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    Not very.

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      Political spin that did its intended job extremely effectively.

      We have had some very dodgy AGs, but Barr's degree of spin in the unusual context of a Special Counsel investigation has gone way beyond anything we have seen previously.

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        Playing Devil's Advocate, "I'm fucked" could just mean that he won't be able to do anything due to the enquiry taking up all his time. It's not an admission of guilt.

        But I think obstruction of justice is a slam dunk that is repeatedly proven.

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          "Beyond a reasonable doubt"? By evidence admissible in court?

          I don't necessarily agree, but I can certainly understand how Mueller reached the conclusion he did.

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            I thought the whole point was he didn't reach a conclusion.

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              Also Mueller agrees that additional charges against aides and associates could be brought

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                I thought the whole point was he didn't reach a conclusion.
                Which was an extremely important conclusion in itself.

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                  "efforts to influence the investigation" are not attempts at obstruction?

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                    Attempting obstruction is not necessarily a federal offence.

                    Obstruction can be a difficult crime to prove. Conspiracy is nearly always difficult. Conspiracy to obstruct is hard.

                    If you would vote to convict based on that paragraph, no defence lawyer is going to want you on a jury.

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                      While I recognise that I may be unusual in this way (and others) I think that the entire report is very much worth reading.

                      I particularly recommend the two page introduction to Volume II, which summarises his reasoning behind not charging the President on obstruction (see pages 213-14).

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                        Those pages sound really scathing, to me. That reads as "I'm not allowed to claim he committed a crime because that would be fundamentally unfair... but the evidence is obvious that I can't clear him".

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                          I would be a bit more lawerly, but I think that is a fair reading.

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                            It does appear that there's a whole lot of red meat in the report. There's nothing that will bring down the presidency, because there'd have to be actual taped phone calls between Trump and Putin to get Republican senators to vote for impeachment (and even then they might not).

                            There does seem to be a whole lot of connections between the Trump campaign and various Russians but it's unable to connect them to the Russian government because any time there might have been a connection the trail either gets lost in Russia and Ukraine, or because various people deliberately obstructed justice by deleting communications or by taking the fifth or by straight out lying to Mueller.

                            And, on Trump himself rather than the campaign, there seem to be a whole bunch of times when we would have committed even more massive obstructions of justice if his underlings hadn't had the common sense to just ignore orders.

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                              With the caveat that it might just be the media that I consume: it's beginning to look like the red meat is coming through and the substance is beginning to push aside the bullshit spin from Barr.

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                                On that subject

                                https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/1119099934903398401

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                                  I think the real value of the report is that the House Dems can now decide how long they want to keep bringing people in for hearings and see how that plays out in polls. It also means that, for example, Don Jr. is always looking over his shoulder. Trump must also be pissed at Lewandowski, whilst Sarah Sanders is now on record as a liar.

                                  How it plays in campaign season presumably depends on the skills of the Dem contenders. OTOH I think Bernie, and maybe a few others, would much rather the focus be on health care and redistribution.

                                  In the long run, how does this increase the chances of 45 being prosecuted after his Presidency, and who goes down with him?

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                                    It was clearly written to a certain extent as a road map for potential future prosecutions (see the second of the four points covered on the two pages I linked to above).

                                    That said, I think that state-level prosecutions on tax and other kinds of fraud are both more probable and more likely to result in conviction than a federal proceeding. He is going to have a unique post-presidency.

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                                      I think Congressional Dems are making a strategic mistake right now. (What's new, huh?).

                                      They seem completely focused on getting an unredacted report. Which means they either believe, or they're trying to create the impression, that under those bits of blacked out text they'll find the smoking gun that will end the presidency.

                                      And what that means is that they're not pushing the myriad actual pieces of corruption and illegality, the actual impeachable offenses, that are sitting right in front of their - and everyone else's - eyes. They're implying that the current report is not damning enough of Trump. And they're wrong.

                                      They should be telling everyone that the Mueller report is full of impeachable offenses but that they aren't going to bring impeachment proceedings until there's a chance that Senate Republicans might actually look at the evidence. That while the Senate Republicans have Stockholm Syndrome and refuse to consider anything critical of Trump, then impeachment proceedings would be pointless despite the fact that they are clearly available.

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                                        I don't disagree, but believe that there is significant work going on within the relevant committees that will be much more substantive than Easter weekend sound bites.

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                                          Of course Barr dropped this right before Easter and I think there's a sense that it will take some time to digest the massive deception that Barr has been pulling, although Chris Hayes did a good job on that last night (the one weakness being perhaps the need of the format to draw on other talking heads plus Kamala Harris rather than just trusting his ability to hold people's attention).

                                          Rachel Maddow, OTOH, same old same old. It's impossible to trust her reaction to anything.

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                                            Satch, where are you?

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                                              UA thanks for that highlighting of pages 213-4; very enlightening indeed.

                                              Also despite points above about there being enough "red meat" already, it is damnably frustrating there are so many redactions. Is Barr citing national security on all this stuff?

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                                                Primarily national security and on-going investigations, which isn't as over-reaching as it may appear given that a) the counter-intelligence prong of the Russian investigation isn't discussed at all and b) there are twelve active investigations that Mueller's office referred to other prosecutors that remain on-going.

                                                This Washington Post piece makes some informed guesses on the redactions.

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                                                  As do the people in the comments.

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                                                    That's good.

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