Mueller Objected to Barr’s Description of Russia Investigation’s Findings - The New York Times

"Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, leaving Easter services in April. He ended his investigation and delivered his 448-page report to the attorney general in March.Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, wrote a letter in late March to Attorney General William P. Barr objecting to his early description of the Russia investigation’s conclusions that appeared to clear President Trump on possible obstruction of justice, according to the Justice Department.



The letter adds to the growing evidence of a rift between them and is another sign of the anger among the special counsel’s investigators about Mr. Barr’s characterization of their findings, which allowed Mr. Trump to wrongly claim he had been vindicated.



It was unclear what specific objections Mr. Mueller raised in his letter. Mr. Barr defended his descriptions of the investigation’s conclusions in conversations with Mr. Mueller over the days after he sent the letter, according to two people with knowledge of their discussions.



Mr. Barr, who was scheduled to testify on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the investigation, has said publicly that he disagrees with some of the legal reasoning in the Mueller report. Senior Democratic lawmakers have invited Mr. Mueller to testify in the coming weeks but have been unable to secure a date for his testimony.



“The special counsel emphasized that nothing in the attorney general’s March 24 letter was inaccurate or misleading,” a Justice Department spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, said in response to a request for comment made on Tuesday afternoon. “But he expressed frustration over the lack of context and the resulting media coverage regarding the special counsel’s obstruction analysis.”



A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.



A central issue in the simmering dispute is how the public’s understanding of the Mueller report has been shaped since the special counsel ended his investigation and delivered his 448-page report on March 22 to the attorney general, his boss and longtime friend. The four-page letter that Mr. Barr sent to Congress two days later gave little detail about the special counsel’s findings and created the impression that Mr. Mueller’s team found no wrongdoing, allowing Mr. Trump to declare he had been exonerated.



But when Mr. Mueller’s report was released on April 18, it painted a far more damning picture of Mr. Trump and showed that Mr. Mueller believed that significant evidence existed that Mr. Trump obstructed justice.



Over the past month, other signs of friction between the attorney general and the special counsel have emerged over issues like legal theories about constitutional protections afforded to presidents to do their job and how Mr. Mueller’s team conducted the investigation.





Read the Mueller Report: Searchable Document and Index



The findings from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, are now available to the public. The redacted report details his two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.



In congressional testimony in April before the report was released, Mr. Barr demurred when asked whether he believed that the investigation was a “witch hunt” — Mr. Trump’s preferred term. It “depends on where you’re sitting,” Mr. Barr replied.



“If you are somebody who’s being falsely accused of something, you would tend to view the investigation as a witch hunt,” he said, an apparent reference to the president.



His testimony stood in contrast to comments he made during his confirmation hearing in January. “I don’t believe Mr. Mueller would be involved in a witch hunt,” he said then.



A rift between the men appeared to develop in the intervening months as the special counsel wrapped up his inquiry.



Mr. Barr and senior Justice Department officials were frustrated with how Mr. Mueller ended his investigation and crafted his report, according to the two people with knowledge of the discussions and another person briefed on the matter.



They expressed irritation that Mr. Mueller fell short of his assignment by declining to make a decision about whether Mr. Trump broke the law. That left Mr. Barr to clear Mr. Trump without the special counsel’s backing.



The senior department officials also found Mr. Mueller’s rationale for stopping short of deciding whether Mr. Trump committed a crime to be confusing and contradictory, and they concluded that Mr. Mueller’s report showed that there was no case against Mr. Trump.



But Mr. Mueller did lay out evidence against the president. After explaining that he had declined to make a prosecutorial judgment, citing as a factor a Justice Department view that sitting presidents cannot be indicted, the special counsel detailed more than a dozen attempts by the president to impede the inquiry. He also left open the door for charges after Mr. Trump leaves office.



“If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” Mr. Mueller and his investigators wrote. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.”



Mr. Mueller’s report, the attorney general and the other senior law enforcement officials believed, read like it had been written for consumption by Congress and the public, not like a confidential report to Mr. Barr, as required under the regulations governing the special counsel.



Attorney General William P. Barr testifying before lawmakers in April. “If you are somebody who’s being falsely accused of something, you would tend to view the investigation as a witch hunt,” he said.Erin Schaff/The New York Times





Attorney General William P. Barr testifying before lawmakers in April. “If you are somebody who’s being falsely accused of something, you would tend to view the investigation as a witch hunt,” he said.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Some of the special counsel’s investigators have told associates that they were angry about Mr. Barr’s initial characterization of their findings, government officials and others have said, and that their conclusions were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated in his four-page letter. That proved to be the case.



In once instance, Mr. Barr took Mr. Mueller’s words out of context to suggest that the president had no motive to obstruct justice. In another instance, he plucked a fragment from a sentence in the Mueller report that made a conclusion seem less damaging for the president.



Investigators wrote, “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”



Mr. Barr’s letter only quoted the passage that the investigation had found no conspiracy or coordination.



It is not clear whether members of Mr. Mueller’s team were angered by these points in particular, or whether Mr. Mueller’s letter cited them.



Despite the disagreement about the report, members of Mr. Mueller’s team worked alongside senior Justice Department officials to redact sensitive information from the report before it was released.



Hours before the public release of the Mueller report, Mr. Barr said during a news conference that he had “disagreed with some of the special counsel’s legal theories” about what constitutes presidential obstruction of justice. He also said repeatedly that the special counsel had found “no collusion” between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. President Trump often uses the term, but Mr. Mueller’s investigators pointed out it had no legal standard and left it out of their judgments.



Instead, investigators wrote that they had not found evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians.



Mr. Barr also said during the news conference that some of Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the investigation needed to be put in “context.”



“There is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” he said."



Mueller Objected to Barr’s Description of Russia Investigation’s Findings - The New York Times

Opinion | The Zombie Style in American Politics

"By Paul Krugman April 29, 2019



Russia didn’t help Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. O.K., it did help him, but the campaign itself wasn’t involved. O.K., the campaign had a lot of Russian contacts and knowingly received information from the Russians, but that was perfectly fine.



If you’ve been trying to follow the Republican response to revelations about what happened in 2016, you may be a bit confused. We’re not even talking about an ever-shifting party line; new excuses keep emerging, but old excuses are never abandoned. On one side, we have Rudy Giuliani saying that “there’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.” On the other side, we have Jared Kushner denying that Russia did anything beyond taking out “a couple of Facebook ads.”



It’s all very strange. Or, more accurately, it can seem very strange if you still think of the G.O.P. as a normal political party, one that adopts policy positions and then defends those positions in more or less good faith.



But if you have been following Republican arguments over the years, you know that the party’s response to evidence of Russian intervention in 2016 is standard operating procedure. On issue after issue, what you see are multiple levels of denial combined with a refusal ever to give up an argument no matter how completely it has been discredited.



