The Mueller investigation.

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Quantum Quack, Feb 17, 2018.

  1. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,447
    may i suggest that demands in an open forum are more like a adhominem in themselves if they directly deviate from the subject by the nature to assert a sense of entitlement that is being disrupted.

    do members have an entitlement ?
    legally there are obvious issues....however...

    past the basic legal stuff... any concept of demand is inherently doomed to fail its subject nature by asserting a sense of desire to stop a fellow contributor.

    you may choose to make a demand for adherence to a rule.
    that rule is subject to the approval of a site moderator when you agree to join the site.

    like choosing to go to another country then demanding they change their laws to suit you.

    personal critique of a member is probably subject to forum area and as a point of note to suggest that validates your postion seems to defy its own sense of logic.

     
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  3. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Censorship is of it's nature potentially evil.
    Secrecy in government usually hides something that most of us would find to be evil, deceitful, anti-democratic, or distasteful.
    And yet, secrecy in government seems to be the norm.

    Always wonder:
    What are they hiding? and perhaps more importantly: Why do they feel the need to hide it?

    ........................
    Wild guess de jour
    We will never see the unedited/unredacted report.
     
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  5. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    The report will obviously show that the Trump tower meeting was about adopting a few dozen babies from mothers below the poverty line (it's well known that Trump prioritizes his personal interactions with individuals from the lower economic classes, often skipping important business meetings just to spend time with them). It was necessary to conceal this information from Congress, the general public and security officials, because general awareness of the adoptions could have potentially compromised national security at a time when caravans of migrants are threatening to leave empty water bottles and bags of Tostitos scattered all over the border.


    It seems to have worked out well for his colonial compatriots in Ukraine, he can be forgiven for thinking that's how it works in civilized countries too.
     
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    But we will continue to assign responsibility for that secrecy and its implications to a general bothsides mass of "government" and so forth. We will not name or blame the actual perpetrators or beneficiaries.
    - - - - -
    That's an example of the kind of defamation - not only wrong, but obviously calculated - that you claim to oppose.
    To the extent it replaces or fills the role of reasoning from evidence, which in your case is almost completely, it is also an ad hominem argument, used preemptively - which is kind of interesting, as a standard Republican Party media feed technique.
    ? That's possible, but unlikely: One would have to take your word for it.
    The evidence here, from your posts, is that you have a great deal of trouble even recognizing the content of my posts. Granted you mostly refuse overtly, leaving the question of comprehension open, but the rare attempts to engage do not suggest comprehension on your part. Whether you understand what you are doing or not is anybody's guess.

    Generally speaking, if it's not a canard of Republican Party propaganda du jour, it's not in your posts - and few of my posts can be addressed by repeating Republican Party media feeds.
    Observations, warnings, etc, do not become "ad hominems" because you declare them to be so - something you do in perfect tandem with the Republican Party media feeds you fill the rest of your posts with. You apparently do not know what an ad hominem argument is.
    Clue: you use the term "ad hominems". That's an illiteracy rarely found in the writing of those who know what an ad hominem argument is.
    Didn't say you did (although I could have pointed out that you have in fact attempted to describe the Iraq War as bipartisan and bothsides and so forth, when for some unknown reason you were trying to sell Democratic Party warmongering as equivalent to Republican Party).

    That's a bizarre misreading - exactly backwards, directly contrary to the sense of my post. It's almost as if you had no clue - as if the central point, that describing US Republican-backing corporate interests as backers of nationalism while the Iraq War they backed last time around was a globalist venture is a major confusion of yours, was invisible to you. And then you throw in Clinton - - ?

    Here is another example of your misunderstandings - apparently (there is no way to tell for sure):
    You just claimed to understand my posting with no trouble. Now you can't comprehend a simple reality-based observation about US politics from my point of view.
    You are trying to construct a "deep State" description of the US that will match your pre-selected division of influences, rather than the actors and events of US history and politics and economics. It won't work.
    There is. It's called a reality check.
    You have not seen what does not exist. And I am perfectly justified in claiming you have not seen what does exist, if you deny that it exists.
    You lack information. That's why you sucker for rightwing authoritarian US media feeds - they dominate the propaganda sources, and propaganda sources are - apparently - the only sources you have.
     
