Trump Sours on Mueller Report After Its Details Paint a Darker Picture

The Mueller report is finally out but unsurprisingly it has resolved little between proponents and opponents of the Trump presidency. Each camp has taken away what it hoped to find, and like the War of the Roses, the discord promises to drag on interminably.

Essentially, the president and those on the right hold to the top line — no collusion
Robert Mueller
and a questionable claim of no obstruction — whereas the left burrowed into the details and found a president and an administration guilty of appalling conduct.

Almost lost in the heated exchanges across the media was the indisputable proof in the report that the Russians had waged a dismayingly successful campaign of interfering with the 2016 elections. But we already knew that. Not the president, however. Mr. Trump has never acceded that the Russians meddled, saying alongside Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, “I don’t see why they would”. He believes acknowledgement threatens the legitimacy of his election. The report quotes his former aide, Hope Hicks, saying that is his “Achilles heel”.

a low barr

Given the multiple categories for redaction outlined by Attorney General William Barr, it was a relief that less than expected was blacked out, and that he kept his pledge to deliver not just to Congress but the public. On Fox News, Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist thought that Barr “did a remarkably good job of just laying out the facts”.

But even at that network, others such as former prosecutor Bob Bianchi, said, “I felt he was trying to be a cheerleader for the president”. Barr had stepped in front of the report’s release in an introduction dubbed a “pre-spin” in which he colored Mueller’s opus favorably to the president’s benefit, repeating “no collusion” (not a legal word) four times. In the four-page letter of three weeks previous, Barr had said the report would present evidence on both sides of the obstruction question. That proved false. All of the evidence is on the side of obstructive conduct. Before the cameras he now said:

“President Trump faced an unprecedented situation. There was relentless speculation in the news media about the president’s personal culpability. There is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks.”

The president’s frustration and anger appears nowhere in the report. He had refused to be interviewed by the Mueller team where he could have made that case, so this was simply William Barr’s gratuitous attempt to explain away the president’s obstructive acts.

Trump’s volte-face

Just as we wrote when the president went with “complete and total exoneration” the moment Barr’s four-page letter came out, only to become apprehensive when notions began circulating that the Mueller report was hundreds of pages long, the same cycle repeated with the release of the report itself. Trump went with Barr’s repetitions of “no collusion” in his press conference, but then the president who famously reads nothing longer than a page, turned angry when he heard of the deeply unflattering characterization of his administration in the text itself. Save for it being the deplorable conduct of a president of the United States, his tweet tirade upon discovering his error was rather comical. Sample:

…and so on, tweeting that some of the statements made about him were “total bullshit” and that the Mueller investigation, which just a day or two before he thought had vindicated him, “was an Illegally Started Hoax that never should have happened”. The three part tweet ended with calling the investigators “some very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying or Treason”. (The capitalization is his).

No collusion, but close

The first section of the report covers Russian hacking of e-mails, their attempts to break into state election systems (successfully breaking into the voting records of one Florida county), and their social media campaign — all designed to influence and disrupt the 2016 elections. Mueller and cohort found no instances where the Trump campaign or transition had coordinated with what has been called an incredibly successful assault on the U.S. by the Russian Federation without firing a shot. The report outlines a campaign far too vast not to have had the effect of helping Trump capture the presidency.

But while no connective tissue was found, much came close. Items:

 The campaign didn’t itself hack into the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) nor campaign chairman John Podesta’s e-mails, but their defense that they only distributed what the Russians had dug up for them is corrupt.

 The special counsel verifies that Konstantin Kilimnik is assessed “to have ties to Russian intelligence”, so when Paul Manafort, while Trump’s campaign manager, “had caused internal polling data to be shared with Kilimnik, and the sharing continued for some period of time”, how is that not collusion? That data was not what we are accustomed to seeing — just Trump x.x% vs. Clinton y.y%. It would have been scores of tables by state and election district, precisely what Russia was looking for in targeting its election interference. If the defense is that perhaps Manafort was freelancing his way out of debt to a Russian oligarch, Trump is nevertheless responsible for bringing on board a character with such shady dealings with Russian and Ukrainian contacts.

 How did Roger Stone know in advance there would be a Wikileak dump of DNC e-mails? Why, on a drive to New York’s LaGuardia Airport, was candidate Trump, after taking a phone call, able to tell Manafort sidekick Rick Gates that more releases of damaging material would be coming? Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen says the same, that an overheard phone call in Trump Tower was about advanced notice that more would be released by Wikileaks.

 The investigation “did not establish that one Campaign official’s efforts [again presumably Manafort] to dilute a portion of the Republican Party platform on providing assistance to Ukraine were undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia”. But the dilution did happen.

 Gen. Michael Flynn had lied to the FBI (a felony), denying that before Trump took office his meeting with the Soviet ambassador about eliminating sanctions against Russia just imposed by President Barack Obama for interfering in the U.S. elections.

 Trump said that his “Russia if you’re listening” call for them to search for an alleged
30,000 missing Hillary Clinton e-mails was a joke, but five hours later, Russia’s “GRU officers targeted for the first time Clinton’s personal office”, says the report.

