Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[y66]

According to the NYT Editorial Board, "the real danger that the Mueller report reveals is not of a president who knowingly or unknowingly let a hostile power do dirty tricks on his behalf, but of a president who refuses to see that he has been used to damage American democracy and national security". Of course, it's not just the president who refuses to see that he has been used or the Rooskies who are the biggest perps. Putin has nothing on the Murdoch family, the Koch brothers and the Republic party. Clearly, it's not just the president who refuses to see that he has been used or the Trump presidency that is f*cked.

[Winstonm]

Yes,it is truly sad that true Hillary got beat. She is, as we all know, an absolute paragon of virtue.

FYP

 

Two words: Al Gore

 

Of course, Individual-1 is a paragon of virtue: (Mueller report)

 

With respect to Manafort, there is evidence that the President’s actions had the potential to influence Manafort’s decision whether to cooperate with the government. The President and his personal counsel made repeated statements suggesting that a pardon was a possibility for Manafort, while also making it clear that the President did not want Manafort to “flip” and cooperate with the government.…In light of the President’s counsel’s previous statements that the investigations “might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons” and that a pardon would be possible if the President “come[s ] to the conclusion that you have been treated unfairly,” the evidence supports the inference that the President intended Manafort to believe that he could receive a pardon, which would make cooperation with the government as a means of obtaining a lesser sentence unnecessary.

 

Furthermore...

 

Trump seethes after Mueller report relies on notes from White House aides

 

Individual-1 is expected to sign an executive order that will ban notetaking, disagreement with him, and will make failure to lie in support of his lies a capital offense. (Sarah Sanders is safe) B-)

[y66]

Guest post from Michael Bloomberg:

 

Americans have not seen the full Mueller report. But we have seen more than enough. The warning I delivered at the 2016 Democratic National Convention — Donald Trump is not fit for office — is now clearer than ever.

 

Despite the report’s substantial redactions, in many cases because related criminal investigations continue, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s careful and detailed narrative is clear. And all citizens, no matter their party, should be deeply troubled.

 

The report found that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in “sweeping and systematic fashion” to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign and to benefit Donald Trump’s. And although Mueller did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Russian agents and the Trump campaign, he did establish an appalling pattern of conduct unbefitting an American president.

 

The Trump campaign devised a communications strategy to exploit Russian sabotage, the report states, and the candidate himself indicated to an aide that he’d been informed of an upcoming leak of stolen information.

 

After the election, Trump’s associates tried to thwart the special counsel’s probe of the Russian attack. “Several individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign lied to the Office, and to Congress, about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals and related matters,” Mueller reports. “Those lies materially impaired the investigation of Russian election interference.”

 

Trump himself refused to be interviewed in person and provided “inadequate” answers to Mueller’s written questions, invoking variations on the statement “I don’t recall” more than 30 times.

 

The matter of obstruction of justice remains a troubling loose end. Many of the president’s actions, conducted in public, are already familiar: the firing of FBI Director James Comey, the complaints about Attorney General Jeff Sessions recusing himself, and so on. But the report also portrays alarming efforts by Trump outside the spotlight to interfere with and even terminate Mueller’s work, including requests that White House aides act to impede the investigation.

 

In his report, Mueller opens the door for Congress to assert itself, noting that the legislative branch has authority to examine presidential conduct. Congressional committees have already invited Mueller to testify. He should, and in the process clarify what is perhaps the report’s most important passage: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

 

In addition, Congress should make sure that Mueller’s decision not to press conspiracy charges is not regarded as a legal precedent for future campaign practices. Foreign assistance in campaigns — especially from a hostile power — is expressly forbidden in the U.S. And new legislation is needed to protect American campaigns and voting systems against future attacks.

 

Some lawmakers will no doubt also consider whether to pursue impeachment. Given the Republican majority in the Senate, such an effort would have no realistic chance of success. It might even improve Trump’s political prospects by advancing the story that he is being harassed by the opposing party.

 

In any case, impeachment at this point should not be necessary. The American people will soon have an opportunity to render the verdict they see fit — in the 2020 election.

[y66]

Guest post from Mitt Romney:

 

I have now read the redacted Mueller report and offer my personal reaction.

