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Mueller Investigation pt 6

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Childlike Empress said:
Matt Taibbi: The rise and fall of superhero Robert Mueller
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All this shows is that a lot of people really had the totally wrong expectations of what Mueller was going to say. Anyone that had been paying attention to what was going on would not have been surprised by his performance. He masterfully wasted the questioner's time when he didn't want to answer the questions, he made the Republican questioners look like a bunch of crazed Conspiracy theists, and he gave the Democrats virtually no rope to use him as the executioner for Trump. He played it perfectly non-partisanly, and make sure that never side had sound-bites that they could use to claim victory, while at the same time making sure to stand by and confirm the report he and his people worked on. Anyone that expected more than that was fooling themselves. Anyone who honestly expecting him to declare that Trump committed crimes and should be Impeached was totally delusional, just as delusional as anyone that expected him to state that Trump had been exonerated.
 
PhantomWolf said:
All this shows is that a lot of people really had the totally wrong expectations of what Mueller was going to say. Anyone that had been paying attention to what was going on would not have been surprised by his performance. He masterfully wasted the questioner's time when he didn't want to answer the questions, he made the Republican questioners look like a bunch of crazed Conspiracy theists, and he gave the Democrats virtually no rope to use him as the executioner for Trump. He played it perfectly non-partisanly, and make sure that never side had sound-bites that they could use to claim victory, while at the same time making sure to stand by and confirm the report he and his people worked on. Anyone that expected more than that was fooling themselves. Anyone who honestly expecting him to declare that Trump committed crimes and should be Impeached was totally delusional, just as delusional as anyone that expected him to state that Trump had been exonerated.
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Very much this. I mean, he even specifically went to the DoJ beforehand to request that he receive, in writing, confirmation of what he could and could not talk about. Anybody paying even the slightest amount of attention should have been able to understand that this fit perfectly into his stance of not allowing himself to be politicised by either side.

Hell, I knew that, and real-life stuff had meant that before watching his testimony I hadn't been following any US politics for 2-3 months.
 
PhantomWolf said:
All this shows is that a lot of people really had the totally wrong expectations of what Mueller was going to say. Anyone that had been paying attention to what was going on would not have been surprised by his performance. He masterfully wasted the questioner's time when he didn't want to answer the questions, he made the Republican questioners look like a bunch of crazed Conspiracy theists, and he gave the Democrats virtually no rope to use him as the executioner for Trump. He played it perfectly non-partisanly, and make sure that never side had sound-bites that they could use to claim victory, while at the same time making sure to stand by and confirm the report he and his people worked on. Anyone that expected more than that was fooling themselves. Anyone who honestly expecting him to declare that Trump committed crimes and should be Impeached was totally delusional, just as delusional as anyone that expected him to state that Trump had been exonerated.
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Squeegee Beckenheim said:
Very much this. I mean, he even specifically went to the DoJ beforehand to request that he receive, in writing, confirmation of what he could and could not talk about. Anybody paying even the slightest amount of attention should have been able to understand that this fit perfectly into his stance of not allowing himself to be politicised by either side.

Hell, I knew that, and real-life stuff had meant that before watching his testimony I hadn't been following any US politics for 2-3 months.
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Understanding all this requires people to be smart, intelligent, well-informed and to pay attention to detail, to facts and to what is happening. That is why Trump sycophants and Putin's Russian trolls fail!
 
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I think it also helps not to see it as an "us" vs. "them" thing. If you consider yourself part of an "us", then it's only natural to want "our guy" to "stick it to them", which is likely to colour your thinking.

You could see it all over the place (including in this thread) when people pounced on a couple of little things that Mueller said and eagerly morphed them into the thing that most matched what they wanted him to say, then paraded them triumphantly around. That's not a good idea, really.
 
Childlike Empress said:
Matt Taibbi: The rise and fall of superhero Robert Mueller
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One small problem with Taibbi's self-congratulatory thesis is that the Mueller report does indeed document "collusion":

A total of 272 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia-linked operatives have been identified, including at least 38 meetings. And we know that at least 33 high-ranking campaign officials and Trump advisers were aware of contacts with Russia-linked operatives during the campaign and transition, including Trump himself. None of these contacts were ever reported to the proper authorities. Instead, the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.

