In a battlefield situation the difference between a successful lightning strike into enemy lines and one that strikes deep and then becomes surrounded, cut off and destroyed can come down to a matter of moments. Since a short time after Bill Barr released the First Barr Letter I’ve thought we were looking at something like the latter case.
Bill Barr was installed at the Justice Department to protect the President. His carefully worded letter appeared to do just that. The President declared complete and total vindication and exoneration. All his supporters have rushed to do the same, creating a wild chorus of cheers, demanding Democrats resign, piling on the President’s demands for retribution. Many Democrats, like getting sucker punched two or three times, were stunned and demoralized.
On the day the letter was released one TPM Reader sent me this.
So, if Trump didn’t collude, then why was he so defensive about the investigation?
He’s pathological, so maybe that’s it.
But what is also true is that he has a masterly ability to get people deranged and focused on the wrong things. I think they suckered us into the collusion/Mueller storyline. It was in Trump’s interest to keep the circus going, especially if he had reason to expect he’d be exonerated. I see no reason to doubt Mueller professionalism or diligence. So, perhaps we need to think about all the things Trump did to keep us focused on collusion as a very skillful manipulation.
Anyway, at this point, we should expect a major bump in his approval ratings, and though we’re far out from 2020, I’d say he’s gone from being a slight favorite to win reelection to a strong favorite. We’ll see, I guess. But our side invested a lot of energy into the collusion story line, and we rolled snake eyes.
At this point, Trump and the GOP is giddy beyond belief at the possibility that Democrats are going to try to keep the Mueller stuff and Russia in the spotlight. Reading TPM, Slate, etc. is just killing me. This was always a long shot. A desperate silver bullet to try to remove Trump is one, fell swoop. We lost. We need to move on. Anyone on the Democratic side of the aisle talking Mueller at this point might as well be working for the Trump campaign. It is a losing issue and a distraction. Forget Mueller. Forget Comey. Forget collusion. Forget obstruction. Forget Trump kissing Putin’s ass.
None of this seems right to me. The most basic problem is that finding out what happened has always been more important than the politics of the eventual revelation. If a thorough investigation really shows there was nothing to do this, the country will be much better off for finding that out. But even as to the politics this misses most of what’s happening.
Where’s the Report? From the start it looked odd that a report that offers the President total exoneration somehow cannot be released. Remember, this is a White House that has repeatedly gone against its own Justice Department and national security apparatus’s explicit objections (which, remember, works for the President) to declassify information to support various pro-Trump conspiracy theories.
The Barr Letter was always part of a bum’s rush.
Now you have the White House, the President, all the President’s supporters committed to this idea that there was just nothing there to this whole story. And yet there appears to be a 300 to 400 page report on the 2016 and post-2016 obstruction investigations – plus various charts and tables and appendices. That’s a lot of exonerating. Like the President’s taxes, the need for secrecy speaks for itself. The rearguard effort to redact and slow roll the release by ten different standards also speaks for itself.
At the beginning it seemed possible that Mueller had prepared only a thin discussion of his decisions not to bring charges, which is all he was obligated to do under DOJ guidelines. If that were true, the nitty gritty of what he found might not be relevant because there was no clear record of it. That’s not what he did.
There is an obvious and creeping realization now that what is in that report is probably pretty bad for the President. Clearly it stopped short of any criminal charges – a major victory for the President in itself. But what’s in there? Most of the people who’ve delved deepest into this story have been clear from the start that the real wrongdoing quite likely wouldn’t fit into criminal charges. If the report had all come out at first the headline might still be no charges, at least the final headline. Now whatever is in that report will have to be navigated against the standard of total exoneration the President’s defenders have embraced.
Barr’s angle is clearly to conceal and delay the release as much as humanly possible. But keeping this report a secret will not be sustainable. The flurry of redactions Barr has in mind won’t be sustainable. It will all come out.
Where’s the report?
