He’s not the only one. I turned my phone off 8 hours ago. I’m in the worst of moods, and the unfettered jubilation of a few people I know that have been hanging tough with Trump for the last several years is likely to push me over some edge.
I’m not pissed off that he didn’t collude specifically, but I’m becoming increasingly incensed at the blanket justification and embracement of him and everything he’s done because of how well he has managed to narrow the entire scope of how a massive slice the public judges him by hammering on NO COLLUSION for 2 straight years. And because he now has the Justice Department announcing that he’s right about this, we’ve got people extending that finding to every facet of him and his enterprise and every decision or action he undertakes.
The fine print doesn’t matter. The reset button has been pushed, he crawled through 2 years of shit to come out looking clean on the other side, and those are the headlines that matter to too many people who are using these results to sweep everything else under the rug and mark any further inquiries into any other part of him as nothing more than petty retaliation.
Trump did collude with the Russians. We already know this. His campaign manager gave polling data to the Russians.
But that’s not a crime. Mueller simply didn’t find enough evidence to support a case of criminal conspiracy. It’s a different thing.
Trump still worked with the Russians. This is already established in prior court documents. We knew this months ago.
I’ll get some cards printed up so I don’t have to repeat that 62,984,825 times.
If you’re looking for optimism, remember Trump’s penchant for saying imbecilic shit that undermines his situation.
Went snowboarding today with a friend who is an illegal immigrant from South America. Somehow this investigation+AOC has made her and some of her friends like Trump. How does the math on that even work???
I still wonder if I got a brain injury or if I really heard that.
The objectionable part about Trump was never only about his possibly conspiring with the Russians to get himself elected. There’s the fact that he is a known contract-reneger, grifter (the emoluments stuff is self-evident), sexual harasser etc. and on top of that almost certainly a tax cheat and a money-launderer. And even if his campaign didn’t actually coordinate with the Russians, he was most definitely the beneficiary of Russian interference in our Presidential election.
And if you’re looking for pessimism, remember Trump’s penchant for walking away unscathed from the most imbecilic statements imaginable.
Yes, this is so flagrantly obvious that I hope we don’t all have to expend a bunch of energy reiterating it now.
This didn’t change anything. People believe what they want to believe at this point. The key is to sway the minds at the last minute of the people who don’t think about it much with an October 2020 surprise.
That would be a great time for state charges.
Taking bets on how soon Trump will announce his new victory tour. I think the first one was about winning the election, this one will be about no collusion.
The 4th circuit hearing the case brought by Maryland et al were extremely hostile towards the AGs bringing the suit.
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A trump crony summarizing the report in the most favorable light possible shouldn’t preclude the House from having Barr and Mueller testifying as well as release of the full report.
The question remains whether Democrats will wilt from the crowing and gloating. I know this is a rather tiresome exercise, but imagine Loretta Lynch releasing a tersely worded “Clinton not guilty of any wrong doing” after the Clinton email investigation and the Republicans or the media leaving it at that.
Having said this, I think @kerzain is largely correct.
A number of people are pointing out the very narrow claim Barr attributes to Mueller on this. Arguably, the scope of Mueller’s investigation on collusion / coordination was narrowly defined, and he would have had to find evidence of an agreement (explicit or tacit) between the campaign and the Russian government to hack Democratic materials and use them to help Trump get elected in order to satisfy the brief.
So things like Manafort giving polling data to a Russian government cut-out isn’t evidence, because they can’t prove it was the result of such an agreement, and the Russian cut-out isn’t provably the Russian government. Stone coordinating with WikiLeaks on the release of stolen Russian materials isn’t evidence of an agreement with Russia because the coordination isn’t with Russia, it’s with WikiLeaks; and Stone isn’t part of the campaign anyway.
Edit: Indeed, the entire episode of Trump playing footsie with Putin, exchanging promises of sanction easing for support on a real estate deal, was outside of Mueller’s scope because it had nothing to do with any agreement between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government on hacking and election influence.
Report: “This does not exonerate Trump.”
All media: “Report exonerated Trump.”
FFS.
Halberman is even calling the letter the ‘Mueller letter.’
Can’t wait to see the first approval poll after this weekend, where people completely forget all the shitty things Trump has done because of Barr’s summary letter.
“He rides roughshod over the Constitution and is a national embarrassment daily, but he didn’t sell us out to Russia to do it, so woo!”
“He didn’t leave behind chargeable evidence that he sold us out to the Russians, just his entire campaign did”