Beyond the many lies the Trump team told to the American people, Mueller himself repeatedly remarked on how far the Trump team was willing to go to hide their Russian contacts, stating, “the investigation established that several individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign lied to the Office, and to Congress, about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals and related matters. Those lies materially impaired the investigation of Russian election interference.”
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Trump’s Russia Cover-Up By the Numbers – 272 contacts with Russia-linked operatives

One of those meetings, of course, was the infamous Trump Tower meeting, where Junior, Kushner, and Manafort decided that the Hillary dirt the Russians offered wasn't worth the Magnitsky Act relief they wanted for it, so No Deal. And then when the meeting was unearthed by the "witch hunt," Trump personally wrote the first version of the lies about it. Never mind that we still don't know what most of those 272 contacts were about, and that the "witch hunt" did find several Trump people running personal scams with foreign nationals. and never mind that Trump did try to unilaterally lift the sanctions as soon as he got into office, Taibbi is able to convince himself that Trump's clear and repeated pattern of obstruction of justice was a rational and forgivable response to being "unfairly accused of a crime."

But nope, Mueller didn't find hard evidence linking Trump to the specific election interference crimes that Russians were indicted for, so that proves that Taibbi's psychic insights were Right All Along.

Taibbi is so busy celebrating the "fall of superhero Robert Mueller" that he ignores that the "witch hunt" did uncover serious evidence that we have a president and administration who are seriously compromised by their own lies and foreign entanglements, and that they are an ongoing national security threat. And we still don't know everything in the report.
 
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No question it is disappointing of Mueller to refuse to read from his own Report. Actually, it is rather cheeky of him.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
No question it is disappointing of Mueller to refuse to read from his own Report. Actually, it is rather cheeky of him.
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While it might have been disappointing, those that were listening to the News articles about him in the days before the testimony knew that it was going to be extremely unlikely. I was a bit more disappointed that he allowed a number of the Republicans to spin conspiracy theories rather then telling them that they were talking out their butts, but he couldn't have done that without looking Partisan, and he wasn't going to do that. He played the ball right down the middle, and part of that was not giving the Dem's sound bites of him reading the report.
 
theprestige said:
IT'S NOT RACIST TO TELL AN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT TO GO BACK HOME.

Now are we done?
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Fortunately, (Or unfortunately for you), Omar is not an illegal immigrant, is a Citizen of the United States, and has been elected to serve her constituents within the United States.

This would indeed make is racist to tell her to 'go back to her country', along with the other elected women who were BORN in the USA.

I do not recall Trump, or anyone else telling other elected officials to 'go back to their home country'. Why then was it just these four women?

Well, at least we can spot the racists.
 
theprestige said:
Yup. In fact, I even begged the question that she's an illegal immigrant.

What I did not do was defend the claim that she's an illegal immigrant.
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Begging the question by definition means that you assume the claim to be true.

I'm not sure what microscopic hair you think you're splitting between assuming a claim to be true and defending the claim.

Whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess.
 
WilliamSeger said:
One small problem with Taibbi's self-congratulatory thesis is that the Mueller report does indeed document "collusion":


Trump’s Russia Cover-Up By the Numbers – 272 contacts with Russia-linked operatives

One of those meetings, of course, was the infamous Trump Tower meeting, where Junior, Kushner, and Manafort decided that the Hillary dirt the Russians offered wasn't worth the Magnitsky Act relief they wanted for it, so No Deal. And then when the meeting was unearthed by the "witch hunt," Trump personally wrote the first version of the lies about it. Never mind that we still don't know what most of those 272 contacts were about, and that the "witch hunt" did find several Trump people running personal scams with foreign nationals. and never mind that Trump did try to unilaterally lift the sanctions as soon as he got into office, Taibbi is able to convince himself that Trump's clear and repeated pattern of obstruction of justice was a rational and forgivable response to being "unfairly accused of a crime."

But nope, Mueller didn't find hard evidence linking Trump to the specific election interference crimes that Russians were indicted for, so that proves that Taibbi's psychic insights were Right All Along.

