Mueller Said to His Man. II

Image via Xavier High School Xpress.

In a progressive meaning-degeneration like a game of telephone, Robert Mueller:

"[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

William Barr:

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.

David Greene/NPR:

The investigation did not find any like evidence right I mean there wasn't any collusion I mean do Democrats really sort of want to keep sort of beating this I mean dead horse?

That last one may not be verbatim, but the network really does keep saying the investigation "found no evidence" of collusion or of "conspiracy and coordination" if they're being a tiny bit more careful and "there was no collusion" (Rachel Martin at 6:09 repeated at 8:09) when they throw caution out the window, and that is absolutely not the case, and Barr absolutely did not say anything of the sort.


Barr's quotation from Mueller's own report is completely clear: it's like physicists saying between 1964 and 2011 that a given experiment did not establish the existence of the Higgs boson; it didn't mean there was no Higgs boson, or there was no evidence of a Higgs boson, it meant they hadn't caught one yet. In fact they were pretty confident they were going to get one sooner or later, and in 2012 they did. What Mueller is saying is that he wasn't able to put together a case with an 85% chance of conviction, or whatever the threshold is.

We don't know what kind of case he did manage to put together, or if he didn't put together a case at all; we don't know what he thought his chances of convictions were. We don't know why he wasn't confident enough to bring a case, whether the evidence he would have needed didn't exist, or whether he was frustrated in his efforts to get it (e.g. because of the bad cooperation of Papadopoulos, the criminal uncooperation of Manafort, and the impossibility of getting Trump to tell the truth about anything, but that's only one set of possibilities), or whether the story he'd be telling was just too complex or technical for a jury to grasp (it'd be great to know what was put before the grand juries the Mueller team worked with, but apparently that's exactly what's going to be hidden from us under the authentically ancient principle that grand jury testimony is secret). Or whether he just didn't have the time, under some deadline pressure that's been kept secret from us.We don't know whether the ongoing investigations regarding Flynn and Gates and Stone in particular could possibly end up presenting such a case. Sorry to say that's starting to seem increasingly unlikely to me, but you never know.

It's always possible Mueller decided all the people he didn't charge were actually innocent! But he definitely didn't say that, or Barr would have reported it. Barr did report Mueller's statement on the exoneration issue with reference to the obstruction of justice case:

"while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

Does Mueller's report include a non-exoneration statement of this type on the conspiracy-coordination investigation? We don't know, but I'll bet you anything that Barr would not have included that in his summary, and I'll tell you why: because the summary is carefully designed to suggest that Trump has been exonerated without saying so, to suck in sloppy readers like the NPR hosts (too bad Inskeep wasn't on duty this morning) and even BBC ("found that the campaign had not colluded," just heard that twice; on the positive side they've got somebody on BBC—that Bush-era idiot Doug Feith if I'm hearing properly!—noting that the absence of indictments frees the New York State prosecutors to charge people with the crimes Mueller would have charged them with, if they want).

This is why Barr softens Mueller's "did not establish" to "did not find", smushing out the fact that Mueller certainly did find something. And this is why he leaps in his own person into the obstruction case to announce his own, as opposed to Mueller's, conclusion:

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. 

Because it gives him an opportunity to reinforce his hints that there is "no evidence" of conspiracy, which would be an indication that the president didn't actually have anything to obstruct, if it were true:

we noted that the Special Counsel recognized that “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference," and that, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President's intent with respect to obstruction.

Which is very close to outright lying; the evidence is certainly not "absent", it's just (apparently) inadequate.

As far as I'm concerned, I should remind everybody that there is plenty of evidence of Trump criminality unrelated to Russia and working its way through the courts and the House committees. I don't intend to abandon this one, though, in spite of today's ridiculous news coverage, because I don't regard the case as being over, at all. Barr is playing an exceedingly dangerous game.

Update: Also see Emptywheel. Looks like I scooped her a little yesterday on one thing; yesterday I tweeted

It's as if you took out a hit order on someone and cops investigated whether you carried a gun to the scene yourself, but refused to look at whether you paid the killers.

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

and today she writes,

Here’s the thing, though: at least given what they lay out here, they only considered whether Trump was covering up his involvement in the hack-and-leak operation. It doesn’t consider whether Trump was covering up a quid pro quo, which is what there is abundant evidence of.

They didn’t consider whether Trump obstructed the crime that he appears to have obstructed. They considered whether he obstructed a different crime. And having considered whether Trump obstructed the crime he didn’t commit, rather than considering whether he obstructed the crime he did commit, they decided not to charge him with a crime.