 And then of course there was the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign principals and a Russian lawyer associated with Russia’s chief prosecutor who had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton to offer, to which Donald Jr. replied, “I love it, especially late in the summer”, followed late in the summer by the Wikileaks drops.

 What explains why Eric Prince, brother of the secretary of education and founder of the notorious mercenaries-for-hire firm Blackwater, had to go to the Seychelle islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean — as did Jared Kushner as well — to meet with the head of Russia’s sovereign fund, a connection that is one of the more heavily redacted sections of the report.

On the right, we wouldn’t hear these stories. Instead, as Fox reporter Katherine Herridge elucidated, it was Russia that made an aggressive outreach to the campaign and transition, and only to compromise its principals. She and others on the right made no mention “that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts”, as the Mueller report found, nor was there mention of the eagerness of the Trump team to engage in acquiring “dirt”. That’s fair enough, though, considering that Donald Jr.’s attempt would be far surpassed on the other side a month or so later by the exposure of the Clinton campaign’s financing of the unverified dirt of Christopher Steele’s dossier, mention of which is curiously absent from the Mueller report save for cursory mentions.

Still, what accounts for all the lying, some of which landed Trump figures in prison? Wasn’t that food for suspicion and investigation? And the outburst by Trump when told by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions that a special counsel had been appointed in the wake of Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey:

“Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”

That’s not what we’d expect an innocent man would say. Trump’s made himself look guilty with his constant insistence of “no collusion” for months on end, as did his requests to his intelligence chiefs — ignored by them — to put out press statements saying there was no collusion. That none was found, and that the president squeezed under the high bar of criminality, does not mean that the Trump team wasn’t flirting with collusion. Nor have we seen any movement from the Trump administration to prevent Russian interference in 2020. In all, Section 1 paints a damning portrait of the Trump presidency.

If This Isn’t Obstruction, Nothing Is

Section 2, on obstruction, is the longer part of the report. The Mueller team lists 10 instances. A few of the most notable:

 The firing of FBI Director James Comey. Trump supporters insist the president has the unencumbered right to hire and fire at will, but reaching past the attorney general to fire the FBI chief is unprecedented. The point they skirt was the president’s intent, that he expected to end the investigation by firing Comey, revealed the following day when he told two Russian diplomats in the Oval Office that he had “faced great pressure because of Russia,” which had been “taken off” by Comey’s firing, and on the day after that in a television interview he had “decided to just do it,” that “this thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story”. Mueller’s sense is that Trump was worried because “the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes”.

 Mueller covers at length Trump’s twice calling White House counsel Don McGahn to tell him “Mueller has to go”, that McGahn is to set in motion his firing, and to “call me back when you do it”. Chris Wallace at Fox says this abrupt attempt coincides with the first instance of a news report saying Trump had obstructed justice. McGahn refused and threatened to resign rather than take part in what he called another Saturday Night Massacre, referring to Nixon’s firing of the special prosecutor in the Nixon scandal. Rather than “do crazy shit” for Trump, McGahn effectively saved the president from himself.

 The report lists a number of such instances where Trump was kept out of trouble by staff declining to follow his orders, knowing them to be illegal or inadvisable. He demanded that his first Chief of Staff Reince Priebus procure Session’s resignation; Priebus did not follow through. Trump wanted Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to hold a news conference to say that it was his initiative to have Comey fired. Rosenstein would not comply. He had written a letter (to his subsequent regret, he said) justifying Comey’s firing over mishandling the Clinton e-mail probe, but the letter was at Trump’s request.

 The president even told McGahn to deny media reports that Trump told him to fire Mueller.

 The president “on at least three occasions” directed the staff to keep secret the June 9th, 2016, meeting with the Russian attorney. Once it was exposed by The New York Times, Trump dictated a false statement for Donald Trump Jr. to issue that described the meeting as about adoption of Russian children.

 Trump asked several in the intelligence community that he has broadly vilified to say publicly that no link existed between him and Russia. He asked Mike Pompeo, then CIA director, to do so and pressured Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats repeatedly about the investigation, asking if Coats could “do something to stop it”. When Coats made it clear that he would not get involved with an ongoing FBI investigation, the president called NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers asking if he would verify to the media that stories linking Trump with Russia were not true. Rogers’ deputy director, Richard Ledgett, who was present for the call, said it was “the most unusual thing he had experienced in 40 years of government service”. As people who take so-called ‘notes'” who Trump says we should “watch out for”, the two wrote a memorandum and stored it in a safe.

Finally, while not obstruction, it was gratifying to see White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders having to confess to Mueller that she lied about “countless” FBI staff voicing to the White House their appreciation for James Comey’s firing and that her statement “that rank-and-file FBI agents had lost confidence in Comey was a comment she made ‘in the heat of the moment that was not founded on anything'”. (Picture FBI agents calling the White House to thank Trump if you can). Finally, the highly principled Sanders, has since gone on Fox News to resume lying about her lie.

cooperation

In announcing the report’s release, Barr said that the president and “the White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims”. Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow on Sean Hannity’s program said that 1.4 million documents had been turned over. The Trump legal team issued a statement saying, “Nothing withheld; nothing concealed; nothing deleted; nothing destroyed; and nothing bleached”.

