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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
Thanks for posting the link to AG Barr’s letter, @exjon. A few sentences jumped out at me:
p. 2 “But as noted above, the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.” (emphasis added)
That seems to indicate that the Trump campaign actively rejected to conspire or coordinate with the Russian government, not just passively missed opportunities to do so. It also has me curious as to who are these “Russian-affiliated individuals”, will we get to find out their identities, or do we already know who these people are (i.e. Stefan Halper, etc.)?
p. 3 “…Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense. Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.” (emphasis added)
First, the fact that Barr mentions Rosenstein’s involvement in making this determination is important. He is the Justice Dept. official who approved, supervised, and shepherded the Special Counsel’s investigation throughout its entire existence. It also preemptively blunts criticism that Barr acted on his own to get his boss off the hook. Second, noting that this was determined apart from the above mentioned constitutional considerations gives weight to the determination itself – there’s no obstruction of justice not because we’re afraid to indict a sitting president, but because there’s no evidence of obstruction of justice.
The fact that Mueller’s investigation was unimpeded is also indirectly supported by the last paragraph on page 1, particularly the last sentence: “The Special Counsel issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communication records, issued almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses.”
I don’t know if it will get cut for YouTube, but Rudy Giuliani was just epic on Fox. I’d love to know what the Ricochet lawyers think of it.
Chris Wallace is his father’s son.
Nothing to see here, move along, move on now.
I agree that will be Nadler’s rationale. The problem is that Barr’s summary states the investigation did not establish the Trump campaign colluded or even coordinated with the Russians. The issue of indictment is explicitly raised only regarding obstruction of justice which would require bringing charges against the President for conspiring to obstruct investigation of something that never happened.
Hope springs eternal!
Yes, absolutely. Nadler’s rationale is a lie, obviously. I’m just saying to be aware of the precise untruth they’re deploying, so we can find opportunities to make it explicit and let them commit to it.
I am most troubled by Mueller’s failure to make “a traditional prosecutorial judgment” on the obstruction issue, leaving that to Barr and Rosenstein.
Comey, while he was the FBI director (as Mueller’s successor in that post), made precisely such a prosecutorial judgment in the Clinton e-mail case, though it was not Comey’s role to do so. Now it is Mueller’s role to do so, as he is no longer the FBI director, but is a special prosecutor. Yet he declined.
I wonder if they have the same motive — to avoid “interference” in the political process.
Comey’s decision saved Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Mueller’s decision plays clearly into the hands of the Democrats.
Now that the saintly Herr Mueller and his team of Clinton campaign operatives crack investigators has officially wrapped up the investigation, is there any hope the AG will inform us how much we taxpayers paid for this bit of Democratic opo research? I’m guessing somewhere north of 25 million.
It will be interesting to know if among those who testified under oath or had records subpoenaed are included anyone from the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, Bruce Ohr, James Comey, Lisa Page, McCabe & Strozek etc. If not, the “any Americans” language means nothing.
And remember that language is limited to joining with Russian conspiracies, not their own conspiracy to clear Hillary, spy on the Trump campaign, and then seek to depose the President after his election.
If you want to know where this country is heading watch The Death Of Stalin. LOL
#Soviet
Let’s not forget that the investigation did find evidence of Russian attempts to manipulate the election, and did indict Russian nationals for those crimes:
If the Trump campaign had been involved in #2 in particular that would have been very analogous to Watergate (i.e. spying on a rival campaign) and grounds for impeachment in my view. Since a very thorough investigation found no such links, Trump is now completely exonerated in my opinion, and that should be the lead GOP message here.
However, to say the whole thing was a hoax and worse would be to overplay a strong hand. Also, why at this point try to discredit an investigation that just exonerated Trump? The GOP should be pointing our how fair, impartial, and thorough it was rather than trying at this stage to undermine it, since it just reached a favorable conclusion.
