On Monday, Pelosi tried to tamp down impeachment fever, while not foreclosing the possibility: “For now, House Democratic leaders appeared to have enough leeway to pursue investigations without formally convening impeachment proceedings.”
Bouie makes the case for impeachment: “there’s also the real question of our constitutional order. Either the president is above the law or he isn’t. Voters can’t determine this… impeachment helps Democrats make a truly comprehensive case against the president, uniting his corruption, his criminality and his contempt for ordinary Americans under a single narrative.”
Hillary Clinton pens an op-ed for the Washington Post advising democrats how to proceed. She suggests time and caution before impeachment: “Watergate offers a better precedent. Then, as now, there was an investigation that found evidence of corruption and a coverup. It was complemented by public hearings conducted by a Senate select committee, which insisted that executive privilege could not be used to shield criminal conduct and compelled White House aides to testify. The televised hearings added to the factual record and, crucially, helped the public understand the facts in a way that no dense legal report could.”
Nadler subpoenaed McGahn to testify and turn over documents for a May 21 hearing. Trump’s lawyers are suggesting they will invoke executive privilege to keep Don McGahn and others from testifying before congress.
Wheeler suggests that McGahn welcomes the subpoena and is eager to testify: “He appears to be upping the ante by further distancing himself from Trump’s corruption.”
Mnuchin has blown past the second deadline to hand over Trump’s tax returns to congress. He says he will reach a final decision by May 6.
To resist Congressional investigations, Trump had called for a refusal of all requests and subpoena’s: “Mr. Trump’s scorched-earth strategy appears meant to prompt a lengthy fight for each subpoena, by giving the House a choice between seeing its subpoenas ignored or going to court to ask a judge to order the administration to comply with them. Such lawsuits would then prompt wrangling in the courts over whether Mr. Trump had the authority to block the subpoena.”
Three current senior Trump Administration officials and one former sounded an alarm about Russian interference in the 2020 elections by speaking with the New York Times: Officials said [Neilson] had become increasingly concerned about Russia’s continued activity in the United States during and after the 2018 midterm elections — ranging from its search for new techniques to divide Americans using social media, to experiments by hackers, to rerouting internet traffic and infiltrating power grids. But in a meeting this year, Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff, made it clear that Mr. Trump still equated any public discussion of malign Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his victory. According to one senior administration official, Mr. Mulvaney said it “wasn’t a great subject and should be kept below his level.”
FBI director Wray gave a warning that the Russians were working on their 2020 election interference now, and that they would use a mix of old and new methods this time around.
The Washington Post reports on why Trump did not fire Rosenstein back in September when news broke that he ha discussed the 25th Amendment and wearing a wire. He assured Trump that “I give the investigation credibility,” Rosenstein said, according to an administration official with knowledge of what was said during the call. “I can land the plane.”… Trump ended the call with Rosenstein thinking he was “on the team after all,” one senior administration official said, adding that the president has been further swayed by Rosenstein’s deference in meetings and other settings.”
According to a Monday report by the New York Times: “The White House has not asked to read the report in advance, and aides are planning to speed read. They intend to all but skip the sections related to potential criminal conspiracy, and instead zoom in on two outstanding questions that Mr. Trump himself wants to ignore: why Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, was not able to conclude whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice, and what the attorney general meant when he wrote in his letter that “much” of the president’s conduct was public — meaning some of it was not.”
Wednesday afternoon The New York Times reported that DOJ has been briefing members of Trump’s team on the Mueller report. Journalists noted that Pompeo visited DOJ on Wednesday to meet with Barr, which is unusual. DOJ is also spreading the word on background that the report will be “lightly redacted.”
Wheeler released a guide to things to look for in the Mueller report, along with suggestions on how to interpret it.
Here is the Mueller Report itself, released online just after 11:00am, Thursday.
Barr and Rosenstein stepped to the podium Thursday morning at 9:34am. Barr spoke for just under 20 minutes, then took questions. In his remarks he repeated the message from his letter that there was no collusion with Russia. He was more specific about that there was no collusion with IRA and GRU. On Wikileaks he said that what Wikileaks did by dumping the stolen documents was not illegal, therefore no one associated with the Trump campaign did anything illegal by coordinating with Wikileaks. He took questions for about 5 minutes, and walked out on a question about Barr trying to provide coverage for Trump. Rosenstein did not speak.
Contrary to Barr’s statements, Mueller wrote that he had no opinion on collusion, and that while questionable campaign contacts did occur, there was no way to charge conspiracy. He also supplied evidence of obstruction but neglected to charge Trump with obstruction because DOJ regulations do not allow him to do so. Here is how the New York Times explained this aspect of the report: “Citing a Justice Department view that sitting presidents cannot be indicted, the special counsel said it would be inappropriate to analyze the evidence while Mr. Trump is in office and busy running the country because it would be unfair to accuse him of an offense without giving him an opportunity to clear his name in court.” Many note that the report suggests Congress is free to accuse Trump of obstruction based on the facts he laid out, or that future prosecutors may do so after Trump leaves office.