Well and good. Not mentioned, though, was a major exception: for a year Rudy Giuliani had forestalled any prospect that Trump would testify before the special counsel. Mueller elected not to issue a subpoena for reasons he will have to explain to Congress. In place of testimony, the president answered questions in writing, unquestionably written by his lawyers. Despite his claims that he has “one of the great memories of all time” or even “the world’s greatest memory”, Trump more than 30 times would answer “I do not remember”, “I do not recall”, “I have no recollection”, “I have no independent recollection”, “I have no current recollection”. Written answers and Trump’s refusal to reply to further questions about those answers disabled Mueller from getting at intent, the important criterion for obstruction, and straight-arming Mueller is the cherry-on-top success of Giuliani and Trump’s legal team. It left Mueller ending with a whimper, complaining of answers that are “incomplete or imprecise”, and turning the mess of potage over to Congress.

never again

President Trump is now tweeting, and Fox has taken up the theme, that the Mueller investigation “never should have happened” and “should never happen again”. We don’t hear from them that 12 Russians were indicted by a grand jury for hacking e-mails of the Clinton campaign, 13 other Russian nationals and 3 companies were indicted last year for using social media to influence the election, and a Dutch lawyer and a half dozen Americans have either served time, begun their sentences, are awaiting sentencing, or further prosecution. Add to that the several matters unrelated to Mueller’s Russia probe that his team handed off to the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, and the DC circuit. There are a dozen such referrals that are secret and were unknown until mentioned in the Mueller report.

Yet for the president this was “a big, fat waste of time, energy and money”.

Apr 23 2019 | Posted in Governance | Read More »

The Nightly Histrionics at Fox

Right wing media has ridiculed Rachel Maddow in particular for her yearlong pursuit of Trump collusion nightly on her MSNBC program, the cable channel that vainly tries to go up against the much larger audience watching Fox News. For her trying to prove
Tucker Carlson

Trump guilty of “treason”, “collusion”, and “conspiring with the Russians”, she “has been a hero of her own spy thriller”, says Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, the conservative magazine started by William Buckley.

No question that MSNBC’s views
Sean Hannity
tilt well to the left, and they often delight in ridiculing the president’s malaprops and gaffes. Still, the nightly lineup at MSNBC is a sedate lot — Maddow is preceded by newsy Chris Hayes and followed by Lawrence O’Donnell and Brian Williams.

At Fox during the day, Shepard Smith tries to hew to the abandoned “fair and balanced” motto of the network, and Bret Baier does responsible work, but at night Fox descends into agitprop far beyond the rival channel, and prime time is when working America is home to watch television. First comes Tucker Carlson. Here’s what he had to say the night the Mueller report was released:

“We just lived through two full years of…screaming , threatening, surveillance, character assassination, loyalty tests, wild allegations of treason and spying and betrayal from office holders…it was all thoroughly bizarre, demented really, although nobody said so at the time, they were too afraid.

What? It is bewildering to try to match events with each of these hyperbolic descriptors. Buoyed by Mueller’s finding that there were no ties between the Trump campaign and transition with Russia, the Fox channel is campaigning to make false the entirety of all reporting by the liberal media across the last three years. Carlson continues…

“At Jeff Bezos’ newspaper [The Washington Post] a guy called Philip Bump was telling us that ‘the vast amount of reporting by mainstream outlets about Trump and Russia was on the mark’. Even they don’t really believe this. They know they lied”

Of course they do believe this, they know this, and they can point to the fact that we already knew so much of what the Mueller report verified because The Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal had done a spectacular job of shoe-leather journalism. Carlson then sites the Buzzfeed report that Michael Cohen was told by Trump to lie to Congress, about which the Mueller investigation took the unusual step of speaking out to say it wasn’t true. “It was a lie. That and so much more. All lies”. This is Fox brand propaganda: veer off to a single instance of one news outlet’s screw up to characterize the entire media industry as lies, “all lies”, an industry that got so much right.

He then takes up Trump’s saying, “This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked”.

“As usual, Trump’s instincts were…dead on. In the ways that matter most, the Russia hoax did end his presidency in some sense. It certainly sabotaged it. Mueller’s investigation ended critical momentum from the 2016 election almost immediately, momentum that every president uses to get your program enacted, to make good on the promises you just made to voters. Trump didn’t have that thanks to Russia…the result? An election that should have realigned our political process and changed this country had almost no effect.

Correction: Doesn’t Trump claime that he has accomplished more than any other president in history? He banned people from six Muslim countries from entering the U.S., with Congress tried twice to end Obamacare, enacted major tax reform, confronted North Korea’s dictator, enacted tariff barriers against allies and China, abrogated the nuclear pact with Russia, cancelled out of the Iran pact, on and on, none of it affected by the silent Mueller investigation. Instead we hear:

Two years later virtually nothing has changed. Millions are still flooding over our borders, the opioid epidemic rages on, suicides are up, our troops are still bogged down in Syria and Afghanistan and many other places, Goldman Sachs still controls our economy, tech companies are still spying on you, Americans are dying younger and having fewer children…

The Russian investigation is somehow responsible for all of this. “It didn’t destroy Trump” says Carlson in conclusion, “but it did a lot to destroy this country”.

the consigliere

Carlson is followed by Sean Hannity, who is so incestuously entwined with Donald Trump that he has joined him on stage at rallies and reportedly advises the president by phone almost daily.