 

It is good news that there was insufficient evidence to charge the President of the United States with having conspired with a foreign adversary or with having obstructed justice. The alternative would have taken us through a wrenching process with the potential for constitutional crisis. The business of government can move on.

 

Even so, I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President. I am also appalled that, among other things, fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia—including information that had been illegally obtained; that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement; and that the campaign chairman was actively promoting Russian interests in Ukraine.

 

Reading the report is a sobering revelation of how far we have strayed from the aspirations and principles of the founders.

Not to mention the aspirations and principles of the OP.

[johnu]

Guest post from Mitt Romney:

 

Romney is really a gutless wonder. He's a 1%'er who speaks loudly and carries a small stick.

 

“It is good news that there was insufficient evidence to charge the President of the United States with having conspired with a foreign adversary or with having obstructed justice. The alternative would have taken us through a wrenching process with the potential for constitutional crisis. The business of government can move on.

Despite being sickened by the words and actions of those in the white house, Romney is basically taking Dennison's government paid personal attorney Barr's word that Dennison is innocent. Romney says nothing about impeachment, congressional investigations and oversight. Just more business as usual. One might suspect that he has illusions about running for president again.

[hrothgar]

Yes,it is truly sad that Hillary got beat. She is, as we all know, an absolute paragon of virtue.

 

I think that its telling that even someone as far down the rabbit hole as Chas can't come up with any response other than "Wattabout Hillary?"

[hrothgar]

Romney is really a gutless wonder. He's a 1%'er who speaks loudly and carries a small stick.

 

I'll be interested to see whether Romney decides to primary Trump.

It's not impossible.

[hrothgar]

FWIW, I felt that the following podcast had some of the best discussion surround the Mueller report.

 

https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-special-edition-what-make-mueller-report

 

It would be interesting to know what some of the Trumpista's have to say about the conclusions...

 

The first five - ten minutes have a pretty good summary.

[Chas_P]

FYP

 

Two words: Al Gore

 

Of course, Individual-1 is a paragon of virtue: (Mueller report)

 

 

 

Furthermore...

 

 

 

Individual-1 is expected to sign an executive order that will ban notetaking, disagreement with him, and will make failure to lie in support of his lies a capital offense. (Sarah Sanders is safe) B-)

I was just rattling your chain Winnie. As previously stated, I have grave doubts that anything posted by any of us on an internet message board will have a major impact on the future of our country. It just gives old farts like you and me an easy way to waste time. Anyway, have a happy Easter or vernal equinox holiday or whatever politically correct greeting you deem appropriate for this time of year.

 

Your friend,

 

Chas.

[hrothgar]

I was just rattling your chain Winnie. As previously stated, I have grave doubts that anything posted by any of us on an internet message board will have a major impact on the future of our country. It just gives old farts like you and me an easy way to waste time. Anyway, have a happy Easter or vernal equinox holiday or whatever politically correct greeting you deem appropriate for this time of year.

 

 

Its so rare that the trolls admit that they are old and lonely and desperate for attention...

[johnu]

 

Why is Chas_NoDignity_NoHonor_NoIntegrity still posting on this thread? :rolleyes: He doesn't have the dignity, honor, or integrity to honor his word and stop posting. He could have taken the easy way out and just changed his username, but he prefers to continue embarrassing himself by continuing to show that he can't control himself and stop posting.

[hrothgar]

AG Barr said he used Mueller's criterion for deciding the obstruction issue, not his previous legal opinion. Are you suggesting AG Barr is lying?

 

 

Oh look, Barr was lying

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/us/politics/mueller-report-william-barr-excerpts.html

[Winstonm]

I was just rattling your chain Winnie. As previously stated, I have grave doubts that anything posted by any of us on an internet message board will have a major impact on the future of our country. It just gives old farts like you and me an easy way to waste time. Anyway, have a happy Easter or vernal equinox holiday or whatever politically correct greeting you deem appropriate for this time of year.

 

Your friend,

 

Chas.

 

Here is the basic issue that the Mueller report showed. Russia actively worked to influence the 2016 election with the intent of helping elect Donald Trump, and Donald Trump, his family, and his campaign welcomed that help.

