Official Proceedings

Joseph Fischer in the Capitol, via LebTown.com.

Following the reporting on the arguments in the Supreme Court on behalf of Joseph Fischer, a cop from Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, who had already started driving home from Trump's Stop the Steal rally on 1/6/20 when he heard on the radio about the crowd gathered around the Capitol and turned his car around to join the fracas, and made it as far as the East Rotunda where he turned on his phone's video recorder, yelled "Charge!" and went at a group of Capitol police who pepper-sprayed him as he slid to his ass on the slippery floor and into their line, and then hustled him back out of the building.

This behavior, while plainly illegal, did not do a lot of harm: it was already 3:24, well after the congressmembers had fled, and he was only there for about four minutes. How he became one of the 300-odd January 6 defendants, including former President Trump, to be charged with a felony count of "obstruction of an official proceeding" is something else, the insurrectionary violence of his intentions, as revealed in a series of texts and Facebook posts from before and after the riot: 

Minions. I

Drawing by Drew Sheneman, New Jersey Star-Ledger.

OK, let's start with attorney Michael Ellis, b.1984, Dartmouth and Yale Law (where he was president of the local Federalist Society), did a little stuff with the country-club type of Republicans (W and the Mittster) here and there on the way, and after his clerkship started working in Congress, first for Rep. Mike Rogers, then for Rep. Devin Nunes. 

So after the 2016 election he got a job with the new Trump administration—in fact, two jobs, it seems, one as deputy legal advisor to the National Security Council and the other as senior associate counsel to the president, where he played a central role in one of the more startling dramas of the early Trump administration, in March 2017, when Rep. Nunes went to the White House to warn the president about some evidence he'd found that some of his 2016 campaign staffers might have been subjected to problematic surveillance during the campaign, only then it turned out that Nunes had gotten the material he was delivering to the White House from the White House.

From that same Mike Ellis, to be precise, who got it from another young staffer, Ezra Cohen-Watnick (b.1986), a protégé of General Mike Flynn, under whom he had served at the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Obama administration before Flynn got himself fired in 2014 and was now staying on at the National Security Council after Flynn got himself fired from that gig in February.

Not Quite a Smoking Gun

Breville Pro Smoking Gun.

William Barr got his copy of the Mueller Report on Friday, 22 March 2019, about five weeks after he assumed the attorney generalship of the United States. That Sunday he sent Congress his four-page letter describing his views on what the 448 pages said, which was not as he later explained a "summary" of it, just a statement of its "principal conclusions", including two main failures to draw conclusions: on the subject of Russian active measures in the 2016 election it

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 on the subject of actions by the president, Mueller had

considered whether to evaluate the conduct under Department standards governing prosecution and declination decisions but ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment.

Neither one of which was exactly true, as, one thinks, he might have found out if he had had time to read the thing. He did, however, with the assistance of Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, come to his own opinion, 

that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel's investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense. Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.

And on the same Sunday, 24 March, two Justice Department lawyers drafted a memo summarizing the advice they had given Barr in reaching this decision, to which Barr was evidently referring when he told Congress when he gave them the report itself on 18 April, that

Another Steele Dossier?

Updated 5 May

This is kind of interesting, reported in England by The Telegraph (paywall) and picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald: It seems Christopher Steele compiled a second dossier on Donald Trump, this one directly for the FBI, after Trump took office:

The second dossier contains raw intelligence that makes further claims of Russian meddling in the US election and also references claims regarding the existence of further sex tapes. The second dossier is reliant on separate sources to those who supplied information for the first reports.

The fact the FBI continued to receive intelligence from Steele, who ran MI6’s Russia desk from 2006 to 2009 before setting up Orbis, is potentially significant because it shows his work was apparently still being taken seriously after Trump took hold of the reins of power.

It was, was it? We'd been given to believe FBI broke off relations with Steele in November 2016, after David Corn revealed the existence of the original dossier in a Halloween article in Mother Jones—not that at that point that they didn't trust his research, but that they couldn't trust him to stay away from the press, which is understandable (I can also understand Steele's point of view, that the FBI didn't seem to be doing anything with the material he'd showed them, even as they publicly reopened an obviously bogus investigation into Hillary Clinton, and someone who appeared to be a tool of the Russian government was dangerously close to getting elected president of the United States, and he and Glenn Simpson felt morally obliged to do something).

But it's not exactly true that the FBI broke off with Steele. DOJ's Bruce Ohr kept talking to Steele, and the FBI was aware, and opinions on it in the Bureau differed:

Counterintelligence News

Update 8/29/20: Since it turns out that Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein shut down the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Trump's Russian ties around the same time as he appointed the spccial counsel, it looks like Toobin was right and I was totally wrong on a central point below.

