If you've got the Mueller, I've got the beer

Backlit photo (is Trump trying to stop us from seeing his eyes?) from Kid Rock's Twitter via People.

OK, on reflection and some reading around, and an unbelievably tedious fight with a Greenwald acolyte (Glenn called it a "simple fact" that "not one single American was charged, indicted or convicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election" by the Mueller team or, so far, in any of the spinoff cases, and I pointed out that until we saw Mueller's explanation for his declination decisions we could not know how simple the fact was and the acolyte called me a "conspiracy theorist"), I'm inclined to keep working on that bone we got thrown Friday night, by way of preparing myself and anybody who wants to join in for what is clearly not going to be a great big catharsis moment, but will be something nevertheless, when we start learning what's in the report.

One thing that fits in my normal frame of mind is a tweet from Richard Nixon's Michael Cohen, the ineffably proper and wholly rehabilitated John W. Dean:

Trump and his minions think they dodged a bullet. I have a notion — only a recurring though — that Mueller delivered a bomb to AG Barr, who is now trying to figure out how to tell Trump in a way that doesn’t cause him to start World War III. Barr knows he works for a psycho.

— John Dean (@JohnWDean) March 23, 2019

("Thought" not "Though".) That's really something to think about: that the manner in which the report is released has been designed to lull the #AudienceOfOne. Barr does know he works for a psychopath, as does nearly everybody except his zombie fans and the Washington political press corps (which also knows, but worries that it's bad form to say so).

Is it plausible? Marcy believes the report must contain a fairly complete account, based on sworn testimony and attested documents we've seen already, of a large scheme she calls the "quid pro quo" and I'm happy to call bribery, Trump pursuing his $300-million Moscow tower deal "even though the deal would use sanctioned banks, involve a former GRU officer as a broker, and require Putin’s personal involvement" beyond the Republican convention, Papadopoulos early on being used to tell the campaign about Russian plans for weaponized emails, the Veselnitskaya meeting in which Junior agreed to accept the "dirt on Hillary Clinton" and to "revisit Magnitsky sanctions" if his father won the election even as Cohen and others kept working on the Moscow real estate deal, and Manafort passing Konstantin Kilimnik that polling information (which is a bit of an exception to Greenwald's statement, in my view: prosecution did at least get really pissed off with him for lying about that, and it's certainly a big instance of Trump-Russia collusion). Does that add up to a bomb?

It's not an easily prosecutable crime, somebody was saying, if only because Trump was so open about his fondness for Putin and willingness to lift Russian sanctions; voters knew he intended to do it, and voted for him anyway. But it's not very nice, right? Especially with the $300 million for Trump being part of the arrangement.

And I think it's important to remember that impeachment is the process explicitly designed for prosecuting things that are crimes but that Congress never thought of passing a law against, because they never imagined a federal executive or judge would do those things; that's one reason for putting it in the hands of the legislature, arraignment in the House and trial in the Senate, because it may require legislative (in the etymological sense of "law-proposing") action. "High crimes and misdemeanors", it's often said, are whatever the House says they are, whether they're on the statute books or not.

It really shouldn't come as a shock that there's no indictment of Donald Trump coming from the special counsel's office—it's been telegraphed often enough that the Justice Department has been opposed to the idea for the last 45 years, and as I say these crimes are pretty ambiguous from the purely legal standpoint, though obviously bad to us normal people.

And it's also been telegraphed that they feel the report shouldn't include "derogatory information" about anybody who hasn't been indicted (unless her name's Hillary Clinton and she's accused of a really serious though not illegal offense like mismanaging a State Department email account), though they do believe, as Barr assured us in his letter, that they are obliged to tell us why they decided not to indict. I'm not sure what that entails for Trump himself, since they seem to have started with the view that they couldn't indict him, but I'm very anxious to see what it entails for Junior and Jared.

Also, I'm really wondering why we know so little from the already issued indictments and convictions and sentencing documents about what Flynn, Manafort and Gates, Cohen, and Stone really did. Greenwald's almost correct to claim that none of the crimes they were charged with had any direct relationship to Trump-Russia conspiracy, though he's missing an important one from Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to FBI about two conversations with Ambassador Kislyak about Russia sanctions, during the transition. And only a maniacal attorney could say there's no Trump-Russia connection in the crime with which Roger Stone is charged, lying about his work as an intermediary between "a top Trump campaign official" acting for "an unnamed person" and WikiLeaks over their publishing of the materials stolen by Russian intelligence. Or Papadopoulos's lame attempt to deceive the FBI about his interactions with Professor Mifsuf. The charges were more about obstruction than conspiracy, but the conspiracy was what the lies were clearly meant to conceal.

But at least in Manafort's case we also know for a fact that he committed such crimes and that references to them were redacted from the documents, because of the one group of redactions that reporters unmasked, on his lies about interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik during the time he was Trump's campaign manager and passed sensitive information to Russians on the campaign, as well as talking about a Ukraine "peace plan" (code for getting rid of sanctions). This was clearly important to the special counsel. Where did it go? What did he know about the purpose and purport of these actions and why Manafort decided to lie about him, even after his guilty plea? And where Manafort goes there goes Gates, whose cooperation "in several cases" is still ongoing while his sentence (and sentencing documentation) from the Washington district court we're still waiting for. Any indictments arising from this wouldn't have been in the Mueller report.

Papadopoulos, Flynn, Cohen, and Gates all got vastly reduced sentences for their crimes in return for cooperation with the Mueller investigation. Surely in their proffers they explained they had some information about possible interactions between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign, otherwise why were they offered the deals? Are we ever going to learn anything about what the investigators found out?

In a Saturday conference call to strategize on next steps, Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued a warning for his fellow Democrats, some of whom have pinned high political hopes on Mueller’s findings: “Once we get the principal conclusions of the report, I think it’s entirely possible that that will be a good day for the president and his core supporters.” (HuffPost)

Or are we going to find out that the investigators didn't learn anything, and those guys got a great deal from the system for nothing? Say it ain't so, Bob! That's what I'm especially going to be watching out for.

There are also signs, favorable to the Dean hypothesis, that Trump, holed up in Palm Beach with Kid Rock and Senator Graham (what a swell party this is!), is freaked out:

First appearance in 44 hours? (My arithmetic could be off here) pic.twitter.com/XI9plPjNzF

— Fountains of Devin Nunes (@Yastreblyansky) March 24, 2019

That vapidity is all he's tweeted in more than 50 hours as I write (Scavino issued a Kim Jong-un–style happy-talk number on a visit from Caribbean leaders on Friday afternoon), and that's pretty odd.