Robert Mueller, Former F.B.I. Director, Is Named Special Counsel for Russia Investigation

The one thing I will say about Mueller’s strategy and gamesmanship that Trump did not prepare for though was his strategy to farm out investigations in as many places as he could to protect all the different areas of potential criminality.

This Chess move is what led to the first big crime in the hush money payments with SDNY. It’s hard to believe that’ll be the only investigation that bears any criminality.

Where Mueller could get played again though would be with Bill Barr going through all 14 investigations and ordering them to shut down & destroy the evidence.

If that happens we’d hopefully hear from those offices assuming they go public. Mueller rightfully is criticized for getting taken advantage of because he was a Boy Scout but I do give him a ton of credit with his chess move of playing spread games. He knew he was on this ice and they were going to get shut down sooner or later so he did what he could under that pretense to not be a complete schmuck.

 

He should have said they were indictable offensives but for the DOJ ruling.

The idea that a prosecutor can't accuse someone without an indictment is also silly. Happens all the time.

 

So you were serious about the post below? I thought it was a sad attempt at a joke.

 

You are funny. You will contort to incredible levels to try and justify your views.

Order 3915 does not say that Mueller must render a definitive finding or guilty or innocence. Indeed, the Mueller Report goes into great deal explaining the Justice Department under Barr will not indict a sitting President. Barr personally has taken it a step farther.

Mueller laid out examples of behavior by the President that are potentially obstruction of Justice, he named 7-8 such examples if memory serves me correct. He named possible defenses on several of the examples (with no defenses for the other provided).

Because Mueller was an employee of the Justice Department and was bound by the policy of Barr not indicting a sitting President, he lays out the avenues which include impeachment and filing charges after Trump is out of office.

Last, since Barr will not prosecute a sitting President, Barr states concluding Trump was guilty of obstruction of Justice would not be fair to the President because he would not be able to defend himself in court.

Anyone that isn’t helplessly biased and has bothered to read part II of the report can draw very concrete views on the criminal behavior of the President. There is ample evidence to prove obstruction of justice. The issue is that at this point congress is the only one that can punish him and Pelosi won’t **** or get off the pot.

 

Do you think that the actions I listed which have all been established are a joke?

 

He explained why he didn’t, the President would not have his day in court to defend himself against the charges.

 

extended discussion about the Mueller report authors use of the Dowd voicemail and what it might mean for the credibility of other parts of the report:

https://hotair.com/archives/2019/06/04/dowd-mueller-lied-voicemail-else-lie/

excerpt:

The problem for Mueller and his team is that there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for their edits of the voicemail message. It’s not as though they related to any privileged content, or went off at length on unrelated topics. They didn’t replace an extended conversation about, say, the prospects for the Washington Nats with three-dot ellipses. The only apparent reason for editing out the underlined passages is to make Dowd look nefarious for doing basic due diligence in a conscientious manner regarding potentially confidential information.

And this does make attempts by prosecutors to keep other transcripts out of court look suspicious, too. Perhaps this was just one singular, ill-advised attempt by Mueller’s team to put a thumb on the scales in its report. At this point, though, it’s tough to bet on it — and one might suspect that federal judges might not want to bet on it either. Barr might have more to consider in this investigation than just the FISA warrant.​

 

Pretty sure he said that in his report and in his public appearance, but in a legal way.

Most “someones” aren’t the president of the US who can submit written answers and not have retribution from deleting communications. It should be clear by now this wasn’t a normal investigation.

 

That DoJ guidance has been around long before Barr, and with good reason (otherwise every subordinate prosecutor could indict the President and throw the country in turmoil). Also, Mueller told Barr three times that the guidance was not what prevented him from indicting Trump.

Spoiler

Indictment or not, Mueller could and should have made a determination on whether a criminal act had occurred. That's his job, that's why the DoJ exists, to conduct criminal investigations.

 

Well, we could believe what barr said Mueller told him, or we can believe Mueller himself, who clearly wrote:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/29/politics/mueller-barr-contradiction/index.html

Of course, it wasn't the first or only time barr misrepresented what Mueller said or wrote.

https://www.vox.com/2019/4/30/18524663/mueller-barr-letter-trump-russia

 

The guidelines were in place. Mueller could not indict. If there wasn't a written directive, the things that Barr says are meaningless. His trust level is only slightly above Trump's.