    Last edited: Apr 13, 2019
  8. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    "pro democrat freedom workers looking for a fair deal" ?

    must be awfully hard to tell the difference when looking from soo far up and soo far away.
    imagine, if they work really hard for below minimum wage, agree to work to undercut medical and education costs for them and their children, one bright marvelous day in the future, they will be equally treated to have the opportunity to participate in a paper towel scramble when all their worldly possessions have been wiped away.
    assuming they are not black, or poor, or kinda foreign looking...
    and they pay all their taxes and never exercise free speech....
    ...
    marching on to glory they are...

    bigger and better paper towel scramble ??(Fake it till you steal aid it)
    aid convoy hijacking ?
    jungle law ?
    he was probably on the phone to banning at the time
    "oh shit some F_cking idiot just put me in-front of a table full of paper towels and a crowd of dirty poor people... what should i do?"
    Banning: "get rid of it as quickly as possible"
    "of the people? but the cameras are on????
    banning "i mean the paper towels"
    "ok" . "done" ..."now what?" ... hang on, there is an entire table full, i am not going to stand here and throw them all away,"
    banning: walk away WALK AWAY !" ...
     
    Last edited: Apr 14, 2019
  9. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Just this past February Trump's sister resigned her judgeship when faced with an inquiry into Fred's tax scam she shared with Donald.
    Apparently the tax code violations are past the tax law statute of limitations, but there is no statute of limitations on judicial ethics violations. (Which is why the inquiry focused on her instead of Donald - her records would have been available for discovery).
    Since she resigned that avenue for discovery is moot, as they say.
    But this is hardball, if the enforcement authorities can stay the course.
     
  10. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    The Barr Bar

    Amid the murmur and buzz about the forthcoming redacted Mueller report, pundits eventually got around to recalling the Christmas Eve memo, when Attorney General William Barr advised President Bush to pardon people involved in a scandal to which Mr. Bush was substantially connected, even as a material witness. But that 1992 maneuver was not the first time Barr had, as a public attorney, attempted the maneuver.

    On Friday the thirteenth October 1989, by happenstance the same day as the “Black Friday” market crash, news leaked of a legal memo authored by William Barr. He was then serving as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It is highly uncommon for any OLC memo to make headlines. This one did because it was issued in “unusual secrecy” and concluded that the FBI could forcibly abduct people in other countries without the consent of the foreign state. The headline also noted the implication of the legal opinion at that moment in time. It appeared to pave the way for abducting Panama's leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega.

    Members of Congress asked to see the full legal opinion. Barr refused, but said he would provide an account that “summarizes the principal conclusions” ....

    .... When Barr withheld the full OLC opinion in 1989 and said to trust his summary of the principal conclusions, Yale law school professor Harold Koh wrote that Barr's position was “particularly egregious.” Congress also had no appetite for Barr's stance, and eventually issued a subpoena to successfully wrench the full OLC opinion out of the Department.

    What's different from that struggle and the current struggle over the Mueller report is that we know how the one in 1989 eventually turned out.

    When the OLC opinion was finally made public long after Barr left office, it was clear that Barr's summary had failed to fully disclose the opinion's principal conclusions.

    And as Ryan Goodman↱ notes for Just Security, the Attorney General would then go on to obfuscate, including leaving Poppy Bush embarrassed and unable to answer questions about the summary of the OLC report. Furthermore, even the State Department, under the one and only James Baker, found need to get involved, noting the narrowness of the opinion, failure to consider intenrational law, and disregard shown the duties of the presidency. Goodman reminds it remains unknown whether the Secretary of State ran his statement by Justice, observing Baker's "description of the OLC opinion would turn out to be not just misleading, but false". When Congress asked for the full OLC opinion, the answer was no, but the Attorney General delegated that response to an assistant.

    The obvious seems obvious: "So why not release the 1989 opinion? Was there something to hide?"

    The idea that Barr and the administration would not even discuss the content of the opinion could not withstand public pressure. Barr's stance was especially untenable because his OLC opinion reversed a prior OLC opinion (an unusual event), and the Justice Department had released that prior opinion in full to the public just four years earlier.

    For some reason, it sometimes seems people have trouble with the question of hiding something. Sometimes we refer to partisanship, and this can easily get lost in both-sides equivocation. Here is an important indicator: While the question of what someone might be hiding can seem like an easy trope, it is harder to dismiss of one does something like lying in public, and even more so if an Attorney General takes that lie to Congress. On 8 November 1989, Attorney General William Barr appeared before the House Judiciary:

    First, Barr started out by saying that the history of internal Justice Department rules was a basis for not handing over the full opinion to Congress. “Chairman. Since its inception, the Office of Legal Counsel's opinions have been treated as confidential,” Barr said.

