Witch Hunt 'Exonerates' President As GOP Moves to Try Hillary Clinton for Collusion
There are a lot of takes on the Special Counsel’s investigation into President Trump’s campaign, many of which are built on faulty assumptions about its conclusions given that we haven’t even seen the report. It’s appropriate to think of the punditry and partisan responses as being akin to blind men trying to describe an elephant by touching it.
I’ll cycle through a few of those deep thoughts, all of which are based on a four page summary written by the Attorney General. And then I’ll go on with a few comments based on what the evidence shows.
The biggie, of course, is the GOP spin machine, which has already sainted the stable genius and is now calling for more investigations into the loser of the 2016 Presidential campaign.
Politico quotes Republican National Committee member Shawn Steele saying the report marks "the first day of Trump's re-election .... Now Trump gets 35 states, the Senate looks better .... This gives Trump a completely new shield around him.''
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee appeared on Fox & Friends to proclaim “there was a conspiracy, apparently, a cover-up, and an attempted coup d'etat. But it was not by anyone on the Donald Trump campaign, it was by people inside the government who tried to upend this president and overturn the election.”
White House spokesperson Kellyanne Conway took to the airwaves to call for new investigations of the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton."'Why are still talking about Hillary Clinton?' Because folks, you wouldn't let the 2016 election go... There should be a reckoning, because our democracy bears nothing less."
There is a very noisy subset of activists (only some of whom are Democrats) who have made the Mueller investigation the focus of their fantasies about removing the President from office.
The allure of a Great White Savior swooping down to save our Democracy was a tempting fantasy, particularly on days when details about the actions of the low-minded Trump campaign apparatus came to light.
There is also a mindless group of media types and others who have insisted this obsession with “collision” was the basis of Democratic party opposition to the Trump administration.
One such person is Josh Lederman, NBC National Political Reporter, who tweeted “It’s fair to assume there is a significant degree on panic setting in this afternoon at the DNC, Democratic primary campaigns across the country.”
I challenged him to name any two such campaigns and am still waiting for a response.
Democrats ran in 2018 and are running for 2020 elections based on a broad set of issues, which vary by candidate.
Maybe you've heard talk of Medicare for All, or the Green New Deal, or Universal Basic Income, or a Wealth Tax on the uber-rich.
While they may go so far (as Bernie Sanders did this weekend) as to call the Trump administration corrupt, everybody I’ve seen campaign is striving to be seen as less sleazy and more empathetic.
Let’s take a look at what the letter from the Attorney General says.
Mueller took a narrow view of his responsibilities, focused on Russia first. He was tasked with determining whether Russia interfered in our elections and whether American players, the president not excepted, aided this attempt or interfered with investigations.
The Attorney General’s Barr’s description of Mueller’s determination is solely focused on the Russian government.
By that standard, a quid pro quo where Trump willingly accepted Russian help without actively coordinating with them in return for Trump Tower Moscow and/or a relaxation of sanctions would not be covered by this determination.
Neither would be Paul Manafort’s passing of internal polling data to Konstantin Kilimnick since he’s not technically a Russian government official. Roger Stone’s interactions with Wikileaks is also not covered by this determination.
In other words, the determination on conspiracy or coordination ignores the documented conspiracy and coordination with foreign nationals, many of whom are closely connected to the Russian government but are not an official part of it.
https://twitter.com/chrisinsilico/status/1109983298397310976
It should be obvious by now that subjects not directly related to this focus were farmed out to various Department of Justice district prosecutors. All the questions and accusations about Trumpian finance have yet, for the most part, to be answered.
After nearly two years the special counsel netted 199 criminal charges, 37 indictments or guilty pleas, and 5 prison sentences. Donald Trump’s campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, personal attorney, and national security adviser have all been convicted of or pleaded guilty to crimes related to this investigation.
The foundation for the original claims about a Trump-Russia connection came from foreign intelligence communications intercepts.
Communications intercepts are nearly impossible to use as evidence, if for no other reason, the process of how they were obtained would have to come before the court. There ain't nobody gonna let go of those sources and methods. And if prosecutors can’t build a case out of corroborating evidence, then there is no case.
Given that this was an investigation into criminal behavior, the presumptive evidentiary standard would be beyond a reasonable doubt.
Although we’ll have to wait for the actual report to be made public, it’s likely the Special Counsel found some evidence of conspiracy and coordination, but not enough to pass such a high evidentiary threshold.
As was stated in the Barr letter, to prove a cover up, it's necessary to prove that a crime occurred. Mueller-- I think-- believed that Congress rather than a jury should make a determination, simply because the rules of evidence are different.
The most spot on reaction I’ve read comes from Marcy Wheeler, writing at the New Republic:
The hack-and-leak is not the crime Trump may have committed. It is, instead, a quid pro quo deal by which Russia would help Trump win and Trump would relieve Russia of the sanctions imposed for engaging in human rights violations, annexing Crimea, and hacking the election to help Trump win.
Nothing in the report was ever going to change Russian intent to undermine and weaken western democracies. Moscow will continue to do so well after Mueller and Trump.
It ain’t over ‘till it’s over, as one writer at Daily Kos points out:
Forget Russia for a moment. Pretend it didn’t exist. Think of all the other crimes Trump and his have committed: Payoffs to women who had affairs with Trump, agreements with the National Enquirer to bury stories, massive grift and graft surrounding the inauguration, Hotel emoluments, Trump Foundation, tax and bank fraud, to name a few. In another administration, any one of these, on its own, would have riveted the nation’s attention. In another media environment, any one of these could be grounds for impeachment. As they still are.
A couple of final thoughts, focused on the road ahead...
Here’s the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch:
Simply put, putting Trump’s alleged wrongdoing before a prosecutor before it went before the public was a huge mistake. Robert Mueller was tasked largely with deciding what about Team Trump’s behavior could win a unanimous jury verdict from 12 people, not with determining what was right politically or morally. Now, more than two years into it, Democrats have gained control of the House and have launched the probe that should have happened in 2017. But the existence of Mueller’s report -- and his decisions on whom to prosecute or not prosecute -- will likely be used as a bludgeon by Republicans to discredit the hearings as a “witch hunt” into matters that have already been litigated. Trump is hoping to ride that persecution complex all the way to a second term, and after living through 2016, I’m not sure that it won’t work.
Forty-five years after Nixon’s downfall, we have a Congress that was too addicted to self-preservation to perform its basic function of executive oversight, a Beltway media too addicted to ratings (or Fox News’ weird power trip) to dig deeper, and a public too addicted to shouting at the TV or at each other on Twitter to do the hard work of demanding a better Congress, a better media -- and a better president. And part of the problem, especially for those whose hearts and heads are in the right place, has been waiting for Bob Mueller to fix everything.
We absolutely do need to see Mueller’s full report, and learn whether it’s an exoneration or a sweeping small-"i" indictment of the president, or (most likely) something in between. But if and when we do, we need to read it with the clear-eyed perspective that it won’t undo the legacy of mistakes and erosion of democratic norms that brought us to this place, nor will it mitigate the hard work of fixing America that will last well beyond the 2020 election.
Robert Mueller might bring some measure of justice, but at the end of the day there’s just us.
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1109877625265229824
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Lead image via ACLU