 

The original sounds just as bad as the quoted parts. My guess would be that they abridged the full transcript for the sake of readability. Not just the umms, all the sentence fragmentation makes that transcript some hard reading.

Why solitary?

Meanwhile, Mueller told all of America on live TV that that is exactly what prevented him.

I know people don't like Mueller's decision to not make a recommendation. Democrats don't like it because they think they know that Mueller would have concluded there was enough evidence for a prosecution. Trumpers think they don't like it because they were going to reflexively criticize whatever Mueller's conclusion was, regardless. But, don't yall remember the visible relief Trump showed back when he apparently learned that Mueller wasn't going to make any recommendation? That dude is happy with Mueller's choice. In any case, Mueller did what he did. We need to take that information and move on to whatever is next, whether it is an impeachment or indictments of FBI agents.

What strikes me about the construct of the SCO is not the rules about indictments of presidents. The SC has the wrong boss. I can't complain too much because neither the House nor the Senate would have done anything and no one besides Rosenstein had the moral scruples to do anything to assure accountability. But, it would have worked a little better if the SC reported to either the House or the Senate as part of their oversight duty. Then there'd be no issue of investigating your own boss, nor any tortured logic about whether you can make accusations, nor any fighting over who controls the primary documents.

 

I guess there are three reasons why a prisoner gets solitary... for the prisoner's protection, for the other prisoners' protection, or for the public's protection. My understanding Riker is a pretty gruesome place (just saw the last episode of When They See us, and the main wrongly accused was sentenced there) with very serious criminals and so I suspect Manafort was put in solitary for his own protection.

 

Here's a great article by Ryan Goodman of Just Security. He is a law professor and professor of politics at NYU. He also served as a Special Prosecutor for the Department of Defense. Well worth the read.


A Side-by-Side Comparison of Barr’s vs. Mueller’s Statements about Special Counsel Report
https://www.justsecurity.org/64441/...lers-statements-about-special-counsel-report/

 

Senate Intelligence Committee summons mysterious British security consultant

https://www.politico.com/story/2019...committee-british-security-consultant-1353675

 

a 4 page summary can never capture the "context, nature and substance" of a 450 page report, it's as though they're engaged in a campaign of making people stupider by stating blatantly obvious things as criticisms and succeeding. The most charitable reading for Mueller is someone on his team thought the full report wasn't going to be sent out and that the summary was going to be it

A continuation of the make you stupider campaign, look at the first one. Mueller is talking about what Russia did , Barr is talking about what Trump did. The 2nd one, Barr is saying that the executive doesn't work for congress, if there's a contradiction here then Mueller is the one in the wrong (unless you're actually going to claim that Barr is wrong, and that the executive branch works for congress, because why not, it's a clown world after all), and so on and so forth.

He said it prevented him from considering indictment, which doesn't mean that he would have indicted him without the ruling, which is why Barr asked him that question (why would he even ask that question?), being prevented from considering something doesn't create some ipso facto conclusion that it would have been true.

It's as though people view Trump as guilty until proven innocent by a jury of his prosecutors, honestly good luck with the future if that's the legal system you want.

 

This twitter thread is amazing:

 

"If you have information that implicates the president, then we've got a national security issue."



And, interesting timing...

 

So, how does that square with the idea that it would somehow be unfair to come to a determination (as special counsel -- not as the ultimate fact finder) that Trump committed a crime (or at least there was sufficient basis to prosecute him for one but for his position) because he couldn't be indicted while in office and therefore couldn't defend himself?

Laying out a report that finds wrongdoing seems to put Trump in the same position of being accused without the benefit of cross-examination, other facts that may be salient, etc.

I would have preferred the Special Counsel just come to his determination -- should be prosecutable but for the Presidency, shouldn't or unsure -- than where he left it.

 

No, it doesn't. Mueller did it in a fact-finding and presentation way, not in any kind of judgemental way.

Mueller said this is what would qualify as obstruction of justice. This is the evidence we found towards meeting those criteria. Everyone who reads the report sees that it clearly meets that criteria but it isn't Mueller's place to say it did since he can't prosecute. There are institutions such as Congress that are capable of looking at the requirements for actions to rise to the level of criminal obstruction and the evidence and then taking action. Mueller was not able to take action. He simply presents the evidence.

I'm not sure where anyone should have a problem with that.