NBC News reports that 37 children were held in vans overnight because the ICE facility was unprepared to process them.
By Wednesday, talks with Mexico had not produced an out from Trump’s tariff threat, and border crossings surged to a seven year high.
By Friday, Trump called the tariffs off, saying that Mexico had agreed to his demands. In fact, the details of the deal was worked out months before he ever threatened increasing tariffs by 5%: “It was unclear whether Mr. Trump believed that the agreement truly represented new and broader concessions, or whether the president understood the limits of the deal but accepted it as a face-saving way to escape from the political and economic consequences of imposing tariffs on Mexico.”
Trump was in England for most of the week on a state visit, and celebrating the 75th anniversary of D-Day.
On Wednesday, Mueller gave a public statement at DOJ saying that his special counsel office is closed and he is resigning. Some key quotes: “it is important that the office’s written work speak for itself.” “When a subject of an investigation obstructs that investigation or lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.” “if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the President did commit a crime.” “under long-standing Department policy, a President cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. “ “the opinion explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting President because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents are available. Among other things, that evidence could be used if there were co-conspirators who could now be charged.” “the opinion says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrongdoing.”
“We appreciate that the Attorney General made the report largely public. I do not question the Attorney General’s good faith in that decision.” “I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments—that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election. That allegation deserves the attention of every American.”
While Mueller was measured and did not call for impeachment, many in the media interpret his statement (and report) as an impeachment referral to Congress. Dan Balz: Mueller’s appearance now leaves House Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), with an unpalatable choice. She can authorize a politically explosive impeachment inquiry opposed by a majority of the American people — and one that surely would die in the Republican-controlled Senate — or appear to abdicate in the face of the evidence of obstruction contained in the Mueller report.
Wittes after Mueller spoke–he does not call for impeachment but he does think Congress needs to get a better strategy in how it is investigating Trump: “A big part of the story here is that key committees are just not pursuing a focused oversight agenda involving live testimony by the key witnesses in a fashion that is likely to prove effective. Congress has so far sought the testimony of relatively few people named in the report. It has not so far moved aggressively against anyone who has resisted.”
Frum makes a strong tactical case against impeachment: Right now Trump is fighting on many fronts to suppress many investigations of many different forms of alleged wrongdoing. He must plug more holes in the dike than he has fingers. But submerge all those many stories into one big question—“remove or don’t”—and the impeachers will have to focus their energy on the most salient allegations. The battlefront will narrow, and as it narrows, the unity of the executive branch will confer a tactical advantage… focus on the discovery of facts rather than arguments over consequences: “What wrongs did Trump do?” rather than “Is removal the right remedy for these wrongs?”
In Other News
New documents reveal that the Census Citizenship question was advocated by a Republican operative who said it would explicitly help the GOP create stronger gerrymandered districts.
News broke that during Trump’s visit to Japan over Memorial Day weekend, the White House had the USS John McCain cover the name of the ship with a tarp, and turned away sailors with the name of the ship on their uniforms from Trump’s speech.
The New York Times reports that Deutsche Bank investigators triggered several suspicious activity reports for Trump and Kushner finances, including payments to Russians during the summer of 2016, and that bank managers squashed the reports, taking no action.
GOP congressman Justin Amash became the first Republican congressperson to call for Trump’s impeachment
A series a legal blows to Trump attempting to fight congressional investigations came this week: The decision in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York could clear the way for Deutsche Bank and Capital One to hand over the president’s financial records to Democrats in the House. Trump’s attorneys could appeal the decision.
Trump gave Barr the power to declassify any intelligence he wishes about the origins of the Russia investigation. DNI director Coats issued a statement that basically warns Barr not to release any information that “would put our national security at risk.” According to the New York Times: “Though the ultimate power to declassify documents rests with the president, Mr. Trump’s delegation of that power to Mr. Barr effectively stripped Mr. Coats and the C.I.A. of control of their secrets. The move could endanger the agencies’ ability to keep the identities of their sources secret.
NBC News: “The Trump administration has identified at least 1,712 migrant children it may have separated from their parents in addition to those separated under the “zero tolerance” policy, according to court transcripts of a Friday hearing.”
