Mueller Said to His Man

Tony and John, encountered at many folk festivals in days gone by, the greatest.

Honest to god this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Barr's letter to the judiciary chairs and ranking members, Graham and Nadler, Feinstein and Collins

to advise you of the principal conclusions reached by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and to inform you about the status of my initial review of the report he has prepared.

You've heard the conclusions by now, that the Special Counsel "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" and was unable to decide whether Trump obstructed justice or not. They might as well have put it the other way around, that it didn't find that Trump obstructed justice and couldn't decide if the campaign conspired, because it amounts to the same thing, or for that matter that it didn't find that the campaign didn't conspire or coordinate and couldn't decide if Trump was innocent. Or you could say Barr has been unable to determine what the Special Counsel did at all, which I think is unlikely, but he'd rather that's what we thought, but the evasiveness of it is just amazing. There are literally zero conclusions!

The only positive findings are the things we've known since the indictments of the St. Petersburg troll farm Internet Research Agency in February 2018 and the GRU email hackers in July. As to whether Trumpies had anything to do with these, at first you get the impression that they were looking for signs of the Trump campaign helping out with the trolling and hacking—"Hey Donald, you weigh 400 pounds and you're always on a bed, you should be good at this"—

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.”1

Focusing on the ways in which the Trump campaign couldn't possibly have been involved, in the election interference activities, and omitting consideration of all the things I'm actually interested in myself, the quae pro quo, or objects that the parties hoped to achieve around or through the election activities, like the building of Trump's Moscow hotel project, or Trump's propagandizing on behalf of Putin, or the lifting of US sanctions on Russia if Trump should happen to be elected, but on second reading that may be the subject of the definition of "cooordination" in the footnote:

¹ In assessing potential conspiracy charges, the Special Counsel also considered whether members of the Trump campaign “coordinated” with Russian election interference activities. The Special Counsel defined “coordination” as an “agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.”

So the investigators were unable to establish whether there were any agreements, including tacit ones, on the election interference, which would probably cover my contention that Junior, and subsequently Big Donald, did agree on or about 9 June 2016 that the interference should go ahead, and that would explain why Junior said at the meeting that if his father happened to get elected he would "revisit the Magnitsky sanctions", according to, says Emptywheel, "the sworn testimony of four people at the meeting." I can't establish there was an agreement there either, but I bet it's not impossible to figure it out.

And since they can't be sure that there was a conspiracy, they can't be sure there was obstruction of justice either:

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. Generally speaking, to obtain and sustain an obstruction conviction, the government would need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person, acting with corrupt intent, engaged in obstructive conduct with a sufficient nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding.

So that's pretty much it. There is nothing in the summary that can be read as referring to the dozens of meetings campaign officials had with Russian intelligence figures and subsequently lied about, other than when it involved the proffer of "dirt",  when they know how a meeting started but not how it ended up:

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.

There's no apparent reference to work to establish a "back channel" for secret Trump-Russia discussions which would often touch on sanctions, there's no reference to Trump's dogged insistence that he had no business dealings with Russia even as he was working on a $300-million deal. There's no evidence to all the things that remain hidden about Manafort and Cohen in particular, or touching on all the ongoing investigations involving Cohen and Gates. There's no awareness of those elderly merry pranksters Stone, Corsi, Giuliani, and so on, perhaps because they have plausible deniability of the Russian connection. There's no indication that Mueller could have been interested in anything other than WikiLeaks and the IRA, though we know from court documents that Mueller was interested in pretty much everything I'm interested in, from Felix Sater and Rinat Akhmetshin to Mariya Butina and her nasty Republican boyfriend and the NRA. Did Butina have any connection to Russian interference with the election? Duh. The NRA got $30 million from Russia to deploy in the 2016 election, or is that not defined as interference because it wasn't done through Facebook or WikiLeaks?

When I put up that tweet from John W. Dean this morning suggesting that we should be wondering how Barr and Mueller would be able to cope with Donald's craziness once the actual Mueller report was released, I sort of meant it for laughs, but now I'm starting to wonder: If I were William Barr and I were trying to hide from Trump and Giuliani and Sekulow just how much I know about him, if I could get away with it, while the 19 or so jurisdictions working on this keep working, wouldn't I handle it exactly this way? Other than that, Mueller might as well have just written, "Adam, Jerry, I didn't have time to finish this, good luck homeys!"



I'm not saying, it's certainly possible that Barr is just another fool or tool, but that's the only thing that could even begin to justify this idiocy. Thou hast well drunken, man; who's the fool now?

BTW, Barr promised to consult Mueller, but hasn't consulted him yet, for some reason.

AG Barr will he called to testify says House Judiciary Chair Nadler. #Mueller was NOT consulted on content of AG letter.

— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) March 24, 2019