Word is going out from within DOJ that Robert Mueller’s statement will be “substantial” and the NYT adds that it will be “lengthy.” Stay tuned.
I was out at a long scheduled meeting when Robert Mueller gave his statement a short time ago. Here’s Tierney Sneed’s write up. The upshot to me is that he has to testify in public. He’s made clear he doesn’t want to. But half of life is made up of things we’d rather not do. And my takeaway is that the Congress has to approach securing his testimony with the same determination and teeth they’re using with the bad-acting administration officials. That’s not because I see him as a bad actor. It’s simply because he has to testify, time is of the essence and the decision is up to Congress.
I confess I’m stunned. I’ve told you again and again that the iron law of 21st century Israeli politics is that Netanyahu always wins. The election he’s finally going to lose, the coalition he’s never going to hold together – fuggedaboutit, he always figures it out; he always threads the needle. Yet, only a couple hours ago, he finally didn’t. Netanyahu managed what seemed like a come from behind election victory on April 9th of this year. But he turned out not to be able to assemble a government. He got together 60 Knesset members. But he needed 61. He held out dissolving the Knesset and holding new elections as a doomsday cudgel to get everyone in line. But it didn’t work. Now the country will return to the second election in only a few months. It is the first time in Israeli history that an election has failed to produce a government.
Let me explain what happened.
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In the drama yesterday, as Netanyahu struggled in vain to cobble together a government, there was a legitimately hilarious moment I want to share with you. As noted yesterday, in the final hours, Netanyahu was offering crazy deals to all sorts of people – most notably Labor MKs – if only he could get one more seat (for a total of 61 out of 120) for his government AND who would support legislation to make him immune from prosecution. The appeals to Labor MKs were the crucial sign that he was willing to bargain away virtually anything to get that last seat and immunity.
So while all this is happening, Hadash MK Ayman Odeh goes up to the speaker’s rostrum in the Knesset to epically troll Netanyahu.
President Trump says so many ridiculous things. But this one stood out to me this morning. He appears now to believe that to impeach him, the House would need not only to find a “crime”. They’d also have to find a “misdemeanor”. Remember “high crimes and misdemeanors”. Video after the jump.
Trump’s claim about Robert Mueller interviewing for and trying to get the FBI job again is preposterous on its face. But it actually comes up in the Mueller Report itself, from Steve Bannon’s interview …
The best way to understand Bill Barr’s activities is that it is his current job to seed an ever-expanding catalog of pro-Trump conspiracies with the imprimatur of the Department of Justice. I don’t know how many civil servants Barr will purge, how selectively he’ll use declassified intelligence to damage political enemies or how much he’ll try to imprison the President’s political opponents. He clearly wants to do all these things and I’m certain he is actively working to do one and two. But to the extent he finds himself limited on those fronts, he accomplishes a lot just by this on-going lying on which there is little way for people to call him out.
We just recorded a new episode of the podcast with Mike Isikoff and Dan Klaidman of Yahoo News and the Skullduggery podcast. (Should drop late this afternoon or early evening.) We mainly talked about the Russia probe, looking back to the second half of 2016, what was known then, how reporting on the dossier looks in retrospect. But we also talked about the recent faux-controversy with Rashida Tlaib because it was based on comments she made on their podcast. And we got some interesting backstory on how it unfolded and how and why it exploded as a story.
Have you been wondering why Robert Mueller was able to investigate President Trump for obstruction of justice, but not accuse him of any crime? TPM’s Josh Kovensky has you covered.