    That statement was misleading or false, and Chairman Edwards knew it.

    What we're seeing in Barr's current tenure atop the Department of Justice is pretty much to form. "Some of the events that unfolded," Goodman writes of the 1989 hearing, "also bear a remarkable resemblance to Barr's handling of the Mueller report to date." After his false claim about OLC opinions, he sparred with Chairman Edwards, leading the legislator to explicitly remind of the point, complaining that while Congress had certain OLC decisions, what they were being told they couldn't have was the decision that reverses what they already had. The false pretenses make it clear the Department of Justice was hiding something.

    The following paragraph from Goodman reads pretty much like business as usual with Republicans:

    Barr then pointed out his willingness to provide Congress with “our conclusions and our reasoning.” This was the 13-page written testimony which contained a detailed recounting of the views expressed in the OLC opinion. Chairman Edwards complained that Barr had violated the rules of the House by submitting his written testimony only that same morning of the hearing, rather than 48 hours in advance. Barr's timing meant that members of the committee and their staff were not well equipped to analyze or question the OLC's analysis. But at least they had the OLC's views in writing. Or did they?

    One of the big questions about Thursday's pending release of the redacted report is whether or not it will happen. And consider the hair one splits, at that point: Procedural necessity can, indeed, cause delays; given history, if something pushes the release back a day, even better for President Trump. Barr has used Christmas Eve, before, so we ought not be surprised at the proximity to Good Friday and Easter.

    More directly, Mr. Barr, in his short tenure under Mr. Trump, is following his own long-established model, to parse not simply like an attorney but, rather, a bad stereotype thereof. His purpose is utterly political, and if he cannot win outright, the least he can do for the team is obfuscate. His actions in 1989 reflect this, and in the current circumstance the Attorney General's behavior continues to remind that the key↑ to understanding the Sunday letter (24 March) is to scrutinize what Mr. Barr says according to the point of how it is not a disqualifying lie.

    Recalling a 1993 paper on the subject of Barr's behavior in 1989, Goodman writes:

    Without the benefit of the OLC opinion, Professor Koh explained how Barr could be hiding important matters by asking Congress and the public to trust just the 13-page version. Koh wrote:

    “Barr's continuing refusal to release the 1989 opinion left outsiders with no way to tell whether it rested on factual assumptions that did not apply to the earlier situation, which part of the earlier opinion had not been overruled, or whether the overruling opinion contained nuances, subtleties, or exceptions that Barr's summary in testimony simply omitted.”​

    Koh's words proved prescient.

    Goodman's analysis of three powerful distortions can easily be understated if one calculates to contain the questions entirely to politics. In consideration of a question about the U.N. Charter, Barr's "proposition is a very difficult one to sustain, and as Brian Finucane and Marty Lederman have explained, Barr was wrong". Also, Goodman quotes law professor Jeanne Woods, who explained over twenty years ago that, "A careful analysis of the published opinion, and the reasoning underlying it, however, reveals the depth of its deviation from accepted norms". Goodman is more direct in his analysis of the Charming Betsy reversal: "That part of the OLC's analysis has not withstood the test of time. Indeed, there was good reason to keep it buried." There also arose a question of Barr's apparent failure "to inform Congress that the 1989 opinion discussed international law"; consider that a State Department legal adviser who testified alongside Mr. Barr in 1989, pretended, "As Mr. Barr has indicated, that opinion addressed a narrow question—the domestic legal authority to make such arrests", in order to posture State's role in the hearing as addressing "issues not discussed in the OLC opinion—the international law and foreign policy implications of a nonconsensual arrest in a foreign country". That statement was inaccurate; Goodman notes, "the OLC opinion had addressed some questions of international law and how a specific treaty—the U.N. Charter—might apply in such contexts". And while the OLC opinion itself struggled to justify itself on this point, Goodman also reminds, "What's relevant is that Barr represented to Congress in his written and oral testimony that the OLC opinion did not address these legal issues, even though it did."

    The object of obfuscation was, then, and is, today, to allow a particular and calculated narrative time to set in the marketplace so that all emerging deviations can be postured as contrarian to some established truth. There is a certain amount of what Barr said in 1989 that was purely political, instead of juristic; there is also a certain amount that was plain wrong. This was the point of styling a memo that "summarizes the principle conclusions", as the Attorney General put it, thirty years ago.

    Or, as Jed Shugerman↱ put it last month, the 24 March "letter—word for word, legal theory for legal theory—shares exactly what we already knew about Barr's view of the relevant law without telling us anything about Mueller's factual findings."