The New York Times compared Barr’s language to what Mueller actually wrote, highlighting the discrepancies. Some are saying Barr lied, while others are saying he was merely misleading. Nearly everyone know understand that Barr is spinning the report to protect Trump and/or the institution of presidential powers.
“Being duped is not the same as committing a crime, and Mueller conclusively puts to rest the question of whether the Trump campaign was somehow aiding the Russian social media operation.”
“While the report does not find criminal conspiracy between Trump associates and Russia, it describes a set of contacts that may not involve chargeable criminality but might reasonably be described as “collusion…. a large quantity of engagement that was apparently not chargeably criminal but that did involve covert attempts to engage with a hostile foreign government for the benefit of Trump’s campaign and business.”
“Despite the overwhelming number of contacts and ties, Mueller concludes this section by noting that the investigation did not “yield evidence sufficient to sustain any charge that any individual affiliated with the Trump Campaign acted as an agent of [the government of Russia] within the meaning of FARA [the Foreign Agents Registration Act].”
On obstruction: “though subtly, Mueller is pretty clearly deferring—at least in part—to Congress: His office chose not to evaluate whether to bring charges against the president, he suggests, both because indictment of the president while he remains in office is off limits to him and because the decision regarding how to handle such conduct by a sitting president is, in any event, more properly left to the legislature.”
“It is not entirely clear how Mueller would apply his overarching factual considerations, discussed above, to the specific cases, but he does seem to be saying that the evidence of obstruction in a number of these incidents is strong.”
Here is Marcy Wheeler’s live reaction to reading and re-reading the full report, as she posted on Twitter.
Here is Wittes’s analysis of each section of the report, posted on Lawfare as he reads each section.
He notes: “the Mueller probe was a criminal probe only. It had embedded FBI personnel sending back to the FBI material germane to the FBI’s counterintelligence mission. But Mueller does not appear to have taken on any counterintelligence investigative function. And the report is purely an account through the lens of the criminal law. This partly, though only partly, explains why is no classified information in the report, which contains no “portion markings” anywhere. This point has a major analytical consequence for the entire way one reads the Mueller report: Don’t assume it answers counterintelligence questions.”
Wheeler goes there on counterintelligence: “it must be noted that the report doesn’t answer what a lot of people think it does: whether Trump has been compromised by Russia, leading him to pursue policies damaging to US interests. Let me very clear: I don’t think Trump is a puppet being managed by Vladimir Putin. But contrary to a great number of claims that this report puts those concerns to rest, the report does the opposite. With the limited exception of the suggestion of a tie between firing Comey and the meeting with Lavrov, the report doesn’t even mention the key incidents that would be the subject of such analysis. If anything, new details released in this report provide even further reason to think Trump obstructed the Russian investigation to halt the counterintelligence analysis of his ties with Russia. But the report itself doesn’t ever explicitly consider whether that’s why Trump obstructed this investigation.”
Lawfare provided a map of evidence of obstruction, based on Mueller’s findings. Of the 10+ cases of potential obstruction episodes, Mueller laid out substantial evidence across the three qualifying factors–obstructive act, nexus to crime, intent–for four episodes, and substantial or could support evidence for four more.
Frum argues what he has all along: that Congress, not Mueller, is the only way to learn what Russia has on Trump. As others have pointed out, counterintelligence information was completely absent from the report.
Douthat argues what he has all along: that we know Trump is an “amoral incompetent surrounded by grifters, misfits and his own overpromoted children, who is saved from self-destruction by advisers who sometimes decline to follow orders, and saved from high crimes in part by incompetence and weakness,” and Meuller only re-confirms that without adding much new damning information, and that politics should turn to trying to defeat Trump at the ballot box.
Here is David French’s first reaction: “to see the extent to which his virus infected his entire political operation is sobering. And the idea that anyone is treating this report as “win” for Trump, given the sheer extent of deceptions exposed (among other things), demonstrates that the bar for his conduct has sunk so low that anything other than outright criminality is too often brushed aside as relatively meaningless…. The lies are simply too much to bear. No Republican should tolerate such dishonesty.” (Most of the conservative commentariat are much more sanguine about the Mueller Report than French.)
Rosenzwieg takes down many of Barr’s actions regarding the Mueller Report, including the reason for waiting to release the summaries on the grounds they needed to be redacted when the ones that were finally released were not redacted.
Neilson met with Trump 5pm on Sunday and presented him with a list of changes she requested in order to continue in her job. He asked her to resign.
This was followed by a firing of several other people in Homeland Security, including the head of the Secret Service, supposedly for the agency’s role in the Mar-a-Lago security breach last week.
The Washington Post reports that Trump had already decided to fire Neilson. This story is also a good history of this DHS shakeup, which began with Trump’s threat to close the border on March 29.
Grassley took to the Washington Post and Fox News to get word to the President not to fire any more people from DHS. On Stephen Miller he said: “I think it would be hard for him to demonstrate he’s accomplished anything for the president.”
