Mueller Report Finds No Russian Collusion, Not Enough Evidence to Support Obstruction - Dems Don't Care
Mueller Report Finds No Russian Collusion, Not Enough Evidence to Support Obstruction – Dems Don’t Care
Attorney General Barr released the summary of Mueller’s Report to Congress on Sunday. The Mueller report found no Russian collusion by President Trump, and not enough evidence to support prosecution for obstruction. We suspect some of the Democrats are crying in their beer. But they’ll keep pushing anyway because there are some issues they’ll snag on to.
THERE WAS SOME WEIRD DRAMA WITH BUZZFEED NEWS LAST WEEK but the upshot of it is: Donald Trump is a criminal, and that is finally starting to sink in for a critical mass of people.
While this one article didn’t dramatically change what we know about Individual-1′s ties to the Kremlin, it’s worth unpacking because it demonstrated a lot of what’s been hard to absorb about this story.
Most of us come across BuzzFeed as, you know, the website with all the “choose your favorite stadium food and we’ll tell you which Disney princess you’re most like” quizzes. Nothing wrong with that! But it can overshadow their often excellent longform reporting. Over the last couple of years they have been almost uniquely relentless about the Russian government’s years-long crime spree in western countries, from the mysterious deaths of Russians living in the UK to its apparent compromise of the US Treasury Department before the 2016 election.
BuzzFeed’s first big mainstream breakthrough in the Trump-Russia story came a little more than two years ago when they published former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele’s memos about Individual-1’s many ties to the Russian government. They emphasized that they couldn’t verify everything in the dossier, and justified the decision to publish it anyway with the fact that the memos had been circulating around the US government for months. Readers ate it up, understandably: people were confused and frightened by what had happened during the election and what would happen when President Obama turned over the keys to Individual-1, and they were frustrated about having been in the dark about the story until it was too late.
The mainstream press lost its fucking mind jumping all over each other to condemn BuzzFeed, and you didn’t exactly have to be a hardened cynic to question their motives. Mainstream political media bends over backwards to placate bad-faith Republican allegations of “liberal media bias.” After collectively donating billions of dollars in free ad time to the Trump campaign, they were eager for the opportunity to prove that they were not biased against him. Scapegoating BuzzFeed – an upstart competitor with an unserious reputation – was both useful and easy.
Even worse, the performance had an unmissable stench of guilt about it. As it turns out, the memos had been widely distributed around media circles. Steele – an established expert – had flown in from London during the election to plead with them to take the situation seriously. They ignored him and rewarded the attackers. The same people who spent October of 2016 transcribing John Podesta’s risotto recipe had passed on the story of a century, and they were SUPER mad when someone broke the omertà. (Or maybe it was #ACTUALLY ABOUT ETHICS IN JOURNALISM????!? hahahaha, no.)
There were reasonable concerns about BuzzFeed’s decision to publish Steele’s memos. Major reporting on a legitimate national security issue – not bureaucratic posturing or bad faith partisan garbage, but something that could pose a genuine threat – almost categorically can’t be an easy call, right? If something is actually serious, and someone is bothering to keep it a secret, there’s usually a good reason for it. Even if the dossier itself was already out there, somebody leaked the fact that it was in a presidential briefing; we don’t know who they were or why they did it. Anything that gets as much attention as this did as quickly as it did should probably be treated with skepticism, because bad actors are so good at gaming the algorithms that capture attention. And there were questions about its accuracy.
On balance, though, I think BuzzFeed’s decision to publish the Steele dossier has been vindicated. A lot of the allegations have been verified. Repeated attempts to disprove any of it have failed; Congressional Republicans’ desperation to do so suggests that it’s even more credible than we realize. It goaded the rest of the media into reporting on the story, which has exponentially increased the understanding of the problem we all have on our hands. Most importantly, it helped people wrap their minds around a nebulous, intimidating story which was largely derided as a Trump-like conspiracy theory. The pee tape is the least worrying thing in those memos, and unlike a lot of the more serious allegations it hasn’t been confirmed yet – but you know exactly what I’m talking about.
That’s a long wind-up, but it’s generally useful to remember that most of the people who frame this story for us are unreliable narrators, and worth recalling the specific context for the news BuzzFeed has been breaking. Last year, they reported that Michael Cohen, who was Individual-1’s personal lawyer and is now a convicted felon, had been representing Individual-1 in negotiations with high-ranking Kremlin officials to build a Trump Tower Moscow until well into the 2016 general election. Cohen had lied to Congress about this, and then told the press what he had told the committee, which of course gave anyone else who would be questioned the chance to get their stories straight. This report was confirmed at Michael Cohen’s sentencing.
So when they dropped another Cohen story late last week, people were inclined to listen. This time, they reported “sources [plural] in law enforcement” claimed that Trump had explicitly and directly asked Michael Cohen to lie in his Congressional testimony, he did it in writing, and that the special counsel’s office had “internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents” to prove it.
It’s that last part that shook the world. Even if you’re paying just tangential attention to this story, you know that Trump has been directing his people to lie to law enforcement, Congress, and the public. But the claim that there was cold, hard, proof for the thing we all know, that even Senate Republicans would not even be able to feign denial about it, that would have changed everything – if true.
