After two years of Viceroy Trump living under the cloud of the Mueller investigation – a cloud of his own making, of course – Robert Mueller submitted his final report to Attorney General William Barr, and as promised, Mr. Barr has just released a summary to Congress and the public. And it would seem to justify the position of the Trump Administration.
Sorta.
According to the letter Barr sent to Congress, the Special Counsel’s report consists of two parts. On the matter of whether Americans (including the Trump campaign) assisted in the Russian conspiracy to influence the 2016 election (the existence of such conspiracy being taken as a given by most of the government), the investigation “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.”
The second part of the report “addresses a number of actions by the President — most of which have been the subject of public reporting — that the Special Counsel investigated as potentially raising obstruction-of-justice concerns.” In the language of Barr’s summary, “After making a “thorough factual investigation” into these matters, the Special Counsel considered whether to evaluate the conduct under Department standards governing prosecution and declination decisions but ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction. Instead, for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as “difficult issues” of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction. The Special Counsel states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” This left the matter at the discretion of the Attorney General, and in his report, Barr said that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had concluded that there was insufficient evidence to establish an obstruction of justice offense.
The full text, of course, is in the hands of Attorney General Barr, which is why Democrats in government have called for, and continue to call for, the majority of the report to be made public so that its conclusions can be further examined. As they should.
What strikes me is that in a legal system with presumption of innocence, the question of exoneration should not be an issue. The point that the president is not exonerated seems to be an emphasis. The language seems to indicate that they saw a lot of smoke but couldn’t trace the fire.
But all the liberal commentators who emphasized how straight and by-the-book Robert Mueller is should have anticipated that he wasn’t going to go after Trump just for the sake of doing so. Such a person wouldn’t see it as his place to be the linchpin of the American government’s self-correction.
It is not the place of the Department of Justice to impeach and remove a president. If the only way to get rid of the were-yam occupying the White House was through the DOJ, all the little Trumpniks would whine that their enemies were subverting democracy, and for once they would have something like a point.
I mean, put aside the fact that the only reason Liddle Donnie Clown Boy is president is because we’re NOT a majoritarian democracy, but I’m going to get to the Electoral College in another post. There is still a representative process. And if Republicans are going to be accomplices in doing to the American Senate what the Roman elite did to their Senate, if the Democrats can’t strike oil with all the Congressional investigations they now have power to pursue, and if a Democratic nominee can’t defeat Donald Trump in a presidential race now that we don’t have Hillary Clinton to kick around anymore and we KNOW what he’s like in charge, that would say more about the system than about Trump.
There’s also the point that, as many in the press have pointed out, that this is a long game. This is part of why some of Mueller’s initiatives were “farmed out” to the Southern District of New York and other state prosecutors’ offices that are subject neither to the federal Department of Justice nor a presidential pardon that can only apply to federal crimes. As Ed Kilgore points out in New York Magazine: “Just because Mueller considers a certain batch of evidence not grounds for a prosecution on his own motion doesn’t mean it might not create future legal and political jeopardy for Trump. Other prosecutors pursuing other angles could pick up on his findings. And to the extent that the Justice Department doubts a sitting president can be indicted at all, the report could produce evidence that will sit, ticking like a time bomb, until he leaves office.”
And just think: If the second most incompetent presidential candidate in American political history had just lost, none of this would be happening because he’d just be a whiny little nobody trying to flag his career in “reality” TV and right-wing grievance media, as opposed to a whiny little nobody with the nuclear codes whose pique and incompetence make him a threat to the Deep State, which prior to Trump was simply “the state.”
What that also means is that with all the investigations still ongoing – and with Trump and Jared Kushner still creating new causes for investigation – the stakes for the 2020 election have been raised, whether anyone wants to admit this or not. The turn of events implies that if, for whatever reason, one votes against Donald Trump to remain president, that is a vote for Donald Trump to be criminally prosecuted once he leaves office.
The problem being that some people aren’t willing to confront those stakes, and some of us are a lot more comfortable with turning the election into a referendum on Trump’s prosecution than others.
POSTSCRIPT: And in any event, why do we even need a “beyond reasonable doubt” case that Trump conspired with Russia to swing the election for their benefit when he has proven himself willing to interfere with or recall sanctions on North Korea, with no quid pro quo whatsoever? Which leads to the next question, when your president sucks up to socialists in North Korea (and post-Marxists in Russia and China), wants to build a new Iron Curtain on the border and wants to turn American government into a one-party cult of personality, how can “conservatives” claim to represent the opposite of socialism?
Why isn’t the political-media complex focusing on THAT?