Zandar flagged some important and at first sight kind of depressing reporting from Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker, showing how the fix was in on the Mueller investigation from the start, with some new details on two meetings from the beginning, one in which Andrew McCabe (in his brief time as acting director of the FBI) briefs Mueller on what the FBI knows about the stuff Mueller will be investigating, and one in which Mueller gets initial instructions from acting attorney general Rod Rosenstein. It's in the latter that the fix comes:

Rosenstein wasn’t as familiar with the evidence as McCabe and his team were, but he had a broader piece of advice for Mueller. Now that he was Mueller’s boss, it could be interpreted as a command. “I love Ken Starr,” Rosenstein said, according to people present. (Starr was the independent counsel who oversaw the Clinton Whitewater investigation; Rosenstein had been a prosecutor on the Arkansas portion of that inquiry.) “But his investigation was a fishing expedition. Don’t do that. This is a criminal investigation. Do your job, and then shut it down.”

In other words, far from authorizing a wide-ranging investigation of the President and his allies, the Justice Department directed Mueller to limit his probe to individuals who were reasonably suspected of committing crimes.

I always forget how good Toobin is (as a TV pundit I find him annoying, but on the page he's still a real New Yorker writer), but in this case I think he's mistaken; Rosenstein was right about the danger of emulating Starr, and Mueller was right to take heed. But I also think Toobin is missing something important that we here in Left Blogistan just happen to know about, and it's causing him to misread his evidence.

And in Trump Nemesis News

Drawing by Baulking Trams/DeviantArt.

Before he stepped down on 15 May as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee as a result of the Covid insider trading scandal, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) made an official request, side by side with the ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA), to the Trump administration, asking it to move quickly to declassify the fifth and final volume of the committee's report on Russian active measures in the 2016 presidential election—the one that finally gets down to examining the interactions and relationships between the Russian activities and the Donald Trump campaign. It's said to be over a thousand pages long.

I should say straight out that you shouldn't count on the report providing the "smoking gun" evidence for an indictment of Trump—this is a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation, so it's not what they were looking for. Though you shouldn't be sure it won't, either: it's going to have a lot of detail on Trump's personal business relations in Russia going back from who knows how long before 2013 and continuing up to after the election, when his lieutenants were still working on the Trump Tower Moscow deal; and on the not necessarily illegal collusion between Trump's agents like Manafort and Stone with Putin's agents like Deripaska, which may or may not go over the line into definitely illegal conspiracy. (I think it does, of course; as with a huge theme I've been catching up with from Emptywheel, laying out evidence that Deripaska engineered the disinformation in the Steele dossier to benefit the Trump campaign and Manafort was aware of it.)

A fascinating Twitter thread from @BlakesMustache yesterday (it's under protection right now, and you may not be able to access it—I can't access it myself—but there's the link, for the record) set forth the possibility that it's got enough damaging information to have Trump, and Barr, really freaked out, explaining a whole bunch of strange things that have been going on lately. I want to walk through some of this material (as best I can without the tweets) to see where it gets us.

And the (journalistic) grift goes on

Startled by a headline in The Hill

AG Barr just signaled that things are about to get ugly for the Russia collusion team

into thinking what? there's a chance that Junior and Jared, Flynn and Prince, Stone and Parscale, and some of those other malefactors could be in trouble?

Sadly, no, and of course that's not what Barr is talking about. The headline writers didn't realize that the expression "Russia collusion team" has an obvious meaning. What the author of the article, one Kevin R. Brock, is offering, is an interpretation of what Barr meant on his visit the other day to Laura Ingraham's Foxhole:

"I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history," Barr said. "Without any basis they started this investigation of his campaign, and even more concerning, actually is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president. So I -- to sabotage the presidency, and I think that – or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency." 

That is, Brock is hoping Barr's announcing an effort to get the real villains, McCabe and Strzok, Simpson and Ohr, and Robert Mueller and presumably James Comey and Barack Obama and maybe FBI inspector general Michael Horowitz, who had the nerve to say that the investigation of the Trump campaign was not baseless, or a travesty, or sabotage, at all.

And Then the Critics

Image via The Clyde Fitch Report.

The way I received it, listening to the Judiciary hearing on the radio (unlike Chuck Todd, I don't get to criticize the "optics", and I didn't listen to the Intelligence hearing at all, though I've got the transcript in an open tab and I'm working on it), Mueller had a pedagogical task I thought he was living up to pretty well, with the intense cooperation of the Democrats on the committee. Namely, he wasn't going to read us the Report ("Hey kids, it's story time!"). He was going to make us read it, or the committee members on our behalf, because that's what you need to do in this class: if the professor spoonfeeds you the material, you're not going to get it, you have to master it for yourself.

