In regards to obstruction (Volume II) Mueller declined to make a traditional prosecutorial judgement because he felt constrained by a 2000 rule from the office of legal council. Plus a criminal...
Exemplary
In regards to obstruction (Volume II)
Mueller declined to make a traditional prosecutorial judgement because he felt constrained by a 2000 rule from the office of legal council. Plus a criminal prosecution would impede the presidents ability to govern, and preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct (page 1, fourth paragraph).
Mueller states the evidence does not clearly exonerate the president, but is complex (page 2, fourth paragraph.) He notes that while the president knew Cohen gave false testimony, there is no evidence that the president directed or aided Cohen to give false testimony (page 153.)
Mueller states "The President's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests." Therefore no more additional obstruction of justice charges will be filed against the presidents aides and associates (page 158.) Mueller also notes that it is still a crime even if your attempt at obstruction does not succeed and even if the attempts are mostly public. To my uneducated eye, this seemed the most damaging part of the report. The presidents orders, if followed, would have been obstruction of justice.
Mueller spends significant time on the question if the president can even be held accountable, and states while constitutional questions are complex, the president can be held accountable to obstruction of justice charges using current supreme court precedence (pages 159-182).
Ultimately the report has very little new real information, and simply confirms what either happened publicly, or has already been publicly reported.
It does raise fresh questions on why the House is reluctant to initiate impeachment proceedings, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out.
It also raises the question of how far Trump can and will push things before he faces consequences. Could he really shoot someone dead and still have support from his party and his base?
The house is reluctant to initiate impeachment proceedings because doing so will likely only make the problem worse. Like it or not, Democrats winning big in 2020 is critical to undoing the damage...
The house is reluctant to initiate impeachment proceedings because doing so will likely only make the problem worse. Like it or not, Democrats winning big in 2020 is critical to undoing the damage Trump has done. The House shouldn't impeach until they are confident they can get the conviction in the senate and that it won't hurt Democrats in 2020.
that's probably never, then. even if donald literally shot and killed a congressperson on the senate floor, i'm not convinced you could find the necessary republican votes to impeach him in the...
The House shouldn't impeach until they are confident they can get the conviction in the senate and that it won't hurt Democrats in 2020.
that's probably never, then. even if donald literally shot and killed a congressperson on the senate floor, i'm not convinced you could find the necessary republican votes to impeach him in the house or senate. impeachment proceedings also infamously backfired on republicans when they tried them on clinton, and he came out of them more popular than when they started. given that there is realistically no chance of impeachment actually occurring, i'm honestly not sure what the point would be other than pandering to the base, which democrats really don't need to do at this point to win in 2020 and which they can also do in ways which won't potentially backfire and turn voters against them like impeachment proceedings might.
offtopic: @Deimos: why does the above comment have a blue border? Isn't that the "Exemplary"-awarded border? I can't see any labels on it. Not the first such comment, either.
offtopic:
@Deimos: why does the above comment have a blue border? Isn't that the "Exemplary"-awarded border? I can't see any labels on it. Not the first such comment, either.
just based on what's already being reported so far, it looks an awful lot like mueller actually wanted to prosecute people, but couldn't because there's basically no way to prove intent with the...
just based on what's already being reported so far, it looks an awful lot like mueller actually wanted to prosecute people, but couldn't because there's basically no way to prove intent with the charges being levied, and therefore was forced to punt and say "hey uh, congress, wanna try and do something here?".
The "collusion" part was not charged partly due to the difficulty of proving intent, but to me, it seems like the obstruction part is practically an impeachment referral to Congress. He...
The "collusion" part was not charged partly due to the difficulty of proving intent, but to me, it seems like the obstruction part is practically an impeachment referral to Congress. He intentionally did not give a conclusion on obstruction due to the OLC policy about indicting a sitting president, but provided ample evidence for Congress to exercise their authority.
That, and it seems that the reason there was no motive was because Trump never answered questions from a prosecutor during the investigation. I wonder how that strategy of just not saying anything...
That, and it seems that the reason there was no motive was because Trump never answered questions from a prosecutor during the investigation.
I wonder how that strategy of just not saying anything would have worked out for "normal" people and not a politician. I don't know enough about the process in detail to know if this is essentially the result one should expect from this type of investigation or not.
If you try that with a grand jury as a normal person though they throw you in jail for contempt until you answer. Happened to Chelsea Manning recently, has happened to several activists when...
If you try that with a grand jury as a normal person though they throw you in jail for contempt until you answer. Happened to Chelsea Manning recently, has happened to several activists when Occupy was going.
Because she wont testify due to some reason besides self-incrimination. The 5th protects you from self-incrimination, which this is not - theyre presumably asking her to testify due to their...
Because she wont testify due to some reason besides self-incrimination.
Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand jury system
The 5th protects you from self-incrimination, which this is not - theyre presumably asking her to testify due to their prosecution of Assange.
Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who provided archives of secret military documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, was taken into custody on Friday after a federal judge found her in contempt for refusing to testify before a grand jury that is investigating the antisecrecy group.
Refusal to testify before a federal grand jury can result in jail time for contempt of court. (Video journalist Josh Wolf, for example, served seven and a half months in 2006 and 2007 for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury and turn over his footage of a protest in San Francisco.)
I'm no lawyer, but am under the impression that the Fifth Amendment is more complicated than that in practice. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Salinas v. Texas said than you have to...
I'm no lawyer, but am under the impression that the Fifth Amendment is more complicated than that in practice.
For example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Salinas v. Texas said than you have to actively invoke the Fifth Amendment or silence can be used against you in court.
By invoking the Fifth Amendment you're actively saying that you could incriminate yourself by saying something.
If I'm not mistaken, the whole point of subpoenas are to compel testimony in a lot of different situations.
If everyone just has a right to remain silent, why do subpoenas exist and what do they actually do?
This is why it is so baffling why he didn't try harder to interview Trump. How else do you prove intent, other than asking that person what their intent was?
This is why it is so baffling why he didn't try harder to interview Trump. How else do you prove intent, other than asking that person what their intent was?
intent is honestly almost impossible to prove unless you literally have something unambiguous in writing--or, alternatively, if you can railroad someone into just taking the charge because...
intent is honestly almost impossible to prove unless you literally have something unambiguous in writing--or, alternatively, if you can railroad someone into just taking the charge because fighting it would be too expensive or something. so i'll be honest: even if they did actually interview him, it'd probably only come after an extensive legal battle (meaning we'd have probably not seen this report for another few months at least) and if they got him on anything because of it, it probably would not be conspiracy or something similar. it'd be a lesser charge like perjury.
You mean something like this with regards to firing Comey:
You mean something like this with regards to firing Comey:
"And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said 'you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won'."
It's disappointing to me that they uploaded images instead of text. It could've been such a smaller file, and easily searchable to boot. Ah well, someone will surely upload an OCR'd version soon...
It's disappointing to me that they uploaded images instead of text. It could've been such a smaller file, and easily searchable to boot.
Ah well, someone will surely upload an OCR'd version soon enough.
Probably because of how many times people have screwed up "redacting" text PDFs, where you could just... delete the black boxes and read the text underneath. I'm sure they'd much rather pay for...
Probably because of how many times people have screwed up "redacting" text PDFs, where you could just... delete the black boxes and read the text underneath. I'm sure they'd much rather pay for the bandwidth than risk something like that being possible on this one.
From reddit : https://viewfromll2.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/mueller-report.pdf By https://www.reddit.com/u/reddsophia88 From here : https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/bemwmt/-/el73vh6
Related - WaPo has a "live" article (last updated just a few minutes ago) highlighting important details their journalists are finding as they comb through it:...
A quick scroll shows that a lot of the Wikileaks stuff appears to be redacted. Personally, that was my guess for where the potentially most serious wrongdoing would be. News outlets are clamoring...
A quick scroll shows that a lot of the Wikileaks stuff appears to be redacted.
Personally, that was my guess for where the potentially most serious wrongdoing would be.
News outlets are clamoring to analyze and present what's going on. According to my twitter feed, Trump's reactions to the investigation seem to be summarized as "my presidency is over" and "F***" although I haven't read the report for myself yet.
That response and his campaign and administration's lack of cooperation just paints a really bad picture, imo. That's not how innocent people behave at all. Which isn't to say acting guilty is...
That response and his campaign and administration's lack of cooperation just paints a really bad picture, imo. That's not how innocent people behave at all. Which isn't to say acting guilty is enough to make you guilty, but if he's truly innocent (and I doubt he is, personally) think of how much sooner this would've been over for him if he'd just complied with all requests, not tried to obstruct justice, dangle pardons, etc.
Does anyone know what page that line on? I keep seeing everyone repeat it, without attributing the source it came from. I'm very curious how Mueller found out about that reaction. And how reliable...
Does anyone know what page that line on? I keep seeing everyone repeat it, without attributing the source it came from. I'm very curious how Mueller found out about that reaction. And how reliable that source is.
Oh man, the line after that is even better. Very interesting that he was discussing the possibility of a special counsel before one was even created.
Oh man, the line after that is even better.
"Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels, it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years and I won't be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.
Very interesting that he was discussing the possibility of a special counsel before one was even created.
Why is it redacted? Not from US, so I don’t know why should it be redacted, and it is probably obvious to everyone else, since I couldn’t find anything about it.
Why is it redacted? Not from US, so I don’t know why should it be redacted, and it is probably obvious to everyone else, since I couldn’t find anything about it.
There are four reasons Barr gave for why certain sections would be redacted, and good reasons for them:
Revealing it would harm an ongoing matter. Ward writes, “Some redactions in the report will exist mainly to allow other related cases to continue unimpeded.”
It reveals investigative techniques. Ward writes that “it’s highly likely the US government had to use sensitive spying methods — like, say, an undercover agent or top-secret surveillance technology — to investigate.”
It reveals private information of third-party individuals. Ward writes the “Justice Department has long had a policy of not divulging people’s names during an investigation unless they are indicted.”
It was obtained via grand jury testimony. This is secret by law.
So the document is more dense than I'm used to reading but am I reading the introduction to volume 2 correctly where it states the first reason for not coming out with a decision to prosecute is...
So the document is more dense than I'm used to reading but am I reading the introduction to volume 2 correctly where it states the first reason for not coming out with a decision to prosecute is simply because even the threat of prosecution would not allow the president to excercise his proper authority?
we recognized that a federal crimiinal accusation against a sitting President would place burdens on the President's capacity to govern and potentially preempt constitutional process for addressing presidential misconduct.
Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President's conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President's actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
The following paragraphs indicate that once his presidential term is complete he is open to prosecution and there appears to be at least evidence for which to prosecute and the only reason they haven't is because he won't be able to fulfill his duty as president during such a trial?
The OLC opinion also recognizes that a President does not have immunity after he leaves office.
Finally, this report was basically a way of establishing and verifying the facts so that if a prosecution were to take place this information would not be lost? Do I understand the basic gist of it correctly?
Given those considerations, the facts known to us, and the strong public interest in safeguarding the integrity of the criminal justice system, we conducted a thorough factual investigation in order to preserve the evidence when memories were fresh and documentary materials were available.
IANAL, but yes, but this seems accurate. So, did Barr brazenly lie in today’s press conference in reply to the first question from the press? Barr claims that in his meeting with Mueller on March...
IANAL, but yes, but this seems accurate. So, did Barr brazenly lie in today’s press conference in reply to the first question from the press? Barr claims that in his meeting with Mueller on March 5th that he asked Mueller about the OLC opinion, and he claims Mueller stated his decision was not based on the OLC opinion. This is contradictory to the report. Barr refers us to the report, which as you’ve quoted, does cite the OLC opinion, but then also claims that Mueller did not rely on that opinion in the declination decision. Barr’s contradiction of the report seems like pretty damning evidence that he is not a reliable communicator, and supports the position Barr is attempting to protect the president and misconstrue the findings of the report.
If Manafort gave internal polling data to Russian intelligence...that sounds like coordination to me? What am I missing there? See top of page 7, Volume 1. And they couldn't have given us an...
If Manafort gave internal polling data to Russian intelligence...that sounds like coordination to me? What am I missing there? See top of page 7, Volume 1.
And they couldn't have given us an OCR-version with electronic bookmarks? C'mon!
they used a very strict definition of "collusion" which goes far beyond most people's this requires this wording makes it sound as if that's why people weren't charged (emphasis mine) basically...
they used a very strict definition of "collusion" which goes far beyond most people's
this Office's focus in resolving the question of join criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law, not the commonly discussed term "collusion" - Mueller Report, Volume I, Page 181
this requires
an agreement to commit any substantive violation of federal criminal law - Mueller Report, Volume I, Page 181
this wording makes it sound as if that's why people weren't charged (emphasis mine)
The Office therefore did not charge any individual associated with the Trump Campaign with conspiracy - Mueller Report, Volume I, Page 181
basically defined it as "conspiracy" not "coordination", which there clearly was
Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming. [Redacted] were discussed within the Campaign, and in the summer of 2016, the Campaign was planning a communications strategy based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks - Mueller Report, Volume II, Page 18
In regards to obstruction (Volume II)
Mueller declined to make a traditional prosecutorial judgement because he felt constrained by a 2000 rule from the office of legal council. Plus a criminal prosecution would impede the presidents ability to govern, and preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct (page 1, fourth paragraph).
Barr did not feel constrained by the same rule, and in fact, stated that it was left to the Attorney General to determine if a crime had been committed. Barr then stated the evidence was not sufficient to prosecute.
Mueller states the evidence does not clearly exonerate the president, but is complex (page 2, fourth paragraph.) He notes that while the president knew Cohen gave false testimony, there is no evidence that the president directed or aided Cohen to give false testimony (page 153.)
Mueller states "The President's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests." Therefore no more additional obstruction of justice charges will be filed against the presidents aides and associates (page 158.) Mueller also notes that it is still a crime even if your attempt at obstruction does not succeed and even if the attempts are mostly public. To my uneducated eye, this seemed the most damaging part of the report. The presidents orders, if followed, would have been obstruction of justice.
Mueller spends significant time on the question if the president can even be held accountable, and states while constitutional questions are complex, the president can be held accountable to obstruction of justice charges using current supreme court precedence (pages 159-182).
Ultimately the report has very little new real information, and simply confirms what either happened publicly, or has already been publicly reported.
It does raise fresh questions on why the House is reluctant to initiate impeachment proceedings, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out.
It also raises the question of how far Trump can and will push things before he faces consequences. Could he really shoot someone dead and still have support from his party and his base?
The house is reluctant to initiate impeachment proceedings because doing so will likely only make the problem worse. Like it or not, Democrats winning big in 2020 is critical to undoing the damage Trump has done. The House shouldn't impeach until they are confident they can get the conviction in the senate and that it won't hurt Democrats in 2020.
that's probably never, then. even if donald literally shot and killed a congressperson on the senate floor, i'm not convinced you could find the necessary republican votes to impeach him in the house or senate. impeachment proceedings also infamously backfired on republicans when they tried them on clinton, and he came out of them more popular than when they started. given that there is realistically no chance of impeachment actually occurring, i'm honestly not sure what the point would be other than pandering to the base, which democrats really don't need to do at this point to win in 2020 and which they can also do in ways which won't potentially backfire and turn voters against them like impeachment proceedings might.
offtopic:
@Deimos: why does the above comment have a blue border? Isn't that the "Exemplary"-awarded border? I can't see any labels on it. Not the first such comment, either.
Thanks.
just based on what's already being reported so far, it looks an awful lot like mueller actually wanted to prosecute people, but couldn't because there's basically no way to prove intent with the charges being levied, and therefore was forced to punt and say "hey uh, congress, wanna try and do something here?".
The "collusion" part was not charged partly due to the difficulty of proving intent, but to me, it seems like the obstruction part is practically an impeachment referral to Congress. He intentionally did not give a conclusion on obstruction due to the OLC policy about indicting a sitting president, but provided ample evidence for Congress to exercise their authority.
That, and it seems that the reason there was no motive was because Trump never answered questions from a prosecutor during the investigation.
I wonder how that strategy of just not saying anything would have worked out for "normal" people and not a politician. I don't know enough about the process in detail to know if this is essentially the result one should expect from this type of investigation or not.
The right to remain silent is a well established one at all levels of society.
If you try that with a grand jury as a normal person though they throw you in jail for contempt until you answer. Happened to Chelsea Manning recently, has happened to several activists when Occupy was going.
Manning's trial was a court mashall, which is very different. Youll have to be more specific concerning the activists.
Because she wont testify due to some reason besides self-incrimination.
The 5th protects you from self-incrimination, which this is not - theyre presumably asking her to testify due to their prosecution of Assange.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/03/08/politics/chelsea-manning-detained-contempt-wikileaks/index.html
Re: Chelsea Manning: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/us/politics/chelsea-manning-wikileaks-jail.html
Re: Jailed activists: https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/political-convictions/Content?oid=14397498
As stated elsewhere: the 5th protects against self incrimination, which neither of these are.
I'm no lawyer, but am under the impression that the Fifth Amendment is more complicated than that in practice.
For example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Salinas v. Texas said than you have to actively invoke the Fifth Amendment or silence can be used against you in court.
By invoking the Fifth Amendment you're actively saying that you could incriminate yourself by saying something.
If I'm not mistaken, the whole point of subpoenas are to compel testimony in a lot of different situations.
If everyone just has a right to remain silent, why do subpoenas exist and what do they actually do?
Presumably the opportunity to cooperate and receive a less severe sentence, on the assumption that guilt will be found out regardless.
