As in his earlier letter, Bill Barr made very specific and technical claims as part of trying to exonerate the President. His argument tied to Wikileaks and the hacked emails is one you need to listen very closely to. He gives a blanket exoneration because he argues – plausible in legal terms – that the only way a Trump associate could have committed a crime is if they had already participated in the hacking of the DNC computers. Read More
In Attorney General William Barr’s prepared remarks, he emphasized that there was “no collusion” four separate times:
Rush transcript of key part of Barr’s remarks, essentially justifying Trump’s behavior because he thought the investigation wasn’t fair. Read More
We’re maybe 6 or 7 minutes into Bill Barr’s extended summary of the Mueller Report. And it’s basically an extended version of the Barr Letter, Barr making maximal ‘no collusion’ claims. Same highly technical language.
So many side stories and rivulets to watch over the course of the day. But I note that The Washington Post already seems to be downplaying its scoop that the Report would only be “lightly redacted”. It’s still included in the current versions of their main story. But it appears to have been demoted from the headline and nowhere on the digital front page. Curious to see how that get from Barr’s aides will age over the course of the day. The Post especially seems to have leaned quite far out on the basis of news that almost certainly comes from Barr and his top aides.
All of our coverage of the redacted Mueller report and the accompanying theatrics right here.
As we wait for tomorrow’s follies, I thought it would be interesting to take a detour into the history of the words ‘redaction’ and ‘redact’. Today we know these words refer to those heavy-handed black bars which obscure portions of text in indictments, various court documents, government records and more. But this wasn’t always what these words meant. In fact, the meaning we’re now all buzzing about right now is quite new. Read More
We’ve now gotten more details about about what we’ve basically already known or should have known: the fix is in. The goal here is to max out every avenue to protect the President from the contents of the Report. Bill Barr and his friends at the White House clearly do not care what anyone outside of Trump world thinks at this point. They are not even bothering to keep up appearances at the margins. A good and increasingly relevant question for Bill Barr at this point would be at what point the statutory powers of the Attorney General can amount to obstruction of justice if exercised with corrupt intent.
Let’s go through what we’ve learned this afternoon. Read More
A few early reveals on the dubious handling of the Mueller report:
Fascinating look at how Obama’s departure may have pushed the NRA in a harder extremist direction – beyond anything to do with guns – to stay in business.