And Mueller really wants us to read the Report. "The Report speaks for itself," he keeps saying, like Dorothy insisting she just wants to go back to Kansas. He's aware, I think, that nobody has read it, but he's put so much into it that he doesn't have much left for himself.

So he wouldn't give them a lecture, he gave them a "recitation", or what's called a tutorial in UK, in which the congresscritters read it to him, and he signaled to what extent he thought they were getting it right:

The Loudest Thing Mueller Didn't Say

Image via NBC.

Rep. Ted Lieu during the first Judiciary session with Mueller this morning:

“I’d like to ask you the reason, again, that you did not indict Donald Trump is because of OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion stating that you cannot indict a sitting president, correct?” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) asked Mueller.

Mueller’s response was straightforward: “That is correct.”

And Mueller walking it back after the break:

“I want to go back to one thing that was said this morning by Mr. Lieu who said, and I quote, ‘you didn’t charge the president because of the OLC opinion.’ That is not the correct way to say it,” Mueller said in his statement. “As we say in the report and as I said at the opening, we did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime.”

Via Vox, which argues that it isn't a big deal:

It’s understandable why many have latched onto the Lieu moment. After all, it would be a massive admission by Mueller under oath. But it seems he was a bit imprecise in answering the lawmaker, or at least didn’t make his true feelings clear.

I totally disagree with that assessment; I think Lieu absolutely won a vital point here, and Mueller said as much. Not "what I said is not true" but "that is not the correct way to say it". And not the correct way to say it not because he doesn't believe that, but because it was not "as we say in the report".

What Lieu succeeded in doing is getting Mueller to say something that isn't in the report, to express his "true feelings" in violation of the constraints he's been imposing on himself since his formal statement of 29 May,

So beyond what I’ve said here today and what is contained in our written work, I do not believe it is appropriate for me to speak further about the investigation or to comment on the actions of the Justice Department or Congress. And it’s for that reason I will not be taking questions today, as well.

And saying something he very specifically didn't want to say, as prefigured in the statement he co-signed with Barr, released 30 May:

The Attorney General has previously stated that the Special Counsel repeatedly affirmed that he was not saying that, but for the OLC opinion, he would have found the President obstructed justice.

Not that it isn't true, but that he's "not saying it". In contrast to Barr's categorical statement in his deceptive letter of 24 March, that

Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.

So under questioning from Ted Lieu, he said it. And then turned around with the explanation that he had said it in an "incorrect" way and "corrected" it to make it agree with the official stance.

It's not so earthshakingly important in itself, but it's a kind of skeleton key to all the other things he's been carefully not saying that we've been reading between the lines, that he did have cases for coordination and conspiracy against people in the Trump campaign who were never charged, including Trump himself (just not quite strong enough to send to court), that he could have written an indictment against Trump for obstruction of justice, and that he does intend that Congress should take over the case of Trump himself with the tool it has, of impeachment. All these things he successfully didn't say today are the rest of the iceberg we glimpsed when he was responding to Lieu. The way we've been reading the report, as the basis of articles of impeachment, is the right way.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

For the Record: Where's My Article 2, Dude?

Via SamuraiDVD.

Trump has this thing he likes to say about Article 2 (to you and me, the section of the US Constitution that describes the qualifications for and duties of the presidency) that gets weirder and weirder, most recently:

TRUMP: "Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president."

(Article 2 does not in fact empower the president to do whatever they want.) pic.twitter.com/qIFP1AbHw6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 23, 2019

Last week, I think I found the source of this

He has no clue what Article 2 is. Not even what document it belongs to. It's a confused memory of something he saw on Fox.

— O'er the Airports We Watched (@Yastreblyansky) July 12, 2019

in an article of April 2018 by the unspeakable Hans von Spakowsky arguing that Trump had a constitutional right to fire Mueller if he wanted, and the very Fox segment he could have gotten it from

Fox ran a story on it https://t.co/dyJeaugOaZ

— O'er the Airports We Watched (@Yastreblyansky) July 13, 2019

It seems clear that my initial speculation, that he doesn't in fact know what an Article 2 might be or where you'd look for one if you wanted it, that he sees it as something like the secret book everybody's looking for in a kungfu romance and he's trying to bluff everybody into thinking he's acquired it and could annihilate all his enemies any time he chooses, looks more and more likely to be right.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Puzzle

Racine County Logic Puzzle Museum.

