Things You Need To Remember About Thursday April 18 2019

Tomorrow is supposed to be when trump's Attorney General Lackey General Barr releases the Mueller Report to the public.

Here's the first thing you should understand:

This is not the real Report.

This will be a redacted - probably heavily redacted - copy of a report that will hide absolutely everything embarrassing (if not documented illegality that Mueller couldn't make a solid court case for) related to trump's behavior during his 2016 campaign and into the early parts of 2017 when trump was trying to stop the FBI from exposing Michael Flynn's bad behavior as his National Security Advisor.

This is part of Barr's attempt to defang any possibility of Mueller's investigations providing a link between the Russian hacking into the 2016 elections that he proved to a grand jury and the trump campaign's eagerness to work with Russians from 2015 onward.

To refer to Michael Stern's observations at Slate:

Here are just some of the ways that Barr has failed the public and the Justice Department he heads.

First, there is a huge piece of the puzzle that is missing in the countless articles that take, at face value, Barr’s claim that he cannot release much of Mueller’s report to the public because it contains grand jury material.

Yes, it is true that federal rules governing grand jury secrecy stop the Department of Justice from releasing testimony that occurred “before the grand jury.” However, there is a practice that is common among federal prosecutors that would allow for the release of the substance of most grand jury testimony without violating the secrecy rule.

While much of the material from these interviews is the same as what is said before the grand jury, the grand jury secrecy rule only prevents grand jury testimony from being released. It does not act as a bar to the release of interview reports that hold the same information. And so, while grand jury testimony must not be publicly disclosed, the attorney general has the authority to disclose interviews of witnesses who appeared before the grand jury. This material could appear in the version of the Mueller report Barr is set to release on Thursday. But these reports will likely present damning evidence of campaign links to Russia and obstruction by Trump and members of his administration. If Barr’s past actions are any indicator, he will do all he can to prevent their release.

From all signs, much of Mueller’s full report, including the interviews, will be missing. As Congress tries to pry the full report loose from Barr, it must ensure that Barr’s public redactions do not include interviews of witnesses who appeared before the grand jury. Since any such redactions cannot be based on Barr’s claim of grand jury secrecy, their release is fair game...

Second: Lacking the details of the investigation will make Barr's presentation ripe for conspiracy-mongering (on both sides). The Far Right will argue there's things in the report hiding proof of HILLARY'S criminal misdeeds, while the rest of us will remain convinced that there had to have been some quid pro quo going on between trump and Putin. To quote Ben Mattis-Lilley at Slate:

Before James Comey got fired, before Robert Mueller was even a twinkle in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s bewitching hazel-green eyes. Before the obstruction question, before offshoots like the Michael Cohen campaign finance case and Trump Tower Moscow and the inaugural fund. At that point, the public knew two things: one, that Russia had likely orchestrated a hacking and propaganda campaign against Hillary Clinton, and two, that Donald Trump’s advisers had made squirrelly efforts, both during the Republican National Convention and the presidential transition period, to advance Russia-friendly positions regarding economic sanctions and the war in Ukraine.

And, to badly paraphrase David Mamet, if there’s a quid and there’s a quo, there is probably a pro. Had Trump been trying to do favors for Russia’s ruling oligarch-gangsters to reward them for sabotaging his opponent? And did they sabotage his opponent because they knew he’d in turn make it easier to launder money into the U.S. by eliminating sanctions against them?

That possibility became the central mystery of Mueller’s investigation into “collusion”: In Rosenstein’s words, the special counsel was tasked with investigating “links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” And when Attorney General William Barr released his March letter summarizing Mueller’s conclusions, he quoted the special counsel as having written that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” But Barr didn’t explain how that conclusion had been arrived at, and given that Mueller’s report is defined by a law as a summary of “prosecution and declination” decisions, the most long-gestating question it might be able to resolve when it’s (partially) released on Thursday is why the special counsel decided that a number of publicly known links between Russia and the Trump campaign did not constitute a chargeable conspiracy...

To me, that's the sticking point: Barr failed to explain Mueller's conclusions and substituted Barr's own... and Barr is NOT an unbiased actor in this matter. He's covering for his boss in ways an Attorney General should not behave.

Third: I cannot recall the earlier Special Counsel reports being redacted in any way. In particular, the Starr Report from 1997-98 contained a lot of details - much of it unrelated to Ken Starr's original investigations into Bill Clinton's Whitewater deals - that came from grand jury testimonies, something that Barr's covering up here.

We are facing the likelihood of Mueller's redacted report not even corresponding to news we've long known about trump and the Russians, which makes it even more likely the House Democrats will fight Barr to get the grand jury testimonies released and unredacted.

Fourth: This is not the end of the investigation. Mueller farmed out part of his findings to other Justice Department offices, especially the ongoing trials for the likes of Roger Stone. Unless - damn him - Barr tries to use HIS redacted copy of the Report to shut the whole thing down.

At which point I hope to God Mueller comes back as Special Counsel and hammer Barr with an Obstruction charge for that. Yeah, I'm hoping this happens.

Tomorrow is going to be a crazy day.

Gods help us.

P.S. As John Cole puts it over at Balloon-Juice:

REPUBLICANS IMPEACHED BILL CLINTON FOR LYING ABOUT A BLOW JOB.

That is all.