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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
OR … you can go read the folks at Lawfare<\/strong><\/em>. 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<\/strong><\/em> mob think<\/a> the Mueller Report says?<\/p>\n 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 \u201cno collusion\u201d either. Indeed, he described in page after damning page a dramatic pattern of Russian outreach to figures close to the president, including to Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s duty to \u201ctake care\u201d that the laws are \u201cfaithfully executed\u201d\u2014a pattern Mueller explicitly declined to conclude did\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>obstruct justice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Call it a newer, bigger swamp,<\/em> 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<\/em>. But there’s more:<\/p>\n As the report is careful to explain, \u201ccollusion\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u201cmeeting of the minds\u201d 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.<\/p>\n This conclusion is far from the full vindication that chants of \u201cno collusion\u201d 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\u2014as evidenced by the guilty pleas and indictments that the Mueller team secured\u2014but 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s intention. They just didn\u2019t agree to work together toward that goal together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And this is dismaying:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s private server before she deleted them. The trouble is that it appears the emails didn\u2019t exist. It has previously been reported that now-deceased Trump supporter Peter Smith went to extreme lengths to try and track down Clinton\u2019s 30,000 deleted emails. According to today\u2019s report, after candidate Trump stated in July 2016 that he hoped Russia would \u201cfind the 30,000 emails,\u201d 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 \u201cClinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative\u201d was \u201c\u2018in coordination\u2019 with the Trump Campaign\u201d 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 \u201cinitiated or directed Smith\u2019s efforts.\u201d So essentially, a bunch of people in Trump\u2019s orbit tried very hard to obtain stolen emails but came up empty. Mueller decided that chasing this particular ghost did not constitute criminal conduct.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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<\/em> and taken it to mean anything other than time to profit<\/em>? Such is the conservative movement these days.<\/p>\n Remember Mueller’s responsibility to investigate possible obstruction of justice charges by the President?<\/p>\n All this leads to Mueller\u2019s key conclusion, quoted only in part in Barr\u2019s initial letter: \u201cif we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. \u2026 Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.\u201d This reasoning makes clear the disconnect between Mueller\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t make up his mind\u2014or decided to defer to the attorney general for judgment. Mueller\u2019s decision not to reach a traditional prosecutorial judgment in no sense indicates that the evidence of possible obstruction by the president was weak\u2014\u201cNo Collusion, No Obstruction,\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n But that’s just my<\/strong> conclusions, not necessarily Lawfare’s<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0Give Lawfare’s<\/strong><\/em> article a read. It’s a calm dissection, even if a self-admitted first read, of the Mueller Report. It’s grounding<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u2026 Continue reading