 

That, all by itself, should be enough to invalidate him as a U.S. president.

[y66]

In the news: Comedian wins in Ukraine: Volodymyr Zelensky, a political neophyte who is best known for playing a president on TV, decisively won the country’s presidential election on Sunday, exit polls indicated. Excerpt:

 

Mr. Zelensky’s victory will give Ukraine its first Jewish leader and deliver a stinging rebuke to a political and business establishment represented by Mr. Poroshenko, a billionaire candy tycoon who campaigned on the nationalist slogan “Army, language, faith.”

 

After five years of grinding war with Russian proxies in the east of Ukraine, voters appeared to send a signal that they were more concerned with the internal menaces of corruption and poverty — ignoring Mr. Poroshenko’s warning, delivered after he cast his own ballot on Sunday, that voting for a comedian “is not funny” and could lead to “painful” consequences.

 

Speaking at his campaign headquarters in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, moments after the scale of his apparent victory became clear, Mr. Zelensky took a jab at Russia and other former Soviet lands that have turned elections into empty rituals that merely confirm their authoritarian leaders’ continued rule.

 

“As long as I am not officially a president, I can say as a citizen of Ukraine to all countries of the post-Soviet Union: Look at us — everything is possible,” Mr. Zelensky said.

 

Mr. Poroshenko conceded that that his presidency — which began in 2014 after street protests ousted Ukraine’s deeply corrupt, pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych — was over.

 

“‘Never give up’ — I also hear that now,” Mr. Poroshenko said on Sunday night in Kiev. “But when I see the results of these exit polls, they are obvious and give reasons to call my opponent now and congratulate him.”

 

Mr. Zelensky’s triumph hits back at years of Russian propaganda presenting Ukraine as a failed state dominated by fascists steeped in anti-Semitism and contempt for Soviet fighters who defeated Hitler’s forces in World War II.

 

Though part of a trend that has brought the rise of maverick political outsiders in the United States and Europe in recent years, Mr. Zelensky has shunned populist themes like hostility toward immigrants and minorities. Ukrainians worry less about outsiders coming in, and more about the large number of their own people leaving to work in Poland and other wealthier countries.

 

Ukraine has the lowest economic output per capita in Europe, according to figures released late last year by the International Monetary Fund.

 

Two revolutions delivered only disappointment after the country gained independence following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. While desperate for change, some of Mr. Zelensky’s supporters acknowledged that they could not realistically expect him to transform the country quickly.

 

“He promises utopia of course, but let it just be different,” said Natalia Melnykova, 42, who added that she did not like either candidate on Sunday’s ballot, but had voted for the comedian.

 

“I want something to change,” she said. “Let the youth try.”

 

The prospect of a smooth transfer of power after a boisterous but mostly orderly election campaign shows how far Ukraine has moved away from Russia, where listless elections offer no real competition and, for nearly 20 years, have kept President Vladimir V. Putin in power.

 

“The beauty of this election is that we did not know when it started who was going to win,” said David J. Kramer, a Russia expert who was an assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush. “It is not a preordained exercise.”

 

As of Sunday afternoon, polling had been calm and free of notable irregularities, said Mr. Kramer, who is in Ukraine with a team of election observers from the International Republican Institute, an independent group.

 

Many voters said they had supported Mr. Zelensky not so much because they thought he was a good candidate but because they wanted to punish Mr. Poroshenko for deflating the hopes raised by Ukraine’s 2014 revolution and for doing little to combat corruption.

 

Mr. Poroshenko tried to rally support during the campaign by promoting himself as a defender of Ukraine’s national interests against Mr. Putin, while Mr. Zelensky focused on what he said was the incumbent’s failure to deliver on promises to end crooked deals between officials and Ukraine’s powerful oligarchs.

 

Mr. Zelensky, who plays a teacher who improbably becomes president in the hit television series “Servant of the People,” wound up his campaign on Friday by lambasting Mr. Poroshenko at a raucous debate before more than 20,000 people in a Kiev sports stadium.

 

Referring to a 2017 pledge made by Mr. Poroshenko to tackle graft and “cut off the hands of those who steal in the army,” Mr. Zelensky asked, “Why do your people all have both their hands?”

