The last month has been busy for me, and I’ve let the summaries of the Mueller report slip. Yesterday Robert Mueller testified before Congress.
We know the report says that the Trump campaign accepted help from Russia gladly and tried to cover it up. We know the report gives something like ten ways Trump obstructed justice.
Explanations in the report are somewhat contorted, owing to the Department of Justice opinion that a sitting President cannot be charged with a crime.
That’s pretty much it. There are podcasts and a multitude of summaries available all over the internet, in any flavor you want.
Not many jackals were reading along with me.
So is there any point in my continuing? I’ll be honest – reading the report is no pleasure, despite what some have said. It’s not overweighted with legal terms, but the composition is leaden, and the content is dense. Which add up to difficult reading.
What say you?
Elizabelle
I would put this down as a public service, very honestly. Cheryl, thank you for all that you have done so far, whatever you decide about the Book Club.
ccl
Cheryl – I would like to continue (and will on my own if you understandably decide not to). I think it’s my civic duty to know what is in the actual report – and not let myself be subverted by ridiculous media claims and propaganda. Just my two cents. Whatever you decide, thank you for being the push to get me to buy it and start reading it.
Fair Economist
I’d like to continue. I also find it kind of dull when not infuriating, but like the Mueller hearing, it’s really important even when not interesting.
Another Scott
The timing was and is bad for me, unfortunately. I quickly skimmed the report when it was first released, but have not had a chance to actually read it.
Your summaries and discussion about them are appreciated.
Cheers,
Scott.
rikyrah
Please continue :)
Another Scott
[eta] – Whoops – I meant to post that downstairs.
Cheers,
Scott.
rikyrah
Trump mocked on stage by errant satire presidential seal
Rachel Maddow shares the ridiculousness of Donald Trump’s appearance at an event for teenage supporters in which he stood in front of a fake presidential seal altered to mock him as a Russian puppet.
rikyrah
Senate Intel report validates Mueller on Russia election attack
Rachel Maddow reports on the first installment of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, which echoes the conclusions and warnings Robert Mueller expressed in his testimony to Congress.
Amir Khalid
Is anyone else having trouble getting into their Gmail, or finding themselves signed out of YouTube?
Another Scott
@Amir Khalid: Gmail seems OK here.
Good luck.
Cheers,
Scott.
gvg
Somehow or other I have missed the book reports even though I read this site often. I’d like to read the past posts which I will go look for. I don’t feel right asking you to continue when I missed what you already did. I assume it has something to do with my weekend building project of a garden shed meeting Florida Hurricane codes. Almost done. Were the reports on sundays?
Amir Khalid
@Another Scott:
It’s okay now for me. Some kind of passing glitch, I guess.
Another Scott
Relatedly, Twitter:
Getting close to half-way there. Still a long way to go, but September is a ways off…
Cheers,
Scott.
joel hanes
@Another Scott:
I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised that Kuster has said this now.
I figured she’d be about the 180th.
zhena gogolia
Cheryl, I’ve noticed along with you that this hasn’t really caught fire on the blog. Although I think I’m one of the people who said it reads like a spy novel and is absolutely gripping, and I stand by that assessment of the first 70 pages of Vol. 1 that I read, I find myself unable to pick it back up BECAUSE IT’S REAL and not fiction and gets me too upset. I will always read whatever you have to say about it, but you shouldn’t waste your time if you feel it’s not getting enough of a response.
The major takeaway for me is that Hillary Clinton should be President and the entire Trump family should be charged with treason. Sorry Mr. Mueller didn’t feel he was able to say that loud and clear at the hearings.
cope
Save yourself. Those of us who want to read it can do so, those of us who don’t have the time or motivation to do so don’t have to. You seem to be a very busy and engaged person and I am sure you can fill the time in other ways. I am a life-long lover of reading but if reading it gives you no joy and you don’t actually HAVE to do it, why bother?
Just my thoughts.
weasel
@gvg: Just follow the tag or this link… https://balloon-juice.com/category/politics/rofer-on-mueller/
wvng
The details are worth knowing. The Dems actually did a very disciplined job of bringing out the key points (unfortunately interspersed with republican distractions), and if we could just get the Dem caucus to uniformly stop whining that Mueller didn’t save the day and just say, always, that we were aggressively attacked by Russia to hurt our democracy and to help Trump, that Trump welcomed their help, and Trump tried to obstruct the investigation in numerous ways, we could seize the narrative. That said, I haven’t had time to follow your reports.
Fair Economist
@Another Scott: Is there a list of the 100?
CindyH
I’m a lurker and am waiting for my copy to arrive but have followed your posts on it. You should only do what you can stomach – there’s a lot of cause for stress these days, so just do what is best for you.
jl
I didn’t participate in the discussion. I have a copy of the report, but I can’t say I’ve read the whole thing.