Mueller's statement is a logic puzzle; as a matter of fact, so is the whole 450-page Report, but this morning's presentation was more succinct, and it went, in proper puzzle form, pretty much like this:

Based on the following statements,

1. If I thought Trump was not guilty, I would say so
2. If I thought Trump was guilty, it would be improper for me to say so (since he's president), so I wouldn't
3. If I had a case I couldn't prove, I might say so (as I did in the conspiracy case, but without directly naming the suspects)
4. I'm not going to say what I think

what does Mueller think?

It's not very difficult, but the answer isn't simple either.

Mueller Blogging

Dahlia Lithwick on my radio said something I was starting to think in my own half-assed way on Kamala Harris's questioning of the attorney general yesterday, that it was kind of weird when she was browbeating Barr over whether he had looked at the original evidence on which Mueller's failure to decide whether Trump had obstructed justice or not, because do people at that level really listen to all the tapes look at all the canceled checks and so forth?

And what was important, which Harris apparently missed: that his lack of familiarity with the evidence materials was the least of it. He didn't seem to be very familiar with the report itself, or even the executive summaries. For example, he didn't know who Konstantin Kilimnik was (quoting from Philip Bump/WaPo's survey of some of the stuff Barr didn't seem to know)—

“What information was shared?” Barr asked.

“Polling data was shared, sir,” Booker replied. “It’s in the report; I can cite you the page.”

“With who?” Barr responded.

Booker continued with his questioning.

And more significantly, he didn't seem to know that Mueller had explained why he didn't make a ruling in the obstruction case, leaving it to Congress:

And not to the attorney general. It's almost as if Barr decided what he was going to say first, and looked at the report afterwards, and it doesn't look good.

Breaking

Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP via NBC.

Looks like Mueller read Barr's four-pager the same way I read it:

After Barr's four-page summary-not-a-summary. Don't think Mueller response to the spin conference is going to be available this soon. https://t.co/kHxlnSrNxO

— The Young and the Vibrant (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2019

It's the way Barr report was written ("did not find") specifically in order to be misread by the press ("there was no evidence") and to ratify Barr's own (wrong) conclusion that there should be no obstruction charges

— The Young and the Vibrant (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2019

Barr didn't tell any lies in the letter, but he wrote it to be misunderstood. And it looks as if he held back the summary reports after Mueller asked him to release them—

The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and made some initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials....

Barr said he did not want to put out pieces of the report, but rather issue it all at once with redactions, and didn’t want to change course now, according to officials.

—in order to make more time for the false impression to settle into popular belief. As I said when Mueller investigators first began airing their discontent, in the Times story of 4 April. Now I'm watching Chris Hayes reconstruct what I told you all a month ago.

Good Impeachment Takes Time

Via.

There's some really interesting news out of the Reuters-Ipsos poll (h/t Scott Stedman), which has found, in polling conducted Thursday through this morning, that Trump's approval rating has dropped 3 percentage points since the Mueller report was released, to its lowest level of the year to date in that poll, 37%. Although—and this is important—support for impeachment remains pretty weak.

The really startling thing is the share Republicans are taking in the result, with the total number approving Trump at 75%, down from 83% in late March. That's a lot!

And it's pretty reminiscent, once again, of what started happening to Richard Nixon in February 1973, when the Senate Select Committee began its hearings, and continued on to October, and the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon's approval rating somewhat stabilized at very low levels; note particularly how the Republican vote, the red line in the chart below, sinks from 90% at the beginning of the plunge to hover around 50% for the duration.

Mueller Blog: Trump's 86% Memory Loss

Trump's responses (or rather the responses issued by Giuliani, Sekulow, et al.) to Mueller's written questions in lieu of a proper interview, submitted under oath 20 November, are included somewhere in the Mueller report, and can also be seen separately in various venues, like CNN, but haven't attracted a lot of attention, presumably because they are really not very informative, about 86% "I do not recall." Seriously: as Philip Bump reported with admirable precision at the Washington Post,

They covered four primary topic areas: the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, the Russian effort to interfere with the election, the proposed development project in Moscow and contacts with Russia or Russia-related issues during the campaign and transition. In total, the Mueller team asked 38 distinct questions with 37 follow-ups.

Trump offered 22 distinct answers. In 19 of those answers, he claims not to remember or recall some particular issue. Often, those failures to remember what happened constitute the entirety of his response.

Maybe it's true. He's certainly suffering from some kind of memory problem; in a tweet yesterday he didn't even seem to remember answering the questions at all:

Mueller Blog: The establishment

Photo by Picpedia.

From the executive summary to Volume I, in the cuttable-pastable version supplied by The New York Times:

Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

But

when substantial, credible evidence enabled the Office to reach a conclusion with confidence, the report states that the investigation established that certain actions or events occurred. A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.

