Former FBI Director James Comey voiced a popular opinion Tuesday when he called Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s decision to punt the obstruction question in his report “really confusing.”
Neither Comey nor anyone aside from Attorney General William Barr and a few members of the Justice Department have seen the full report, and all outside those precious few are reacting based off of Barr’s four-page summary.
According to a Tuesday NBC News report, Comey spoke before an audience in Charlotte, North Carolina and said that he has “great faith in Robert Mueller” but “just can’t tell from the letter why didn’t he decide these questions when the entire rationale for a special counsel is to make sure the politicals aren’t making the key charging decisions.”
Comey also took issue with Barr’s decision to not pursue obstruction charges against President Donald Trump as a result of Mueller’s indecision.
“The notion that obstruction cases are somehow undermined by the absence of proof of an underlying crime, that is not my experience in 40 years of doing this nor is it the Department of Justice’s tradition,” Comey said. “Obstruction crimes matter without regard to what you prove about the underlying crime.”
It is unclear when a redacted version of the Mueller report will be released to the public, but a Justice Department official said Tuesday that the report would be released in “weeks not months.”
I’ll leave my opinion of Comey aside from what he did on Oct, 2016…
But the answer to the confusion any observer would feel is that Trump’s hand-picked A.G. buried the Mueller Report.
Because in the end Mueller thinks that this kind of issues are really supposed to be decided by politicians? There seems to be multitude of financial crimes he has committed (and were at least mostly outside the scope of this investigation), but the remedy for obstructing justice by abusing the otherwise legal powers the office of POTUS has, is impeachment. Mueller isn’t supposed to give recommendation on that, but the republican enthusiasm to publish the report gives a the hint of the likely content.
Anyone definitively weighing in on the Mueller report as exculpatory without having seen it and basing their views solely on the Barr summary letter is either a shill or an idiot, and if the latter for multiple reasons, not least of which are that one, Barr is an obvious fixer who should not be trusted whatsoever, and two, you don’t base your views on a hundreds or thousands of pages long report produced by a nearly 2 year probe (longer if you include the work done prior to Mueller’s hiring that he rolled into his probe) on a 4 page summary put out by said fixer. Comey’s not doing this, of course, but basically every Trumpie is, which was to be expected and precisely why Barr’s summary was structured as it was.
An aside, and this is a bit of an obsession with me, but shame on Glenn Greenwald for being among these. He may not be a “Trumpie” in the true and full sense of the word, but he was among those who breathlessly claimed that the Barr summery proved that there was no collusion and all that. And he’s a lawyer and journalist ferchrisakes. That’s facially professional malpractice. WTF happened to him? Seriously, it’s one of the more bizarre things to happen since Trump fake “won”. How’d they get to him? Or is it payback for what Obama did to him, David Miranda, Edward Snowden et al? Is that how they got to him? He’s basically a shill now.
First, I’d like to give Jeet a pat on the back for filling in for Josh so ably.
Second, I’d like to use his piece today in my response to this Comey bafflement story. Jeet says
I agree with this, in broad terms, but as we attend to other fronts we have to stop and think for a moment about what it would mean if we “moved on” and treated the Mueller report, and more importantly its misrepresentation and nondisclosure by Barr, as a minor matter. It would mean that the President, by firing Comey and installing Barr, has successfully halted and buried the gravest investigation into presidential criminality and abuse of power that anyone can remember. Watergate and Iran-Contra are chickenfeed compared to Trump-Russia and Trump-FBI. And if Barr succeeds in not disclosing the report and the so-called derogatory information it contains, it will mean the end of poiltical and criminal accountability for the president. We will essentially have a president who is above the rule of law. So it’s a huge call to say, in effect, let’s move on.
It’s also naive–and I’m not looking at Jeet here at all–to think that you can merrily carry on with policy arguments about healthcare, climate change etc in the belief that the 2020 elections will be like every other. If in addition to escaping criminal liability by politicizing the DOJ, Trump buries the Mueller report and escapes congressional oversight and public scrutiny–another unthinkable departure from all previous norms–what greater encouragement could he receive for fucking with the 2020 elections? He will understand that he can basically do anything he want.
As for that, my view has long been that while Comey actually wrote and sent that letter, he was forced to by rogue pro-Trump hacks in the NYPD, FBI & SDNY, who were about to leak the “newly discovered” Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop. One way or another that was going to come out whether from Comey or others. I don’t think he intended to throw the election so much as he was a weak and foolish FBI director who was in way over his head and didn’t know what was going on in his agency.
And yes, obviously, Barr is trying to bury the actual report, or frame it in such a way that if and when it does come out, it won’t matter anymore. Anyone who doesn’t get that is an idiot whose opinion isn’t fit to wrap a dead fish with (and yes that was directed at the establishment media).