I first encountered this style of argument a long time ago, over the issue of rising inequality. By the early 1990s it was already obvious that growth in the United States economy was becoming ever more skewed, with huge gains for a small minority at the top but lagging incomes for the middle class and the poor. This was an awkward observation for a party that, then as now, wanted to slash taxes for the rich and dismantle the social safety net. How would conservatives respond?



The answer was multilayered denial. Inequality wasn’t rising. O.K., it was rising, but that wasn’t a problem. O.K., rising inequality was unfortunate, but there was nothing that could be done about it without crippling economic growth.



You might think that the right would have to choose one of those positions, or at least that once you’d managed to refute one layer of the argument, say by showing that inequality was indeed rising, you could put that argument behind you and move on to the next one. But no: Old arguments, like the wights in “Game of Thrones,” would just keep rising up after you thought you had killed them.



And this is still going on. Even as you read about the superrich buying $240 million apartments and demanding ever-bigger mega-yachts, there’s a whole industry of people denying that inequality has gone up.



You see the same thing on climate change. Global warming is a myth — a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists around the world. O.K., the climate is changing, but it’s a natural phenomenon that has nothing to do with human activity. O.K., man-made climate change is real, but we can’t do anything about it without destroying the economy.



As in the case of inequality, refuted climate arguments never go away. Instead, they become intellectual zombies that should be dead but just keep shambling along. If you think Republican arguments on climate have gotten more sophisticated, wait for the next snowstorm; I guarantee you’ll hear the same crude denialist arguments — the same willful confounding of climate with daily weather fluctuations — we’ve been hearing for decades.



What the right’s positioning on inequality, climate and now Russian election interference have in common is that in each case the people pretending to be making a serious argument are actually apparatchiks operating in bad faith.



What I mean by that is that in each case those making denialist arguments, while they may invoke evidence, don’t actually care what the evidence says; at a fundamental level, they aren’t interested in the truth. Their goal, instead, is to serve a predetermined agenda.



Thus, inequality denial is about using whatever argument comes to hand to defend policies that benefit the rich at the expense of working Americans. Climate denial is about using whatever argument comes to hand to defend fossil fuel interests. Russia denial is about using whatever argument comes to hand to defend Donald Trump.



All of this is or should be obvious. After all, it’s a pattern that goes back decades. But my sense is that the news media continue to have a hard time coping with the essential fraudulence of most big policy debates. That is, reporting about these debates typically frames them as disputes about the facts and what they mean, when the reality is that one side isn’t interested in the facts.



I understand the pressures that often lead to false equivalence. Calling out dishonesty and bad faith can seem like partisan bias when, to put it bluntly, one side of the political spectrum lies all the time, while the other side doesn’t.



But pretending that good faith exists when it doesn’t is unfair to readers. The public deserves to know that the big debates in modern U.S. politics aren’t a conventional clash of rival ideas. They’re a war in which one side’s forces consist mainly of intellectual zombies.



Opinion | The Zombie Style in American Politics

Opinion | A Terrorist Tried to Kill Me Because I Am a Jew. I Will Never Back Down. - The New York Times #ResistanceIsNotFutile

Opinion | A Terrorist Tried to Kill Me Because I Am a Jew. I Will Never Back Down. - The New York Times

Mom of Charlottesville victim addresses Biden video

Mueller Report Shows President Donald Trump’s Repeated Efforts To Obstru...

'Terrified': Trump On Edge After Mueller As Dems Eye Obstruction | The B...

Bernie Sanders booed after name-dropping MLK Jr.

Joe Biden Expresses Regret to Anita Hill, but She Says ‘I’m Sorry’ Is Not Enough

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called Anita Hill earlier this month to express his regret over “what she endured” testifying against Justice Clarence Thomas at the 1991 Supreme Court hearings that put a spotlight on sexual harassment of women, according to a spokeswoman for Mr. Biden.

But Ms. Hill, in an interview Wednesday, said she left the conversation feeling deeply unsatisfied and declined to characterize his words to her as an apology. She said she is not convinced that Mr. Biden truly accepts the harm he caused her and other women who suffered sexual harassment and gender violence.

“I cannot be satisfied by simply saying I’m sorry for what happened to you. I will be satisfied when I know there is real change and real accountability and real purpose,” she said.

She said she cannot support Mr. Biden, who as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 oversaw the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, until he takes responsibility for what he did and is also troubled by the recent accusations of improper touching.

Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee during confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas in October 1991.Jose R. Lopez/The New York Times

Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee during confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas in October 1991.Jose R. Lopez/The New York Times

“The focus on apology to me is one thing,” she said. “But he needs to give an apology to the other women and to the American public because we know now how deeply disappointed Americans around the country were about what they saw. And not just women. There are women and men now who have just really lost confidence in our government to respond to the problem of gender violence.”

Mr. Biden’s outreach to Ms. Hill, a law professor, was an attempt to defuse one of his most glaring vulnerabilities as he begins his presidential bid.

“They had a private discussion where he shared with her directly his regret for what she endured and his admiration for everything she has done to change the culture around sexual harassment in this country,” said Kate Bedingfield, the deputy campaign manager for Mr. Biden, who declared his presidential candidacy on Thursday.

Mr. Biden has long cast the hearings in passive terms, as something that happened to Ms. Hill, not something he and others did to her. Ms. Hill has said in the past that Mr. Biden has never directly apologized for his actions.

Last month, at an event in New York honoring students who fight sexual violence, Mr. Biden acknowledged his role in a moment that remains seared in the minds of many women.

“She faced a committee that didn’t fully understand what the hell this was all about,” he said. “To this day, I regret I couldn’t give her the kind of hearing she deserved. I wish I could have done something.”



Joe Biden Expresses Regret to Anita Hill, but She Says ‘I’m Sorry’ Is Not Enough

President Donald Trump Trying To Obstruct Congressional Investigations |...

Busted: Mueller Report Shows Trump AG Barr Did Not Tell The Truth | The ...

Impeach Trump"The Sooner The Better" - Chuck Schumer

Is Obstruction an Impeachable Offense? History Says Yes - The New York Times

"WASHINGTON — President Trump has been consulting the Constitution. In a Twitter post on Monday, he recited part of Article II, Section 4, the provision that allows Congress to remove federal officials who commit “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”



Mr. Trump wrote that he had done none of those things: “There were no crimes by me (No Collusion, No Obstruction), so you can’t impeach.”



The president’s analysis had two shortcomings. It misstated the conclusion of the report issued by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which made no definitive judgment about whether Mr. Trump had violated criminal laws concerning obstruction of justice. And it failed to take account of what the framers meant by “other high crimes and misdemeanors.”



The phrase is vague, of course, but it plainly does not encompass every ordinary crime. Rather, it follows two offenses that give a good sense of the kinds of crimes the framers had in mind: treason and bribery. Those are crimes against the state and the justice system that undermine the ability of the government to function.



Constitutional scholars say that similar offenses — ones involving the lawless use of official power threatening the constitutional order — are what the framers thought could justify removal from office.



