The Mueller Gloaters Are Wrong. Trump Obstructed Justice And Colluded With Russia.
Trump is a treasonous president who has committed numerous crimes he should be impeached for, and do not let anyone bully you into thinking otherwise.
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by Ben Cohen
According to Donald Trump, most Republicans and many figures on the far left, Attorney General Bill Barr letter outlining the Mueller investigation report exonerates Trump from any wrong doing in the Russiagate scandal. “Total EXONERATION!” Tweeted an exuberant Trump.
“Everyone who questioned this buillshit scam from the start - who endured accusations of being Kremlin agents, Putin stooges, Trump supporters, anti-US haters, who got banned from cable news & had smear jobs published in the New Yorker & the like - should wear it all with pride,” tweeted an ecstatic Glenn Greenwald in response to Barr’s letter.
“MSNBC CONSPIRACY NETWORK LIARS FAKE NEWS CNN LIARS NY TIMES WAPO LIARS,” wrote Sean Hannity.
This is, to put it simply, complete bullshit.
The Facts
Firstly, we haven’t read Robert Mueller’s full report and can only rely on a hyper partisan four page summary from Trump’s handpicked Attorney General. As William Saletan at Slate writes, Trump has not actually been cleared of collusion or obstruction of justice. “The letter says the Justice Department won’t prosecute Trump,” writes Saletan. “But it reaches that conclusion by tailoring legal standards to protect the president.” Saletan lays out in great detail the manipulative language Barr uses to narrowly define collusion and ignore the mountains of evidence (like Trump’s remarkably pro-Russian policy positions and business dealings) that paints a very different picture.
Secondly, Barr, who was appointed by Donald Trump specifically because he had sent the Department of Justice an unsolicited 20-page memo arguing against prosecuting the president for obstruction of justice, clearly stated that Trump had not been exonerated by Mueller from the charge of obstructing justice. Barr himself exonerated the president, a ruling that should be taken as seriously as one of Trump’s early morning tweets.
Thirdly, Mueller’s findings on Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russian government don’t actually mean very much. Almost all the evidence is publicly available already, and anyone who can read can see quite clearly that the Trump campaign team sought help from Russia in its efforts to win the 2016 election. Wrote David Frum in the Atlantic a day before the Mueller report was (partially) released:
It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that Vladimir Putin’s Russia hacked American emails and used them to help elect Trump to the presidency.
It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that agents purporting to represent Putin’s Russia approached the Trump campaign to ask whether help would be welcome, to which Donald Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that Donald Trump publicly welcomed this help: “I love WikiLeaks!”
It’s solid political science that this help from Russia via WikiLeaks was crucial, possibly decisive, to Trump’s success in the Electoral College in November 2016.
Furthermore, Trump asked Putin on live television to assist in hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails. During a news conference about Vladimir Putin on July 27th 2016, Trump said:
“Why do I have to get involved with Putin? I have nothing to do with Putin. I've never spoken to him. I don't know anything about him other than he will respect me. He doesn't respect our President. And if it is Russia -- which it's probably not, nobody knows who it is -- but if it is Russia, it's really bad for a different reason, because it shows how little respect they have for our country, when they would hack into a major party and get everything. But it would be interesting to see -- I will tell you this -- Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens.”
On the exact same day, Russians began, as CNN reported, “spearfishing email accounts used by Clinton's office.” If you think this a coincidence, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
It is quite possible that Mueller decided that the narrow range of his probe could not definitively determine whether Trump engaged in a technical crime. There is also significant debate over whether collusion is defined as a crime to begin with, so Trump’s “exoneration” given the circumstances means very, very little.
To be clear: Trump and his campaign team colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election, and benefited greatly from their assistance. That is a matter of historical fact, not speculation.
Obstruction of Justice
When it comes to Trump’s obstruction of justice, again, we have all the evidence publicly available to render a definitive conclusion. As Marcy Wheeler writes in the New Republic:
We know that Trump has been involved in getting his aides to lie. His own lawyer, Jay Sekulow, reportedly edited the prepared statement Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen gave to Congress about an effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen goes to prison in May, in part, for telling lies that Sekulow reviewed.
And Trump has repeatedly dangled pardons to subordinates under investigation, reportedly including former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, former campaign chair Paul Manafort, and Cohen. Indeed, in a hearing in February, Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann argued that Manafort lied about the details of sharing Trump campaign polling data with the Russian political operative Konstantin Kilimnik on August 2, 2016—knowing that the data would be passed on to others including other Russians—specifically to “augment his chances for a pardon.”