Hannity delivers a non-stop nightly monologue before settling down to speak to a guest or two. On the night of the Mueller report release he begins with “The president of the United States has been totally and completely vindicated”. What then followed is fairly typical of what his fans at Fox hear every night:

“Tinfoil conspiracy theorists and the media mob obsessed at a level of psychosis we’ve never seen…for two-and-a half years, you, we, the American people , you have been the victims of the biggest con job in American history, every second, every hour, every day….we saw it over and over again, Russia, Trump, collusion, collusion, false reports that Don Jr. would be found guilty of crimes, Jared Kushner guilty, Melania, Ivanka, other family members smeared, slandered, besmirched…by sanctimonious, self-righteous, frankly overpaid lazy agenda-driven liars in the news media, conspiracy theorists. No shame whatsoever. And today, where are the apologies? Where are the retractions?…because of their blind adherence to rigid, left-wing, Hillary-loving ideology, so it’s no shock that…the media mob in their echo chamber they’re back in action with one last full-on hysterical freakout over the Mueller investigation. This is a sad, disturbing grand finale”.

These two are what a sizable audience of Americans hear every night as their only source of news. We thought a sampling would be informative.

Apr 23 2019 | Posted in Media | Read More »

Mueller Comes Up Short of Expectations

Those who think no one should be above the law are more than disappointed that Robert Mueller followed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) guideline that a sitting president should not be indicted, and therefore came to no conclusion that the president had committed a crime despite Mueller’s own overwhelming 10-count list of Trump’s obstructions of justice. It’s the limited scope he adopted, not any deficiency of evidence he found, that is meant by the report stating, “The evidence we obtained about the president’s actions and intent present difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment”.

The beginning of the report’s obstruction section goes further, saying that, even if Mueller thought there was evidence that could implicate Trump and call him a criminal, it would be unfair to do so because the president would have no opportunity to defend himself. He is referring to a man who has had the liberty to defend himself with a daily fusillade on Twitter during his entire presidency.

Mueller’s reticence feeds into the meme put forth by Republican Congress members and guest prosecutors on Fox talk shows who say that Mueller should not have even put forth the ten instances of obstruction, because the Prosecutor Creed (our caps) is either to bring charges, or if evidence is insufficient, stay silent. It’s “maddening that dirt gets out with no chance to defend yourself”, said one.

Which is to say there should have been no obstruction section in the report at all, never mind that this was not a prosecution. It was a mandate to Mueller to produce his findings, not to turn in blank pages and say “sorry, couldn’t find anything”.

Their other argument is that there can be no obstruction if there is no underlying crime, which implausibly says that an investigation to determine whether or not a crime has been committed can be freely obstructed without its being obstruction.

And then there is Attorney General Barr saying that a president cannot obstruct justice because he or she is the boss of the justice department in control of deciding what gets investigated. Barr’s interpretation therefore is that a president is free to block an investigation of self.

Mueller has handed the job to Congress to determine what, if anything, should be done, having made clear that,

“If we had confidence after a thorough examination of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment…While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him”.

Mueller does seem to urge action, stating, “With respect to whether the President can be found to have obstructed justice by exercising his powers under Article II of the Constitution, we concluded that Congress has authority to prohibit a President’s corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice”. He had the weapon in hand but he couldn’t pull the trigger.

Apr 23 2019 | Posted in Governance | Read More »

Heavy Redaction Expected to Keep Mueller Report Secret

The attorney general is about to release a Mueller report to Congress that has undergone several layers of redaction. To get to where we are now, first the twists and turns of the three weeks since Mueller and cohort turned in their work, weeks in which “complete and total exoneration” has turned into something highly suspect and an attorney general accused of acting as President Trump’s personal lawyer

Right off, the media was in for a drubbing. “A catastrophic media failure” by “the leading lights of journalism who managed to get the story so wrong, and for so long”, wrote Federalist co-founder Sean Davis in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “It wasn’t merely an error here or there. America’s blue-chip journalists botched the entire story, from its birth…to its final breath”.

“It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD”, wrote Matt Taibbi at the otherwise liberal Rolling Stone. “Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor [sic] Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media”. Rich Lowry at National Review said, “Never has so little come of so many screaming chyrons. The last two years have been a disgrace”.

Sean Hannity was “pissed off and so should the rest of the country be”.

“The so-called mainstream media, so-called journalists, they should be embarrassed tonight, they should feel humiliated tonight, they should be apologizing tonight to the American people.”

Even the The New York Times was contrite. An op-ed was headlined, “We Were All Seduced By Collusion”. Columnist David Brooks’ headline was “We’ve all just made fools of ourselves — again”. Peter Baker, a lead reporter of the Trump administration, wrote on the front page that “It will be a reckoning…for the news media…Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really add up?”.

absolution

When Attorney General William Barr’s summation letter was released, minimally quoting that Mueller’s collected evidence “did not establish” that the Trump campaign “conspired or coordinated” with Russia, and that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime” of obstruction of justice, “it also does not exonerate him”, President Trump was triumphant. “There was no collusion with Russia. There was no obstruction, and none whatsoever and it was a complete and total exoneration”, he declared on the tarmac returning from Mar-a-Lago.