Does Mr. Trump’s conduct, as described in the Mueller report, clear that high bar? The two most recent impeachment proceedings, against Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton, indicate that it could.



The articles of impeachment in both cases identified one sort of presidential conduct that the Constitution cannot tolerate: the corrupt use of power to frustrate lawful investigations.



“The Nixon and Clinton cases prove beyond a shadow of the doubt that obstruction of justice can qualify as a ‘high crime and misdemeanor,’” said Joshua Matz, an author, with Laurence H. Tribe, of “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment.”



Frank O. Bowman III, a law professor at the University of Missouri and the author of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump,” to be published this summer, said the Nixon and Clinton cases were informative.



“The historical comparisons make out a solid case for an article of impeachment against Trump for obstruction of justice in both the technical legal sense and in the more general sense of an attempt to subvert American legal process and institutions,” Mr. Bowman said.





President Bill Clinton in February 1999, after the Senate acquitted him.

Photo by: Stephen Jaffe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Impeachment, it has often been said, has a political component. “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history,” Gerald R. Ford said in 1970, when he was the House minority leader.



That may reflect the current political reality, too. Many House Democrats are wary of impeaching Mr. Trump because they know the enterprise would very likely be doomed. Impeachment is an accusation akin to an indictment, and it would be followed by a trial in the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans and where removal would require a two-thirds majority.



But if the question is one of constitutional principle, there is reason to think Mr. Trump was a little too sanguine in his analysis.



In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee adopted articles of impeachment against Mr. Nixon, accusing him of “interfering or endeavoring to interfere with the conduct of investigations” into the Watergate burglary.



Philip Allen Lacovara, who served as counsel to special prosecutors investigating Mr. Nixon’s role in the Watergate scandal, said reading the Mueller report evoked a sense of déjà vu. “The overarching concept of obstruction of justice parallels some of Nixon’s activities rather neatly,” Mr. Lacovara said.



Mr. Bowman said that “the similarities between Trump’s case and Nixon’s are sufficiently numerous and striking that they make out a strong case for Trump’s impeachment.” He ticked off examples.



“Both Nixon and Trump attempted, sometimes successfully, to induce witnesses to refuse cooperation with prosecutors or to lie,” Mr. Bowman said. “Their methods were similar. Both on some occasions attempted to directly convince subordinates to lie. Both Nixon and Trump dangled pardons as incentives for witnesses to keep quiet.”



“Both Trump and Nixon repeatedly lied to the public about the investigations,” Mr. Bowman said, noting that the articles of impeachment against Mr. Nixon relied on those public statements.



Mr. Nixon resigned rather than face what seemed like inevitable impeachment and removal, elevating Mr. Ford, by then vice president, to the presidency.



In 1998, the House impeached Mr. Clinton, saying he had “prevented, obstructed and impeded the administration of justice” in connection with a civil suit in a sexual harassment case and a grand jury investigation into his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Mr. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate.



The accusations against Mr. Nixon and Mr. Clinton were quite different, of course, but both focused on obstruction of justice.



“In Clinton’s case, the pattern of conduct constituting obstruction involved a small cast of characters and a few discrete instances of wrongdoing, all centered firmly around his false testimony concerning Monica Lewinsky,” Mr. Matz said. “Nixon’s case was very different: he was accused of obstruction for dozens of acts, taken over several years and in a wide range of settings, broadly aimed at concealing the truth of the Watergate break-in.”





President Trump this month in Minnesota. His White House counsel expressly invoked a parallel to the Watergate investigation when he refused to convey an instruction from Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Mueller.

Photo by: Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times

Mr. Mueller’s report detailed conduct that was almost as varied as Mr. Nixon’s, if less effective.



“Our investigation found multiple acts by the president that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” the report said.



“The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the president sought to use his official power outside of usual channels,” the report said. “These actions ranged from efforts to remove the special counsel and to reverse the effect of the attorney general’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”



History shadowed Mr. Trump’s actions. Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, expressly invoked a parallel to the Watergate investigation when he refused to convey an instruction from Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Mueller.



Mr. McGahn said he did not want to be “Saturday Night Massacre Bork,” referring to Robert H. Bork’s role in the firing of Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor, on orders from Mr. Nixon. Mr. Bork’s superiors at the Justice Department had resigned rather than carry out Mr. Nixon’s instructions.



“As the Mueller report makes explicit,” Mr. Lacovara said, “the only reason why Trump was unable to complete the parallel with Watergate more precisely was that some of his aides, including the White House counsel, simply refused to obey his instructions.”



Mr. Nixon faced all but certain impeachment and removal because his aides followed his orders to obstruct justice. Had Mr. Trump’s aides done the same thing, Mr. Matz said, “the nation would have reached a constitutional crisis, and the case for impeachment would be overwhelming.”



“To be clear,” Mr. Matz added, “Trump may still have committed ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ by seeking to obstruct justice, even if his own staff refused to carry out the plan. Internal insubordination has its limits as a defense to impeachment. When the president repeatedly gives orders that would merit impeachment if implemented, the nation is not required to cross its fingers and hope that White House advisers will ignore them.”



There were other parallels to the Watergate era, Mr. Lacovara said. “Nixon approved the arrangements to bribe witnesses and offered to take care of their families if they went to prison,” Mr. Lacovara said. “Trump urged witnesses not to cooperate, berated any witnesses who might be cooperating, and held out the prospect of pardons to protect anyone who got caught and who would refuse to cooperate with Mueller.”



A young lawyer named Brett M. Kavanaugh studied the constitutional standard for impeachment when he worked on Ken Starr’s investigation of Mr. Clinton. Mr. Kavanaugh, who now sits on the Supreme Court, helped draft a report to Congress setting out 11 possible grounds for impeachment.



Among them was a pattern of lying that frustrated investigations. Mr. Starr’s report said, for instance, that Mr. Clinton lied to his aides about his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, “knowing that they would relay those falsehoods to the grand jury.” The report added that Mr. Clinton had lied to the American public in an attempt to head off an investigation.



Reflecting on investigations of sitting presidents in a 2009 law review article, Justice Kavanaugh, then a federal judge, said the Constitution provides a single mechanism to address presidential misconduct.



“The country needs a check against a bad-behaving or lawbreaking president,” he wrote. “But the Constitution already provides that check. If the president does something dastardly, the impeachment process is available.”



Is Obstruction an Impeachable Offense? History Says Yes - The New York Times

Why You Should Visit Ghana In 2019

Lawrence's Last Word: Robert Mueller Exposes Sarah Sanders' Lies | The L...

Opinion | Impeach Donald Trump? - The New York Times

"April 21st, 2019

Obstruction of justice is a crime. The decision is clear.   Cnarles Blow NY Times.



The Mueller report has been released, with redactions of course, and it is a damning document. Not only does it detail Russian efforts to attack our election to help the Trump campaign and the Trump campaign’s eager acceptance of that help, it paints a picture of Donald Trump as an unethical man with no regard for the rule of law.



