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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
Man, I wish I remembered what I said!
Latvia…he was colluding with Latvia!
If they weren’t crying, then they weren’t playing it straight.
Any apologies to their viewers for wasting 104 weeks of their time with “Collusion!!”?
How many times did they use the word Kompromat?
People need to be executed over this. Failing that, they need to be fired and de-pensioned.
But, yeah, embarrassed is probably the best we can hope for.
Yeah, I realize it’s just an anecdote but one is tempted to say “No matter how much nature or nurture, high-functioning r-selection and sociopathy is sometimes inherited.”
Not only for wasting time, but for actively promoting a narrative of which they should have been highly skeptical. Also, for promoting a narrative meant to destroy an enemy instead of to honestly inform their audience.
Well, here’s an appetizer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjUvfZj-Fm0
Obviously not as important as matters the career DOJ staff support and for which they want credit. This is a small piece of #resistance by the “swamp.”
Here is the statute cited by AG Barr [emphasis added]:
Here is Section 6 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Too lengthy to cut and paste here. 6(e) is the subsection cited, limiting the release of grand jury information. This is, in part, to prevent use of the forum to create a public record of unverified, irrelevant, but politically or publicly useful claims.
More likely option is guaranteed sinecure as TV pundits. Seems to be the usual route.
Here’s Dershowitz slamming Mueller:
Right, because threatening to execute anyone who dares to question whether the president and his advisors obeyed the laws that bind everyone else is a great way to preserve a constitutional republic…
As we all know, that was not what happened and was never the intent. That said, attempting to subvert an election and the Constitution is not a capital offense.
I’m with Andrew McCarthey:
I think that was humorous hyperbole.
Since we’re on the subject, however, the punishment wouldn’t be for daring to question whether the president and his advisors obeyed the laws that bind everyone else. The punishment would be for weaponizing the federal government not only with no evidence, but possibly with manufactured evidence. Not punishing such an excursion is a guaranteed way to damage a constitutional republic.
I just heard House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy says it is time to move on. Well, I always thought McCarthy was a bit dim. It’s time do a victory lap and then salt the earth and crush our enemies, possibly in a different order. We need prosecutions against people like Comey, Brennan, McCabe, et al. The Trump campaign should sue the Clinton campaign. The people who perpetuated this fraud in the media should lose their jobs and be driven from the public square.
The coast to coast Bill Cunningham Show is going to be absolutely epic tonight. He’s a lawyer and he delivers the best monologues on radio. Really good at breaking things down and commenting on them.
It starts at 10 PM Eastern. I think it tends to be on iheart stations.
The podcast is free, if you miss it.
It’s criminal malpractice if the RNC doesn’t already have transcripts and clips of every Dem and media figure making an ass of themselves as they perpetuate this obvious hoax over the last two years.
I don’t disagree with anything you said, but I would note that ‘a good day for Trump’ treats government, not to mention the law, as some kind of sports event.
And while I’m at it, it wasn’t so much a good day for Trump as it was the end of 676 bad days that were artificially engineered by his opposition.
We’ve established that this was legitimate, so there is little reason that this won’t be our future; every president until the end of our republic indicted for nonsense on their first day of office. Pistols leveled at the wives of people who associated with him. Corrupt people with badges blatantly representing the opposition.
Half of me hopes we can rise above this in future.
The other half of me is quite sure we should do it back twice as hard.
And to hear the lamentations of their interns!
This is great, but it’s exactly what I said in #38 above. Plagiarism! Which one of you is feeding my brilliant comments to Prof. Dershowitz?
I was thinking the other day that the moment our judicial system first ran amok was the Al Capone prosecution. The FBI’s getting Al Capone on tax evasion has been held up for years as the model prosecution of all time. But I think the FBI and Justice Department were wrong in that case and any others they have prosecuted in that way.
This idea that we’ll find something, anything, has led to a lot of prosecutorial abuses such as prosecutors’ sitting down with the accused and pointing to a stack of vague laws and statutes, saying, “You’d better confess because we’ll get you on something.” I guess that’s what the book Three Felonies a Day is about. I think that’s what happened to Conrad Black.
I also really resent the “obstruction of justice” prosecutions. They are too subjective. When all else fails, it seems the prosecutors can always find something that sounds like an “obstruction of justice.” I want this “crime” to be deleted from the books.
And I resent the way prosecutors approach people peripheral to the person they are really trying to get–“Just give us the dirt on this guy and we’ll overlook these other [non]crimes we found while we were looking into your friend’s affairs.”
This attitude of U.S. prosecutors is not right. All leaders–local, state, and federal–are vulnerable to this kind of prosecution. I thought this type of harassment was what the warrant and indictment systems were designed to protect against.
I’m really upset about it. I’ve reached the point where I would rather some guilty people walked away than continue to conduct such unethical investigations and prosecutions.
Moderator Note:
Please stop using Gary as a punching bag. Respond to his comments with actual arguments or ignore him.Too bad we have the CoC here then.
Kidding, just kidding. The CoC is what will let us move on as a community.
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p>Once Gary admits he was wrong.Moderator Note:
Please stop using Gary as a punching bag. Respond to his comments with actual arguments or ignore him.When Hell freezes over…………….
It’s hard to tell these days.
No one would do that. Ricominions are too loyal. The only answer is…Dershowitz is secretly here under an assumed name!
Which of us is secretly him?
Hint: it’s not me.
I suppose I should clarify: questioning isn’t treason. Orchestrating a coup through false testimony while having sworn to uphold the Constitution is.
I am aware that this is an extreme view.
Well, it’s extreme this century. In times past I’m not so sure that such an action wouldn’t have involved hanging. And I don’t think I could pass such a sentence myself.
What I wish, though is that these people would have something to fear; death, dishonor, loss of job…something to give their better angels a kick in the rear.
McCarthy wants President Trump as weak as possible and the Clinton and corporatist cabal untouched. He accurately represents the subservient California Republican party. Not one dime for the House GOP until they throw him out of leadership and put into leadership a promise-keeping politician.
Paul Mirengoff is no Trump booster, far from it, but now concludes:
Exactly so, except that the last sentence is wrong. Mueller, suddenly constrained by a real Attorney General, fell back to feeding the destroy-Trump team with innuendo and “indecision.” This gives the Democrats and Neuter-Trump faction exactly what they need to continue trying to disrupt the presidency, divert attention from policy successes, and complete the radical transformation of America with leftist presidential victory in 2020.
Mueller is practically begging to be the star witness in endless House hearings, with traunch after traunch of opposition research gathered by his team. Disrupting this presidency and covering up the real collusion and real interference by a weaponized intelligence community and DOJ have always been Mueller’s goals, and he has done fairly well so far.
The only defense to this is an all-out offense against the rats who have infested our intelligence and law enforcement senior headquarters, unlike Watergate. Time for complete disclosure of the Rosenstein memos and all the FISA warrant applications, to start.
Glenn Reynolds’ column in USA Today is on point.
Moi? Not sure if this “edit” was aimed at me or @instugator; if, perchance, it was aimed at me, I have always refrained from using @garyrobbins, my colleague at the Bar, as anything but an honored debate opponent, same as I did with many of my opponents in cases over the years, some of whom, it must be noted, made Gary look like the Marquess of Queensbury. I will also note I have always endeavored to abide by the Code of Conduct, as it is the one feature which distinguishes this site from so many others, which have sadly fallen into something resembling “The Jungle” of uncivil conduct and speech.
Sincerely, Jim