Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Taking Note of the Mueller Report, As Things Get Worse

By the by, I finished reading the Mueller Report.

Well, the parts of it that weren't redacted.

There's not much to say about it that hasn't already been said elsewhere by better legal experts. I'll just add my three cents by pointing out the three things the Report proves.

One: The first half of the Report is a meticulous and detailed review of how Russia attacked our 2016 election cycle, with a ton of laundered money to help trump and other Republican candidates and a spicy helping of psych ops via social media to suppress voting and distract voters.

You can argue the merits of the rest of the investigation until you're red in the face, but the evidence on this part is solid: Russia meddled in our elections, and there are things Congress - specifically the Senate, where election security bills are dying in the shadows - should act on to protect our rights as Americans.

Two: The second half of the Report tries to answer the question if trump actively worked with Russians - both to get their aid as well as provide information to them for their operations - but ran into enough Obstruction and lying to prevent a full understanding of what happened. While the investigations didn't get enough evidence of that, the Report did highlight how trump instructed his people to hinder those investigations long enough for trump's replacement Attorney General Barr to shut the investigations down (just as Mueller was getting close to trump's Inner Circle with Stone's indictments).

What Mueller left behind with his Report was a road map to how Congress could file Obstruction charges against trump, just as long as the Democratic-controlled House grew enough of a spine to do so.

Three: The Mueller Report revealed a glaring weakness in our legal and political systems. A lot of accountability and responsible governance relies on everybody acting in Good Faith. That is, a general acceptance by all parties - not just the political parties but the media covering the elections and the state/federal agencies overseeing the process - to adhere (mostly) to the rules.

What happened in the 2016 election cycle was a breakdown of that Good Faith. Our system wasn't ready to handle the likes of donald trump - an over-reaching, unstoppable force of lying and corruption - who abused and ignored the rules so often and so consistently that the agencies tasked to enforce them couldn't keep up. The ones that did uncover some of the rule-breaking - our intelligence agencies like the FBI - didn't see enough of the pieces to solve the puzzle fast enough (the details of the June 2016 trump tower meeting didn't come out until after the election). The pieces they did find got set upward to the Congressional level where the likes of Mitch McConnell refused to accept the evidence provided and denied our agencies a chance to warn voters before the election that trump was compromised.

Even Mueller's investigations was - still is - hampered by guidelines and administrative codes that prevented him and his teams from breaking through the lies and delays by trump's people. For all the arrests and indictments his Special Counsel's office could produce, there were glaring misses among the targets - why donnie junior wasn't indicted with what Mueller found out anyway remains one of the greatest flaws of the investigation - that highlighted what couldn't be done.

Above all, there was only so much Mueller could do. He was hampered by a major guideline - an Office of Legal Counsel memo from 1973 claiming a sitting President can't be indicted - that he felt couldn't be challenged or ignored. The argument for that memo relies on authority outside of the courthouses: the power of Congress to impeach Presidents for abuse of office ("high crimes and misdemeanors").

And this is where the Good Faith breaks down even further. Impeachment isn't a legal tool, it's a political one. It relies a lot on the willingness of both major political parties to see it through. When one party (Democrats) are reluctant to apply it and the other party (Republicans) are eager to quash it to protect their own corrupt boss, relying on Impeachment to resolve the high crimes of trump becomes impossible to comprehend. Even if the House Democrats follow through on their inquiries - currently on trump's Ukraine extortion efforts - and Impeach, there's every sign McConnell will simply toss the proceedings over the Senate railings and let trump crow "vindication!" in triumph.

It's sad to note that ever since the release of Mueller's Report, trump's own behavior has gotten worse: open acts of compelling foreign nations to dig up dirt on political enemies, threatening retaliation against the FBI for even impugning his Russian buddies, and making impulsive foreign policy decisions that clearly benefit Putin to the detriment of our allies.

Everything Mueller documented in his Report is replaying out again in real time. Only now, trump's gone public with it.

Because trump thinks he's untouchable now.

Which makes trump more dangerous than ever.

Gods help us.

2 comments:

dinthebeast said...

Yesterday, before the second circuit appellate court, Fergus' legal team argued that he, while in office, cannot be even investigated, no matter what the allegation of wrongdoing.

The government's attorney brought up the hypothetical of Fergus shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, and his attorney said that he could be charged after he left office.
When pressed, they denied that even local law enforcement had any authority to stop him from subsequent killings, so long as he remains president.

Yes, I understand the corner they had painted themselves into by claiming "absolute immunity" and how they had to be prepared to defend all of the consequences of such a claim, but that's the point now, isn't it?

The rules they want immunity from are there for reasons, and at this point, no hypothetical crime one could imagine is too absurd to prepare for his commission of it.

He brought this all on himself, and if we allow him to weasel out of it, if past is prologue, he will only take it as license to take his criminality up a notch or ten.

-Doug in Oakland

dinthebeast said...

A federal judge ruled today that the grand jury material redacted from the Mueller report must be turned over to the house judiciary committee.

-Doug in Oakland