I found the way Cheryl presented the summaries very useful, and provided me with an incentive to at least read most of the report, at least what was covered.
jl
@CindyH: Maybe a good solution is for Cheryl to only cover in detail the sections that she thinks are most important.
zhena gogolia
@jl:
Maybe the low number of comments on her posts doesn’t really reflect how many people are finding them useful.
Cheryl Rofer
@gvg: Click on the label “Mueller Report Book Club” for the rest of the posts.
Cheryl Rofer
@zhena gogolia: I have thought this is the case. We have many more lurkers than commenters – I keep running into them when I’m involved in a public meeting!
HRA
I vote to continue if it does not put a difficult strain on your own life, Cheryl. The truth is there are others who chiefly read as I do and are not counted in threads every day.
FelonyGovt
Cheryl, I’m guilty of having said I was interested, then not following along. I have tried, over and over again, to read the report on my own, but I toggle back and forth between “it’s SO-O-O boring” (and I’m a lawyer and I’m used to reading boring stuff) and “OMG this all really happened and no one has done anything about it”.
I really appreciate your insights but don’t want you to feel like you need to continue with the book club. Sadly, the Mueller report doesn’t seem to be making any difference at all.
zhena gogolia
@FelonyGovt:
It’s making a difference.
Kattails
@joel hanes: She’s my rep and I find her very responsive, I’ve called regularly and her staff are always polite. She’s very good about sending informative emails and just did a town-hall type phone-in, which I had to miss because of work. I’m not actually surprised. Senator Hassan is the one I find most wishy-washy.
Cheryl, I meant to follow this and have just been swamped with deadlines and work and trying to keep my head above water, so I should just be a good girl and download the audio to read. If you choose to go forward I will skim the more current news and work on catching up with the report, but I’m not the one to tell you to go forward. Which is probably not very helpful, sorry!
Another Scott
@Fair Economist: FTFNYT lists 95, and says it was updated today.
I don’t know where Beyer has his list.
HTH a little.
Cheers,
Scott.
Elizabelle
Cheryl: I wonder if you might want to farm the unread parts of the Mueller report out to a few regulars here (volunteers, mind you), who can summarize (with annotations) and get it back to you for final review and publishing to Balloon Juice?
Maybe you personally should not have to do all the preliminary work.
Redshift
I’m still slogging through the report, but I haven’t happened to be around for the discussion threads. If I am, I’ll join in.
Don’t know if it was discussed previously, but one big revelation for me so far is that at the time of the Trump Tower meeting, Veselnitskaya was actually working for one of the companies that was named in the Magnitsky fraud investigation, and was in New York to defend them in court. I hadn’t realized there connection was that direct.
zhena gogolia
@Redshift:
Yeah, this is why they were so interested in orphans.
Three-nineteen
I lurk around here – I think my average is two comments a year. I am using one of them to vote for continuing the series.
CatFacts
Greg Sargent in the Washington Post is saying that the Judiciary Committee is exploring launching an impeachment inquiry on its own, without forcing the House moderates to vote on it. Maybe a way forward?
Jay
I like the Mueller book club.
I read every one, and the comments.
But there’s not much to discuss about the Report itself, is there?
I think it’s well worth doing, as it breaks the report up into digestable sections, and may be the only way some people manage to read the report.
JoeyJoeJoe
@Another Scott: I called beyer’s office last night and left a message calling for impeachment inquiry- on a time table Nancy Pelosi thinks is good, I trust her judgment. I will assume that my message got him to do the retweeting.
Omnes Omnibus
@CatFacts: Both Nadler and Raskin have said that “in effect” their investigation is now an impeachment inquiry. They say approach is broader than a formal impeachment inquire, but that it could lead to an impeachment recommendation. This is from Greg Sargent’s Twitter feed.
Taobhan
I got a copy of the Mueller report as soon as it became publicly available and read it. As disturbing as Mueller’s evidence was, the more disturbing thing for me was the lack of outcry from the public or the media for Trump’s immediate ejection from the White House. He literally committed crimes that Mueller exposed and our nation just let out a collective yawn about it. That told me something very frightening about our society – it has now normalized illegal behavior at the highest level of our government.
How different we are now from the Watergate days. Nixon’s crimes were minor peccadillos compared to Trump’s crimes but the nation was outraged then and there was no way Nixon could continue in office. Today we accept this as normal behavior. Daily pounding on the American people by right-wingers, such as Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones has fundamentally changed the American people. The odds are disturbingly high Trump will be reelected and the right-wing will be able to complete its project to transform us into a fascist nation. Now I am truly scared.
CaseyL
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s all over Twitter, too. It’s finally happening – and I think (someone correct me if I’m wrong) that formally calling it an impeachment inquiry gives the Judiciary Committee more muscle with its subpoenas.