    And Goodman, yesterday: "Some of the events that unfolded also bear a remarkable resemblance to Barr's handling of the Mueller report to date."
     
  11. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Notes on #347↑ Above

    Goodman, Ryan. "Barr's Playbook: He Misled Congress When Omitting Parts of Justice Dep't Memo in 1989". Just Security. 15 April 2019. JustSecurity.org. 16 April 2019. http://bit.ly/2V2xm5R

    Shugerman, Jed. "Why Did Barr Share Only Four Incomplete Sentences From the Mueller Report?" Slate. 24 March 2019. Slate.com. 16 April 2019. http://bit.ly/2Uo35Km
     
  12. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    A Tale of Two Headlines

    CNN↱ ran with, "Judge in FOIA case says he may want to review DOJ redactions of Mueller report after release". Politico, in its own distinct manner, settled on, "Judge: Barr sowing public mistrust with Mueller report handling".

    Comparatively, CNN's Katelyn Polantz opens:

    Federal District Judge Reggie Walton expressed uncertainty about the redactions Attorney General William Barr is making to special counsel Robert Mueller's report and suggested he may want to review the Justice Department's redactions for himself once versions of it are made public.

    "Obviously there is a real concern as to whether there is full transparency," Walton said at a Tuesday court hearing in Washington about a request from BuzzFeed News to have the Justice Department release the report quickly under the Freedom of Information Act. "The attorney general has created an environment that has caused a significant part of the American public to be concerned" about the redactions.

    Josh Gerstein, for Politico:

    Attorney General William Barr has created public distrust about whether the Justice Department is committed to sharing as much as possible about the Russia probe's findings, a federal judge said on Tuesday.

    “The attorney general has created an environment that has caused a significant part of the public … to be concerned about whether or not there is full transparency,” U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton said during a hearing Tuesday afternoon on a Freedom of Information Act suit demanding access to a report detailing the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller.

    Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush, did not elaborate on what actions or statements by the attorney general have generated those perceptions.

    At this point, we should note Judge Walton rejected BuzzFeed's request for preliminary injunction to require unredaction. While the D.C. District Court judge "told the parties in court he's interested in putting the proceedings on a 'fast track'", according to Polantz, he apparently was not impressed by a BuzzFeed pitch to that very point; for its part, the Justice Department was about as calculated in its vagary as we might expect. Gerstein reports:

    Matthew Topic, a lawyer for BuzzFeed, said at the hearing that putting a court order in place would speed up further litigation over whatever information is redacted from the report.

    “The government claims it can make an open-ended extension with no specific deadline in mind,” Topic said.

    Indeed, Justice Department attorney Courtney Enlow declined to say whether the version of the report made public Thursday will be identical to what the department releases under FOIA. Nor could she say whether she'd be prepared to commit to that during another hearing set for May 2 on the BuzzFeed case and a related suit.

    “I can't give you a timeline,” Enlow said.

    As to the fast track, the Politico report also notes a suit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, regarding other materials related to Mueller's investigation. Judge Walton apparently intends to deal with the report itself, first, and then the otehr materials:

    “We’d be dealing separately with the report,” said Walton. He also said he’ll want to consider whether to order the government to give him an unredacted copy of the report so he can assess whether the redactions are proper.

    “That’s something we will have to work through. I’ll have to think about it,” he said.

    Walton said he hopes any disputes will be limited because the Justice Department makes the bulk of the document public.

    Polantz, for CNN, includes the detail that, "A separate judge did this in CNN's court case seeking former FBI Director James Comey's memos about his meetings with President Donald Trump."

    Certes, that detail is important; nobody is really surprised that Judge Walton said no to BuzzFeed at this time. There is, however, an observable difference between the narratives, and there are days when the principles of either are appropriate.

    The Politico headline stands out as more politically active, or, at least, less journalistically passive, and Gerstein's reporting presupposes, in part, certain norms, baselines, or standards about the fact of being an Attorney General of the United States. The CNN headline and report cover the basics, and, yes, the detail that Walton's answer, at the end of the day, followed the usual way of things is itself important to keep in mind when trying to assess the situation. But, yes, what seems so nakedly political about Gerstein's report is not simply the fact of Gerstein's headline and lede, but, rather, that it is possible for reportage to go that way. It's not that the CNN report skips out on certain points, but that the lede seems somewhat dampened by comparison, and the headline about as nondescript as can be. Part of that is market dynamic, of course, because Politico always was a bit more specialized than CNN, but therein we come back to a particular point: It is easy to understate certain significance if we do not recognize it.

