It seems impossible that the still-highly redacted version of the Mueller report reached the public only three days ago. It seems so much longer.
Part of the reason it seems longer is that so much has been written in that brief period as everyone, including me, attempts to rip through 400+ pages looking for the key phrase, dropped name, or hidden angle that everyone missed. The sum total of articles written about the report is already surely many times longer than the original.
Another aspect of it seeming such old news after just three days, is that we’ve been living in the spin zone for more than two weeks since William Barr produced his instant “summary” providing Donald Trump with every talking points he wanted. With Barr leaping in to make his enormously misleading assessment of the report, and every Trump-flavored source announcing that it was “time to move on” even before the first full sentence of the report was seen, the last two weeks have been long.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that for over a year we liven with almost daily announcements that the report was going to drop. Any day now. Or next week. Or certainly before next month. That helped to make the arrival of the report seem late months ago — although the articles predicting the release of the report, were one of the few things that reporters got consistently wrong throughout the period of the investigation.
But mostly what makes the report seem old news is that it is … mostly old news. That is, the report produced by the special counsel’s office consists in large part of details confirming reports that have circulated for months, or years. And that’s really the biggest news of the week—we were right. Christopher Steele was right. The FBI agents who suspected Trump’s campaign was reaching out to Russia were right. Reports that Michael Flynn, and Donald Trump Jr, and Jared Kushner were trying to build a “back channel” for secret communications with the Kremlin were right. Stories that the Paul Manafort shared private polling data with a Russian agent were right. The reports about Carter Page were right. The reports about George Papadopoulos were right. The stories about Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to build a giant tower complete with personal space for Vladimir Putin and an Ivanka-branded spa were right. And every story of Trump trying to hide evidence, destroy evidence, suborn perjury, and simply end the investigation … they were all right.
We were right. We were right. We were right. Now … what are we going to do about it?
After we read some pundits, of course ...
Special Counsel’s report
Joan Walsh says what all of us have been saying for weeks.
The Nation
Early last year, The New York Times published a meticulously reported piece about Donald Trump’s frenzied attempt to fire FBI Director James Comey, which succeeded, and to stop Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which did not.
In the flood of damning revelations, one fact stood out to me at the time: a frustrated Trump bleating, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Cohn, of course, was the conscience-free hitman who began his career aiding Senator Joe McCarthy’s destructive crusade against so-called Communists in government, who wound up, appropriately, as Trump’s mentor and fixer.
I thought perhaps Trump had found him, in Rudy Giuliani, but I was wrong.
One year later, Trump finally has his Roy Cohn, in his new attorney general William Barr.
Another attorney general—an honest attorney general—making an honest assessment of the contents of the Mueller report, would have likely triggered events that would already have impeachment proceedings underway.
If you were paying attention, you knew the fix was in when Trump picked Barr: The former attorney general had already shared with the White House a memo arguing that a president cannot obstruct justice, since his powers to hire, fire, and redeploy staff are infinite. In an earlier stint as AG, under George H.W. Bush, Barr pronounced himself “subordinate” to the president in a 1992 interview. In his confirmation
Barr’s protection of Trump is a critical factor in why there is not already a moving van at the White House. And every pundit pretending that Barr somehow did America a “favor” in allowing the report, the redacted report, to leave his desk, should realize that no one is buying that idiotic argument.
Jonathan Chait on Sarah Sander’s lying about lying.
New York Magazine
Following the firing of James Comey as FBI director, Sarah Sanders repeatedly stated that he had lost the confidence of the rank and file, “countless” numbers of whom had said as much. One of the small comic subplots of the Mueller report reveals that Sanders conceded that “her reference to hearing from ‘countless members of the FBI’ was a ‘slip of the tongue,’” and that “her statement in a separate press interview that rank-and-file FBI agents had lost confidence in Comey was a comment she made ‘in the heat of the moment’ that was not founded on anything.”
Sanders repeated that “slip of the tongue” at least two more times. And defended her “founded on nothing” statement by lying again.
The legal significance of her lies is that Trump’s firing of Comey is a piece of a broad attempt to obstruct justice, and Sanders was engaged in an effort to craft a false cover story. Because it happened to touch on a criminal investigation, she was interviewed under oath and had to admit that she made the whole thing up. But it’s a petty fair guess that, if the FBI could interrogate Sanders upon pain of perjury about all of her claims, this would not be the only lie she would confess.