“Complete and total exoneration” became Trump’s immediate mantra, repeated endlessly, the “beautiful conclusion” of the report. His base would hear him saying that, and not the contrary wording of the Mueller report about obstruction, and it is a certainty that this distortion will be the rallying cry in his re-election campaign — that along with calling the “fake news media” the “enemy of the people” for having “promoted, and perpetuated the single greatest hoax in the history of politics in our country”. He has gotten out in front of the actual report with that mantra so that once the details emerge at some later date, his followers will have moved on, indoctrinated against believing anything contradictory. As Taibbi wrote, “Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population”.

“After three years of lies and smears and slander, the Russia hoax is finally dead”, he told the crowd at a Grand Rapids, Michigan, rally. “The collusion delusion is over”.

grand illusion

The collusion theory “expired in an instant” with Barr’s letter, said the lead editorial at the Journal. One would think that everything and everyone suggestive of collusion had been made to disappear in a puff of smoke, as if all turned up by the investigative media over the last two years was imagined. That must mean:

 That Gen. Mike Flynn, when designated national security adviser, did not meet with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak about eliminating sanctions, lie about it to the FBI, and is awaiting sentencing.

 That Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, did not hand over polling data that Russia presumably used to interfere with our elections to Konstantin Kilimnic, indicted for witness tampering and thought to have ties to Russian intelligence.

 That there was no Trump tower meeting where a Russian lawyer was to broker “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, a prospect which elicited from an excited Donald Jr., “I love it, especially late in the summer”.

 That the president didn’t concoct a lie, saying that the meeting was about adoption.

 That there was no Wikileaks download of Russian-hacked Democratic National Committee e-mail late in the summer, which Trump’s longtime friend and strategist Roger Stone seemed to know about in advance.

 That Jared Kushner did not try to set up a back channel at a Russian diplomatic site to communicate with Russia secretly.

 That Trump didn’t admit to CBS’s Lester Holt that he fired FBI Director James Comey because of the Russia investigation, and didn’t tell Russian officials in the Oval Office the next day that he had “taken off” the “great pressure because of Russia”.

 That Trump and his lawyer Michael Cohen were not working to land a deal for a Moscow hotel tower and Cohen did not lie that those negotiations efforts had ended that January when in fact they continued all the way to the election.

 That Trump never said “Russia, if you’re listening” to ask that they find an alleged 30,000 missing Hillary Clinton e-mails, nor that there was hacking activity that very night.

The list is much longer. And why all the lying if the over 100 unexplained contacts with Russian nationals were innocent? What to make of Trump’s constant praise of Vladimir Putin, even to accepting his word in Helsinki over his own intelligence agencies’ that Russia did not meddle in the U.S. elections. (“I don’t see why they would”.)

All the above and far more was found out by the media. Absent their extraordinary investigative work these last three years, you would have known none of this.

And yet President Trump wants to investigate why there ever was an investigation.

James Comey had an answer for that in an interview with CBS’s Lester Holt. The fired FBI Director said:

“Let me make one up for you. The Iranians — this is totally made up — the Iranians interfere in the election to help elect Barack Obama because they think they’ll get a better nuclear deal from him. And during that election, an Obama aide meets with the Iranians and talks about the dirt they have that will help Obama get elected, and the FBI finds out about that…And then President Obama’s national security adviser lies to the FBI about his contacts with the Iranians and then the president, Obama, asks me to drop an investigation of that, and then fires me and says, ‘I was thinking of the Iranian thing’. Who on Earth doesn’t think the FBI should investigate that? So the hypocrisy is revealed just by changing the names.”

Mueller’s cohort had come up with indictments of 34 people and 3 companies, seven guilty pleas, and several other matters discovered outside the Russia question and referred to the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, and the DC district — all these cases ongoing. But none of that registered in the rush to create the new reality. Columnist Fred Barnes at the arch-right-wing Washington Examiner wrote:

We didn’t need a ‘special counsel’ to tell us President Trump had not colluded with Russia…practically anyone with a law degree…would have recognized Trump’s innocence from the start. And declared, ‘There’s no case here’.”

Sure about that?

tremors

It took about a week before anyone in the media wondered how big is the Mueller report. Former judge Andrew Napolitano on “Fox and Friends” startled reporters awake when he spitballed about “700 pages”. Barr seemed to be in a hurry to knock that back but was cagey about the page count, refusing to be specific even to House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler who called him up to ask. He could only say it was “substantial”.

Barr’s short letter with its cursory conclusions of no “controversy or coordination” with Russia and ambivalence about obstruction had given the impression there was not much to report. Barr evidently did not want it known that the report ran to more than 400 pages. That said there is a lot more to be told. How could the Mueller crew have written 400-plus pages about nothing? And if there are exhibits and notes, it might reach Napolitano’s 700.