The Washington Post reported that last year the Trump Administration was planning a mass arrest and deportation of immigrant families in 10 major cities; that the families would be targeted for failing to show up for their immigration hearing; that Nielson and the tapped head of ICE Vitiello were fired in part for objecting to the plan, but “DHS officials said the objections Vitiello and Nielsen raised regarding the targeted “at large” arrests were mostly operational and logistical and not as a result of ethical concerns about arresting families an immigration judge had ordered to be deported.” The plan was hatched in September 2018: “By January, Justice officials had obtained deportation rulings for 2,500 parents and children in 10 locations whose names were added to a target list for ICE.”
The White House is putting together a war plan to counter Iran that calls for 120,000 troops to be deployed to the Middle East. Trump has told his chiefs that he does not want a war with Iran.
Since trade talks with China collapsed (again) last Friday, some Republican senators are publicly expressing concern over Trump’s trade war and tarriff tactics: “Until last week, many Republican senators supported a tougher approach with China. But with Trump’s decision to increase tariffs, GOP lawmakers are now fielding angry calls.” Republican lawmakers are planning another farmer bailout.
Mnuchin finally formally refused to hand over Trump’s tax returns to Congress, citing legal precedent that Congress can only request it for a legislative purpose.
Hundreds of former federal prosecutors signed a letter that said Mueller had enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction: “All of this conduct — trying to control and impede the investigation against the President by leveraging his authority over others — is similar to conduct we have seen charged against other public officials and people in powerful positions.” It was posted on Monday with over 300 signatories. By the weekend it was up to 802.
The New York Times obtained copies of Trump’s tax returns from 1985-1994: The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.
In order to force Europeans “to compensate for the unilateral American sanctions” they declared that they will no longer comply with two aspects of the Iran Nuclear Deal, rebuilding its stockpile of enriched uranium and resuming construction on a nuclear reactor.
The Judiciary Committee voted to hold Barr in contempt.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Burr, issued the first subpoena for a Trump family member, Don Jr. The New York Times reports why they want to speak with him: The committee is particularly interested in the younger Mr. Trump’s account of the events surrounding the Trump Tower meeting — as well as his role in his father’s efforts to build a skyscraper in Moscow — and comparing the testimony to his previous answers to Senate investigators in 2017. The subpoena was issued in mid April. Republicans senators who face primary challenges next year are attacking Burr’s move, while others are supporting him.
Giuliani is traveling to Ukraine to persuade the incoming president not to replace the prosecutor who is investigating if Ukraine released documents about Manafort’s Ukraine dealings during the 2016 election. He he also hopes to pursue evidence that Joe Biden tried to persuade a Ukrainian prosecutor to back off of an investigation of a business that his son Hunter worked for. By the end of the weak, he said the trip is off.
Barr threatened to not show up for this Thursday congressional hearing if democrats insist on using staff lawyers to interview him. Nadler said they will not change their format, and if Barr reuses to testify he will be sent a subpoena. Barr then refused to go before the House committee on May 2.
The day before Barr testified before the Senate, someone leaked to the Washington Post and the New York Times that Mueller sent a letter to Barr in the week between Barr’s announcement of the no charges against Trump and Barr’s follow up letter to Congress. Mueller was not happy about how Barr was handling the release of the report: “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”
Here is the letter itself, which was written March 27, and made public May 1, the day of Barr’s senate hearing. He said that Barr had received an introduction and executive summary of each volume of the full report, with redactions, and that “I am requesting that you provide these materials to Congress and authorize their public release at this time.”
Here are key moments from the Barr senate hearing. Wheeler recounts some of Barrs more remarkable statements. Barr offered different interpretations of Trump’s obstructive actions than Mueller, and ignored some evidence when doing so.
Katyal writes “We knew when we drafted them that we could have a nefarious attorney general (though, in fairness, we didn’t predict this amount of duplicity).”
Wittes outlines all the ways Barr has mischaracterized the Mueller report: The effect of these layers of mischaracterization are to rewrite the Mueller report and to recast the presidential conduct described in it. The direction of the recasting just happens to dovetail with the president’s talking points, and just happens to transmute him from a scofflaw with power into a victim of the “deep state.”