    Attorney General Barr's conduct is extraordinary compared to Attorneys General who aren't him. Judge Walton's remarks, for all the political weight they can carry, really are a point about juristics, law enforcement, governance, and the magnitude of an Attorney General's appearance of impropriety. Compared to the usual way of things, there have been some judicial scoldings around the pushback against investigation and process, and the fact of a district court judge willing to actually call out the top of the Justice Department like that is itself significant.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Gerstein, Josh. "Judge: Barr sowing public mistrust with Mueller report handling". Politico. 16 April 2019. Politico.com. 17 April 2019. https://politi.co/2UnHC4a

    Polantz, Katelyn. "Judge in FOIA case says he may want to review DOJ redactions of Mueller report after release". CNN. 16 April 2019. CNN.com. 17 April 2019. https://cnn.it/2IAR2qR
     
  13. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    23,328
    Can they ask ex president Obama to review the unredacted report and state whether the concerns are legitimate or not?
    Is Obama still bound by his security clearance as ex-president?
     
  14. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    On Questions of Lying

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!


    ↖Click image↗ for Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
    (pdf, 145.5 MB, via NPR)

    A reminder, at this point, since msnbc is already onto it, that we should scrutinize what Mr. Barr says according to the point of how it is not a disqualifying lie (#316↑). Former Deputy and Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, a frequent presence on the network's punditry circuit, as well as attorney and host Ari Melber, picked issues with Attorney General's characterization of the Muller report, per Mr. Barr's 24 March letter in which he stated, explicitly, "The Special Counsel's decision to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime." Katyal and Melber point to the opening pages of Part II of the Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election [pdf pp 213-14]↱, citing points orbiting the standing OLC opinion against prosecuting a sitting president, including:

    Third, we considered whether to evaluate the conduct we investigated under the Justice Manual standards governing prosecution and declination decisions, but we determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes. The threshold step under the Justice Manual standards is to assess whether a person's conduct "constitutes a federal offense." U.S. Dep't of Justice, Justice Manual § 9-27.220 (2018) (Justice Manual). Fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought. The ordinary means for an individual to respond to an accusation is through speedy and public trial, with all the procedural protections that surround a criminal case. An individual who believes he was wrongly accused can use that process to seek to clear his name. In contrast, a prosecutor's judgment that crimes were committed, but that no charges will be brought, affords no such adversarial opportunity for public name-clearing before an impartial adjudicator.

    The concerns about the fairness of such a determination would be heightened in the case of a sitting President, where a federal prosecutor's accusation of a crime, even in an internal report, could carry consequences that extend beyond the realm of criminal justice. OLC noted similar concerns about sealed indictments. Even if an indictment were sealed during the President's term, OLC reasoned, "it would be very difficult to preserve [an indictment's] secrecy," and if an indictment became public, "the stigma and opprobrium" could imperil the President's ability to govern. 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 adjudicator form to review its findings counseled against potentially determining "that the person's conduct constitutes a federal offense." Justice Manual § 9-27.220.

    Fourth, 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. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are not able to reach that judgment. The evidence we obtained about the President's actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

    Mr. Barr's 24 March letter not only bears all the shadow of impropriety, but the underlying question might well resolve to what counts as a disqualifying lie. That is, the Attorney General of the United States very much has the appearance of issuing a false statement to Congress in re his handling of the Mueller investigation: "The Special Counsel's decision," he wrote, "to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime." There is nothing about that statement supported in the Volume II introduction; whatever the subtleties the Attorney General might require are now his to enumerate and explain. The point of leaving it to the Attorney General, as Mr. Barr claimed last month, seems utterly contrary to the expressly enumerated "considerations that guided [the] obstruction-of-justice investigation.

    The Attorney General's letter and subsequent clarification were problematic from the outset; as one Trumpist argument↑ runs, "What matters is, in fact, only if the claims made in that summary are lies or not." And here we have an example of what has every appearance of being a lie. Should we take a moment for subtleties, there is this: It is also because of the standing OLC opinion against prosecuting a sitting president that the Fourth point, bears such a blow against the Attorney General's summary. Were this a standard prosecutorial inquiry, the written memorandum would not contain such an explicit statement as, "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".

