First, I want to thank Jeet Heer for filling in for me while I was away. Thank you as well to our New York and DC teams. I would call out specific highlights. But I made an especial effort to wall myself off from everything tied to my cacophonous news life while I was away. My comments on the Mueller Report were a brief exception given what seemed to me the unique nature of the news.
In any case, it’s clear we are in the midst of a massive bum’s rush spearheaded by what should be the notorious Barr letter. I explained some of what seem to me the details here. Others here at TPM and elsewhere have too. We have a letter written by an AG specifically appointed to clean up if not cover up the Mueller findings. It gives the President a clean bill of health based on a narrow claim that there was insufficient evidence to establish a crime in the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia. Because of this, per Barr’s argument, the idea that Trump could have obstructed Justice in the course of his cover-up was all but a legal impossibility.
This was the kick off for an ongoing campaign not only to claim “complete exoneration” as the President and his supporters insist but to further insist that the whole investigation and scandal was a hoax and the product of lies. This leads to demands for members of Congress to resign and Trump’s campaign going so far as to demand that Trump’s critics no longer be allowed on the public airwaves. Mitch McConnell, perhaps the craftiest and most cynical man ever to head up the US Senate (think about that for a second), says the Mueller Report proves President Obama didn’t do enough to protect the country from Russian subversion.
In other words, the Mueller Report is a game-changing blockbuster of such gravity that we will apparently never be allowed to see it in any other than a few dozen carefully chosen words or further summaries. To date, if you look closely, we’ve seen maybe two or three dozen words of it, out of a document that reports suggest is voluminous. This whole show is such an immense pile of bullshit it really beggars the imagination.
That Barr and Trump would go this route is hardly surprising. And no I don’t expect Schiff or others will be run out of Congress. But let’s see clearly what the angle here is. Use this period between the Barr letter and whatever portions of the actual report emerge to sufficiently cow the press, the public and the opposition party out of ever mentioning the story again and – just as important – aggressively reporting on all the other instances of presidential and administration corruption.
The big league players at the Times, the Post and other marquee publications have gone along with this to a surprising and yet frankly not terribly surprising degree. This seems to be maybe changing a bit as the days wear by. But honestly, I’ve seen enough over a long enough time, that the ‘analyst’ voices at these publications, as opposed to the reporters, will almost always, and certainly at first, give way to conventional wisdom, power and the desire (perhaps not even entirely consciously) to score points with bad faith actors. “The darkest, most ominous cloud hanging over his presidency was all but lifted on Sunday with the release of the special counsel’s conclusions … The end of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry also left Democrats on the defensive and will force them to decide how vigorously to continue pursuing allegations of misconduct by the president and his allies.”
In so many words, we don’t know anything until we see this report. And anyone who doesn’t see that is a chump or a fool. I actually have a relative confidence that we will see the Mueller Report. It’s possible parts do need to be restricted for national security reasons. But anything that falls into that category, which should be very small, should of course be fully available to Congress. I don’t think it will be possible to keep this fully under wraps. The point is more to create a new set of realities – press-cowing, false storylines, room for more bad-acting – in the interval in which we are supposed to make our judgments based on Barr’s letter and when we actually see the thing.