Taibbi is so busy celebrating the "fall of superhero Robert Mueller" that he ignores that the "witch hunt" did uncover serious evidence that we have a president and administration who are seriously compromised by their own lies and foreign entanglements, and that they are an ongoing national security threat. And we still don't know everything in the report.
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This is something I've been wondering about since the report was released. Mueller defined "coordination" with Russians in his investigation to be something so narrow and outside of the scope of what most people thought Trump and his people actually did, of course it concluded that it didn't happen. But did anyone actually think Trump or his campaign were engaged in a direct quid-pro-quo arrangement with the Russian government to materially interfere in the election? I certainly don't remember hearing that accusation, and I was watching lots of MSNBC at the time; all the accusations I was aware of were pretty much directly in line with what Mueller detailed in report: business arrangements, meetings about information, setting up contacts with ties to the government, etc. And Mueller directly confirmed that a lot more of that behavior went on than the public knew about. For all the talk about the obstruction ruling, as far as I'm concerned, his conclusion in the first half of the report is equally as wishy washy, and I don't understand why more of the media hasn't/isn't talking about it. Even the really questionable stuff like not charging Trump Jr. and Kushner with the crimes they were obviously trying to commit because they didn't know they were engaging in illegal activity.

Yeah, Trump didn't commit the very specific crime Mueller defined in his report, but his report also confirms that his campaign was engaged in very shady dealings with Russian individuals, then tried to cover it up. That's what people were worried about, it happened, and it was confirmed, regardless of the way Mueller put it.
 
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The Great Zaganza said:
Mueller could have nailed Trump if he had the stamina to go all the way through the courts.
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I thought the narrative was that the rules prevented Mueller from going through the courts. That the best, most conscientious thing he could do was provide to Congress exactly the "I'm not saying, I'm just saying..." report and testimony that he provided.

My position is that if he legitimately had the evidence - if he knew for an indictable fact - that Donald Trump had conspired to steal the election, then he should have gone for an indictment. Rules be damned. The man's retiring anyway. What does it matter to him if he gets cockblocked trying to bring Trump to justice? At least he would have done his best to make it right, instead of relying on Congress to read between the lines of his report and figure it out.
 
theprestige said:
My position is that if he legitimately had the evidence - if he knew for an indictable fact - that Donald Trump had conspired to steal the election, then he should have gone for an indictment. Rules be damned. The man's retiring anyway. What does it matter to him if he gets cockblocked trying to bring Trump to justice? At least he would have done his best to make it right, instead of relying on Congress to read between the lines of his report and figure it out.
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Because he apparently thinks that those rules serve a larger purpose to which he dedicated his entire life and which create a greater good beyond even the circumstances of Trump's specific case.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Mueller could have nailed Trump if he had the stamina to go all the way through the courts.
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On even more? Trump wasn't going to be charged because of that OLC memo that was created to achieve a specific political outcome (and did!), regardless.

theprestige said:
I thought the narrative was that the rules prevented Mueller from going through the courts. That the best, most conscientious thing he could do was provide to Congress exactly the "I'm not saying, I'm just saying..." report and testimony that he provided.

My position is that if he legitimately had the evidence - if he knew for an indictable fact - that Donald Trump had conspired to steal the election, then he should have gone for an indictment. Rules be damned. The man's retiring anyway. What does it matter to him if he gets cockblocked trying to bring Trump to justice? At least he would have done his best to make it right, instead of relying on Congress to read between the lines of his report and figure it out.
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You're hardly alone in being unhappy on that front. IIRC, last relevant poll that I saw for that question actually had a significant majority in agreement. I certainly do. Going further, Mueller made multiple notable and outright errors, based on the report, ones that fairly certainly blunted the effect significantly. There's plenty to respect about the guy and how he handled things in general, but that doesn't mean that we have to support everything he did, even when he was wrong.
 
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theprestige said:
I thought the narrative was that the rules prevented Mueller from going through the courts. That the best, most conscientious thing he could do was provide to Congress exactly the "I'm not saying, I'm just saying..." report and testimony that he provided.
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I believe The Great Zaganza was referring to Mueller having the stamina of going through the courts to subpoena Trump's under oath testimony.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
No question it is disappointing of Mueller to refuse to read from his own Report. Actually, it is rather cheeky of him.
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And to ignore the fact he passed the baton to the guy that put it in cold storage.

NYT: How Barr’s Excerpts Compare to the Mueller Report’s Findings
When Attorney General William P. Barr sent Congress a four-page letter last month describing his take on the conclusions of Robert S. Mueller III’s special counsel investigation, he quoted several fragments of Mr. Mueller’s then-secret report.

But none of the excerpts were in context or even complete sentences, raising the question of whether he was portraying their thrust and tone accurately or skewing them to make them sound better for President Trump.
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And that was just the beginning of the quashing of Mueller's report.

A Side-by-Side Comparison of Barr’s vs. Mueller’s Statements about Special Counsel Report Seven pages of word for word comparisons.

Hopefully Congress can expose the findings.
 
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