In this report, we see a president who doesn’t deserve to be president. We see attempts over and over to obstruct justice, which in some cases succeed.



The question is: What are we going to do about it? Obstruction of justice is a crime. If Trump committed that crime, he’s a criminal. Are we simply going to allow a criminal to sit in the Oval Office and face no consequence? Are we simply going to let the next presidential election be the point at which Trump is punished or rewarded?



It is maddening to think that we are at such a pass. But, my mind is made up: I say impeach him.



I know all the arguments against.



First, even if the House voted to impeach Trump, the Senate would never vote to convict and remove him. This is the “failed impeachment” theory.



But, I say that there is no such thing as a failed impeachment. Impeachment exists separately from removal. Impeachment in the House is akin to an indictment, with the trial, which could convict and remove, taking place in the Senate. The Senate has never once voted to convict.



So, an impeachment vote in the House has, to this point, been the strongest rebuke America is willing to give a president. I can think of no president who has earned this rebuke more than the current one.



And, once a president is impeached, he is forever marked. It is a chastisement unto itself. It is the People’s House making a stand for its people.



Then there is the idea that an impeachment would be contentious and increase public support for Trump the way it did for Bill Clinton.



But I find the conflation of Clinton and Trump ill-reasoned on the issue of the public’s response in polling.



First, Clinton’s approval was subject to change in a way Trump’s is not. Clinton experienced a 40-point swing in his approval over his presidency, according to Gallup. Trump’s seems almost impervious to change, no matter the news.



People either love Trump or hate him. Impeachment will most likely not change that any more than Trump seeing fine people among Nazis or locking children in cages.



Furthermore, Clinton jumped 10 points, from 63 percent 73 percent, just after the House voted to impeach him. But, five month later, those gains had vanished and then some. His approval rating sank to 53 percent.



I’m tired of all the fear and trepidation.



Senate Republicans are worried about getting on the wrong side of the Republican base.



Mitt Romney wrote in a statement on Friday, “I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President.”



But, will that sickness give birth to action? No, if the last two years is our guide. This is the strongest statement among Republican senators, but it is as toothless as a baby’s mouth. This admonition is idle.



House Democrats, at least the leadership, are afraid of looking like they have a blood lust and inadvertently increasing Trump’s chances of re-election.



Folks, this is not the 1990s. Until 1996, CNN was the only cable news network. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram didn’t exist. Google wasn’t founded until 1998. Cellphones were in their infancy, and few people had them.



Furthermore, the massive — and growing — amount of campaign spending will drown out anything that happened months prior.



In 1996, Clinton raised $42 million for his re-election bid; in 2012, Obama raised a billion for his.



And finally, there was no President Trump in the 1990s producing a head-scratching number of headlines each day. Trump can’t ride a victory nor will he be crestfallen in defeat. There would likely be untold new outrages even after an impeachment.



As for me, I’m afraid of lawlessness and the horrible precedent it would set if Congress does nothing.



On Friday, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on Twitter that “the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States.”



In another tweet she explained:



“To ignore a President’s repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own disloyal behavior would inflict great and lasting damage on this country, and it would suggest that both the current and future Presidents would be free to abuse their power in similar ways.”



I worry that inaction enshrines that idea that the American president is above America’s laws. I worry that silent acquiescence bends our democracy toward monarchy, or dictatorship.



As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “In America the law is king.” He continued: “For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”



Who will we let be king in this country, the president or the law?"



Opinion | Impeach Donald Trump? - The New York Times

Robert Mueller Report: Outline For Prosecution | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC

Rep. Ted Lieu: If Trump Obstructed Justice, Impeachment Should Be On The...

Joy & Happiness

Sarah Sanders Caught Lying. So She Lies Again It's in the Mueller report.. | All In | MSNBC

Opinion | Mr. Mueller’s Indictment - The New York Times

“We determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the president committed crimes,” the report explains, because “fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought.”

In other words, Mr. Mueller felt his hands were tied. Longstanding Justice Department policy prohibits the indictment of a sitting president, and it isn’t fair to make accusations without giving the president a legal forum in which to respond.

A bit further on, the 448-page report says, “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.”

So what now? Although Mr. Mueller was unable to bring criminal charges against the president himself, his report lays a foundation for investigation by Congress, which has the authority and the responsibility to check the executive branch and hold the president accountable. “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the president's corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law,” the report states.

It is up to Congress to decide whether the behavior described in this report meets an acceptable standard for the country’s chief executive.

In order to adequately conduct such an investigation, Congress must have access to a fully uncensored version of the report and all its underlying materials. Congressional leaders are right to subpoena the full report, as the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jerrold Nadler, said he would do on Thursday.

The public also has a right to hear Mr. Mueller testify before Congress at the earliest opportunity.

Descriptions in the public version of the report of the ways in which the president used, and abused, his powers challenge the dignity of the presidency and the free and fair function of the justice system. The special counsel investigated 11 incidents in which the president may have obstructed justice, the same offense facing Richard Nixon during Watergate and Bill Clinton during his impeachment.

The report notes that the president engaged in “public attacks on the investigation, nonpublic efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation.” That the president’s norm-shattering behavior has become so flagrant and familiar doesn’t make it right.

Little wonder that Mr. Trump, when notified that a special counsel had been appointed to scrutinize his behavior, reportedly slumped in his chair and said: “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”

In addition to indicting, convicting or securing guilty pleas from 34 people, the special counsel’s office made 14 referrals for further investigation of potential criminal activity outside the purview of the investigation’s mandate. Twelve of those referrals remain secret.

The report is more definitive when it comes to the extensive interference by Russian spies and hackers in the 2016 election, a campaign of disruption it calls “sweeping and systematic.”

Mr. Mueller’s investigation found that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” Mr. Mueller was not able in the end to establish definitive coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

At the same time, large sections of the report, apparently regarding dealings between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, have been blacked out. Mr. Barr said Thursday that any such coordination between the website and the campaign wouldn’t be criminal. Congress and the American people deserve to know what happened nonetheless.

If the report — and the entire saga around the Russia investigation — has one through-line, it is the dishonesty at the heart of the Trump administration. The president told Mr. McGahn to lie to reporters about Mr. Trump’s attempt to fire the special prosecutor. The press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, made up from whole cloth the notion that “rank-and-file F.B.I. agents had lost confidence” in the ousted director, James Comey. Half a dozen people connected with the Mueller investigation have been formally charged with — or pleaded guilty to — lying to investigators.

Then on Thursday, just before the report was made public, the attorney general tarnished himself and undermined the integrity of his office by dissembling about what the report said.

By contrast, the special prosecutor’s report illustrates again and again that, despite Mr. Trump’s constant cries of “fake news,” the responsible news media’s reporting on the investigation was overwhelmingly accurate.

