When it comes to the Mueller Report, everyone’s entitled to their opinions, but not everyone’s opinion is worth listening to. I’ve talked about the problem of the comfortable opinion vs the honest opinion. You can talk to some random dude on the street, you can listen to your favorite ideologue on the left or right, you can listen to lawyers representing those sides, the pundits themselves who do this sort of thing for a living – and therefore have implicit conflict-of-interest problems because of those payments. You can listen to flying nutcases such as the ilk of Alex Jones, and the reason I phrase it that way is that Mr. Jones has retreated behind the defense of having a psychosis to explain his frankly unacceptable behavior. It’s worth wondering about his ilk in the same way. You can even make the absolute pinnacle of mistakes and listen to President Trump’s frantic claims of exoneration, because that’s easier – and faster – than reading the report and forming your own opinion.
You can even listen to me, if you like opinions unleavened with neither money nor specific expertise, hell I haven’t even have the time to read the damn report. I’ll try to get to it this weekend, although I may print it out and use it to beat an invading Martian to death, instead – it’s big enough to do that.
OR … you can go read the folks at Lawfare. They deal with legalese every day, they know how to parse what another national security lawyer (Mr. Mueller) has written, most are lawyers involved in international law or national security law, and they’ve dealt with all sorts of uncomfortable questions when it comes to the painful question of national security. In short, so far as I can tell, they’re paid and trained to write honest opinions concerning the law, the facts, and how it all comes together. So what does the Lawfare mob think the Mueller Report says?
No, Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, and no, he did not conclude that President Trump had obstructed justice. But Mueller emphatically did not find that there had been “no collusion” either. Indeed, he described in page after damning page a dramatic pattern of Russian outreach to figures close to the president, including to Trump’s campaign and his business; Mueller described receptivity to this outreach on the part of those figures; he described a positive eagerness on the part of the Trump campaign to benefit from illegal Russian activity and that of its cutouts; he described serial lies about it all. And he describes as well a pattern of behavior on the part of the president in his interactions with law enforcement that is simply incompatible with the president’s duty to “take care” that the laws are “faithfully executed”—a pattern Mueller explicitly declined to conclude did not obstruct justice.
Call it a newer, bigger swamp, much worse than the one he promised to drain. Or retreat from the colorful and dreadfully misleading metaphors and just go with Trump’s sordid, venal reality. But there’s more:
As the report is careful to explain, “collusion” is neither a criminal offense nor a legal term of art with a clear definition, despite its frequent use in discussions of the special counsel’s mandate. Mueller and his team instead examined the relationships between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government through the far narrower lens of criminal conspiracy. To establish a criminal conspiracy, a prosecutor must show, among other elements, that two or more persons agreed to either violate a federal criminal law or defraud the United States. This “meeting of the minds” is ultimately the piece the Mueller team felt it could not prove, leading it not to pursue any conspiracy charges against members of the Trump campaign, even as it pursued them against Russian agents.
This conclusion is far from the full vindication that chants of “no collusion” imply, a fact driven home by the detailed factual record the Mueller report puts forward. In some cases, there was indeed a meeting of the minds between Trump campaign officials and Russia, just not in pursuit of a criminal objective. In others, members of the Trump campaign acted criminally—as evidenced by the guilty pleas and indictments that the Mueller team secured—but did so on their own. At times, these efforts even worked toward the same objective as the Russian government, but on seemingly parallel tracks as opposed to in coordination. None of this amounted to a criminal conspiracy that the Mueller team believed it could prove beyond a reasonable doubt. But the dense network of interactions, missed opportunities, and shared objectives between the Trump campaign and the Russian government remains profoundly disturbing.
This report shows that the Trump campaign was reasonably aware of the Russian efforts, at least on the hacking side. They were aware the Russians sought to help them win. They welcomed that assistance. Instead of warning the American public, they instead devised a public relations and campaign strategy that sought to capitalize on Russia’s illicit assistance. In other words, the Russians and the Trump campaign shared a common goal, and each side worked to achieve that goal with basic knowledge of the other side’s intention. They just didn’t agree to work together toward that goal together.
And this is dismaying:
The Mueller report lays out in detail a sustained effort to obtain a set of emails which figures associated with the campaign believed hackers might have obtained from Hillary Clinton’s private server before she deleted them. The trouble is that it appears the emails didn’t exist. It has previously been reported that now-deceased Trump supporter Peter Smith went to extreme lengths to try and track down Clinton’s 30,000 deleted emails. According to today’s report, after candidate Trump stated in July 2016 that he hoped Russia would “find the 30,000 emails,” future National Security Advisor Michael Flynn reached out to multiple people to try and obtain those emails. One of the individuals he reached out to was Peter Smith. Smith later circulated a document that claimed his “Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative” was “‘in coordination’ with the Trump Campaign” specifically naming Flynn, Sam Clovis, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. While the investigation found that Smith communicated with both Flynn and Clovis, it found no evidence that any of the four individuals listed “initiated or directed Smith’s efforts.” So essentially, a bunch of people in Trump’s orbit tried very hard to obtain stolen emails but came up empty. Mueller decided that chasing this particular ghost did not constitute criminal conduct.
At this point, it’s not really about specific crimes. It’s about people who’ve forgotten, or never learned, how to act as an American. They lie to the FBI, they give the appearance of conniving with one of our greatest adversaries, all to win a Presidency, and benefit thereby. Had they ever heard the phrase public service and taken it to mean anything other than time to profit? Such is the conservative movement these days.
Remember Mueller’s responsibility to investigate possible obstruction of justice charges by the President?
All this leads to Mueller’s key conclusion, quoted only in part in Barr’s initial letter: “if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. … Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” This reasoning makes clear the disconnect between Mueller’s approach to the obstruction investigation and that of Barr, who independently chose to evaluate the evidence against Trump and determine that it was not sufficient to establish an obstruction offense.
This is not, in short, a circumstance in which Mueller summed up all the evidence for obstruction and all the evidence against it and just couldn’t make up his mind—or decided to defer to the attorney general for judgment. Mueller’s decision not to reach a traditional prosecutorial judgment in no sense indicates that the evidence of possible obstruction by the president was weak—“No Collusion, No Obstruction,” as the president tweeted. To the contrary, the more time one spends with the obstruction section of the report, the more it suggests that the Mueller team believed the evidence of obstruction to be very strong.
But we knew that already. Mueller merely confirms that this is a President without principle, without moral, without qualm. He’s one of the rarest of people – someone who can lie and lie and lie and not blush about it. He’ll make up ludicrous conspiracy theories to cover his ass, and he’ll never take responsibility for any of his failures – only for his successes. And other folks’ successes.
But that’s just my conclusions, not necessarily Lawfare’s. Give Lawfare’s article a read. It’s a calm dissection, even if a self-admitted first read, of the Mueller Report. It’s grounding, for want of a better word. No hysterics, no spin, just your local lawyer giving you the lowdown on what’s come across her desk.
