Taylor Swift as the redacted Mueller report: a thread pic.twitter.com/tOk0B9Gdly — Capital J (@ohcauseshesdead) April 19, 2019 Book critic Carlos Lozada: The Mueller report is that rare Washington tell-all that surpasses its pre-publication hype. Sure, it is a little longer than necessary. Too many footnotes and distracting redactions. The writing is often flat, and the …
Excellent Reads: The <em>Washington Post</em> Takes Much-Deserved Victory LapPost + Comments (103)
… Trump was working on business deals in Russia — which he lied about, repeatedly — through most of the 2016 campaign, as the Mueller report explains in great detail. Trump’s performance when standing next to the Russian president in Helsinki last July was bizarre: The sight of the American president cringing before the Russian president was shocking. (Watch it again if you’ve forgotten.) His repeated attempts to hold secret talks with Putin, with no U.S. officials present, might not be illegal. But neither are they normal, or acceptable, or comparable to the behavior of any previous American president…
Political columnist Paul Waldman, “The Mueller report puts it beyond dispute: Trump is profoundly corrupt”:
Now that we finally have the (redacted) report from Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into the Russia scandal, we have many questions to confront, such as whether President Trump should be impeached. But the report has also given us many answers, and it’s worthwhile to step back and take careful note of what it has clarified.
There are some things that were matters of dispute or insufficiently documented before, but are no longer in question. Let’s run through them:
– Vladimir Putin very much wanted Trump to become president of the United States, and undertook a comprehensive campaign to make sure it happened…
– Trump, his family and his campaign may not have set up a criminal conspiracy to cooperate with Russia, but they were eager to accept the help…
– The president’s attempts to obstruct justice were comprehensive and far-reaching…
– Nearly everything Trump called “fake news” turned out to be true…
Jennifer Daskal, “associate professor of law at American University Washington College of Law and a former counsel to the assistant attorney general for national security at the Department of Justice” — “Trump tried to obstruct justice. But he was too inept to do it”:
Reading the redacted report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III on Thursday felt like reading the story of a particularly clumsy mob boss. President Trump’s longtime former lawyer, Michael Cohen, is told: “The boss loves you.” “Everyone knows the boss has your back.” Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, gets the message: “Sit tight.” You will be “taken care of” as a result. Trump himself says of his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort: Thank you for not flipping. You are so “very brave.”
Except that Trump doesn’t appear to have been anywhere near as effective as the fictional gangsters he resembles in Mueller’s work.
Perhaps one of the most striking takeaways from the report is the degree to which the president and those close to him tried their very best to coerce, coordinate and conspire — and ultimately break the law — but couldn’t quite succeed in doing so. Failure may be the key thing that has, at least for now, saved Trump and his immediate family members from indictment…
A central piece of the story is how little Trump is and was able to control. Despite his very best efforts, key members of his team refused or avoided what were clearly unlawful orders. In so doing, they took critically important, even if limited and self-protective, steps to protect the integrity of the investigation and thus the rule of law. It is the one bright side of what has emerged.
But there are too many dark sides to count. We now have, thanks to the Mueller report, a detailed accounting of an attempted president-dictator. We have a president who sought to cover up and get all those around him to cover up campaign contacts with Russians; to cajole and then ultimately threaten witnesses into lying; to interfere with ongoing law enforcement investigations; to run the executive branch like an arm of the mafia.
And we now have, in William P. Barr, an attorney general who is willing to spin the report with an advance news conference; to defend Trump’s obstructive actions and attempt on the grounds that he felt “frustrated and angry”; and to misrepresent Mueller’s reasons for not recommending an obstruction charge…