Mr. Mueller may have thought he couldn’t indict a president in the legal sense of the term, but he has delivered a devastating description of Mr. Trump’s attempts to abuse his powers and corrupt his aides. This report, even in its censored format, is an important step toward putting the truth of this presidency in the public record. But there’s still a long way to go before it can be said that justice has been done."

Opinion | Mr. Mueller’s Indictment - The New York Times

Mueller report lays out ten counts of obstruction of justice committed by Trump but some people believe in a dual system of justice. The4y believe in King Trump the First. I am not one of them.

Mueller defers to Congress on Trump obstruction judgment Was Robert Mueller’s decision not to make a judgment on obstruction his way of leaving it up to Congress to decide whether Donald Trump is guilty of this allegation? Joy Reid and her panel discuss the 10 episodes of potential obstruction of justice outlined - AM Joy on MSNBC

AM Joy on MSNBC

Opinion | The Mueller Report and the Danger Facing American Democracy - The New York Times

"A perceived victory for Russian interference poses a serious risk for the United States.





Wren McDonald

The report of the special counsel Robert Mueller leaves considerable space for partisan warfare over the role of President Trump and his political campaign in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. But one conclusion is categorical: “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”



That may sound like old news. The Justice Department’s indictment of 13 Russians and three companies in February 2018 laid bare much of the sophisticated Russian campaign to blacken the American democratic process and support the Trump campaign, including the theft of American identities and creation of phony political organizations to fan division on immigration, religion or race. The extensive hacks of Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails and a host of other dirty tricks have likewise been exhaustively chronicled.



But Russia’s interference in the campaign was the core issue that Mr. Mueller was appointed to investigate, and if he stopped short of accusing the Trump campaign of overtly cooperating with the Russians — the report mercifully rejects speaking of “collusion,” a term that has no meaning in American law — he was unequivocal on Russia’s culpability: “First, the Office determined that Russia’s two principal interference operations in the 2016 U.S. presidential election — the social media campaign and the hacking-and-dumping operations — violated U.S. criminal law.”



The first part of the report, which describes these crimes, is worthy of a close read. Despite a thick patchwork of redactions, it details serious and dangerous actions against the United States that Mr. Trump, for all his endless tweeting and grousing about the special counsel’s investigation, has never overtly confronted, acknowledged, condemned or comprehended. Culpable or not, he must be made to understand that a foreign power that interferes in American elections is, in fact, trying to distort American foreign policy and national security.



The earliest interference described in the report was a social media campaign intended to fan social rifts in the United States, carried out by an outfit funded by an oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” for the feasts he catered. Called the Internet Research Agency, the unit actually sent agents to the United States to gather information at one point. What the unit called “information warfare” evolved by 2016 into an operation targeted at favoring Mr. Trump and disparaging Mrs. Clinton. This included posing as American people or grass-roots organizations such as the Tea Party, anti-immigration groups, Black Lives Matter and others to buy political ads or organize political rallies.



At the same time, the report said, the cyberwarfare arm of the Russian army’s intelligence service opened another front, hacking the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and releasing reams of damaging materials through the front groups DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, and later through WikiLeaks. The releases were carefully timed for impact — emails stolen from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, for example, were released less than an hour after the “Access Hollywood” tape damaging to Mr. Trump came out.



All this activity, the report said, was accompanied by the well documented efforts to contact the Trump campaign through business connections, offers of assistance to the campaign, invitations for Mr. Trump to meet Mr. Putin and plans for improved American-Russian relations. Both sides saw potential gains, the report said — Russia in a Trump presidency, the campaign from the stolen information. The Times documented 140 contacts between Mr. Trump and his associates and Russian nationals and WikiLeaks or their intermediaries. But the Mueller investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”



That is the part Mr. Trump sees as vindication, though the activities of his chaotic campaign team that the report describes are — at best — naïve. It is obviously difficult for this president to acknowledge that he was aided in his election by Russia, and there is no way to gauge with any certainty how much impact the Russian activities actually had on voters.



But the real danger that the Mueller report reveals is not of a president who knowingly or unknowingly let a hostile power do dirty tricks on his behalf, but of a president who refuses to see that he has been used to damage American democracy and national security.



Since the publication of the report, Vladimir Putin and his government have been crowing that they, too, are now somehow vindicated, joining the White House in creating the illusion that the investigation was all about “collusion” rather than a condemnation of criminal Russian actions. If their hope in a Trump presidency was to restore relations between the United States and Russia, and to ease sanctions, the Russians certainly failed, especially given the added sanctions ordered by Congress over Moscow’s interference.



But if the main intent was to intensify the rifts in American society, Russia backed a winner in Mr. Trump.



A perceived victory for Russian interference poses a serious danger to the United States. Already, several American agencies are working, in partnership with the tech industry, to prevent election interference going forward. But the Kremlin is not the only hostile government mucking around in America’s cyberspace — China and North Korea are two others honing their cyber-arsenals, and they, too, could be tempted to manipulate partisan strife for their ends.



That is something neither Republicans nor Democrats should allow. The two parties may not agree on Mr. Trump’s culpability, but they have already found a measure of common ground with the sanctions they have imposed on Russia over its interference in the campaign. Now they could justify the considerable time and expense of the special counsel investigation, and at the same time demonstrate that the fissure in American politics is not terminal, by jointly making clear to Russia and other hostile forces that the democratic process, in the United States and its allies, is strictly off limits to foreign clandestine manipulation, and that anyone who tries will pay a heavy price."





Opinion | The Mueller Report and the Danger Facing American Democracy - The New York Times

Kellyanne Conway's husband calls for Trump's impeachment

We Must Impeach Trump!

Special counsel's report says investigators struggled with whether Trump committed crime of obstruction - The Washington Post

"By Devlin Barrett, www.washingtonpost.com April 18th, 2019

The report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III lays out in alarming detail abundant evidence against President Trump, finding 10 “episodes” of potential obstruction of justice but ultimately concluding it was not Mueller’s role to determine whether the commander in chief broke the law.



Submitted to Congress on Thursday, the 448-page document alternates between jarring scenes of presidential scheming and dense legal analysis, and it marks the onset of a new phase of the Trump administration in which congressional Democrats must decide what, if anything, to do with Mueller’s evidence. The report suggests — though never explicitly states — that Congress, not the Justice Department, should assume the role of prosecutor when the person who may be prosecuted is the president.



“The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law,” Mueller’s team wrote.



Trump once feared Mueller could destroy his presidency, but the special counsel may instead define it. By releasing a thick catalogue of misconduct and mendacity that, if not criminal, is deeply unflattering, Mueller’s report may mean long-term political problems for a president seeking reelection next year.



Still, Trump’s electoral base has not been swayed by such stories in the past, and he has already claimed victory on the investigation’s bottom line: no conspiracy with Russia, no obstruction of justice.



Since Mueller ended his investigation last month, a central question facing the Justice Department has been why Mueller’s team did not reach a conclusion about whether the president obstructed justice. The issue was complicated, the report said, by two key factors — the fact that, under department practice, a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime, and that a president has a great deal of constitutional authority to give orders to other government employees.



