Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Release The Full Mueller

I admit I put a lot of faith into Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's involvement with our 2016 election cycle. As I wrote earlier:

Even with all that Mueller did find regarding the Russian end of the scandal - which produced real results, numerous arrests/plea deals/convictions, and exposed the facts of how foreign influence in our elections is an ongoing problem - the investigation closed - thanks to incoming Attorney General William Barr who rewrote and redacted the final report - before any direct links between trump's 2016 campaign and Russian operatives could be proved. At best, Mueller found evidence that trump obstructed the investigation, but he couldn't pursue an arrest and tried to get Congress to file impeachment (which they failed to do. The Democratic House decided to impeach over trump's misdeeds with Ukrainian military aid)...

There is still fallout from what the Mueller investigation achieved, due to how AG Barr bent and warped reality to protect trump from accountability. The legal fight over how Barr mishandled the final report - the conclusions Mueller found, which should have led to trump facing obstruction charges - kicked up a notch last week when the judges overseeing the matter found Barr did bad bad things. Via NPR and AP News:

The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr improperly withheld portions of an internal memo Barr cited in announcing that then-President Donald Trump had not obstructed justice in the Russia investigation, a federal appeals panel said Friday.

The department had argued that the 2019 memo represented private deliberations of its lawyers before any decision was formalized, and was thus exempt from disclosure. A federal judge previously disagreed, ordering the Justice Department to provide it to a government transparency group that had sued for it.

At issue in the case is a March 24, 2019, memorandum from the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and another senior department official that was prepared for Barr to evaluate whether evidence in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation could support prosecution of the president for obstruction of justice.

Barr has said he looked to that opinion in concluding that Trump did not illegally obstruct the Russia probe, which was an investigation of whether his campaign had colluded with Russia to tip the 2016 election.

A year later, a federal judge sharply rebuked Barr's handling of Mueller's report, saying Barr had made "misleading public statements" to spin the investigation's findings in favor of Trump and had shown a "lack of candor..."

While it does not look like this would lead to anything like re-opening the investigation, this may clear a path towards re-opening the final Mueller Report itself, which was so heavily redacted on Barr's orders to where any meaningful understanding of trump's role in the scandals were covered up.

There is serious evidence that donald trump and his campaign aides were directly involved in foreign agents to disrupt and corrupt our nation's electoral system back in 2016. These are problems we are still facing today. A full review of the Mueller Report will show us who the bad actors are, and show us where the faults are in the system so we can get these problems fixed.

Gods, we need to know. And we need to make sure this disaster never happens again.

1 comment:

dinthebeast said...

Billbarr Buggins lied his ass off. They never did those deliberations between DOJ lawyers about whether Fergus' criming rose to the level of obstruction. He just said "Fergus is a Republican, and therefore is obviously not guilty."
Mueller is also a Republican, and I never held out much hope for his investigation, although he seemed to have done a thorough job chasing down the Russian troll farm.

-Doug in Sugar Pine