In Barr’s confirmation hearing in January, Senator Amy Klobuchar asked him whether a president “persuading a person to commit perjury [or] convincing a witness to change testimony would be obstruction.” He said yes, both would.
And yet he just decided that a president who has apparently done both of those things did not commit obstruction of justice.
Barr’s exoneration then, cannot be taken seriously under any circumstance. Trump attempted to obstruct justice in private and public on numerous occasions.
Why Republicans And Fringe Leftists Are Gloating
There is a very obvious reason why those on the far left and right are gloating over Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report: it vindicates their particular worldview.
For Republicans and Trump loyalists, there is literally nothing the president can do that would make them turn against him. He has bragged about sexual assault, lied so flagrantly fact checkers now have to work full time to record them all, and committed treasonous acts on live television (Trump denigrated US intelligence agencies in front of Vladimir Putin for example). Trump was always going to be innocent no matter what Mueller’s report said, so there is little point in taking anything they are saying seriously.
Professional contrarians like Glenn Greenwald have been incessantly tweeting about being vindicated because Trump’s so-called exoneration ties into their narrative about corporate democrats being responsible for all the world’s problems.
“Democrats began desperately trying to blame anyone but themselves for losing the presidency to a joke of a game show host & finally settled on a foreign villain & here we are, 2 1/2 years later, with all of it exposed as a scam but so much damage done,” tweeted Greenwald today as part of a non-stop barrage of venomous barbs directed at his enemies.
It seems not to have occurred to Greenwald that many liberals blame the Democrats for losing to Trump and believe Trump colluded with Russia (I am one of those people for example). Greenwald has built a career blaming centrist liberals for everything, so the election of Donald Trump has not been great for him or his career. Greenwald has spent the past two years saddling up to the likes of Tucker Carlson on Fox News to peddle his outlandish theories, and he is relishing the chance to gloat over his supposedly vanquished detractors.
You Cannot Have it Both Ways
Greenwald, Sean Hannity, and other militant non-believers in Russiagate are also all attempting to have their cake and eat it. There is a slight logical flaw in their so-called vindication: Robert Mueller cannot be a corrupt member of the Deep State dedicated to bringing down Donald Trump in the greatest conspiracy ever if he exonerates Donald Trump. "I don’t regard the F.B.I. as an upholder of the rule of law,” said Greenwald back in 2018 in an interview with the New Yorker. “I regard it as a subverter of it.”
“Robert Mueller was the fucking F.B.I. chief who rounded up Muslims for George Bush after 9/11,” he continued.
Fast forward to 2019, and Greenwald not only sees Mueller’s findings as the incontrovertible truth, but the summary provided by Trump’s handpicked Attorney General a matter of fact. “Now I see the saddest of all last hopes: Barr is a Trump appointee distorting and lying about Mueller's findings,” he tweeted. “You think Robert Mueller & his team - whom you've spent 20 months venerating as the Beacon of Integrity & Patriotism - would sit quietly by if that happened???”
Greenwald sees no need to question the motives of Barr or ask to read the full report (as most responsible journalists are doing) for the sole reason they have reached a conclusion he happens to agree with.
It is worth repeating this again: We do not know what is in the Mueller report because we have not read it. We know that Barr’s summary accepts Mueller has not exonerated Trump from charges of obstruction of justice, and is deeply misleading in its language. We know that Trump’s campaign team reached out to Russians to help win the 2016 election. We know that Trump has extensive business dealings in Moscow and lied about it. We know his foreign policy objectives tie in neatly with those of Vladimir Putin’s. We know that he attempted to obstruct justice on multiple occasions. Regardless of what Bill Barr or Robert Mueller have surmised, the facts and evidence have not changed.
Trump is a treasonous president who has committed numerous crimes he should be impeached for, and do not let anyone bully you into thinking otherwise.
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Uh-huh, good luck with that one.
The right have spent the past 72 hours spinning like a Category F-5 tornado that this exonerates Drumpf and his inner circle, while the left is just standing around wondering what the fuck just happened. This sort of shit shows the public, as well as the Liberally Biased Mainstream Media™, that the right is assertive while the left is confused. That is not going to play well with an election more than a year and a half away, especially given how the Republicans have fallen lock step with Drumpf while the factions in the left continue to squabble over which Democratic candidate is best suited to go up against Drumpf.
If the left doesn't get its shit together, and fast, Drumpf WILL be given a second term and the Blue Wave from November will get pale and diluted and fade away.