Trump submitted written answers to investigators. The special counsel’s office considered them “inadequate” but did not press for an interview with him because doing so would cause a “substantial delay,” the report says.



The report said investigators felt they had “sufficient evidence to understand relevant events and to make certain assessments without the President’s testimony.”



Trump’s legal team declared Mueller’s report “a total victory” for the president. It “underscores what we have argued from the very beginning — there was no collusion — there was no obstruction,” they said.



In their statement, Trump’s lawyers also attacked former leaders at the FBI for opening “a biased, political attack against the President — turning one of our foundational legal standards on its head.”



Trump said little publicly about the report’s release. At an event Thursday, he indicated he was having a “good day,” and adding that “this should never happen to another president again, this hoax.” Ahead of the report’s release, the president lobbed a familiar attack on the investigation. “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” he tweeted. “The Greatest Political Hoax of all time! Crimes were committed by Crooked, Dirty Cops and DNC/The Democrats.”



If Mueller’s report was a victory for the president, it was an ugly one. Investigators paint a portrait of a president who believes the Justice Department and the FBI should answer to his orders, even when it comes to criminal investigations.



During a meeting in which the president complained about then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, Trump insisted that past attorneys general had been more obedient to their presidents, referring to President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, as well as the Obama administration.



“You’re telling me that Bobby and Jack didn’t talk about investigations? Or Obama didn’t tell Eric Holder who to investigate?” Trump told senior White House staffers Stephen K. Bannon and Donald McGahn, according to the report.



“Bannon recalled that the President was as mad as Bannon had ever seen him and that he screamed at McGahn about how weak Sessions was,” the report said.



Repeatedly, it appears Trump may have been saved from more serious legal jeopardy because his own staffers refused to carry out orders they thought were problematic or potentially illegal.



For instance, in the early days of the administration, when the president was facing growing questions concerning then-national security adviser Michael Flynn’s conversations about sanctions with a Russian ambassador, the president ordered another aide, K.T. McFarland, to write an email saying the president did not direct those conversations. She decided not to do so, unsure if that was true and fearing it might be improper.



“Some evidence suggests that the President knew about the existence and content of Flynn’s calls when they occurred, but the evidence is inconclusive and could not be relied upon to establish the President’s knowledge,’ ” the report said.



The report also recounts a remarkable moment in May 2017 when Sessions told Trump that Mueller had just been appointed special counsel. Trump slumped back in his chair, according to notes from Jody Hunt, Sessions’s then-chief of staff. “Oh my God, this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked,” Trump said. The president further laid into Sessions for his recusal, saying Sessions had let him down.



“Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency,” Trump said, according to Hunt’s notes. “It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”



The special counsel’s report on possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russians to interfere in the 2016 election is extremely detailed with only modest redactions — painting a starkly different picture for Trump than Attorney General William P. Barr has offered, and revealing new details about interactions between Russians and Trump associates.



Mueller’s team wrote that though their investigation “did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” that assertion was informed by the fact that coordination requires more than two parties “taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests.”



And Mueller made it clear: Russia wanted to help the Trump campaign, and the Trump campaign was willing to take it.



“Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” Mueller’s team wrote.



The report detailed a timeline of contacts between the Trump campaign and those with Russian ties — much of it already known, but some of it new.



For example, Mueller’s team asserted that in August 2016, Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the FBI has assessed as having ties to Russian intelligence, met with Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, “to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine.”



The special counsel wrote that both men believed the plan would require candidate Trump’s “assent to succeed (were he elected President).”



“They also discussed the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort’s strategy for winning Democratic votes in Midwestern states,” the special counsel wrote. “Months before that meeting, Manafort had caused internal polling data to be shared with Kilimnik, and the sharing continued for some period of time after their August meeting.”



Mueller’s report suggests his obstruction of justice investigation was heavily informed by an opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that says a sitting president cannot be indicted — a conclusion Mueller’s team accepted.



“And apart from OLC’s constitutional view, we recognized that a federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would place burdens on the President’s capacity to govern and potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct,” Mueller’s team wrote.



That decision, though, seemed to leave investigators in a strange spot. Mueller’s team wrote that they “determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes.” They seemed to shy from producing even an internal document that alleged the president had done something wrong — deciding, essentially, that they wouldn’t decide.



“Although a prosecutor’s internal report would not represent a formal public accusation akin to an indictment, the possibility of the report’s public disclosure and the absence of a neutral adjudicatory forum to review its findings counseled against determining ‘that the person’s conduct constitutes a federal offense.’ ”



Barr said during a news conference Thursday that Justice Department officials asked Mueller “about the OLC opinion and whether or not he was taking the position that he would have found a crime but for the existence of the OLC opinion.”



“He made it very clear, several times, that he was not taking a position — he was not saying but for the OLC opinion he would have found a crime,” Barr said.



Mueller did not attend the news conference.



Barr addressed the media before releasing the report. He made repeated references to “collusion,” echoing language the president has stressed even though it is not a relevant legal term.



Barr also described how the nation’s top law enforcement officials wrestled with investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice. He and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein “disagreed with some of the special counsel’s legal theories and felt that some of the episodes did not amount to obstruction as a matter of law” but that they accepted the special counsel’s “legal framework” as they analyzed the case, Barr said.



It was the first official acknowledgment of differing views inside the Justice Department about how to investigate the president.



Barr also spoke about the president’s state of mind as Trump responded to the unfolding investigation. “As the Special Counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” he said.



The Mueller report is considered so politically explosive that even the Justice Department’s rollout plan sparked a firestorm, with Democrats suggesting that the attorney general was trying to improperly color Mueller’s findings before the public could read them.



Prompted by a reporter, Barr responded to a call earlier Thursday from the top two Democrats in Congress to have Mueller appear before House and Senate committees. “I have no objection to Bob Mueller personally testifying,” the attorney general said.



In a letter, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said they wanted testimony “as soon as possible” from Mueller. And after Barr’s news conference, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) released a letter to the special counsel seeking an appearance before his panel “no later than May 23.”



Congressional Democrats have vowed to fight to get the entire report, without redactions, as well as the underlying investigative documents Mueller gathered.



The report has been the subject of heated debate since Barr notified Congress last month that Mueller had completed his work.



Barr told lawmakers he needed time to redact sensitive information before it could be made public, including any grand jury material as well as details whose public release could harm ongoing investigations.



Barr also said he would review the document to redact information that would “potentially compromise sources and methods” in intelligence collection and anything that would “unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties.”



That language suggests Barr wants to keep secret any derogatory information gathered by investigators about figures who ended up not being central to Mueller’s investigation.



Barr notified Congress after the report’s release that senior members of each party would get a chance to review a less-redacted version next week. The invitation was extended to the leaders of congressional committees and one staffer each. Democrats immediately panned the offer, though, calling it a “non-starter.”