And a bit later

the investigation did not establish that one Campaign official's efforts to dilute a portion of the Republican Party platform on providing assistance to Ukraine were undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia. The investigation also did not establish that a meeting between Kislyak and Sessions in September 2016 at Sessions's Senate office included any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.

Looking more like my first thoughts on "did not establish" as it was quoted in the Barr letter in March were right—that it means "I know this happened but I can't prove it, yet." Especially obvious in the case of the platform change, which was so bizarre at the time (as I said recently, it was the first thing that started me imagining a Trump-Russia conspiracy, at a time when the idea was barely a gleam in Josh Marshall's eye). There was just no conceivable reason why that would have happened—the campaign clearly had no interest in any part of the platform other than this exotic bit of foreign policy and who on earth cared about that? Except the campaign manager Paul Manafort, who'd been working for the pro-Russia faction in Ukraine for what were soon to turn out to be many undeclared millions of dollars, and Ambassador Kislyak, attending the Republican convention in Cleveland for reasons that haven't been explained. And yet—how would you go about proving that they were doing it basically because Putin wanted them to?

Immediately after that bit the authors move on to talking in very general terms about the evidence they haven't got and why they haven't got it

The investigation did not always yield admissible information or testimony, or a complete picture of the activities undertaken by subjects of the investigation. Some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination and were not, in the Office's judgment, appropriate candidates for grants of immunity. The Office limited its pursuit of other witnesses and information — such as information known to attorneys or individuals claiming to be members of the media — in light of internal Department of Justice policies...

and

given these identified gaps, the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.

Mueller seems to me to be saying pretty nearly explicitly, "Please follow up on these items, Chairman Nadler."

Steele yourself

"“Red Card,” about corruption involving FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, contains supporting roles for the former spy Christopher Steele and a number of Russian oligarchs and government officials." Simon and Schuster.

Can't help seeing this as a sign of how people in the White House are feeling about the release of the redacted Mueller report tomorrow morning:

Wow! FBI made 11 payments to Fake Dossier’s discredited author, Trump hater Christopher Steele. @OANN @JudicialWatch The Witch Hunt has been a total fraud on your President and the American people! It was brought to you by Dirty Cops, Crooked Hillary and the DNC.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2019

The story to which he's referring goes back, in fact, to last August, when NBC was reporting that the FBI had released 70-odd heavily redacted pages of its correpondence with Steele, recording his service to the FBI as a Confidential Human Source over some  unspecified period of time—every single date is among the things redacted—including the fact that they'd given him or his firm some money for his troubles but obviously not revealing what they'd been paying him for or when.

Now it's been taken up by some of the usual suspects, notably Judicial Watch, the king of rightwing FOIA requests, darkly hinting at a connection to that same Underpants Gnomes story: Bruce Ohr must have been paying Steele to provide him with evidence that would enable him to tape Carter Page's phone calls so that if Trump unexpectedly got elected they could um do whatever it is you do with Carter Page tapes when you want to impeach the president. As you can see, the passage of time is not making this plan any more coherent.

But the thing is it's not at all difficult to guess when and where Steele got most of his payments from the FBI, because it's pretty much a matter of public record, and it had nothing to do with Carter Page of the Trump campaign; it was not long after he'd retired from MI6 and set up his own shop in 2009, and

Got Paranoia? Barr's Narratology

Would you buy a used funeral from this man? Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images via Time.

I should be writing an "I told you so" post on the revelation showing up in The New York Times last night that Mueller's staffers are starting to complain that Barr's letter made Trump look less implicated than he actually is:

WASHINGTON — Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations....

The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation.

But it strikes me as coming a little late. Barr has already succeeded in shaping the discourse in a way that may end up being really hard to remedy. I'm talking about that that weirdly incommensurate treatment of the two chosen aspects of the criminal investigation:

Scandalmongering

Alfred Hitchcock, The Lodger, 1927.

David F. Brooks wishes to inform the public that it's another bothsides case: "We've All Just Made Fools of Ourselves—Again".

Democrats, or at least former congressman Beto O'Rourke and former CIA director John O. Brennan, need to make a public apology to the president for calling him something like a traitor (and O'Rourke said he did the treason "ham-handedly", which is just mean) when they "lacked the evidence". Republicans need to apologize to Washington for calling it a swamp. Everyone concerned should adopt "an attitude of humility and honest self-examination."

I love it to death when David F. Brooks starts talking about honest self-examination. He, of course, is the exception, regarding himself as having no self to examine, an affable, ego-free void.

Also it's all because of Watergate:

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.