There’s a simple answer to this: Don’t listen to her. Sanders has already made it clear that she hates doing press conferences, and when she does make the rare appearance, it’s only to split her time between lying and berating the press for calling her on her lies. So … stop going. Stop asking her for comments. Let Sanders and Conway and every other Trump surrogate spew all the want on Fox News, but stop pretending like there is any value in letting any of them appear elsewhere. Their words are not just of no value, they are of negative value. I’m serious about this. Let Sanders talk to a press room that’s empty except for Fox and Newsmax. It will make things better, not worse.
Michael Tomasky has a good suggestion concerning the “what now” question.
Daily Beast
Well, after all that, the bad news is that this changes nothing.
And the good news? This changes nothing.
Donald Trump is not going to be perp-walked out of Mar-a-Lago next weekend. Trump defenders and Julian Assange acolytes and deep-state paranoiacs can crow.
On the other hand, the Mueller Report has plenty of chapter and verse on sleazy behavior by Trump and his subordinates—and, interestingly, it documents some incidents where subordinates refused to do sleazy things Trump clearly wanted them to do.
It does not clear Trump. Here’s the last sentence of text of the whole thing, on page 180 of Volume II, the obstruction part: “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Mueller’s absolutely strict adherence to the DOJ rules against indicting an executive—adherence that Mueller took so seriously that he felt it was wrong to even state that Trump had committed a crime in internal documents—is such a stiff and extreme take on the rules that even other members of his team were shocked. It is definitely not a universally held belief, and certainly Barr has no intention of playing a hands-off game. The only way that the real intention of the report can be evaluated is for Congress to step in.
Because while Mueller’s report is clear on the facts, it is useless on what to do about them.
The report is like that over and over again. Act A would qualify as an obstructive act if A, B, and C conditions are met. We found considerable evidence that A, B, and C conditions were met. However, they weren’t met enough for us to identify a clear crime.
And that’s where the report has left us, more or less where we were before it hit, with a few damning new details and the certainty that the courts aren’t going to resolve this. So now what?
This is what I meant above when I wrote that the good news is that nothing changes. Democrats should still pursue their investigations. They need to get Bill Barr, who dirtied himself further Thursday morning in breathtaking ways, back up on the Hill. They need to hear from Mueller. They need to keep pushing for an unredacted or less-redacted report—huge chunks of the Wikileaks section in particular are blacked out—as Jerry Nadler vowed they would do at his press conference Thursday afternoon.
I want to see Bill Barr’s smirking face back in a chair with Democrats kicking him in the shins for his lies and distortions. That would be a start.
Will Bunch on why Trump’s “I’m f#@ked” should be a prophesy.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Buried on Page 290 of the long-awaited Mueller report into Russia’s 2016 election interference and questions of collusion and cover-up surrounding President Donald Trump was one of those rare peeks behind the curtain of our insane presidency — exactly why the 440-page report was so highly anticipated for so long.
On May 17, 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had to break the news to Trump that his abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey — who was leading the probe into his election — meant there’d now be a special counsel investigation.
Trump “slumped back in his chair, according to notes by a Sessions aide, and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.’ ”
Now, 23 months later, we finally have most of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in our hands — but only after an obsequious and fundamentally dishonest spin campaign from Sessions’ replacement as attorney general, William Barr.
However, says Bunch, we can still make the beautiful words that Trump uttered on that day come true.
It turns out that Trump’s instincts in 2017 were very, very good. Mueller’s work should mark the beginning of the end of his presidency. Yet that denouement probably won’t happen before the 2020 election — not with politically calculating cowards running both parties in Congress.
Any attempt to calculate the next action in terms of tabulating electoral votes isn’t just a losing strategy, it’s a weakness that Trump will exploit, and laugh about, in 2020.
Bunch also extends the case for going after Barr. Trump’s personal attorney general needs to be sitting in a chair where he can be punched — let’s say rhetorically — 24/7.
Nancy LeTourneau on the facts that Barr and Trump are pretending none of us can see.
Washington Monthly
For almost three years now, Donald Trump has been unwilling to acknowledge that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election, even as he exploited the material they hacked from the DNC and Clinton campaign. Some enterprising reporter should ask the president for his reaction to Mueller’s opening statement which says, “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”
Trump has already given his answer about Russia. “I see no reason why it should be.” Trump is not about to change his opinion because of the Mueller report. After all, he got his opinion straight from Putin.
