Literary Corner: Make a Federal Case of It

 

Matthew Broderick as Professor Harold Hill tries out The Think System.

NY vs. Trump and his spawn and their businesses seems to me to have pretty much everything I could have wanted: over 200 specific acts of fraud committed in the valuations of Trump properties for his annual financial statements between 2011 and 2021 (yes, including during the presidency), generally in order to get better credit terms, some of them just spectacularly off, the demand for $250 million in damages, plus wiping all their New York businesses—should the state win its case, Trumps will be forbidden to operate a business in the state for the next five years—and federal criminal referrals in New York's Southern District and the Internal Revenue Service.

That last especially cheers me, because the publicity over the past year or so has been so dominated by Trump's overvaluing his properties to get loans, and hardly anybody has been talking about how he undervalues them in order to cheat on his taxes. But it turns out AG Letitia James wasn't ignoring it at all; in fact she was making a federal case of it, which is what it's supposed to be. Whether IRS is going to prosecute them or not (he's been fighting them for something like the past 12 years to stop them from collecting a $70-million refund he didn't deserve) I don't know, but the case needs to be out there.

Meanwhile, in another federal case, I'm intrigued by the lyricism and haunting ambiguity of Trump's answer to a a TV question from Sean Hannity ("What was your process to declassify?"):

The Village Lawyer

 

The Village Lawyer, by Pieter Breughel the Younger, 1624, Web Gallery of Art:, via Wikimedia Common.

Emptywheel gives a pretty clear legal account of the foreground lies the key passages from the memo Bully Barr commissioned from his office to "advise" him not to charge Trump with obstruction of justice (i.e., the advice he'd ordered up from them)

To our knowledge, the Special Counsel's investigation of potential obstruction is not similar to any reported case that the Department has previously charged under the obstruction-of- justice statutes. The Report identifies no obstruction case that the Department has pursued under remotely similar circumstances, and we have not identified any either. Of course, any investigation concerning the President would be exceptional, but the President is hardly the only public official who could be subject to investigation. The Department has investigated the potential misuse of official authority, including the obstruction of official proceedings. in a host of different circumstances. 

The Special Counsel's obstruction theory would not only be novel, but, based on his own analysis, it would also be unusual because Volume I of the Special Counsel's Report is conclusive: that the evidence developed “was not sufficient to charge that any member of the Trump Campaign [including the President] conspired or coordinated with representatives of the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election.” Given that conclusion, the evidence does not establish a crime or criminal conspiracy involving the President toward which any obstruction or attempted obstruction by the President was directed. It would be rare for federal prosecutors to bring an obstruction prosecution that did not itself arise out of a proceeding related to a separate crime. Moreover, much of the President's potentially obstructive conduct amounted to attempts to modify the process under which the Special Counsel investigation progressed, rather than efforts to impair or intentionally alter evidence (documentary or testimonial) that would negatively impact the Special Counsel's ability to obtain and develop evidence.

Volume I couldn't be "conclusive" on all the possible Vol. I cases, she explains, because the investigation of at least one of Trump's associates, Roger Stone, over his evident involvement in the Russian hack of the Democratic emails. was still going on at the time. And yet...

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

For the Record: Obstruction by Obfuscation

Drawing by Barry Blitt from The New Yorker, September 2018.

A little applied narratology:

Just to make it entirely clear, that is not quite what the Times story https://t.co/8JkKbda0uo does. That is, it does name Stephen Somma as the figure known as Case Agent 1 in the Horowitz report on Crossfire Hurricane, but it does not say anyone was assigned to "fabricate dirt".

— Brand New Preexisting (@Yastreblyansky) February 24, 2020

For the record: Trump acknowledges Russian help put him in the White House

I heard it from the great Benjamin Dreyer:

Never go full "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia."

Also he just admitted that Russia put him in the Oval Office, so that's fun. pic.twitter.com/B316UBVY2m

— Benjamin Dreyer (@BCDreyer) May 30, 2019

You couldn't have played any role in getting the work done, you've never done any work in your life. You greenlighted it, though Mueller couldn't prove that because of your refusal to answer his questions. It was a crime that you successfully covered up. That is obstruction.

— See Pinned Tweet (@Yastreblyansky) May 30, 2019

Your polls numbers are the worst they've been since February, by the way. Disapproval getting close to 54%. John McCain's ghost laughing at your attempt to hide from his name. You should resign. pic.twitter.com/iiQBYvJusr

— See Pinned Tweet (@Yastreblyansky) May 30, 2019

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:

The Crime. I

I'll get to the crime (the crime Donald Trump is most anxious to conceal) presently, in an update on what I've been maintaining, since last October or so, but I'm going to take my time. Don't @ me, as the Twitter kids say.

So there's this thing floating around tweeted by Aleksandr Torshin, Russian gun enthusiast and oligarch and mentor to our newly indicted lady spy and graduate student Mariya (her preferred spelling, "Mariia", looks like a typo and I refuse to use it) Butina, from February 2016, looking almost like an announcement on Twitter that the secret cabal of Russian gun enthusiasts have finished recruiting their US presidential candidate:

Which I have to say does not seem exactly right to me. I mean, that is, if you are running this incredibly audacious conspiracy from within Russian criminal-governmental circles to take over the US elections and install your own candidate, don't you have some more secure method of communication? Twitter FFS?

What's not being noted adequately among the tweeps is what kind of tweet this is, a link to a Russian newspaper article, from the very popular Putinist Lenta.ru, reporting on the Republican debate of 13 February, where JEB! sternly proclaimed that the United States and Russia could never be allies and Trump said they could: