damage themselves with the voters. We’d like to move on now.
Clearly they don’t care if they have an excuse or not. And they don’t, and it won’t matter.
Trump was vindicated in the AG Barr letter. The political & media circus just started.
I’m watching Chris Wallace interview Jerome Nadler from earlier today. Wallace is working close to the edge these past couple of days, having to chance letting his “bias” show a little more than usual. (I guess now is the time to spend it. Churchill had to make similar decisions regarding broken German codes.)
Nadler’s an impressive public intellect, by the way. I like listening to him speak, except when he lapses into formulaic lies. Even then he executes well.
But Wallace has been my study recently. For instance, Nadler makes his twisted case that goes “DoJ has said a sitting president can’t (won’t?) be indicted. Therefore this case involving the President is an exception to the usual rule of (what, logic?) – therefore we can’t trust their statement that there’s nothing here.” [False quotes, my phrasing.]
And here’s where Wallace shines – he elides the obvious next step of logic and lets Nadler’s suspect assertion pass. I was (almost, I’m jaded) expecting him to ask “Wait, let’s make that clear. Are you saying that the President can’t be prosecuted therefore no crimes by him could ever be indictable, therefore Mueller’s statement is a meaningless throwaway and that’s why you have to continue investigating?”
Or something like that. I’m drinking a Three Philosophers right now and I can’t even put satisfactory words in Chris Wallace’s mouth. What a beer, a big fat heavy quadruple ale leavened with cherries. Think abbey ale and kirsch.
Nevermind that he gives Nadler all the room he needs to run with no challenges; that’s garden-variety Wallace. What a stealthy little rabbit. The one I noticed is how he subtly reinforced the foundation of Nadler’s argument for continuous investigation forever until orange man explodes into carrots for all us rabbit folk. Sorry, that’s the beer talking.
So if you’re Democrat/media person, which way do you go now?
or
I suppose they could actually say both.
Moderator Note:
Rude ad-hominem[redacted]
The collusion is there. We just have to keep investigating.
Collusion 2.0 starts tomorrow.
Nah, I think the collusion narrative just makes them look bad. They’ll move on to racist! Tax returns! Campaign finance violations!
This one makes me crazy. I don’t get why so many Republicans think they are entitled to this, Much less Democrats. I don’t get it.
Oh, I get it. Anyone with tax returns as complex as Donald Trump’s can be made to look dirty with something in there! It’s a gold mine!
The fact that he’s been audited by (Lois Lerner’s) IRS the last 20 years will be conveniently ignored.
Please pass me one of those beers. It sounds delicious. It also seems to have other very positive effects.
Barr needs to pivot quickly and assure aggressive criminal investigation of the FBI and DOJ cabal and their associates elsewhere in government who were responsible for the hoax.
Do you think he might think it’s important to wait for the IG Report? I don’t but he might.
Nope, parallel. Move quickly on all fronts. By the way, my understanding is the IG Report has been complete but DOJ has not released it. Moreover, it is of limited scope. The real issue here is that the Clinton email coverup and the Russia collusion/get Trump conspiracies are tied together – it’s the same people. That’s why needs looking into rather than a more circumscribed IG look at an isolated agency. The IG report can be a part of it, but the investigation needs to be much wider.
I keep saying this over and over. Half of these crimes that people invent about Trump aren’t even possible in this circumstance.
I’m more interested in how Republicans react. This is a big moment, and they are really good at being oblivious to big moments. This hoax was started based on HRC purchased campaign dirt either faked or obtained from Russian and other foreign sources for the purpose of influencing the election. Based on this nothing, the executive agencies were weaponized in a radical and dangerous way. We need to find out how that happened. Who did it. People need to be embarrassed over this at least.
Will Republicans seize the initiative righteously and effectively? Or will they forever lose people like me?
Maybe it’s just a sleepy Sunday afternoon, and I’m not hitting on all 6, although to be fair in my case I might have 4-5 left at this point, but I keep getting hung up on one particular line in this summary which I cannot square with the evidence about Felonia von Pantsuit and her campaign colluding, through a law firm and Fusion GPS and Christopher Sttele, with the Russians who contributed to the now-infamous pile of detritus, which has been all gussied-up with the more respectable honorific “dossier”. That line is as follows:
“The report further explains that a primary consideration for the Special Counsel’s investigation was whether any Americans–including individuals associated with the Trump campaign– joined the Russian conspiracies to influence the election, which would be a federal crime.”
With a full disclosure that I was never involved in a Federal Criminal practice of any kind, and full acknowledgement that there would certainly be vigorous arguments against this proposition, many of which, I am sure, are being bellowed forth on all the cable news channels as I write this, but if what Hillary and her campaign did and financed and worked on for a considerable period of time before and after the election was not being involved with the Russians who were feeding this frenzy to her, what else would it be? She is certainly “any American”, albeit not my kind of American, so why isn’t there some mention of her collusion?
I know some reading this might think I just need to wake up from my dream, as she will never be charged with a single one of the possible 30,000 federal felonies she should have been charged with long ago.
It’s just that that particular wording caught my eye and I would really appreciate any thoughts on my perhaps too close a reading of those words.
Sincerely, Jim
Nadler’s rationale for continued investigation is that since DoJ has a rule against indicting a sitting President, there still might be something completely illegal that a non-President would obviously be indicted for. That putative rule (I don’t know if it exists or what it really says, but it’s Nadler’s basis for his continued investigations) means that those crimes could really be there and even be documented, but DoJ and/or the AG would still quite properly say exactly what they’ve said – that there are no indictments.
I think people are missing this. He’s not saying Mueller didn’t find it, he’s saying maybe he did but DoJ’s statement is meaningless. That’s the stated rationale of the chairman of the House judiciary committee, so let’s get this right.