Donald Trump wanted everyone to see the report. He had insisted he had “nothing to hide” and said, “Let the people see it”. Accordingly, Attorney General Barr pledged maximum transparency. It had looked like we’d all get to see almost all of it, but now the ground has shifted. Before delivery to Congress, Barr said the Justice Department must first comb through the report to redact a dragnet list of exclusion: classified information, material from grand jury testimony, from ongoing investigations, intelligence sources, privileged White House communications (with Barr as judge), material that might impinge on the privacy or reputations of innocent persons. “Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own,” Barr wrote to Nadler. What’s left of it. Late night television hosts began showing completely blackened pages with only two words showing — “no” and “collusion”, or “witch” and “hunt”.

Congress would have none of this. It has members with security clearance and SKIFs (secure rooms) for classified document review. It can ask a federal judge for a waiver to view grand jury material, commonly given in matters of importance of this kind. And claims of executive privilege are debatable and generally don’t hold up. When Barr failed to deliver the report by a one-week deadline thrown down by Nadler, his committee voted to authorize issuance of a subpoena for immediate delivery of the full and unredacted report. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi berated Barr for “condescending” by assuming that Congress should be content with his summary. “Show us the report and we can draw our own conclusions”, she said. “We don’t need you interpreting for us.”

The White House has become unnerved and is having second thoughts about “nothing to hide”. They would apparently like only those two sentences from the report quoted in Barr’s letter to survive. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made clear the White House wants the report smothered. About House Democrats’ demands to see it, she said in a Fox interview, “I think it just shows again what sore losers the Democrats really are.”

With reporters in the Oval Office, the president wondered why Congress needed to see the report at all. He thinks disclosure is “somewhat of a waste of time”:

“Well, I think it’s ridiculous. We went through two years of the Mueller investigation. We have — I mean, not only that, you read the — the wording. It was proven. Who could go through that and get wording where it was no collusion, no nothing? So, there’s no collusion. The attorney general now and the deputy attorney general ruled no obstruction. They said no obstruction. And so, there’s no collusion. There’s no obstruction. And now, we’re going to start this process all over again? I think it’s a disgrace.

These are just Democrats that want to try and demean this country and it shouldn’t be allowed…. I will tell you anything we give them will never be enough.”

Trump will “weaponize the results” of the supposed exoneration. He has torn into Adam Schiff (in Twitter he had called him Adam Schitt), demanding he resign from his post as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, as did Republican members of the committee. Schiff had broadly announced that his committee would continue its probe into the Russia connection. For Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel, Schiff and others are “bitter enders” who cannot accept that “the party is over”.

Bitter ender Schiff has suffered two years in the minority watching previous chairman Devin Nunes block the Russia investigation and instead devote the intelligence committee to attacking the FBI and the Justice Department.

quakes and fissures

And now as this is written have come rumblings from inside the Mueller camp, as first reported by The New York Times quickly followed by a more expanded Washington Post account, of grumbling not from the Mueller team members themselves, but from office associates. They had told the Times of their frustration that “Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry” which are “more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated”. An official told a Post reporter that, “There was immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work”.

For Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, the members of the special counsel team “are a bunch of sneaky, unethical leakers, and they are rabid Democrats who hate the president of United States”.

The Post was told that the report was divided in sections and summaries were prepared for each section with the intention that they “could have been released immediately — or very quickly” to the public. That caused Nadler to write Barr that the summaries should be released right away “to allow the American people to judge the facts for themselves”. The DOJ’s defense for not releasing the summaries is that every page of the report has a boilerplate header or footer that says the page may contain protected grand jury matter, and therefore all summaries needed to be screened for redaction. If that’s the reason, why has vetting of just summaries taken so long, and why would there be any grand jury matter pertaining to the obstruction section? Nadler has not fallen for any of it.

“Barr is an agent of the president. He was put there for that purpose…That’s his job, to protect the president personally and one could not therefore trust the accuracy of anything he produced”.

Which serves to remind that Barr auditioned for the attorney general job with a 19-page memo given to Trump which said that a president cannot obstruct justice. He wrote a memo last year calling Mueller’s obstruction investigation “grossly irresponsible “, “fatally misconceived”, and “premised on a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law”. He has said his attorney general job is to be the president’s lawyer, contrary to the traditional view that the Justice Department should remain independent. Barr believes the president has sweeping executive powers and doesn’t even think that a president needs to answer questions. No surprise that he got the job.

The frustration is that Americans may have already made up their minds about the investigation based not on the Mueller report but on Barr’s stepping in front to frame the issue in the president’s favor.

Barr has expressed a commitment to release the report. He and the Justice Department know there is huge public demand to see it in full. The question is whether the attorney general will scrub it until there’s little left and call that honoring the commitment. If so, then it will be clear that he intends to keep the whole truth from coming out until after the election, and if the subpoena power of Congress and an irate public somehow speeds the process along before then, Trump has in the Supreme Court his two appointees happy for the opportunity to return the favor. Years may pass before the report reaches the public. Americans may find that all they have as strategy is to yell “cover up!”.

The Void Between Today’s America and the Green New Deal

It’s been two months since the odd couple, 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and 72-year-old Edward Markey, changed the weather in Congress with their Green New Deal resolution. We thought we’d wait until the tornado passed and the dishes stopped rattling before assessing the fallout.

