Tag Archives: Mueller report

A Short List of Questions Post-(Redacted) Mueller Report

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As the specifics of The Mueller Report kept exploding like cherry bombs all day yesterday and into this morning, my list of questions and reactions kept getting longer and longer. As a confessed Trump/Russia obsessive nerd, here’s an abbreviated list (in no particular order) of where I’m at roughly 24 hours after release:

1: Mueller decided not to subpoena Trump for an in-person interview, the most conclusive way of determining “corrupt intent” in obstruction and a host of other wildly sketchy behaviors. He didn’t want a “protracted” fight with Trump, one that almost certainly would have gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Plus, there was the high likelihood that if Trump did get in front of a grand jury, a la Bill Clinton, he probably would have pleaded The Fifth from start to finish, rendering the whole fight meaningless. That said, Donald Trump truly is “Individual #1”, everything emanates from him and revolves around him, and the case against him (or even for him) is hobbled by not getting the best possible evidence from him. The fight for his in-person testimony should have gone forward. And let’s remember, it was only a bit over four months from the time Nixon got a subpoena for his White House tapes and the Supreme Court ruled — unanimously — that he had to turn them over. After 22 months of Mueller, we could have waited until July.

2: Likewise, how do we explain Mueller calling in the hapless Sarah Huckabee Sanders for an interview but not anyone in the immediate Trump family? Not Donald Jr., the “I love it!” recipient of the Russian offer to assist the campaign? Not Ivanka, arguably her father’s key advisor (can’t make it up), and not Jared Kushner, his Swiss Army knife of a lieutenant who had clearly demonstrated influence on obstruction by advising Trump to fire Jim Comey? I really want to hear Mueller explain that one.

3. There is nothing — zero — in the redacted report about Trump’s absurdly squirrely finances. Was a full investigation of Trump’s long, long experience with Russian “investor”/oligarch/gangsters truly not part of Mueller’s mandate? A lot of people, not just me, were believing that the presence on Mueller’s team of ace money-laundering prosecutor Andrew Weismann, was proof that Mueller was looking closely at how long-term Russian “investment” in Trump not only explained a comfortable existing relationship with Russians, but a key element in the Russians’ on-going leverage over him. Did Mueller farm all that out to the Southern District of New York? If so, what is anyone doing to prevent Bill Barr from putting a fat thumb on that scale? Never mind “collusion”. Never mind “conspiracy”. “Compromise” is the issue here.

4. Also in finances — understanding that money and the pretense of fabulous, Croesus-like wealth is absolutely essential to Trump’s highly suspect “brand” — was nothing more learned about Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank, a.k.a. the only bank who would still do business with him? Subpoenas are now out from the House Oversight Committee. But was anything investigated regarding the credibly estimated $300-plus million Trump apparently still owed Deutsche Bank as recently as early 2018, (much of it for the construction of the Trump-branded tower in Chicago)? We have good information that many, if not all of Trump’s loans came from a bank within Deutsche Bank, a private bank with assets provided by … who, exactly? In that context it’s interesting to note the number of times in recent weeks the question has been asked whether Trump’s Deutsche Bank debt has been forgiven or dramatically restructured? Wildly speculating here, but if that bank-within-a-bank is in fact a depository for well-laundered Russian money and the Russians have agreed to “relieve” some of Trump’s debt burden … well that’d be kind of interesting, wouldn’t it?

5. It’s already understood that Muller’s obstruction section is in essence a road map for Congress, (i.e. Democrats) to begin aggressive investigation … or more. And everyone is making much of all the Trump aides who just ignored his “crazy shit” and refused to cooperate in flagrant obstruction. But, come on! Since when does it matter that the perp was too stupid or lazy to actually pull off the obstruction? The fact he — the President of the United States — tried so often (and so recklessly) to obstruct investigation(s) doesn’t make it less of a crime. And  again people, this is over a matter — Russian rigging of an American presidential election — about a quadrillion and a half times more serious and relevant to you and me than Bill Clinton obstructing “justice” into sexy time with an intern.

6. Speaking of flagrant, Bill Barr’s gobsmacking defense of Trump was of course appalling, and it reaffirms a key (and politically exploitable) factor in explaining the seething in American culture today. Namely that every system that matters is gamed out in favor of the wealthy and connected — the “insiders”, the people who can leverage — via money or favors — any and all rules in their defense, no matter how naked their crimes. That said, how much do we know about Bill Barr’s private finances? Not to go all tinfoil hat here, but it’d be reassuring to take that question off the table.

7. I don’t think I’m alone in seeing the long-strategy of Barr and the White House (and Mitch McConnell and the Freedom Caucus) being basically a taunt to Democrats to press the impeachment button. Given the picture Mueller does paint and things likely to emerge out of all the other investigations into Trump’s epically sleazy business career, the rest of Trump’s term is going to be more of the same. But what turbo-charges the conflict in Trump’s favor is a full-out impeachment. Total war is where Team Trump is preparing to go anyway to win reelection (and thereby postpone an avalanche of indictments when he does leave office). But impeachment is nuclear fuel for the base. Torches, pitchforks and precious Second Amendment rights. Democrats are going to have to be especially canny in keeping the fires red-hot without setting MAGA-world aflame.