The Barr letter states the DOJ decision on “obstruction” was made without regard to the constitutional question of an inferior officer of the Executive branch charging or prosecuting the president. The letter is silent on the separate question of seeking to criminalize the president’s exercise of his constitutional authority. There is no such thing as criminal obstruction when a president directs a case be pursued or dropped. There is, instead, a political judgment, to be exercised by Congress or the electorate.
This is a good day for America.
They showed up for their trial, too.
St. Mueller apparently made no conclusion whether there was obstruction of justice.
But having reviewed the report, now both Rosenstein and AG Barr have gone on record that they have determined there is insufficient evidence to criminally charge anyone with obstruction of justice, and state this was determined without regard to the DOJ policy of not indicting a president while in office.
However, that leaves the door wide open to the Dems in Congress to rail about “obstruction” in a political way, rather than a criminal way. I predict this keeps the impeachment fires stoked all the way through November 2020. Because Trump.
The whole thing was an obvious hoax and worse. Obvious to all from the start, and obvious on every day since then until now. I am underplaying the hand.
Shamefully, both Senator Graham and AG Barr have failed to force their staffs to immediately post the summary letter to their websites. This failure, or deliberate decision, places the disclosure entirely in the control of a media that Barr and Graham know to be 90% hostile to President Trump. Contrast this with Chairman Grassley’s aggressive posting of every exchange of letters in the Kavanaugh hearings.
Barr and Graham have chosen to give the Democrats and Trump haters a 24 to 48 hour lead. Chairman Graham had his team post his statement, making himself look like he supports the president, but kept the letter on which he commented off of the committee website.
Nadler signaled long ago that he was going to throw everything he could at the President in an attempt to remove him from office, regardless of what Mueller’s report said.
98% at least.
The hoax part was not about the Russians. It was about Trump. And It’s worse than a hoax. It’s a government scandal involving the FBI, DOJ, and the prior Administration and the perpetrators need to be held to account.
So now that the Barr letter of Sunday afternoon is out, I can hope that Nadler will be needing a new rationale. Let’s watch and see how much (or how long, have to account for staff lag) it takes him to move to something else, or whether he has to change it at all.
I checked out CNN and MSNBC. They played it straight, that today was a very good day for Trump, and it was.
1974 was a very hard year for the country. It was appropriate that Nixon be forced out of office, still it had a huge impact on America.
I am glad that we won’t be facing that agony.
The hoax was implicating President Trump with no evidence for doing so. The hoax is the diversion away from the actual known crimes (private servers, deleting subpoenaed emails, weaponizing the executive agencies for political purposes) and the actual known “collusion with foreign agents to influence the election” on the part of HRC, the DNC, and the Obama administration.
I’m not suggesting that Republicans should discredit this report. I’m suggesting that exoneration so complete raises counter questions which should have been raised a few years ago IMO. Serious counter questions with far more support than the original hoax “concerns”. Republicans had better pursue those answers vigorously or they’ll lose me. This is not just run of the mill mudslinging – it was always the highest of high stakes. Either the president was really a traitor, or the Obama administration radically and seriously politically weaponized the federal government and that is way bigger than Watergate IMO.
Really? If the GOP doesn’t do what you want now you’ll be voting for Beto in 2020?
Good one. There is only one righteous and effective Republican, and he can’t do it alone.
I got one out for you but I couldn’t find you so I drank it too.
Sorry about the crappy picture. That usually works better.
Still, they are the hardest hit in this fiasco. The super cut of the media’s “bombshell,” “tipping point,” “beginning of the end” YouTube video should be mandatory viewing in every newsroom in the English-speaking world. (And, yes, that includes New York.)
No matter how saintly they act in the remaining days of the Trump Administration this stench will follow them for a long, long time.
In order: Yes. No.
I have been looking for that supercut on youtube; if you find one please send it. The best I found was Chrissy Matthews in full cry yesterday. He was as angry at Mueller et alia as at Trump.
Only if people make sure it follows them. That will take active and effective argumentation.