This is why it is so baffling why he didn't try harder to interview Trump. How else do you prove intent, other than asking that person what their intent was?
intent is honestly almost impossible to prove unless you literally have something unambiguous in writing--or, alternatively, if you can railroad someone into just taking the charge because fighting it would be too expensive or something. so i'll be honest: even if they did actually interview him, it'd probably only come after an extensive legal battle (meaning we'd have probably not seen this report for another few months at least) and if they got him on anything because of it, it probably would not be conspiracy or something similar. it'd be a lesser charge like perjury.
This is what Preet Bharara has said. If Mueller tried to force Trump to cooperate they'd end up in legal morass for god knows how long.
You mean something like this with regards to firing Comey:
Warning: really large PDF file(145MB) that will eat any potential data caps. Like mine(though I should've expected that.)
It's disappointing to me that they uploaded images instead of text. It could've been such a smaller file, and easily searchable to boot.
Ah well, someone will surely upload an OCR'd version soon enough.
Probably because of how many times people have screwed up "redacting" text PDFs, where you could just... delete the black boxes and read the text underneath. I'm sure they'd much rather pay for the bandwidth than risk something like that being possible on this one.
From reddit :
https://viewfromll2.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/mueller-report.pdf
By https://www.reddit.com/u/reddsophia88
From here :
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/bemwmt/-/el73vh6
Related - WaPo has a "live" article (last updated just a few minutes ago) highlighting important details their journalists are finding as they comb through it:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mueller-report-russia-investigation-findings/2019/04/18/b07f4310-56f9-11e9-814f-e2f46684196e_story.html
p.s. Incognito/Private browser view it to get past paywall.
NYT has one too.
It's pretty heavily redacted in some parts, so the fight over this report is far from over.
A quick scroll shows that a lot of the Wikileaks stuff appears to be redacted.
Personally, that was my guess for where the potentially most serious wrongdoing would be.
News outlets are clamoring to analyze and present what's going on. According to my twitter feed, Trump's reactions to the investigation seem to be summarized as "my presidency is over" and "F***" although I haven't read the report for myself yet.
That response and his campaign and administration's lack of cooperation just paints a really bad picture, imo. That's not how innocent people behave at all. Which isn't to say acting guilty is enough to make you guilty, but if he's truly innocent (and I doubt he is, personally) think of how much sooner this would've been over for him if he'd just complied with all requests, not tried to obstruct justice, dangle pardons, etc.
Does anyone know what page that line on? I keep seeing everyone repeat it, without attributing the source it came from. I'm very curious how Mueller found out about that reaction. And how reliable that source is.
Volume 2, page 78. The source is notes written by Joseph "Jody" Hunt, Jeff Sessions' Chief of Staff.
Oh man, the line after that is even better.
Very interesting that he was discussing the possibility of a special counsel before one was even created.
Not sure what page it's on, but Mueller got it from Sessions. Up to you how reliable you think it is but I'd bet it happened.
Why is it redacted? Not from US, so I don’t know why should it be redacted, and it is probably obvious to everyone else, since I couldn’t find anything about it.
Here's an explainer from Vox
And almost all of it is "Harm to ongoing matter". This is nowhere near over.
So the document is more dense than I'm used to reading but am I reading the introduction to volume 2 correctly where it states the first reason for not coming out with a decision to prosecute is simply because even the threat of prosecution would not allow the president to excercise his proper authority?
The following paragraphs indicate that once his presidential term is complete he is open to prosecution and there appears to be at least evidence for which to prosecute and the only reason they haven't is because he won't be able to fulfill his duty as president during such a trial?
Finally, this report was basically a way of establishing and verifying the facts so that if a prosecution were to take place this information would not be lost? Do I understand the basic gist of it correctly?
IANAL, but yes, but this seems accurate. So, did Barr brazenly lie in today’s press conference in reply to the first question from the press? Barr claims that in his meeting with Mueller on March 5th that he asked Mueller about the OLC opinion, and he claims Mueller stated his decision was not based on the OLC opinion. This is contradictory to the report. Barr refers us to the report, which as you’ve quoted, does cite the OLC opinion, but then also claims that Mueller did not rely on that opinion in the declination decision. Barr’s contradiction of the report seems like pretty damning evidence that he is not a reliable communicator, and supports the position Barr is attempting to protect the president and misconstrue the findings of the report.
If Manafort gave internal polling data to Russian intelligence...that sounds like coordination to me? What am I missing there? See top of page 7, Volume 1.
And they couldn't have given us an OCR-version with electronic bookmarks? C'mon!
they used a very strict definition of "collusion" which goes far beyond most people's
this requires
this wording makes it sound as if that's why people weren't charged (emphasis mine)
basically defined it as "conspiracy" not "coordination", which there clearly was
FYI: an unofficial OCR version has been posted.