US Politics March 2019: “I can’t say I’m happy. I can’t say I’m thrilled”

brb burning down Kid Rock’s honky tonk

i'm sad to say that degree of brazen lying about this is surprising me. this is what the barr summary of the mueller report says:

https://i.imgur.com/z9Sw6Pq.jpg

No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2019

lol, the formatting of that makes it look like trump tweeted that highlighted caption, but that's just a screenshot i took posted just above the trump tweet

it would be really great if trump did accidentally tweet that highlighted excerpt

poor sheriff joe

WATCH: Exclusive video of @RealSheriffJoe getting called "a fucking fascist" at last night's @STLCountyGOP meeting. pic.twitter.com/yjN8fyIi01

— The Jewish Worker (@JewishWorker) March 24, 2019

Will Dems be able to get Barr to release the actual report (and in a timely manner)?

Not likely.

find out next time, on...

They can call/subpoena Mueller to testify before the house, though, and more likely than not in open session.

i'm sad to say that degree of brazen lying about this is surprising me

hey, it's worked so far....

"be able to get Barr to..."

signs point to _Fuck Off Not What I Was Brung To Do_

This reminds me that I used to have a copy of The Starr Report that ran as a special section in the local paper.

where's the tax returns?

Did Mueller manage to get to see them.
Looks like Weisenberg was being uncooperative for most of the time. Not sure if other access routes were more useful.
& Whitehouse were refusing to cooperate over requested documents last thing I heard.

Lots of loose ends.

good morning!!!

maybe time to dust off that u

oh my god @ the dozens of "NOW, everything changes" takes on this, as though the hundreds of crimes exposed in the interim are nothing

i must have missed the part where those hundreds of crimes had any effect on trump

And none of those things are juicy Netlfix Original narratives. Totally boring.

Barr's letter : a vast number of conservatives :: deathbed conversion : St. Peter

'...Arright, ya rascal, we forgive ya (puts Trump in playful headlock and gives him a noogie, spends the next twenty minutes trying to disentangle hand from unruly mass of wispy hair-like follicles).'

The last 48 hours have been excruciating

only 60,000 more to go

I can't say I'm thrilled!

there's something especially maddening about this - Trump unambiguously obstructed justice on national TV, Junior admitted to attempting to collude w/ Russia through Twitter, and Mueller...can't find evidence of either?

It's cool to see people immediately jumping to the most facile, bad faith conclusions. Seventy years of ill-spent public life, magically washed clean in a single weekend! Hail our exonerated god emperor!

A day might eventually come when human beings can be trusted with something as complex as civilization, but I doubt it.

Why did mueller hand off the obstruction recommendation to the AG?

I should have been picked as the special counsel

And why didn’t he subpoena trump?

lol Trump never even got interviewed for this thing, what a joke

Barr made it clear a sitting president could not be indicted; I imagine Mueller took this seriously.

mueller is a nerd

exclusive footage of robert mueller addressing the #resistance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RzmjzP2GoM

especially excruciating:

trump obstructed justice, in the open, on a nearly daily basis for 2 years, through firing comey and explicitly saying on national tv that it was because of Russia, through his constant rage at jeff sessions for recusing himself from the investigation, through his barely veiled threats to the intelligence agencies and the special counsel’s team. (at least, all of that sure seeeeemed like obstruction to me, but what do I know, as I am officially losing my mind)

and yet, a real, actual defense of all this by trump’s team, including the genius, triumphant rudy giuliani, is that none of this was trump actually obstructing anything, it was just trump being trump. you know, gregarious, outspoken, emotional. and that you can’t actually KNOW that it’s obstruction unless you get inside trump’s head. and they wouldn’t let anyone interview trump about his intentions because they knew he’d implicate himself, either by admitting it on accident, or on purpose. so Mueller leaves it in the open – and then Barr (who received confirmation votes from Doug Jones, Joe Manchin, and Kyrsten Sinema) looks at all this and decides it’s ok that trump, the one person who could speak to trump’s intentions, didn’t need to be interviewed and there’s no evidence supporting obstruction. Besides all the obvious public stuff that we all just witnessed for the last 2 fucking years.

and also implied in the barr argument: because the thing that trump would have hypothetically obstructing (collusion with russians in the election) didn't happen, he can't be guilty of obstructing justice.

oooooooook

seriously, in cloud cuckoo land here

At this point, I'm just trying to take comfort in the low probability of Trump surviving to the end of his second term.

This guy is otm for once:

Barr’s logic is upside down. He is saying the finding of no criminal collusion undermines the findings that Trump obstructed justice. In fact, the obstruction undermines the findings of no criminal collusion.

Mueller has apparently found no criminal collusion between Trump and Russia, a finding that is hardly shocking. As Trump’s defenders have pointed out, collusion is not a crime. There are crimes that fall under the category of collusion — many former prosecutors have theorized that Mueller could indict Trump or his campaign under a conspiracy charge. Mueller did not find evidence strong enough to prove in a court of law, and possibly not at all.

It is bizarre, however, to spend two years insisting collusion is not a crime and then turn around and call the absence of crimes proof that there was no collusion. Of course Trump colluded with Russia. He literally went on camera and asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, promising that Russia would be rewarded by the American media, and Russia responded to this request by attempting a hack to steal Clinton’s emails that very day. Trump’s campaign aides repeatedly welcomed and sought out Russian assistance. His campaign manager passed on 75 pages of intricate polling data to a Russian operative during the campaign. And he did all this while secretly pursuing a lucrative business deal with Russia.

To define this nexus of communication and shared mission as something other than “collusion” is to define the term in a way that nobody would have accepted before this scandal began.

yeah it's the "only Trump knows if Trump is a racist" thing again, it's idiotic

I have never seen anyone get more of a pass for being a dumb grifting asshole in my life. feels like next year we'll be griping about all the Trump Org investigations concluding with "of course he scammed people, but that's Trump for ya!"

I told a buddy yesterday that there's another thing to consider: had Mueller had waited until this weekend to announce the indictments of Manafort, Gates, Stone, etc, we'd be thinking, "Holy shit, this is serious!"

Obviously this could never have happened because he needed one to rat on the other or to indict one to pressure the other.

It’s all really weird.

well that's kind of the media's desperation to frame anything they can as a "big win for Trump" - like, I keep seeing the take that this was a waste of money and a fruitless "witch hunt" when in fact it produced multiple indictments

not getting Junior is pretty stunning though

Still somehow hoping there is another boot to drop.

Also, listening to the ladies from Mueller She Wrote saying that if all of this data can be collected and sorted through and no 'crime' found then maybe the definition of crime needs to be looked at.

Whatever. Back to the primaries!

I’m surprised mueller was so willing to let down his fans

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/25/politics/mueller-obstruction-conclusion/index.html

Seems weird

He should have interviewed trump then