Thank goodness I didn’t bother with the pre-Game hype.
Republicans seem to be stuck in the Barr moment this morning and it certainly colored the early coverage when there wasn’t anything to look at and later when there hadn’t been time to read it. It is, as predicted, heavily redacted.
The problem from my perspective is it’s not that the evidence is inconclusive, it’s that Mueller concluded the OLC opinion about non-prosecutablity meant he must decline it in every instance.
Hardly exoneration.
Some have suggested that it is in fact a road to impeachment. I’m not sure about that.
Democrats appear to be pouring through it and saying, “Well, this is a crime. And this is a crime. And that’s a crime.” There are a lot of crimes. I wonder if it will be effective? What they’re not doing (and it doesn’t seem Mueller has at the moment either) is provide a narrative to tie them all together.
Here are 11 of the most jaw-dropping bombshells from the Mueller report
by Travis Gettys, Raw Story
18 Apr 2019
Here are some of the biggest bombshells to fall out of the report in the first hour of its release:
- Trump panicked after deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel, following the president’s firing of FBI director James Comey.
- Mueller could not find enough evidence that Donald Trump Jr. was smart enough to realize he was breaking the law by accepting Russian assistance for his father’s campaign.
- Hope Hicks thought Trump Jr.’s emails regarding his efforts to set up a meeting with a Russian lawyer looked “really bad,” but Trump told her to cover them up.
- Hicks was in contact with a Russian the day after the election who wanted to put Trump in touch with Vladimir Putin, and she relayed that request to Jared Kushner.
- Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort expected his associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who has suspected ties to Russian intelligence, to share internal campaign data with an oligarch to whom he owed millions and others in Ukraine.
- Trump signaled to former national security adviser Mike Flynn that he might pardon him, and asked for a warning before testifying against him.
- Trump instructed Rosenstein to add a line clearing him on Russia in the memo he was drafting to justify Comey’s firing.
- Mueller’s team found Comey’s account credible about Trump’s demand for loyalty, and dismissed the president’s denials as untrue.
- Trump tried to obstruct justice on multiple occasions, but his underlings refused to carry out his corrupt requests.
- Therefore, Mueller’s investigators lacked the confidence to clear the president on obstruction of justice.
- Mueller believed he had the authority to issue a grand jury subpoena for Trump — but knew it would delay the investigation.
Most of the other stuff I’ve read is Versailles Villager Beat Sweetener crap.