    That Barr passed over that point in order to note specifically, "The Special Counsel states that 'while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him'", is its own particular sleight. Even further, in the subsequent paragraph, where Barr claims the report "leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime", he goes even further to explicitly enumerate that his decision in favor of President Trump is made "applying the principles of federal prosecution that guide our charging decisions", and "without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president". In other words, the 24 March letter throws out the standards enumerated in the investigation report, and replaces them with the very standards the investigation rejected. The irony is no accident; while the Special Counsel appropriately worried that unenforceable condemnation could still disrupt the President's ability to properly govern, the Attorney General turned that principle on its head, stigmatizing the Special Counsel and his office, as well as the Department of Justice, in such a manner they cannot easily respond to.

    Along with the consideration of scrutinizing what Mr. Barr says according to how it is not a disqualifying lie is a question of political argument invested in ignorance akin to that described in a common American lament about civics education. As a purely political argument in a context of politics as bloodsport, in which Donald Trump might be viewed like the bit he did attacking Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania in 2007, perhaps Barr's obfuscating and politicking seems wise or, at the very least, useful. But this is not a purely political question. The last three and a half weeks of the Attorney General's performance have been breathtaking and devastating alike. Of all the people accusing the Justice Department of conspiracy theories, it ought not be the Attorney General. Of all the people writing political documents attacking one of the Justice Department's most important undertakings in years, it ought not be the Attorney General. And to be caught out, with even the mere appearance of such impropriety, as he has, Mr. Barr further harms the Department of Justice. He has labored to mislead the American people; his prevarications discredit the very office he holds and department it administrates.

    And that's just the Attorney General.

    Quite clearly, considerations of President Trump are going to take some more time. But that was the point.

    And as a note both aside unto itself, but also not utterly independent of the point of the Attorney General's deceptive behavior, I had remarked yesterday, in an unrelated issue, about a bit on msnbc with Matthew Miller, an Obama Justice Department spokesman, and Michael Steele, former RNC Chairman. They came to a very self-impressed agreement that clownish and dangerous behavior from Republicans that looks like what they accuse of Democrats comes about because the GOP really believes their own stuff. But this is the weird thing about it: If they believe this is what Obama and Clinton did, why make such a public show about doing it? This reminds a fundamental question about the American conservative ethic, whether all that lamentation about Democrats and corruption and injustice is a pretense intending to justify their own malice.
     
  15. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,882
    Update: While I was up grabbing some tea, Chairman Nadler was giving his press statement; a reporter asked about particular issues, and the Congressman from New York Ten explicitly called out Barr's statement regarding the OLC opinion and his application of "principles of federal prosecution that guide our charging decisions ... without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president".

    To the other, this is all still among the predictable stuff.
     
  16. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

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    8,828
    The threat of war.
     
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  17. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    Can someone enlighten me on the difference between "high crimes" and "high misdemeanors"?

    IMO, a high misdemeanor does not need to be a criminal offense to be sufficient cause for impeachment on the grounds of "unfit to hold the office of president"

    Even if there is no sufficient evidence of prosecutable criminal conduct, there is abundant evidence of misdemeanor conduct by Mr. Trump, sufficient for impeachment.
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Bullshit.
    There was no such threat, and Putin is not a stupid man. He had no fear of war.
    If he had, he would never have pushed Trump for the US Presidency.
    - - - - -
    The key point is that Barr managed to get everyone to repeat - over and over and over - the the Mueller report showed no evidence of Trump colluding with Russians.

    That's absurd, of course. But it's been sold - it's the frame of the public discussion.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2019
  19. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    There is still the matter of high misdemeanors and there is plenty of recorded evidence of that.
     
  20. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Barr sold the false frame. It will be used to deflect any such vague accusations as that.
    Note that Barr has received the full cooperation of the entire American "respectable" media in selling that obvious falsehood.
     
  21. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

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    Who has been pushing the narrative? Not Trump and his supporters.
     
  22. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    wow !
    i didnt think it would get this big
    its looking many times bigger than watergate.

    what surprises me is that DT would not just walk away while he has all his own toys inside his own cot.
    the next move historically would be for the republican party to throw all DT's toys out of the cot & expect him to run after them and leave.
    the next would be general public statement by both sides of the house at disapproval of process(waiting for DT to pack up his toys & go home).

    the irony is 99% of Americans think its ok to cheat on your taxes because they have been raised to believe they get nothing for their taxes unless they are at war with someone.
    capitalism is profit
    taxation is socialism
    this is what the majority of Americans believe regardless of the factual economics

    it is quite fascinating to observer from a distance.
     
  23. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,882
    He needs to hold out for five years before he can try to duck charges on statutes of limitation.

    Actually, at this point, some of it only three.
     

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