 

Speaking to supporters on Sunday evening in Kiev, Mr. Zelensky said: “Thanks to all the Ukrainian citizens who voted for me, and to all who didn’t. I promise I won’t mess up.”

 

Volodymyr Ovseychyk, 21, a defense studies student, said he had voted for Mr. Zelensky because he did not want “to vote for politicians who have been in power for five years and have done almost nothing.”

 

He added that he hoped Mr. Zelensky would turn out to be a leader like Ronald Reagan.

[y66]

Guest post from Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

As we enter the first post-Mueller week, I have several things on my mind.

 

As always, a lot hangs on public reaction. We won’t know for at least several days, but just to lay down a marker: Through April 17, the FiveThirtyEight polling summary estimated President Donald Trump had a 42.0 percent approval rating and a 53.0 percent disapproval rating. That’s bad, and it’s awful for a president while the economy is good. That disapproval number is the worst in the polling era for any president 818 days into his presidency, and no elected president has hit that number from this point up through November of his fourth year and still been re-elected. Still, I certainly wouldn’t rule Trump out based on those numbers.

 

Perhaps the Robert Mueller report won’t change public opinion. But once again, even a small real change would be a big deal. If Trump could move above 44 percent approval, he’d be very much within striking distance of winning a second term. If he drops down to 40 percent, he would need to find some real improvement somewhere to have a chance at all, and it’s hard to see where that would come from. My guess all along has been that 40 percent is the rough line below which a significant primary challenge becomes more likely, too.

 

I see several people saying that Democrats in the House now have an obligation to at least consider impeachment, given the strong case that Trump has committed obstruction of justice; I’ve seen others argue that it’s basically a constitutional imperative to impeach if the majority of the House believes Trump has committed a serious offense. I still don’t buy it. As Julia Azari has said, “There is no nonpartisan, apolitical mechanism to evaluate abuses of power and remove a president from office.”

 

Impeachment remains a political act, not a judicial one, and even in the judicial realm, prosecutors normally do take into consideration the chances of obtaining a conviction, not just whether the suspect actually did the crime, in deciding whether to indict. That should be all the more the case for the House on impeachment, which after all is based on the vague constitutional standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and not the criminal code. The Framers gave impeachment to the House, which is perhaps the portion of the government they expected to be most in tune to short-term public opinion. We can only conclude crass political considerations are supposed to be part of the House’s criteria for impeachment, but its members might also believe that setting out exactly what Trump and his people have done wrong in a series of hearings would do more to protect the rule of law than a partisan impeachment followed by a partisan acquittal in the Senate. (And yes, it’s still possible that some Republicans will turn against Trump. If so, that might change the political calculations that House Democrats make. There’s nothing wrong with that.)

 

I’ve seen some say that if the House doesn’t impeach Trump now, for these offenses, then impeachment would become a dead letter. Nonsense. Once could certainly argue that Lyndon Johnson should have been impeached for lying about Vietnam to Congress and the nation, and yet the very next president resigned ahead of certain impeachment and conviction. The truth is (and my apologies to someone who made this comment recently) that impeachment has always been an unlikely solution to most problems with the presidency or any particular president. And certainly using it without winning removal in the Senate would hardly strengthen the power.

 

Whatever turns out to be best for Democrats in the House and Republicans in the Senate to do, Trump certainly has brought us to a point where what he deserves is impeachment and removal. That’s not just because of any specific crimes Trump committed (whether it’s obstruction of justice, payoffs of hush money to keep women quiet, conflicts of interest or others). Trump, like Richard Nixon, has acted as if he alone is a legitimate part of the government of the United States. Like Nixon, his defiance of the rule of law is ongoing and promises to continue as long as he’s in office.

 

To say that he deserves impeachment and removal is not to say that the House and Senate should do it. Again, the politics of the situation matters, and are supposed to matter. But, yes, a president who does the things that Mueller has documented — many of which we’ve seen in plain sight for months — is not fit for the office.