JimV
Thanks for working on the report. At this point I am convinced that Trump deserves to be impeached so I don’t need any more information from the report. The effort that is needed now, I think, is to mobilize people to call their congressional representatives and urge them to work on impeachment hearings and a vote on impeachment. I called mine yesterday, for the first time since moving to this county.
I’m ready to march somewhere also, for the first time in my life. (I am not a social person, mainly keeping to myself and a few friends and relatives.)
zhena gogolia
@Jay:
Yes, it helps me focus and is a manageable “assignment” for whatever day the post appears.
zhena gogolia
@Taobhan:
Back then there were three TV networks and everyone watched the news at dinnertime, and Huntley-Brinkley, Cronkite, and whoever the third one was were all saying the same thing. Now people have a million sources for news, and as a result they’re simply ignorant.
Eljai
@Elizabelle: I like that idea. I also think that perhaps It’s useful to highlight sections of the Report to discuss, as opposed to reading the entire Report. It’s less daunting to people if you say we’re going to cover a section on obstruction or Russian meddling that can be found on these pages. I can definitely handle a short reading assignment from the Report and still grok that a whole lot of law-breaking was going on without reading the whole thing. I look at it as enlightening voters (myself included) on what’s in the Report one small but crucial section at a time.
Chris Johnson
@Taobhan:
Well, that or ‘appears to have’. You’ve got to remember that if part of this well-documented enemy action from Russia has been to control our privately-held media, the most important thing that media can possibly do is to put forth an appearance of normalization and make it seem like a done deal which nobody minds or cares about.
That’s job #1 for those guys, so I’m not surprised to see the effort being made, no matter who’s making it. I’m more likely to go all Red Dawn and think every damn person echoing that stuff is in the pay of the Kremlin. But mostly it depends on people socially echoing each other… or those that they THINK are their neighbors and trusted info sources.
Oh, BTW, did you hear that the Mueller hearing did way more damage to Democrats than it could have helped, because no new information came out but the guy was senile? Everybody’s saying it. ;) ;) ;)
susanna
Add my name to the list of those wanting you to continue, Cheryl. It’s helpful and appreciated.
Additionally, I do wish there were more comments, opinions, counter-arguments, etc. from commenters, however.
Jay
@susanna:
There’s not much to argue about, comment with substance about, other than speculating what’s under the black parts, and there are lots of places on the web doing that.
I mean we can rage about it in comments,……. but that’s 70% of all comments now and many of us did at the time when stuff was trickling out.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
This strikes me as the best thing to say at this time.
Sister Golden Bear
For those having trouble slogging through the dense legalese, this summary those a good job (and it’s a good read — they hired the author of “Blackhawk Down” to do the rewrite):
https://www.insider.com/mueller-report-rewritten-trump-russia-mark-bowden-archer-2019-7
Taobhan
@zhena gogolia: Yes, I remember that very well. I watched a lot of the Watergate hearings on TV and was shocked at how Nixon and his “plumbers” were engaging in blatantly criminal behavior against their Democratic rivals and to obstruct investigations. But even the newspapers at the time were keeping the public advised of what was being uncovered by special prosecutor Leon Jaworski. There was a groundswell of public sentiment against Nixon and his staff (Halderman, Ehrlichman, et. al.).
Looking back at the outcome of Watergate, I’m certain the Republicans learned a lesson – not to operate ethically when serving in government but to set up a right-wing noise machine to muddy the water when they’re caught doing illegal and anti-democratic acts. We’re now seeing the full fruition of their efforts. The Republicans have been successful in their project but in so doing they have also done imaginable damage to our democracy. I’m convinced they won’t stop until they’ve established permanent control of the government and turned the U.S. into a fascist nation. I think that can be best described as pure evil.
Taobhan
@Chris Johnson:
Yes, that’s a reaction that’s completely disheartening to me. I know it’s happened because I too have read or seen it. It’s totally baffling to an “old school” guy like me. It’s a measure of how much our society has changed since the Watergate days. Maybe we were too serious in those days but we considered safeguarding our democracy as serious business. We were about substance – not spectacle. These days, everything is rated on its entertainment value and Trump has taken full advantage of that fact. If we’ve become such a shallow society, how are we going to protect our nation and the form of government we were bequeathed in the founding? If we can’t distinguish between style and substance, how can we make right decisions on issues our communities and nation are facing? It’s a worrisome time for sure for someone who grew up with values different from we see being esteemed today.
Not to say that things were perfect in the old days – there were plenty of issues that needed to be addressed and solved. I thought for a time that we were making progress on these issues – that our society agreed on the ideas of equality and fairness. But we seem to have jumped back in the mud again and discarded whatever social and economic progress we were able to make. I never expected to see our nation retrograde like that in my lifetime.
stinger
I appreciated being able to follow along as you provided structure and commentary, Cheryl, but would certainly understand if you chose not to continue.
Ol Nat
Yes, please!