NBC News reports that Trump has been called for reinstatement of child separation since January, and that was a factor in Neilson’s conflict with Trump.
The New York Times concurs with the NBC report: “President Trump’s purge of the nation’s top homeland security officials is a sign that he is preparing to unleash an even fiercer assault on immigration, including a possible return of his controversial decision last summer to separate migrant children from their parents, current and former administration officials said Monday.” Trump is looking to do more than just family separation: “further limits on who can seek asylum; stronger action to close ports of entry along the Mexican border; an executive order to end birthright citizenship; more aggressive construction of a border wall; and a more robust embrace of active-duty troops to secure the border against illegal immigration.”
Also on Monday, a judge said Tump’s remain-in-Mexico policy must stop.
The Washington Post reports that some in the Trump White House floated the idea of bussing asylum seekers from the border to sanctuary cities and releasing them there as retribution against democrats: The White House believed it could punish Democrats — including Pelosi — by busing ICE detainees into their districts before their release, according to two DHS whistleblowers who independently reported the busing plan to Congress. One of the whistleblowers spoke with The Washington Post, and several DHS officials confirmed the accounts. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Trump told Kevin McAleenan to close the border over Neilson’s objections, and that he would pardon him if he faced any legal repercussions for the move. This was a factor in why Neilson left the administration. McAleenan is now the acting DHS secretary.
Russia Investigation
Barr testified before the House on Tuesday as part of a routine explanation of DOJ budget request. Of course most of the questions were about Mueller Report, Obamacare, and immigration. He said that Mueller declined to review the Barr letters, and that Barr would release the redacted Mueller report within a week.
Barr testified before the Senate on Wednesday, in which he said he believes the FBI spied on the Trump campaign in 2016. Benn Wittes, who has been supportive of Barr, argues that this is indefensible.
In other news
The Chinese woman arrested in Mar-a-Lago had multiple cell phones and devices to detect hidden cameras. When agents plugged in a thumb drive that belonged to her it immediately began installing Malware.
Julian Assange was extradited to the US on Thursday.
On Monday, Nadler wrote in an op-ed int he New York Times:
“If the department is unwilling to produce the full report voluntarily, then we will do everything in our power to secure it for ourselves.”
“The attorney general’s recent proposal to redact the special counsel’s report before we receive it is unprecedented. We require the evidence, not whatever remains after the report has been filtered by the president’s political appointee.”
“We have every reason to suspect that the unedited obstruction section of the Mueller report resembles the report that Congress received from the Watergate grand jury in 1974.”
On Wednesday, Nadler authorized but did not issue a subpoena for the un-redacted Mueller report and documents.
Also on Wednesday the New York Times was able to report on the thinking of people who have some insight into both Mueller team investigators and Barr. These people are telling reporters that some on Mueller’s team are concerned that Barr released a summary that does not reflect the damming evidence contained in the actual Mueller report; that Barr’s summary left out those damming details because he was “wary of departing from Justice Department practice not to disclose derogatory details in closing an investigation”; that there were multiple summaries Mueller prepared but which Barr did not use.
Hours later, at 1AM on Thursday, the Washington Post published their version of the same story:
“members of Mueller’s team have complained to close associates that the evidence they gathered on obstruction was alarming and significant.”
Summaries were prepared for different sections of the report, with a view that they could made public, the official said.
Unlike the Time’s story, this one has actual quotes from sources: “There was immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work instead,” according one U.S. official briefed on the matter. “It was done in a way that minimum redactions, if any, would have been necessary, and the work would have spoken for itself.”
A DOJ spokesman released a statement on Thursday justifying their decision not to release the Mueller summaries: “Every page of the “confidential report” provided to Attorney General Barr on March 22, 2019 was marked “May Contain Material Protected Under Fed. R Crim. P. 6(e)” – a law that protects confidential grand jury information – and therefore could not be publicly released.” Nadler wrote back that “a precautionary marking should not be an impediment to public production in a very short period of time.” He also requested documents of any communication between Barr’s office and the Special Counsel’s office. Read both letters here.
In Other News
The House Ways and Means Committee requested 6 years of Trump’s tax returns from the IRS, due by April 10. Trump’s lawyers have advised the IRS not to turn over the tax returns.
A whistle blower who works in the White House has told Congress that at least 25 people in the administration have been granted security clearances despite being disqualified by career professionals: “foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use and criminal conduct,” the memo said.
The US government is now saying it will take two years to locate all the families separated at the border. They will apply statistical analysis “to about 47,000 children who were referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement and subsequently discharged.” This is necessary because they collected no data on apprehended families prior to April 2018, and thousands were separated before that.
The US government is now saying it will take two years to locate all the families separated at the border. They will apply statistical analysis “to about 47,000 children who were referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement and subsequently discharged.” This is necessary because they collected no data on apprehended families prior to April 2018, and thousands were separated before that.
News broke of a Chinese woman trying to smuggle a thumb drive into Mar-A-Lago, raising security concerns since Trump spends so much time there.