[y66]

From There’s a Bigger Prize Than Impeachment by Joe Lockhart, White House press secretary from 1998 to 2000:

 

In the fall of 1998, Erskine Bowles, the White House chief of staff, traveled to Capitol Hill to meet with the speaker of the House. Mr. Bowles enjoyed a better relationship with Speaker Newt Gingrich than anyone in the Clinton White House, partly based on a shared Southern heritage and commitment to fiscal conservatism. At the end of the meeting, Mr. Bowles put a very direct question to Mr. Gingrich: Why were the Republicans intent on impeaching Bill Clinton? The speaker replied, “Because we can.”

 

I had a front-row seat and a small speaking role in the political drama that followed. Now, as the country is gripped by another impeachment debate, many are comparing the two scandals and handicapping what the Democrats might do.

 

Just as Speaker Gingrich did in 1998, Speaker Nancy Pelosi could direct the impeachment of President Trump because she can. Unlike in 1998, she stands on firmer ground: The Clinton case involved an egregious personal mistake and purported steps to cover it up; the Trump case involves an effort to thwart an investigation into a foreign attack on our democratic system.

 

Inevitably the news media and the political chattering class, of which I count myself as a card-carrying member, has focused on the party politics of impeachment. With the benefit of hindsight, impeaching President Clinton was a disaster for the Republicans. Mr. Clinton’s job approval was at a record 73 percent the month he was impeached, Democrat’s defied the odds and picked up seats in the midterm elections and Mr. Gingrich returned to the private sector.

 

Impeaching Bill Clinton was wholly a political decision; the substance mattered little in 1998. Two decades later, Democrats face almost the exact opposite dynamics.

 

For Democrats, leaving Donald Trump in office is not only good politics — it is the best chance for fundamental realignment of American politics in more than a generation. Mr. Trump is three years into destroying what we know as the Republican Party. Another two years just might finish it off. Trumpism has become Republicanism, and that spells electoral doom for the party.

 

Mr. Trump has abandoned most of the core principles that have defined Republicans for the past century. Free trade abandoned for protectionism. Challenging our adversaries and promoting democracy replaced by coddling Russia and cozying up to dictators near and far. Fiscal conservatism replaced by reckless spending and exploding deficits.

 

What’s left of the party is a rigid adherence to tax cuts, a social agenda that repels most younger Americans and rampant xenophobia and race-based politics that regularly interfere with the basic functioning of the federal government.

 

Republicans today are the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson — a coalition that, in the face of every demographic trend in America, will mean the long-term realignment of the federal government behind the Democrats.

 

We’re not quite there yet — but keeping President Trump in office is the best way to cement Trumpism’s hold on the Republican Party.

 

Republicans themselves know it, and that simple fact is a huge problem for them: By and large they don’t like him, and they know he’s a long-term problem for the party — but in the short term they know they can’t get re-elected without his voters. For Democrats, it’s the dream scenario — as long as he completes his term.

 

President Trump should be impeached because he is unfit for the presidency. He represents a clear and present danger to our national security. We didn’t need Robert Mueller’s report for that. But if Newt Gingrich taught us anything, impeaching the president is likely to be bad politics.

 

Nothing will unite an increasingly fraying Republican Party more than trying to remove the president anywhere but at the ballot box. Democrats risk the kind of overreach that doomed the Republicans 20 years ago. And in any case Democrats are not likely to succeed in getting votes in the Senate to convict the president. And in politics, a loss is a loss — there are no moral victories.

 

I fully understand the historical imperative of holding the president accountable for his behavior. I also share the sentiment of so many Americans who want to punish him for what he’s done to the country. But I believe there is something bigger at stake.

 

Allowing Mr. Trump to lead the Republican Party, filled with sycophants and weak-willed leaders, into the next election is the greater prize. Democrats have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to realign American politics along progressive lines, very much like Ronald Reagan did for Republicans in the 1980s.

 

Trumpism equals Republicanism as long as Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket. And a real shift to progressivism in America will be delivered by a devastating rebuke of the president and his party, a rebuke that will return control of the Senate and state houses across the nation. Politics is always a gamble — and this is the best bet we’ve had in a long time.

I'm down with this plan.

[barmar]

I wonder how much the approval rating really matters in the case of Trump.

