I have a migraine. My head hurts like hell, but, after about four hours, I can finally see again, so things seem to be trending in the right direction… At any rate, I wanted to share a few things with you before I crawl back beneath the covers.
Word came out from the Department of Justice this morning that Attorney General William Barr will be be releasing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s redacted report on the Russia investigation this Thursday morning, and, as you might imagine, Donald Trump responded by going completely, fucking insane, lying about the findings of the report, and demanding that his investigators be investigated.
This, of course, is a lie. For all his talk of “total exoneration,” the Mueller report did not absolve him of collusion, corruption, or obstruction. In fact, even according to William Barr, Trump’s hand-picked Attorney General, the report did not establish that “no obstruction” took place. In his roundly-criticized four-page summary of the Mueller report, Barr even quoted Mueller as having said, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” So, when Trump says that Mueller and Barr found “no collusion,” it’s a deliberate misstatement of fact. While it appears to be the case that Mueller did not find enough to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the President knowingly conspired with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 election, he very clearly states that obstruction of justice may have happened. And the consensus of legal scholars seems to be that he was looking to Congress to make that determination. Barr, however, interceded before Congress could see the report, offering his own interpretation… which was that the President, in his opinion, could not be found guilty of obstruction, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
Barr not only intercede on the President’s behalf to muddy the waters by declaring that no obstruction had taken place, but he also held the Mueller report for several weeks, refusing to even release the Special Counsel’s non-confidential overview documents to Congress, despite repeated demands. Meanwhile, of course, it would appear that Barr briefed the White House on the report, giving them a head start of several weeks not only so that they could push out the “total exoneration” narrative, but also so that they could start drafting a formal response, which one imagines will come out at the same time as Mueller’s report. And, not just that, but, when testifying before Congress last week, Barr threw some red meat to Trump’s conspiracy theory-loving base, suggesting that members of the U.S. intelligence community had illegally “spied” on the Trump campaign — an accusation that Trump is pushing aggressively today, in the run up to the release of the Mueller report.
For what it’s worth, this again is a lie, and even Barr has since backed away from it. The Republicans investigated so-called “Spygate” several times when Devin Nunes ran the House Intelligence Committee, attempting to establish that the FBI had acted inappropriately in their investigation of the Trump campaign, and they never found anything of substance to substantiate the President’s claim that the whole thing started with Hillary Clinton hiring former MI6 agent Christopher Steele to make up lies about his ties to Russia, or the ridiculous claim that Trump advisor Carter Page had been targeted for investigation without good reason. [The truth is, the investigation of Russian interference started well before the Steele dossier, when it became known that Trump associate George Papadopoulos had told an Australian diplomat in a bar the the Russians were preparing to help their campaign by releasing emails damaging to Hillary Clinton. Plus, the Steele dossier wasn’t something that the Clinton campaign had thought up. It was actually drafted by Steele, a former British agent with a significant network of Russian contacts, on the behalf of the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online news site. And, as for Carter Page, members of our intelligence community sought a FISA warrant against him, not because he was working for Trump, but because we knew of Russian attempts to recruit him as an agent.]
But, for those who are unwilling to do the research and look at the actual facts, we have this alternative narrative being put forward by Trump and his associates, claiming that it’s all a “hoax” perpetrated by “dirty cops” within the intelligence community directed by Hillary Clinton… which, by the way, makes absolutely no fucking sense, given that it was the FBI that gave Trump the advantage going into the election by announcing that the investigation into Clinton’s email server had been reopened. And, more importantly, if Clinton had been behind the Steele dossier, hoping to use it to defeat Trump, why is it that it didn’t become public until the January after the election? The whole thing just makes absolutely no fucking sense. But yet here we are, arguing reality with old white men who just refuse to accept the truth.
All bullshit aside, here’s what we know beyond a shadow of a doubt. The Russians interfered in our election on the part of Donald Trump, and he welcomed their assistance. The Russians attempted through various means to make inroads with the Trump campaign, and, at every turn, they found Trump’s associates receptive. And, when questioned by investigators, these same Trump associates then lied about it, repeatedly. Sure, it may be that Mueller didn’t feel it was enough to stand up in court, and allow him to secure a conviction, but we know that it happened.
We know that Jared Kushner sought to set up a secret backchannel with Russia. We know that, when Russian operatives approached Donald Trump Jr. with an offer to help the campaign, he not only responded by saying, “I Love It,” but set up meeting at Trump Tower that was attended by several members of Trump’s campaign. And, we know, when this meeting became public, that Donald Trump himself penned a letter for his son, stating that the meeting had been about adoption policy, when it hadn’t. And we know that, in Helsinki, Donald Trump sided with Vladimir Putin over against his own intelligence agencies, saying that he believed Putin when he said that Russia didn’t interfere with our 2016 election. [Our intelligence agencies had already shown Trump definitive proof that Putin had personally called for the hacking.] And let’s not forget the only change Donald Trump’s team made to the GOP platform before the Republican National Convention in 2016 was to remove U.S. assistance for Ukraine, much to the delight of Putin… I could go on. I didn’t even mention the fact that we know from Michael Cohen that Trump talked with Roger Stone before the election about the timing of the Wikileaks releases of stolen Democratic emails on behalf of the Russians… But suffice it to say that there’s a great deal of evidence of very bad things having happened. And, if Barr doesn’t redact all of it, we’re going to know a great deal come Thursday.
So, prepare yourselves. The next few days are going to be filled with more shouts of “treason,” and demands that the investigators be thrown in jail. This, I’m afraid, is going to get incredibly ugly.
