I know, right? I’m not saying that Barr is wholesale lying. Hell, maybe he’s even the rare exception within the administration that it’s allergic to the truth. That doesn’t mean that he hasn’t heavily spun the report’s findings, though. That’s the sole reason he was appointed to begin with.
It should also be troubling to people that this AG is on record as having to come to conclusions on the Mueller report before he was even appointed or had any access to information regarding the investigation. This alone would raise an enormous red flag as it shows serious bias.
Congress and the people of this country have a right to see the report. I understand if some sensitive information has to be redacted in the public version, but we should be able to read it and come to our own conclusions. And if the report exonerates Trump? Well there we have it. Mueller couldn’t find anything chargeable against Trump, just that Trump has surrounded himself with criminals willing to break the law.
Well, if there’s information that would compromise sources in Russian intelligence or something, that should be kept out of the public report. But a House committee should have access to it, IMO.
Since the New York Times snagged Jamelle Bouie there aren’t many writers left worth following at Slate. But they still have Dahlia Lithwick.
She is a sad panda.
In those 46 hours, there were exactly two facts known: that nobody else had been indicted by Mueller, and that Barr did not find any proposed action by Mueller to be “inappropriate or unwarranted.” That was, quite literally, all we knew. And into that void—that absence of facts—swept the spin. On Fox News, the declamation came forth that there had been an actual finding, of, what else, “no collusion.” Indeed, as Justin Peters noted, the television news station that exists exclusively to protect and defend the president’s preferred narrative declared, without basis in any publicly known or knowable fact, that it was “No Collusion Day!” While every other network was trying to parse out scenarios and future outcomes, and carefully explaining that nothing definitive had been shared with the public, conservative media and congressional Republicans were already claiming that the facts had been amassed, and assessed and released, and supported their cause. Were they clairvoyant? Did they have some insider information? No, they just had the special feeling they get at Fox: The facts are not material to the claim. In the absence of any knowable facts, Republicans declare victory and invent their own. In the absence of any knowable facts, Democrats declare defeat.
Releasing it completely unredacted won’t end this. Anti-Trump people will go “see see” and pro-Trump people will go “see see” and each talk past each other arguing their own points why he should have or shouldn’t have been impeached.
Anyone who thinks that anything will be ended either way is being pretty delusional.
That’s the correct prediction. As I wrote earlier, there will be no evidence of Trump literally meeting with Putin and saying, “Hey, let’s collude on the election. You hack Hillary and give us dirt, and we’ll give you Crimea once I’m in office.” Without that, it will always be “See? No collusion!”
No, but it would still be nice for We The People to actually see what an investigation into the tampering by a foreign power with one of our presidential elections actually, you know, concluded.
I can’t just default to assuming the worst. I am very much in favor of the report getting released, and I think eventually it will. If Barr’s summary is fundamentally incorrect, I think Mueller would have publicly set the record straight. It’s possible, even likely, that there are more questions to be asked based on the things the reports contains. I don’t agree at all with Trump going on and on about how he is now totally cleared of wrongdoing. There’s more to uncover here, but I have a problem with the thinking that just because the report hasn’t been released yet means there is some really damning stuff in there that is being buried on purpose. It’s the same game Trump has been playing for years. He gets to keep everybody distracted by their worst fears about his involvement with Russia and then when nothing damning gets uncovered, he can crow on about how bad of a job the mainstream media is doing. It’s not a game that the Democrats seem to be winning.
Nonetheless it is a bit galling* that even as quoted by Barr the report explicitly says it does not exonerate Trump of obstruction; yet the media (including mainstream) are all but printing in big headlines EXONERATED.
*by “a bit galling” I mean to say “incompatible with faith in liberal democracy,” but I’ve pretty much felt that way about a lot of things for the past 2.5 years
Also, too, people are not reading the footnote in Barr’s exculpatory statement about collusion. He’s ruling out only a very narrow definition of collusion (an agreement between campaign members and the Russian government to cooperate to influence the election).
Why would he define it that tightly? Because there is evidence of collusion with Russian cut-outs, and there is evidence of collusion with WikiLeaks, and aside from the election interference, there’s evidence of tit-for-tat dealing on the Moscow Tower / sanctions front.
How do we know there is evidence of that? Because it is in the public record as a result of Mueller’s filings.
The Swedbank AB money laundering scandal grew considerably more serious this week amid reports that the bank is now being investigated by U.S. authorities after potentially providing misleading information.
Former Trump campaign chairman and convicted felon Paul Manafort was among those to have received suspicious payments made through the Stockholm-based lender, the SVT network reported on Wednesday.
The allegations pile pressure on Sweden’s oldest bank after reports that it was used to handle more than $10 billion in potentially suspicious transactions tied to the Danske Bank A/S Estonian laundering case. SVT is now reporting that the sums could be much greater: Up to 20 billion euros ($23 billion) a year between 2010 and 2016.