 

I think his base still loves him, and they believe all the lies he and Barr spewed regarding the findings in the Mueller report.

 

Trump didn't win the Presidency due to broad-based support. He lost the popular vote by a significant margin, but won the election due to the imbalances in the Electoral College. It would be interesting to see how his approval rating is distributed across the electoral map.

 

And of course it will depend heavily on who the Democrats have running against him in 2020. When it was Trump vs. Hillary, many voters felt they were choosing a lesser of evils, and they just didn't realize how evil Trump actually could be.

[awm]

From There’s a Bigger Prize Than Impeachment by Joe Lockhart, White House press secretary from 1998 to 2000:

I'm down with this plan.

 

I'm not sure I really understand this plan. Why would Trump continuing to lead the Republican party cause Democrats to win a landslide in 2020? And why would impeaching (but failing to remove) Trump change this?

 

There's a number of people who are repulsed by Trump and all he stands for. Impeachment means that Trump's dirty laundry will be on very public display for the next 18 months (in House hearings and a Senate trial). It will put Republican Senators on record supporting Trump. It will make it very clear that Democrats are opposed to Trump and willing to do something about it. Surely these things will improve turnout among the anti-Trump folks!

 

There's some small set of people who may have held their nose and voted for Trump in 2016 but are upset by his various scandals. Again, public airing of these scandals will help convince these people to vote against Trump in 2020. It will also convince some of them not to split their ticket and vote for a Republican Senator, because there will be sound bites of the Republican Senators supporting Trump. Again, looks like a win for Dems.

 

The only remaining group is the people who love Trump. If we're relying on these people not turning out to vote for Trump in 2020 in order to produce the presumed landslide, I think we're deluding ourselves. If we don't spend the next eighteen months trying to remove Trump from office, he will just make up something in September 2020 (remember "the caravan" in 2018?) and convince his supporters this is a big emergency and they will turn out for him anyway!

 

If we're thinking longer term, the more we force Republicans in office to pledge their support for Trump and all he stands for, the better of we'll presumably be. Right now they tend not to comment on a lot of the awful stuff Trump does, but that wouldn't be an option in the course of a Senate trial... unless they actually vote to remove Trump which would be a major shock (and probably cost them big with their Trump-loving base in 2020).

[hrothgar]

I agree with Adam on this one...

 

I think that it is ridiculous to equate the political consequences from the Clinton impeachment with what is likely to happen if Trump gets impeached.

 

Both the charges and the evidence available against Trump are much more sustantative than what the Republics dredged up against Clinton.

The Republicans overplayed their hand and the American public punished them for it.

 

I think that starting impeachment proceedings against Trump will play out very differently.

Moreover, I don't think that it will rebound to the benefit of Republican Senatorial candidates.

 

It will be interesting to see what happens once the 12 remaining indictments start getting unsealed.

If these involve Trump family members and business associates life is going to get interesting.

[Winstonm]

Some at Lawfare agree:

 

 

By Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic

 

Here is, as William Barr might call it, “the bottom line”: The Mueller report describes, in excruciating detail and with relatively few redactions, a candidate and a campaign aware of the existence of a plot by a hostile foreign government to criminally interfere in the U.S. election for the purpose of supporting that candidate’s side. It describes a candidate and a campaign who welcomed the efforts and delighted in the assistance. It describes a candidate and a campaign who brazenly and serially lied to the American people about the existence of the foreign conspiracy and their contacts with it. And yet, it does not find evidence to support a charge of criminal conspiracy, which requires not just a shared purpose but a meeting of the minds.

 

Here is the other bottom line: The Mueller report describes a president who, on numerous occasions, engaged in conduct calculated to hinder a federal investigation. It finds ample evidence that at least a portion of that conduct met all of the statutory elements of criminal obstruction of justice. In some of the instances in which all of the statutory elements of obstruction are met, the report finds no persuasive constitutional or factual defenses. And yet, it declines to render a judgment on whether the president has committed a crime.

 

Now, the House must decide what to do with these facts. If it wants to actually confront the substance of the report, it will introduce a resolution to begin an impeachment inquiry.