It’s an extraordinary document. Their brash attempt — it came just days after Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was sworn in as a Congresswoman — follows the orderly paragraph numbering and lettering traditional to legislation, but at one point veers off on

tangents that have the earmarks of a college all-nighter when someone fired up a doobie. The premise is: Here’s what must be done by 2030 to defeat climate change, but midway through the “whereas” clauses outlining the climate threat, the authors decided, while at it, why not go for broke (literally); why not call for all society’s injustices to be remedied: the basic needs of clean air and water, healthy food, healthcare, housing; income distribution disparity, four decades of wage stagnation, gender inequities, the reduced bargaining power of workers, and so forth. Hence, their proclamation became a Roosevelt-style New Deal wrapped in Green.

It’s easy to poke fun, but for all that, it is an uplifting call to action, beaming with can-do confidence. It lays out wildly ambitious goals against a preposterous timetable but it shakes America by the shoulders to say look how adrift we are, there’s a lot of work to be done, yet instead we have a government that has spent two years tearing apart progress the previous administration had set in motion, most notably in health care and emissions abatement, which has made for a lost decade. We’d better get going.

Nevertheless, the wonder is why this duo made certain that nothing would come of their call to battle by going so far overboard. It calls for a 10-year “national mobilization” to supply “100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” by 2030. Right now, renewables make up only 18% of the country’s total power generation. Even if it were possible to provide the other 82% from wind and solar (it’s not clear if the plan hopes to phase out the 20% supplied by nuclear), Clearview Energy, a research firm quoted in the Journal, calculates the cost of the transformation at $2.9 trillion, and that doesn’t include new transmission lines or compensation to the utilities industry for writing off the remaining useful life of hundreds of natural gas and coal plants.

To cut greenhouse gas emissions the resolution delivers an ambitious list of steps, often contradicted by chimerical stipulations, such as:

  “building or upgrading to energy-efficient, distributed, and ‘‘smart’’ power grids, and ensuring affordable access to electricity”.
The first part of that goal will be formidably costly and there is no way for the second part not to be more costly. Further needs are:
  “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification”. Once again we see “affordability”. Everybody has to pay. “It’s the planet, stupid”, should be the mantra.
 “massive growth in clean manufacturing in the United States and removing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing and industry”
 “working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector
 “overhauling transportation systems in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector” which calls for zero-emission vehicles and hi-speed rail.

Exaggerations poured in. Meat would be banned; we’d be back to ocean liners for travel. Except the resolution does not end air travel or meat eating. “Overhauling transportation systems..” and “working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers…”, as listed above, both say “as much as is technologically feasible”. There is no green fuel technologically feasible for ending air travel.

But Ms Ocasio-Cortez, often referred to by her initials, AOC, didn’t help her cause when she revealed her true goals in a blog post, writing,

“We set a goal to get to net zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast”.

(The cow reference is to methane release, a greenhouse gas about 30 times more problematic than CO2).

the resolutions plan for “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States” earned ridicule for AOC/Markey’s divorce from reality.

“Upgrading all existing buildings in the United States” earned the most opprobrium as divorced from reality. President Obama began a $5 billion weatherization program in 2009 partly to create recession jobs. In what may be a cherry-picked choice of a colder than average state, a Journal article reported only on Michigan, where the average cost was $4,585 per home. Extending that, a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics calculates over $400 billion today to retrofit all 95 million homes in the U.S.

A different take came from Columbia University law professor [1] Jedediah Britton-Purdy:

For every human being, there are over 1,000 tons of built environment: roads, office buildings, power plants, cars and trains and long-haul trucks. It is a technological exoskeleton for the species. Everything most of us do, we do through it… Just being human in this artificial world implies a definite carbon footprint — and for that matter, a trail of footprints in water use, soil compaction, habitat degradation and pesticide use. You cannot change the climate impact of Americans without changing the built American landscape.

For him, the need to retrofit buildings, the heating and cooling of which contributes to climate calamity, is tackling the problem at one of its roots.

There is no mention of a carbon tax, what so many in economics and business think is the strongest incentive for industry to cut back greenhouse gas emissions. The resolution’s authors may think that too slow and too likely to replace more direct actions.

The media claimed that an original draft included phasing out nuclear power, which showed a willingness to bow to environmentalists at penalty of increasing emissions. From 1970 to 1990, Sweden’s deployment of nuclear doubled the country’s energy output while cutting carbon emissions 50%. Over the next half century, the world will need about 38 terawatts (a thousand billion) of energy, a demand that wind, solar, and hydro cannot begin to meet. Those who believe there is any possibility of avoiding a temperature rise of 2° Celsius in this century say nuclear power is an essential zero-carbon energy source. The document now speaks only of “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources”, without specifying which.

Removal of carbon from the atmosphere and its sequestration deep underground, as in depleted oil wells, is not mentioned. It’s a technology that has not yet happened at any scale, but which should be on any “all of the above” list for mitigating the climate problem. It was apparently left out of the resolution because some think oil and gas interests would hold it up as an offset justifying continued use of fossil fuels. The resolution is timid for not confronting that head-on.

Prerequisites for the Green New Deal go much further than mitigating climate change. Further goals are:

  “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.”
 “providing all people of the United States with high-quality health care.”
 
“providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education.”