Virginia Heffernan says there’s one other guilty party indicted by the Mueller report.
Los Angeles Times
To a ghastly extent, the social media attempts “to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States” (Mueller’s words) and the more formal Russian military cyberattacks to demonize Hillary Clinton (and by extension liberals and centrists) succeeded. They’ve left our cognitive processes in disarray.
It used to be that Americans didn’t feel remotely threatened by “invaders” at the border; or thwarted by a phantom “deep state”; or constantly lashed by racist, sexist and violent fantasies. These psychic phenomena, and many more, were seeded in our consciousness on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, then amplified by traditional media so aggressively that we came to believe and even act on them.
Like Iago whispering to Othello, the Kremlin’s operations convinced the prosperous, peaceful United States that it is teetering on the brink of civil war.
If there is one thing that every media outlet should be hammering home, it is the scope and scale of the Russian interference. Most people have no idea how extensive, multifaceted, and sophisticated these efforts were.
Anne Applebaum wonders just why Trump was so terrified of the Mueller report.
Washington Post
The Mueller report has been published — and I am vindicated.
But not only me: Everyone who began writing about the weird connections between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government in the spring and summer of 2016 is vindicated: Sarah Kendzior, Josh Rogin and Franklin Foer, for example. But, of course, there were many more. As it turns out, the Russian attempts to assist the Trump campaign were deep and broad, and those who described them, even if tentatively at first, were right to do so. …
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did not, as we know, find a moment when the Trump campaign sat down with representatives of the Russian state so that they could coordinate their tactics in a manner that could be described as illegal. I am not surprised by that finding: I have never thought that Trump functioned as a Russian “agent,” and I have always thought that Trump’s public behavior — things we all could see and hear — was sufficient to disqualify him for the presidency. But if what the president did was not illegal, it was certainly immoral. As David Frum has written, “It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that Vladimir Putin’s Russia hacked American emails and used them to help elect Trump to the presidency.” It’s also a matter of historical record that Trump campaign officials approved of this interference; indeed, they cheered it on.
They did more than cheer. They contacted Russian officials at every level and said in essence “how can we help?” That it failed to rise to the level of an official conspiracy, shows the huge difference between the way Mueller defined that term, and the way most people would understand the idea.
Trump’s evident fear of Mueller’s investigation and his attempts to obstruct it are now a matter of record. But why was he so afraid, and why did he try to obstruct? Which piece of his past relationship with Russia, or Russians, did he fear might emerge? We still don’t know. And now, it seems, we might never know.
Election 2020
Paul Krugman on Bernie Sander’s “wealth.”
New York Times
A peculiar chapter in the 2020 presidential race ended Monday, when Bernie Sanders, after months of foot-dragging, finally released his tax returns. The odd thing was that the returns appear to be perfectly innocuous. So what was all that about?
The answer seems to be that Sanders got a lot of book royalties after the 2016 campaign, and was afraid that revealing this fact would produce headlines mocking him for now being part of the 1 Percent. Indeed, some journalists did try to make his income an issue.
This line of attack is, however, deeply stupid. Politicians who support policies that would raise their own taxes and strengthen a social safety net they’re unlikely to need aren’t being hypocrites; if anything, they’re demonstrating their civic virtue.
I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary, but he’s not at the top of my list for 2020. Honestly, he’s not even in the top ten. But still, I absolutely agree with Krugman here — Sanders supporting higher taxes on people in his own income bracket is entirely worthy of praise.
The catchphrase “the 1 Percent” has also become a problem, obscuring the nature of class in 21st-century America.
Focusing on the top percentile of the income distribution was originally intended as a corrective to the comforting but false notion that growing inequality was mainly about a rising payoff to education. The reality is that over the past few decades the typical college graduate has seen only modest gains, with the big money going to a small group at the top. Talking about “the 1 Percent” was shorthand for acknowledging this reality, and tying that reality to readily available data.
The difference between Sanders and Jeff Bezos is enormously greater than the difference between Sanders and the poverty line. The increasing strength of capitalism aided by automation as a wealth-concentrating engine is stretching the pyramid ever higher and narrower. Bernie Sanders making a million on book royalties is not the problem.