Comey wrote an op-ed after the Barr hearing where he posited a theory for how career DOJ people like Barr and Rosenstein could be corrupted by Trump. He used his own experience with Trump–the way he lies in meetings and expects your silence to mean consent–and projects out what might happen if you stayed silent and remaind in the administration: Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values. And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.
Max Boot was also ruminating on how Trump corrupts people in the wake of the Barr hearing: The surrender by conservatives outside the administration has proceeded through a gradual process of compromise and corruption similar to that on the inside. The most important factor driving this process, I believe, is fear of the professional consequences of opposing the vengeful occupant of the Oval Office. … The more that critics attack you for your support of Trump, the more you dig in. The more Trump misconduct you defend, the more you feel compelled to defend. In for a penny, in for a pound. No going back now. You tell yourself that only by staying loyal to the president can you check his worst excesses and channel his instincts in a more constructive and conservative direction. You are convinced that you are too valuable to America in your current position to risk losing it — and that whoever replaces you will be far more of a Trump enabler than you are.
Jack Goldsmith makes the case that Barr is not acting as a hack but in support of Article II powers, hence he still believes Barr is an institutionalist.
On Friday Trump and Putin spoke by phone for over an hour: Mr. Trump first mentioned that he “had a long and very good conversation” with Mr. Putin in a tweet, in which he also said that the subjects discussed included “even the ‘Russian Hoax.’” When the subject of the Mueller report and Russia’s role in the election came up during the call, Mr. Trump later explained, Mr. Putin “actually sort of smiled when he said something to the effect that it started off as a mountain and ended up being a mouse. But he knew that because he knew there was no collusion whatsoever.”
Rosenstein finally announced his resignation. He’s leaving May 11.
Wittes finally finished his close read and analysis of the Mueller Report. Here is his section by section analysis, and then his 5 key takeaways: “When Trump leaves office, assuming statutes of limitations have not yet run out, someone will have to make the binary assessment, which Mueller did not make, of whether they amount to prosecutable cases. As a historical matter, the report leaves me with little doubt that the president engaged in criminal obstruction of justice on a number of occasions… This is heartland impeachment material—the sort of conduct the impeachment clauses were written to address.”
In Other News
President Trump, his three eldest children and his private company filed a federal lawsuit on Monday against Deutsche Bank and Capital One, in a bid to prevent the banks from responding to congressional subpoenas.
Reuters reports on a new potential emoluments case where foreign countries leases property in Trump Tower against the law but approved by Trump’s State Department: The records show that in the eight months following Trump’s January 20, 2017 inauguration, foreign governments sent 13 notes to the State Department seeking permission to rent or renew leases in Trump World Tower. That is more solicitations from foreign governments for new or renewed leases in that building than in the previous two years combined.
ProPublica unearthed some Mar-a-Lago receipts: The Secret Service guarded the door, according to the email. The bartender wasn’t allowed to return. And members of the group began pouring themselves drinks. No one paid. Six days later, on April 13, Mar-a-Lago created a bill for those drinks, tallying $838 worth of alcohol plus a 20% service charge. It covered 54 drinks (making for an average price of $18.62 each) of premium liquor: Chopin vodka, Patron and Don Julio Blanco tequilas and Woodford Reserve bourbon. … The bill was sent to the State Department, which objected to covering it. It was then forwarded to the White House, which paid the tab.
Wired updated its running list of legal cases against Trump, closing some, but adding eight new ones, bringing the total to 16: Effectively everything with a Russian nexus appears to be over, leaving a dozen cases focused on Trump world’s finances.
The Washington Post fact checker has been tallying all of Trump’s lies he has made as president. He crossed the 10,000 mark this week.
Pelosi gave a New York Times interview where she continued to argue it would be politically dangerous to impeach Trump. She is all but saying she will not allow impeachment proceedings, while also laying out a House agenda designed to maximize democratic wins among moderate voters in 2020.
NBC News got their hands on government emails from June 2018 that show officials did not have any way to track the children and parents they just separated: “[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful,” a Health and Human Services official told a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 23, 2018. “We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children.”
Asylum officers are fighting back against new policy’s that limit their ability to make judgements about whether or not a seeker should be allowed to stay in the US due to safety reasons. They are speaking out to the media through their union, which is highly unusual.
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.