A federally guaranteed job is controversial enough (what would everyone do?), but the implication of the full cornucopia of benefits suggests permanent, rather than stop-gap, jobs.

It is uncertain how far “providing” takes health care and education. AOC/Markey do not quite come forth with Bernie Sanders’ “free”.

Ocasio-Cortez and Markey want to remedy the “system injustices” that affect…

“indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth”.

That’s quite a list. These diverse elements are swept into their term “frontline and vulnerable communities”, a congregation of people that is tacked six times onto their proposed programs in a double-spaced document that fills little more than 13 pages. The reader begins to wonder if the authors think of climate change and the work of arresting it as primarily a means to rescue these disparate groups from their disadvantages.

The Right certainly thinks so. The Green New Deal resolution was met with howls of “Socialism!”. It isn’t, but Americans are indoctrinated to shudder in panic at the mention of the word without knowing what it means. “The socialist Democrats are off to a great start with the roll out of their ridiculous Green New Deal today!” said a spokesman for House Republicans. The Green New Deal “is likely the most ridiculous and un-American plan that’s ever been presented by an elected official to voters”, said The Federalist. It would be a “massive festival of crony capitalism, a raft of corporate welfare loaded with handouts” with “billions and billions” going to “corporate giants who hire the right lobbyists”, said a Washington Examiner editor, and that’s a conservative publication. That says way more about how corrupt this country has become than any fault in the AOC/Markey prospectus.

An ad from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Washington business lobby unaffiliated with the government, called the proposal “a parody of the progressive agenda”. Its president, Thomas Donahue, wrote, “Good luck to the 3.4 million Americans who would lose their jobs” and “a program like this would be the death knell of innovation”. That’s an oft-repeated right-wing trope that skirts the truth that rebuilding America’s energy sector would create far more jobs that the number that run the system already built. And it would generate a burst of innovation akin to the space program of the 1960s-70s that would dwarf any need for innovation by maintenance of the status quo. “There is another path — a better path — the path of free enterprise”, the ad says. Isn’t that the path that got us here, a path that has done little to control climate change.

Times conservative columnist David Brooks expressed his nightmare scenario:

[I]t would definitely represent the greatest centralization of power in the hands of the Washington elite in our history…The government would put sector after sector under partial or complete federal control: the energy sector, the transportation system, the farm economy, capital markets, the health care system”.

There’s much truth to that but the equal truth is that these changes cannot happen without government. For decades we’ve been made conscious to do our part by less driving and and more recycling, but as said in “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air”, David MacKay’s 2009 book, “if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little” and that’s where we are today. The grass of grass roots doesn’t grow fast enough.

Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote that Democrats had confirmed “every Republican suspicion of what global-warming is really all about”, using climate change as an excuse to take over the economy and impose full socialism. That’s up there with the “alarmist” label conservatives apply to climate worriers.

Socialism calls for transfer of ownership of the means of production to the people, i.e., government. Ocasio-Cortez fired back with:

“There’s all this fear-mongering that government is going to take over every corporation or … business or every form of production. We should be scared right now because corporations have taken over our government.”

Democrats — especially presidential candidates — faced a dilemma. Those more moderate had to show their progressive chops by signing onto the resolution. They hit upon calling it “aspirational” as a way to back away from a full embrace. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to put the resolution on the Senate floor for a vote soonest, to brand those who vote “aye” as socialist with the 2020 election coming.

The resolution speaks repeatedly of funding but makes no mention of where that funding would come from. Its cost in trillions of dollars is greatly aggravated by the social programs that have been folded in, which would require steep tax increases for all. Polls show that Americans are enthusiastic about tackling climate change, and over 70% are all for raising taxes on the wealthy, but immediately balk when told it would cost themselves money. In November, voters in Washington, a blue state, rejected by a 12 point margin a carbon fee that families would have to pay, persuaded by a $31 million campaign against it that was mostly funded by the oil and gas industry.

Foreseeing no possibility of American willingness to foot the bill for a green new deal in any form, Bret Stephens, conservative columnist at the Times, tilts toward those who say climate change is manageable. Better is the chance for “large scale investments in climate resilience”, which essentially means letting the climate change and instead building “coastal defenses”.

Someone aligned with the authors’ hopes would have the urge to wield an editor’s red pencil to pare back their wish list to something realistic, getting rid of Utopianism such as…

“A Green New Deal must be developed through transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses”.

Goodness! Imagine trying to get all these constituencies to collaborate and agree on every step. This is a race against the clock that would fare much better with a benevolent autocrat (if there is such a thing) ramming it through at forced march pace.

It’s unfortunate that Ocasio-Cortez and Markey went off the rails, producing a wish list outside any realm of possibility of its coming true. How much more focused the plan would have been had the they not tried to tackle every problem all at once, speaking of the betterment of the ‘‘frontline and vulnerable communities’’ as a possible side effect rather than a central mission. How much more persuasive and conceivable it would have been had the two stuck to climate change and saved the rest for another day. The Times‘ Stephens said about the resolution, “Its virtue is its undoing”. But that belies its aftershock. With that manifesto out there, effectively spelling out where America has failed, Democrats can never return to Hillary Clinton’s status quo ante.