Greg Miller, Spencer S. Hsu, Karoun Demirjian, Ellen Nakashima, Philip Rucker, John Wagner and Felicia Sonmez contributed to this report."



Special counsel's report says investigators struggled with whether Trump committed crime of obstruction - The Washington Post

Opinion | Mr. Mueller’s Indictment - The New York Times

"By The Editorial Board, www.nytimes.com April 18th, 2019

The special counsel’s report reveals a pattern of deceit and dysfunction. What comes next is up to Congress.

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

So much for “complete and total exoneration.”

To the contrary, it turns out that Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors and investigators found “substantial evidence” that President Trump broke federal law on numerous occasions by attempting to shut down or interfere with the nearly-two-year Russia investigation.

In addition to pointing to possible criminality, the report revealed a White House riddled with dysfunction and distrust, one in which Mr. Trump and his aides lie with contempt for one another and the public. Some of the president’s efforts to interfere with the investigation failed, the report concluded, only because “the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

Put another way, Mr. Trump may survive, thanks to advisers who chose to refuse or simply ignore his demands to do what the former White House counsel Donald McGahn at one point referred to as “crazy shit.”

Mr. Trump — referred to repeatedly by aides as “the boss” — is shown as so attentive to covering his tracks that at one point he scolds Mr. McGahn for taking notes during a meeting. “I never had a lawyer who took notes,” Mr. Trump is quoted as saying. Mr. McGahn responded that he was a “real lawyer.”

With the public release of a redacted version of the special counsel’s report on Thursday, Americans also at last got a clear answer for a central question raised by the terse — and now clearly misleading — summary offered four weeks ago by Attorney General William Barr: Why did Mr. Mueller decide not to make a finding about whether President Trump obstructed justice?

“We determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the president committed crimes,” the report explains, because “fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought.”

In other words, Mr. Mueller felt his hands were tied. Longstanding Justice Department policy prohibits the indictment of a sitting president, and it isn’t fair to make accusations without giving the president a legal forum in which to respond.

A bit further on, the 448-page report says, “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.”

So what now? Although Mr. Mueller was unable to bring criminal charges against the president himself, his report lays a foundation for investigation by Congress, which has the authority and the responsibility to check the executive branch and hold the president accountable. “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the president's corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law,” the report states.

It is up to Congress to decide whether the behavior described in this report meets an acceptable standard for the country’s chief executive.

In order to adequately conduct such an investigation, Congress must have access to a fully uncensored version of the report and all its underlying materials. Congressional leaders are right to subpoena the full report, as the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jerrold Nadler, said he would do on Thursday.

The public also has a right to hear Mr. Mueller testify before Congress at the earliest opportunity.

Descriptions in the public version of the report of the ways in which the president used, and abused, his powers challenge the dignity of the presidency and the free and fair function of the justice system. The special counsel investigated 11 incidents in which the president may have obstructed justice, the same offense facing Richard Nixon during Watergate and Bill Clinton during his impeachment.

The report notes that the president engaged in “public attacks on the investigation, nonpublic efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation.” That the president’s norm-shattering behavior has become so flagrant and familiar doesn’t make it right.

Little wonder that Mr. Trump, when notified that a special counsel had been appointed to scrutinize his behavior, reportedly slumped in his chair and said: “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”

In addition to indicting, convicting or securing guilty pleas from 34 people, the special counsel’s office made 14 referrals for further investigation of potential criminal activity outside the purview of the investigation’s mandate. Twelve of those referrals remain secret.

The report is more definitive when it comes to the extensive interference by Russian spies and hackers in the 2016 election, a campaign of disruption it calls “sweeping and systematic.”

Mr. Mueller’s investigation found that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” Mr. Mueller was not able in the end to establish definitive coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

At the same time, large sections of the report, apparently regarding dealings between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, have been blacked out. Mr. Barr said Thursday that any such coordination between the website and the campaign wouldn’t be criminal. Congress and the American people deserve to know what happened nonetheless.

If the report — and the entire saga around the Russia investigation — has one through-line, it is the dishonesty at the heart of the Trump administration. The president told Mr. McGahn to lie to reporters about Mr. Trump’s attempt to fire the special prosecutor. The press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, made up from whole cloth the notion that “rank-and-file F.B.I. agents had lost confidence” in the ousted director, James Comey. Half a dozen people connected with the Mueller investigation have been formally charged with — or pleaded guilty to — lying to investigators.

Then on Thursday, just before the report was made public, the attorney general tarnished himself and undermined the integrity of his office by dissembling about what the report said.

By contrast, the special prosecutor’s report illustrates again and again that, despite Mr. Trump’s constant cries of “fake news,” the responsible news media’s reporting on the investigation was overwhelmingly accurate.

Mr. Mueller may have thought he couldn’t indict a president in the legal sense of the term, but he has delivered a devastating description of Mr. Trump’s attempts to abuse his powers and corrupt his aides. This report, even in its censored format, is an important step toward putting the truth of this presidency in the public record. But there’s still a long way to go before it can be said that justice has been done."

Opinion | Mr. Mueller’s Indictment - The New York Times

#ImpeachTrump Nancy Pelosi get behind Impeachment proceedings or step aside so we can get a real leader in the House of Representatives who is willing to do their Constitution mandated job.

Ocasio-Cortez says she'll sign on to impeachment proceedings - CNNPolitics

"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday that she would support impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump after reading special counsel Robert Mueller's report.



Ocasio-Cortez's comments differ from Democratic leadership opting not to encourage impeachment. The report indicated that Mueller was unable to conclude that 'no criminal conduct occurred' on the issue of obstruction -- and deemed Congress capable of determining that Trump obstructed justice.



"Mueller's report is clear in pointing to Congress' responsibility in investigating obstruction of justice by the President. It is our job as outlined in Article 1, Sec 2, Clause 5 of the US Constitution," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, promising to sign on to impeachment proceedings led by fellow freshman Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.



Ocasio-Cortez added, "While I understand the political reality of the Senate + election considerations, upon reading this DoJ report, which explicitly names Congress in determining obstruction, I cannot see a reason for us to abdicate from our constitutionally mandated responsibility to investigate."



Ocasio-Cortez says she'll sign on to impeachment proceedings - CNNPolitics

James Clapper: Mueller report is devastating

Trump on Mueller's appointment: I'm F***ed

What the Mueller report says about that 'compromising tape'

Trump did conspire with Russians. Mueller expects Congress to impeach Trump. Attorney General Barr lied in his letter.

Mueller report examines '10 episodes' of potential obstruction by Trump | US news | The Guardian

Mueller report examines '10 episodes' of potential obstruction by Trump | US news | The Guardian

Mueller report shows President Trump tried to remove Special Counsel

Mueller report shows President Trump tried to remove Special Counsel

Mueller Report Is Released: Live Updates - The New York Times

The Justice Department has released a redacted version of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated Russian election interference, any ties to the Trump campaign and possible presidential obstruction.

