We’re still trying to make sense of this letter. It’s ambiguous on a few key points. But there’s one highly relevant thing that seems clear. Attorney General Barr plans to give the extensively redacted version of the Report to Congress too. So Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi et al., will only get to see a version of the report that has been extensively redacted under four broad categories. Read More
Here’s the letter where Barr lays out his timeline. Read More
[This post will be updated and re-timestamped through the day.]
Our situation now seems pretty clear. The administration plan is this: Release the Barr Letter and use it as a cudgel to claim bogus exoneration and threaten revenge against the President’s perceived enemies while Bill Barr tries to run down the clock until January 2021.
Okay, we’re starting to put together the beginnings of a tally, which you can see below. Letters after a Reps name are the initials of the TPM Readers who spoke to their offices. Gist so far is that pretty few are changing their position explicitly. But the key is that most GOP Reps are still saying they support releasing the report but then getting squishy about when. This of course can mean in six months or two years. So these are clearly trying to give room for Barr to pursue his run out the clock until January 2021. Read More
Members of the House get creative in these situations. TPM Reader JR called Rep. Rodney Davis’s office to see if he still supported the immediate release of the full Mueller Report. Davis’s office refused to answer whether Davis had changed his position because there’s no second resolution, which of course makes no sense. Read More
TPM Reader RS called Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner and it looks like Jim’s going a bit wobbly on his resolution vote. RS asked if Sensenbrenner still supported immediately release of the report to Congress.
I called Jim Sensenbrenner’s office. They simply pointed to his statement he made on March 24. The gentleman read me the statement over the phone and I said that doesn’t address the issue or releasing the report and he said “yes it does. He said he looks forward to reading the entire report and that the top line summary is a vindication.”
You can call your Rep too.
Fascinating little nugget. As we’ve noted at various points, the results of the counter-intelligence part of probe is if anything more important that the criminal part of it. It goes into potential compromise or what influence Russia might have over the President or members of his entourage. Politico reporters went to ask House Republicans today what they expected from that part of the report, which the FBI says it is ready to brief Congress on. Turns out they’re not really interested weirdly enough! Read More
TPM Reader PB flags how back in 2017 Betsy DeVos had a slightly different take on the Special Olympics. “I am proud to stand beside you as a partner in support of Special Olympics and its Unified Champion Schools, an important program that promotes leadership and empowers students to be agents of change.”
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A former federal prosecutor has some thoughts on the Barr Gambit …
A few thoughts on the Barr Gambit, which I think will go down as a singular achievement in the annals of intellectual dishonesty and bad faith legal jujitsu:
1. It is undisputed that the Russian government brazenly interfered in the 2016 election to support Donald Trump. In so doing, the Russians and those acting on their behalf committed a variety of federal crimes including computer hacking and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Those crimes were committed to benefit (a) Vladimir Putin and the interests of the Russian government; and (b) Donald J. Trump. It is also undisputed that Trump and his campaign joyfully used and weaponized the information the Russians stole against Hillary Clinton. Trump personally trumpeted the Wikileaks disclosures 141 times during the campaign, and his surrogates countless more times. While Mueller’s team apparently “did not establish” (i.e., did not find enough evidence to charge criminally) that Trump personally conspired with the Russian government to commit the underlying crimes, there is no question that he was (along with Putin) the single biggest beneficiary of those criminal efforts.
We’ve just received reports that the Mueller Report runs over 300 pages. (Note that this likely does not include underlying evidence produced in the investigation.) A rule of thumb is that a single spaced page includes roughly 500 words; double spaced about 250. Let’s split the different and say 375 words per page and let’s assume it’s only 300 pages. That comes out to 112,500 words, a decent sized non-fiction book. Just now I scanned through the Barr Letter and from what I can tell it includes 65 words from the report. In other words, we have currently seen .057% of the Mueller Report.
Note: There’s a footnote which may include an additional 15 words. This will amount to a game-changing .07% of the report we’ve seen.
Late Update Two: Now CNN reports it’s 300-400 pages “not counting exhibits”. So this thing is frigging long. And all we have is between 65 and 80 words.