Late the next night, the special counsel’s office issued an extremely rare statement, saying that BuzzFeed had mischaracterized the evidence and testimony they had received. This was weird. Mueller’s office has never bothered to correct a news story before, nor have they ever waved a journalist off a story that they know is untrue. The statement isn’t even that the core allegation that Individual-1 suborned perjury (meaning, he encouraged or ordered someone to lie under oath) is wrong, just that they don’t necessarily have texts AND emails AND Google docs AND testimony to that effect.
So why did they bother? We don’t know exactly. The most optimistic interpretation is that it was a good faith reaction to the public response to the report. Members of Congress came out and said, basically, “if this is true, we need to know now.” That was reasonable, because committing or suborning perjury is just about the only thing everyone agrees counts as a high crime or misdemeanor. Mueller’s office, also quite reasonably, didn’t want Congress starting impeachment proceedings based on a report that wasn’t 100% rock-solid, so they issued this very narrow statement to cool things down. Then there’s the suggestion that Mueller’s office thought that the report made it look like they had started leaking after running a famously airtight ship for a year and a half. (Cohen was convicted in the Southern District of New York, which is of course where Individual-1 did “business” for decades. Personally, I tend to think BuzzFeed’s sources are in New York federal law enforcement.) The most alarming theory is that the Department of Justice leaned on the special counsel’s office to push back on the story. The special counsel’s office specifically exists to protect an investigation from interference by political appointees at DOJ.
Regardless of why it was issued, that statement did not calm the waters.
The BuzzFeed report prompted a round of press appearances by Individual-1’s “lawyer” Rudy Giuliani, who claimed that Trump had in fact been negotiating with Moscow to build his Russian Trump Tower at least throughout the election. He also claimed that he knew the BuzzFeed story, on which he could not comment, was not true, which he knew because he had “been through all the tapes” that he says do not exist. These aren’t lies calculated to make Individual-1 look less guilty. It is a bunch of nonsense cushioning the blow of an overt admission that Individual-1 lied a lot during the campaign about something that his previous lawyer lied to Congress to hide.
Then, as if to drive the point home, BuzzFeed posted the actual 2015 plans and letter of intent for Trump Tower Moscow. They were working with a local developer. They had picked out the site. They had a business plan and a building design, all ready to go.
Individual-1 appears undeterred. Michael Cohen had agreed to testify publicly for the three relevant House of Representatives early in February, but he backed out this week after Individual-1, over Twitter and in live interviews, started threatening to have Cohen’s father-in-law investigated. I don’t know if Trump wants to open that can of worms, since Cohen’s father-in-law is actually an old business associate of Trump’s, but the point was clear: Individual-1 is willing to throw around the power of the United States government to shut this guy up. We just went through the WHOLE THING about whether or not he acted illegally to control what Michael Cohen said to Congress, and he responded by illegally attempting to control whether or not Michael Cohen speaks to Congress!
Since Individual-1 and his Senate Republican accomplices have ignored all House Democrats’ attempts to reopen the government, House Democrats have nothing to do all day but sit around and be mad at the Puppet-in-Chief. The chairs of the committees that planned to interview Cohen issued a joint press release saying that Michael Cohen will testify whether he likes it or not because they’re not going to reward these, and this is a real quote, “textbook mob tactics.”
Look. I’m not saying my opinion is worth any more than you’re paying for it. But this episode made me think a couple things:
1. Reputable media outlets have to cut it out with the anonymous sources on this story. “Sources familiar with the matter” is not enough. Sources on Capitol Hill? Sources at the DOJ? Sources in New York? Sources meaning somebody’s defense attorney? This is infuriating.
2. Television news shows have to stop interviewing Rudy Giuliani live. He is using their air time for a disinformation blitzkrieg. By all means, they should keep him yakking away on camera. Give him all the rope you got, say I. But they should do it ON TAPE, in advance, so that they can pause the interview to fact-check him, and air his current lies back-to-back with last month’s lies so even casual viewers will grasp that he lies constantly.
3. It is appropriate that Robert Mueller is a professional who knows how to shut his piehole, unlike certain other 21st-century former FBI directors who shall remain nameless. It is also appropriate that public interest in this story is intense and unrelenting. And despite my many gripes about the media’s performance, it is absolutely appropriate that the press keep putting attention and resources toward this story. This is not a sustainable dynamic. It is unfair to keep the public in the dark. This happened to us as a country and as individuals, and we have an existential stake in the matter. As long as we want to know, we will be leaning on the American political media, which is an institution dominated by bullies whose vanity is outweighed only by their willful ignorance. Like Trumps and small children, they cannot focus long without a great deal more help than the special prosecutor’s office is equipped to provide. Our justifiable frustration is becoming an issue for the special prosecutor’s ability to the best job he can.
Fortunately, there is a way to break that loop: the Democratic House's real investigations. Subpoenas. Not just issued, but announced, publicly. Open hearings. Regular reports. Individual-1 has dug in his heels on the shutdown at least in part to obstruct the Democrats’ ability to do that, so it’s great that they have stopped giving him what he wants.
Something is happening on this story. Even hearing people talk about it is different – they speak faster and louder. This guy is on the ropes. That’s not just Mueller, it’s not just the Democratic House. It’s people, it’s you, responding to an attack on our democracy, remembering Individual-1’s illegitimacy, refusing to pretend any of this is normal, insisting that we all deserve better.