8. Finally, (for the moment), Mueller’s “no conspiracy” decision teeters on the very thin edge of the fact that he couldn’t show anyone on Team Trump with a direct, almost contractual agreement with Russians to game the election. In other words Mueller couldn’t prove that Team Trump engaged — hands-on — in the technical aspects of the hacking, the WikiLeaks dumping, the Cambridge Analytica-style social media distortion, etc. Common sense that is cutting “conspiracy” implausibly fine. Trump knew about it. Trump accepted it. Trump continues to deny the Russians had any role in the attack. What’s more, neither Trump nor Bill Barr yesterday has ever expressed any concern, much less outrage, that the attack happened.

And then there’s the fact the … Trump and everyone around him has lied about their chumminess with Russians every goddam time they’ve been asked.

 

Post-Mueller: Raw Politics and a Million Questions

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All morning I’ve been thinking about the famous video of Bill Clinton explaining for the camera what the real meaning of “is is”. It was not Bubba’s finest moment, but it was the President of the United States, under oath for four hours and forty minutes answering questions before a grand jury. He was answering them badly and, uh, excessively legalistically, mind you. But he was answering them.

Donald Trump has not done that — about a matter considerably more relevant to the protection of the American public than canoodling with a White House intern — and it appears Robert Mueller never pushed to force him to answer any questions live, in person and under oath. Nor, as far as we know at this moment, did Mueller ever bring Donald Trump Jr. in to ex-plain what exactly he was doing (or did afterward) as organizer of the infamous June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with multiple Russians offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (aka “Little Adam Shitt”)* has been wondering aloud for weeks about this investigatory oddity.  Not that it means that Mueller is part of an establishment cabal (the deep state underlying “the deep state”, you might say) conniving to keep Trump in office. But rather it could be an indication of a strictly legalized, small-“c” conservative, only by-the-book process designed exclusively to deliver foundational information to Congress and let Congress to then take it wherever they may.

Too many obsessive Mueller-watchers have held a belief that somehow an hour after Mueller finished his work, a half-dozen FBI agents would grab Big Donny by the nape of the neck and frogmarch him out of the Oval Office.

That was never going to happen, which is one reason even Trumpy-insiders like the much abused and humiliated Chris Christie have been saying for a while that Trump’s biggest problem has never been Mueller as much as the Southern District of New York, (and all the other legal offices in his home state). That crowd, furiously filing terabytes of information about Donny’s flagrantly corrupt business activities in Manhattan for the past 50 years, has the power to bring charges that present Trump with the likelihood of complete financial ruin … once he leaves the White House.

But for the moment — as in the last 72 hours — the most salient point is that while, yes, Mueller found no (prosecutable?) evidence of collusion and did not “exonerate” Trump for obstruction, all any of us really knows about the two-year investigation, the 500+ witnesses and the 2800 subpoenas, is what Attorney General Bill Barr characterized in his four-page “op-ed” as critics are calling it.

Given that 800,000+ pages of raw data on the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation, (you know, the one that almost certainly meant a Sixth Extinction apocalypse for the American way of life), there’s no excuse whatsoever for all of Mueller’s raw data — not just his full report, but everything in his taxpayer-funded files — to also be turned over to Schiff, Jerrold Nadler and others.

The basic idea of a Special Counsel is to keep the investigation away from politics, but then when completed, turn it over to politicians for wherever the grand battle royale will take it. That is obviously what has to happen here, and pronto. The public interest in what has been going on — about a cyber attack on our election system, not intern canoodling or a private e-mail server  — has unprecedented public interest.

Without over-playing the partisan hack card, Bill Barr is a true believer of Dick Cheney’s “unitary executive theory”, which basically places the president above and beyond any standard of law applying to everyone else. Barr is also the guy who “auditioned” for his current job with an unsolicited multi-page memo last year reinforcing those beliefs to Trump’s legal team.

Whatever else Barr may be trying to achieve by his minimalist characterization of Mueller’s investigation, what he has achieved over the weekend, by allowing Trumpland to crow loudly about “total exoneration”, is new handicapping of Democrats in the grand political fight that was always to come. With Trump now unleashed to bellow “no collusion” to every MAGA rally he can schedule, the Democratic counter-attack on what are still literally dozens of potent legal fronts, will be viewed by the Trump base as just the wretched whining of poor losers.

All that could shift pretty fast with a crowd-sourced scrutiny of Mueller’s entire report and all his raw data.

Maybe then we’d get answers to hundreds of questions.

Like:

1: Did Mueller ever get Trump’s tax returns?  If not, why not?

2: Mueller’s team included the much-celebrated Andrew Weismann,  a renown pitbull on money-laundering scams, something the Trump family has engaged in flagrantly for years. What did he find? And given the collection of Russians characters using Trump properties for criminal purposes and the leverage that played against Trump, how did that not lead to conspiratorial links?

3: What about the case of Cambridge Analytica? It’s an episode where we find not only Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Trump campaign aid Brad Parscale, but Michael Flynn and most significantly Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the wackadoodle climate change-denying billionaire father-daughter team behind the creation of both Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica. We know Cambridge had a way to micro-target voters down to precise precincts. Who weaponized that information? How exactly was it used?

And 4: If nothing else. For god’s sake tell us why virtually everyone in Trump’s orbit was constantly, perpetually lying about their contacts with Russians?

*As described by our president.