Coverup Is Everywhere

National Archives photoshopped blurring of a protest sign, via Vos Iz Neias.

I didn't even notice whether Governor Whitmer had mentioned the criminality of the White House occupant in her response to the State of the Union address of Individual no. 1, whose writers didn't of course find time to mention it at all. It turns out that she did allude to the Senate trial and Chairman Schiff's hopeful slogan at the very end:

As we witness the impeachment process in Washington, there are some things each of us, no matter our party should demand. The truth matters, facts matter, and no one should be above the law. It’s not what those senators say tomorrow, it’s about what they do that matters. Remember, listen to what people say but watch what they do. It’s time for action.

Meanwhile, the ongoing Trump administration violation of the Presidential Records Act goes way beyond the Stalinoid doctoring by the National Archives of a picture of the Women's March and the president's personal habit of tearing his own papers to pieces and throwing them out—White House staffers who tried taping them back together were fired, historian Matthew Connelly tells us in an opinion piece for The Times:

Thanks, Mitch

Image via123RF.

Impressed by this observation from Jonathan Chait:

McConnell’s desired process of muscling through a wildly unpopular vote to suppress all evidence, followed by a vote to acquit, would rob the outcome of much of the legitimacy Republicans crave. It is instead widely and accurately seen as a cover-up...

McConnell may have finally made the miscalculation we've been dreaming of, that will shock voters out of their feeling that nothing seriously wrong has been going on, as I keep saying with reference to the Watergate scandal, when public support for impeaching and removing Nixon shot up from around 48% to 57% in a couple of weeks after the Supreme Court ruled 24 July that Nixon had to hand over the original White House tapes to Congress (he'd given them edited transcripts in April and the polling had hovered just below a majority for the three months).

They didn't get the story of how the CREEP and the Mitchell Justice Department and the Casey CIA and mad Nixon and his lieutenants had worked to create a kind of secret government inside the government to punish Nixon's enemies and reward his friends—very many people, maybe most, continued to suppose the "third-rate burglary" of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel was the whole of the crime—but they could see there was a coverup. And, as they say, "It's not the crime, it's the coverup," meaning not that the coverup was worse than the crime but that the coverup was the perspicuous index of how bad the crime was, if you couldn't quite follow the latter.

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.

The Reprehensible and the Comprehensible

Two separate warnings this morning, from former US attorney Preet Bharara on NPR (doing a book promotion) and Georgetown Law professor and former OLC staffer Martin Lederman in Washington Post (cited in Raw Story): Mueller's report, to the extent there is one, is not going to contain a nicely wrapped case for the indictment of Donald Trump for crimes committed in the collaboration with Russian agents in the 2016 election.

For more than one reason, but the main thing is that it isn't in their remit to do such a thing, given the Justice Department ruling that a sitting president isn't supposed to be indicted, as Lederman concludes:

it would be surprising if it included any express conclusions about whether Trump’s conduct did or did not satisfy the elements of any particular criminal offenses. As long as Trump is in office, it will be up to the committees themselves — and Congress as a whole — to (in the words of the Jaworski road map) “determine what action may be warranted . . . by [the] evidence” presented in Barr’s notification.

That's probably too categorical; they could signal an opinion on his chargeability in indictments of other people, as an unindicted co-conspirator, as they've already done in regard to Michael Cohen and the Paramour Payoffs (can't decide whether that's the first novel in my detective series featuring a troubled metropolitan lawyer or a band name). But that will be ancillary to what I do hope will be an indictment of Donald Junior, if anything. I still believe he would be indicted in a case where his guilt was transparently unarguable—if he really killed that guy on Fifth Avenue—but this isn't one of those cases. The language in which he agreed to the basic bargain of Russia's assistance with the Moscow hotel and US election projects, if Mueller has it (and we know what he has from Cohen, not too damn much, and we know Manafort and Junior have said little and nothing respectively) will be couched in code, like all those mobster communications, and the way he tried to live up to his end by removing sanctions obscured inside a web of plausible deniability, opinions from foreign policy advisers and lawyers that he's entitled to do what he wants so he can argue he was just doing what he was told.

I guess I'm beginning to understand how unlikely it is that our story is going to have any kind of clean ending, where the public gasps, "OMG he did that?" and the president just has to leave.