Alt-Reich Watch
Laurie Roberts reminds us what supposedly respectable right wingers are saying.
Arizona Republic
Nice to see that Russell Pearce is still out there in fringeville, spreading goodwill and cheer ... and plans for a possible bloody coup.
3TV’s Dennis Welch reports the recalled state senator – who now makes six figures working for Maricopa County – fired up his fellow right wingers during a rally this week, suggesting that a little bloodshed wouldn’t be such a bad thing to get this country back on track.
"It may take the shedding of blood to keep this Republic and I, for one, am willing to do whatever it takes," Pearce said told the crowd at a Monday rally in Gilbert.
This story is the kind I might ordinarily skip on a Sunday as a “local story” (my own form of pundit redaction), but Pearce is all too typical of figures and attitudes to be found at “conservative” organizations across the country. And Pearce, like others, has been at this a long time.
Pearce has long been known – renowned, really – for having one of the most obnoxious mouths in the Republican Party.
A decade ago, then-Senate President Pearce was pushing Senate Bill 1070 and advocating for the return of “Operation Wetback,” a 1950s federal program to round up and deport Mexican immigrants here illegally.
This guy hasn’t been hounded from public office. He’s pulling down a six-figure salary from county government while he calls for “shedding blood.”
Democratic leadership
Renée Graham appreciates Nancy Peolosi — but not Pelosi’s take on the freshman class.
Boston Globe
On the day Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi posted this tweet: “To all women: know your power; be ready, you’re in the arena. This is a tough venue. Know that it is important for women to see women taking credit. Don’t be shy about it. Power through, and bring others along with you. -NP”
Those initials mean it was written by Pelosi herself. It’s a powerful, encouraging message, but also a curious one given that Pelosi is lately behaving like Nancy with the Bad Takes regarding some of the women in her own party.
After President Trump tweeted a video superimposing out-of-context comments by freshman Representative Ilhan Omar over images of the 9/11 attacks, Omar, who is Muslim, was swamped with death threats.
Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were quick to condemn Trump’s smear of Omar. A day later, Pelosi offered a tepid response on Twitter: “The President shouldn’t use the painful images of 9/11 for a political attack.” After critics swarmed, Pelosi toughened her tone, calling Trump’s tweet “dangerous” and promising enhanced security for Omar and her family and staff.
“Tepid” is generous. Pelosi’s statement “defending” Omar was an embarrassment.
Leonard Pitts on how Republicans keep rushing into a buzzsaw labeled AOC.
Miami Herald
Memo to the Republican Party:
You might want to stop messing with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She’s a freshman congresswoman with no significant legislative achievements, so it makes little sense that you spend so much time and energy on her. Besides, every time you do, you end up getting pantsed.
You’d think you’d learn. Yet, like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football, you keep coming back for more.
I would say that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be holding classes for other Democrats in Congress to teach them how to handle these attacks … except she already is.
The latest example began when one of your rank-and-file, Rep. Sean Duffy, took aim at the Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez’s wish list of social, economic and policy goals to stem the impact of climate change. He called it “elitist.”
She responded forcefully. “You want to tell people that their concern and their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist?” she said. “Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx, which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country. Tell that to the families in Flint, whose kids have their blood ascending in lead levels. … Call them elitist.”
That speech prompted another of your members, Rep. Andy Barr, to issue a dare disguised as an invitation: “Come to Eastern Kentucky where thousands of coal miners no longer have paychecks,” he said. “… Go underground with me and meet the men and women who do heroic work to empower the American economy.”
Whereupon Ocasio-Cortez did what Barr never expected: She accepted, noting that the Green New Deal envisions fully funding miners’ pensions “because we want a just transition to make sure we are investing in jobs” in mining communities.
While she’s at it, she should make Barr explain to those miners how Trump has given the mine owners everything they ever wanted, without ever taking up a single thing to protect the safety, health, or finances of the miners.
BTW, as a complete aside, it will be interesting to see how many women Ocasio-Cortez meets underground. Because in 30 plus years of mining, I don’t recall a single woman actually working in a full time position underground. Surface mines? Absolutely. Underground? Nope.
Okay, go find some eggs, put out a chair, associate with strange rabbits, and gobble down ham and / or turkey. And talk over impeachment while you’re at it.