By Peter Baker

Updated 6 minutes ago

Right Now

The report has been released publicly. Our reporters are reading it and will post major findings and analysis soon.

President Trump is attending a White House event for wounded warriors and is speaking after Attorney General William P. Barr’s news conference about the Mueller report.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

• Attorney General William P. Barr offered a strong defense of President Trump before releasing Mr. Mueller’s report, saying that investigators “found no evidence” that any member of the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in its effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. But he left no doubt that Russia interfered in the election, a fact Mr. Trump has not acknowledged.
• Mr. Barr said during a news conference that he gave Mr. Trump’s lawyers access to Mr. Mueller’s report “earlier this week,” before it was to be sent to Congress and made public. Mr. Trump’s lawyers did not ask for any redactions.
• Investigators examined 10 episodes in which the president may have obstructed justice but the attorney general said he concluded they did not add up to a crime.
• Even if the Trump campaign colluded with WikiLeaks, that was not a crime, Mr. Barr said.
• Mr. Trump did not even wait for the report to begin responding aggressively, lashing out with a barrage of tweets denouncing the investigation, while Democrats lashed out at Mr. Barr, accusing him of acting as a spokesman for the president.

Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr. Last month, Mr. Mueller delivered a report on his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election to Mr. Barr.The New York Times and EPA, via Shutterstock

Barr said Mueller ‘found no collusion.’

In his news conference on Thursday morning, Mr. Barr at times sounded like a defense lawyer, making no criticism of the president and instead offering an understanding interpretation of actions that Mr. Trump’s critics have said amounted to obstruction of justice.

[Read Mr. Barr’s full prepared remarks.]

In addressing obstruction, Mr. Barr said the president had no corrupt intent and that his actions seen as impeding the investigation were a result of being understandably “frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks.”

Mr. Barr said the White House made no claims of executive privilege over any information in the report and that none of the redactions in the report to be sent to Congress were made at the request of the White House.

Trump’s lawyers read the report in advance.

Mr. Barr said he gave access to the report to Mr. Trump’s lawyers, which gave them an opportunity to prepare their public defense in advance.

“Earlier this week, the president’s personal counsel requested and were given the opportunity to read a final version of the redacted report before it was publicly released,” Mr. Barr said. “The president’s personal lawyers were not permitted to make, and did not request, any redactions.” 

Mr. Barr said he did so in accordance with the “practice followed under the Ethics in Government Act,” permitting those named in a report to read it before publication. However, that has not always been the practice. In 1998, the independent counsel Ken Starr declined to let President Bill Clinton or his lawyers read his report on the Monica Lewinsky case before he sent it to Congress.

At the news conference, Mr. Barr made sure to include Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who first appointed Mr. Mueller.

Mueller examined 10 episodes for possible obstruction.

Mr. Barr said investigators examined 10 episodes in which the president may have obstructed justice. Among the incidents that Mr. Mueller examined was a June 2017 effort by Mr. Trump to have his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, fire Mr. Mueller.

“After carefully reviewing the facts and legal theories outlined in the report, and in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other department lawyers, the deputy attorney general and I concluded that the evidence developed by the special counsel is not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense,” Mr. Barr said.

Mr. Barr would not explain why Mr. Mueller did not reach that conclusion, saying he would let the report speak for itself. The attorney general said that he “disagreed with some of the special counsel’s legal theories” regarding obstruction but even accepting them found no basis for a criminal charge.

Mr. Barr said he would not stand in the way of Mr. Mueller testifying on Capitol Hill about his findings. “I have no objection to Bob Mueller testifying,” Mr. Barr said. 

Read Attorney General William Barr’s Summary of the Mueller Report

The letter, by Attorney General William P. Barr, details the main findings of the special counsel’s two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Barr says that even if the Trump campaign colluded with WikiLeaks, that is not a crime.

Mr. Barr provided an important qualifier to the determination that Mr. Trump and the Trump campaign did not engage in illegal collusion — not with the Russian government that stole the Democratic emails, but with WikiLeaks, which published them.

“The special counsel also investigated whether any member or affiliate of the Trump campaign encouraged or otherwise played a role in these dissemination efforts,” he said. “Under applicable law, publication of these types of materials would not be criminal unless the publisher also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy. Here too, the special counsel’s report did not find that any person associated with the Trump campaign illegally participated in the dissemination of the materials.”

In other words, since WikiLeaks did not participate in Russia’s underlying hacking of the emails, its actions were no crime. Thus, any Trump campaign collusion with WikiLeaks could not be an illegal conspiracy.

Mueller Report: Who and What the Special Counsel Investigated

More than two years of criminal indictments and steady revelations about Trump campaign contacts with Russians reveal the scope of the special counsel investigation.

Trump frames the report as exoneration.

Mr. Trump tweeted a photo resembling a “Game of Thrones” poster that depicted him staring into a cloud, saying “No Collusion. No Obstruction. For the haters and radical left Democrats: Game Over.”

The tweet was the latest of a barrage that the president posted starting early Thursday morning, long before the report was released. He has an event with wounded warriors at 10:30 a.m. where he will likely speak with reporters.

The report may for the first time provide Mr. Trump’s official responses to Mr. Mueller’s specific questions, which have remained secret since he responded in writing in November. With his lawyers worried that he would make a false statement and expose himself to criminal charges, the president refused to be interviewed in person, and Mr. Mueller did not try to force the issue with a subpoena.

By drafting the answers in writing in consultation with his legal team, Mr. Trump may have sidestepped what his lawyers feared would be a “perjury trap.” 

Waiting for report, Democrats lash out at Barr.

Democrats quickly assailed Mr. Barr for trying to frame the results of the report before lawmakers or the public had a chance to read it for themselves.

“It is clear Congress and the American people must hear from Special Counsel Robert Mueller in person to better understand his findings,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said on Twitter. “We are now requesting Mueller to appear before @HouseJudiciary as soon as possible.”

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said Mr. Barr’s performance demonstrated fealty to Mr. Trump. “Attorney General Barr is supposed to be the nation’s top impartial lawyer, not a White House spokesman,” he said. “His press conference was just an attempt to spin a report nobody has read yet, and that’s really disappointing.”

Democratic presidential candidates quickly pounced on Mr. Barr as well. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, in a tweet, labeled the attorney general’s remarks as “spin.” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said it was “ a disgrace to see an Attorney General acting as if he’s the personal attorney and publicist for the president of the United States.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York called Mr. Barr’s news conference “a complete farce and an embarrassing display of propaganda on behalf of President Trump.”

---

Katie Benner, Michael S. Schmidt, Eileen Sullivan, Michael Tackett and Noah Weiland contributed reporting.

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last four presidents for The Times and The Washington Post. He also is the author of five books, most recently “Impeachment: An American History.” @peterbakernyt •Facebook



Mueller Report Is Released: Live Updates - The New York Times