[Winstonm]

Mueller had little chance of finding enough evidence of cooperation to prosecute. The smoke, though, was thick.

 

....foreign intelligence services, and even many hostile non-state actors, are well aware nowadays of the advanced signals intelligence capabilities wielded by American intelligence and counterintelligence agencies which can lead to the exposure of any contacts using digital means. Non-digital means of communications using the true and tried methods described in the preceding examples, such as face-to-face private meetings in secure or non-suspicious locations, would have been readily available to the two sides if such collusion had occurred. Furthermore, given the methods already known to have been used by the Russian government as part of this electoral intervention, if collusion had occurred it would have required only a handful of such face-to-face meetings. Likewise, in an age where anyone interested in diligently covering their tracks can get access to strong encrypted communications with a smartphone app, it may be harder than ever to find any such direct digital communications if used. As a result, it would be very hard to find direct communications linking anyone associated with the Trump campaign to Russian intelligence...

 

....Mueller’s chances of finding the sort of clear, unambiguous evidence for collusion that would persuade a jury or two-thirds of the Senate are low. His team would have to identify, out of dozens of possible suspects, the specific associates within the Trump campaign who were aware of or involved in colluding with Russia.Then, if a possible suspect were located, Mueller’s team would need to find a way to overcome the heavy social and reputational costs that that suspect may fear more than serving significant time in prison. Alternatively, Mueller would have to find evidence of a handful of private meetings with few participants, which were conducted with people who have advanced professional training in hiding their tracks and avoiding surveillance. Likewise, given the possible non-digital nature of such contacts, Mueller’s team would have to do this without a critical investigatory tool: advanced U.S. signals intelligence and cyber-warfare capabilities.

[barmar]

Mueller had little chance of finding enough evidence of cooperation to prosecute. The smoke, though, was thick.

Although one of the reasons he found as much evidence as he did was that Trump's people were incompetent in using this modern technology. John Oliver talked about the ways that Michael Cohen screwed up when trying to communicate with Russians. In one instance he mistyped the URL for the website to reach some of them. In another case, he google the agent's name, and found information about a Russian weightlifter with the same name.

[barmar]

I wonder how much the approval rating really matters in the case of Trump.

 

I think his base still loves him, and they believe all the lies he and Barr spewed regarding the findings in the Mueller report.

I heard over the weekend that after the report was released, Trump's campaign put out a call for donations, setting a goal of collecting $1M in a day. They did get the million, although it's not known whether it all happened within the specified time limit.

[hrothgar]

Great article by Krugman today

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/opinion/trump-republican-party.html

So all the “fake news” was true. A hostile foreign power intervened in the presidential election, hoping to install Donald Trump in the White House. The Trump campaign was aware of this intervention and welcomed it. And once in power, Trump tried to block any inquiry into what happened.

 

Never mind attempts to spin this story as somehow not meeting some definitions of collusion or obstruction of justice. The fact is that the occupant of the White House betrayed his country. And the question everyone is asking is, what will Democrats do about it?

 

But notice that the question is only about Democrats. Everyone (correctly) takes it as a given that Republicans will do nothing. Why?

 

Because the modern G.O.P. is perfectly willing to sell out America if that’s what it takes to get tax cuts for the wealthy. Republicans may not think of it in those terms, but that’s what their behavior amounts to.

[y66]

Some of the Lawfare folks and Chuck Rosenberg, a former U.S. Attorney, prosecutor and senior FBI official discussed The Mueller report: What did we learn? at Brookings this morning which I attended. After discussing the report they moved to the politics of what to do now (starting at the

) during which Susan Hennessey contrasted political calculations with doing the right thing and asked: "In light of the evidence that Robert Mueller has placed before Congress, what would it mean for Congress not to act, not to at least begin impeachment inquiries? And I think what it would say is that impeachment is just a measure of how many votes there are in the Senate so that impeachment is not a higher constitutional obligation or responsibility, although it is discretionary, but instead it's this raw political calculation. And if that's the case and we go back to the OLC memo that says that a president can't be indicted but don't worry there is this other remedy, there is this other branch of government that can come in, then what we're talking about is a systemic structural failure that is gonna have larger implications for how we think about the separation of powers". Good stuff.