Tag: Donald Trump

Mueller’s Stance On Obstruction Is Clear. Congress, Justice Is In Your Hands Now.

Robert Mueller made a public statement today for the first time since his appointment as Special Counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 Election. True to form, his statement was clear, concise, and drew solely from the findings of his report. Over the past couple of weeks, there has been some tension between the Special Counsel’s office and the House of Representatives in negotiating terms for Robert Mueller’s much sought after public testimony. The Special Counsel has expressed strong reservations about the possibility of such a testimony, and has requested to make a public statement and allow the rest of his testimony to be made in private in order to avoid public spectacle.

Mueller said in his statement today that, “I’ll make a few remarks about the results of our work, but beyond these few remarks, it is important the office’s written work speak for itself.”

It’s important to understand the fairness in Mueller’s position here. A law man through and through, Mueller has been careful at all times to let only the contents of the report itself characterize the findings of the Special Counsel’s investigation. This was clear when Barr who, 48 hours after the report was released to him for review and redaction, made a public statement characterizing the findings of the report, “ Indeed, as the report states, “the investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA’s interference operation.”Put another way, the Special Counsel found no “collusion” by any Americans in the IRA’s illegal activity.“ Put another way, that’s not the way that it is, it is not what it is? There are obvious complications with Barr’s analysis. Mueller actually wrote A follow up letter to the Department of Justice complaining that, “the summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released publicly in the afternoon of March 24th did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.” and that, “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.”

Because this small piece of wording can all too easily be looked over, and it’s easy to get lost in the legal language of DOJ employees I feel that I have to point out that Barr, choosing to parrot Trump’s inane rally chants of “NO COLLUSION!” has conveniently moved the goal post on Mueller’s findings here. The Special Counsel actually states in the report that they purposefully did not use the term collusion as a basis for their investigations. “In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of “collusion.” In so doing, the Office recognized that the word “collude ” was used in communications with the Acting Attorney General (Before Barr’s confirmation) confirming certain aspects of the investigation’s scope and that the term has frequently been invoked in public reporting about the investigation. But collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law. In connection with that analysis, we addressed the factual question whether members of the Trump Campaign “coordinated”-a term that appears in the appointment order-with Russian election interference activities. Like collusion, “coordination” does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law. We understood coordination to require an agreement-tacit or express- between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference. That requires more than the two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests. We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

I apologize for the long excerpt, but this is a blatant cover up attempt by the Trump appointed Attorney General, the highest law officer in the land lying about the plainly stated reality of Mueller’s findings by changing the specific term that identifies the subject matter of the Mueller Report seemingly just for the purpose of kowtowing to the President’s deviant narrative . The report also states, “the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated (remember the legal terminology here) with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” “Did not establish” a specific crime does not mean “exonerated” of all potential crimes and misdeeds, especially when you’re Robert Mueller, who only speaks legalese. Remember, Mueller did not investigate Trump’s tax information, finances, or business history with Russia, and has left much of that work to the other 29, Federal, State, and Congressional investigations into Trump, his campaign, and his business.

Barr’s letter said, “we now know that the Russian operatives who perpetrated these schemes did not have the cooperation of President Trump or the Trump campaign.” This seems a little odd given Donald Trump Jr.’s friendly email exchanges and Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer claiming to have emails containing dirt on Trump’s political rivals (which Trump Jr. then lied about multiple times, including under oath, and once under the dictates of President Donald Trump himself), the Trump Organization real-estate project in Russia known as Trump Tower Moscow (Candidate Trump signed a Letter of lntent for Trump Tower Moscow by November 2015, and in January 2016 Trump Organization executive Michael Cohen emailed and spoke about the project with the office of Russian government press secretary Dmitry Peskov. The Trump Organization pursued the project through at least June 2016, including by considering travel to Russia by Cohen and candidate Trump), Trump repeatedly encouraging Russian political action in the U.S. in his campaign speeches and tweets, Meeting privately with Russian government officials and taking photos in the oval office without any stenographers or U.S. opress presence shortly after being inaugurated, and Trump’s belligerent campaign to obstruct both the public view, and the progress of the investigation.

Mueller has been pretty clear as well when it comes to allegations of Presidential Obstruction of Justice, “Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” Mueller wrote. “The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

In his statement today, Robert Mueller rehashed his position on Obstruction of Justice, “…if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would so state. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime. The introduction to the volume two of our report explains that decision. It explains that under long-standing department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that, too, is prohibited. The special counsel’s office is part of the Department of Justice and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider. The department’s written opinion explaining that policy makes several important points that further informed our handling of the obstruction investigation. Those points are summarized in our report and I will describe two of them for you. First, the opinion explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents available. Among other things, that evidence could be used if there were co-conspirators who could be charged now. And second, the opinion says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing. And beyond department policy, we were guided by principles of fairness. It would be unfair to potentially — it would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.“

In short, Mueller found multiple instances of obstruction, but does not have the authority to press criminal charges against the president according to the constitution, so the ball is firmly in congress’s court. If Congress does not move to impeach now, it will mean that the law is not enforced in this country, even at the highest levels. Democrats in Congress must differentiate themselves from the Republicans by proving to the American People that they are capable of discerning the difference between what’s morally right, and what’s politically easy. Nancy Pelosi, your job is to defend the truth, the constitution, and the American People and I promise that if you do that in good faith, the majority will respond. We’re all in this together.

Trump’s Best Hope In 2020 Is Fake News!

I believe if there’s one thing that voters in democratic states worldwide, and especially in the United States heading into 2020 should concern themselves with, it’s the danger of what I’ll refer to here as “fake news.” The Guardian published an article by Dan Tynan during the 2016 Election that outlines the story of how Social media platforms are creating lucrative advertising incentives in the US and abroad for cheap clickbait political news accounts. The reporting states,

“The town of Veles, Macedonia (population 44,000), is the unlikely home for dozens of avowedly pro-Trump political news sites, featuring headlines like Hillary’s Illegal Email Just Killed Its First American Spy and This is How Liberals Destroyed America, This Is Why We Need Trump in the White House.

The Guardian has identified more than 150 domains registered to people claiming addresses in Veles, though not all of those are associated with active websites.

Some claim to garner millions of page views per month. Most others are relatively obscure. All of them exist primarily for one reason – to cash in on the seemingly endless appetite for news about Donald Trump. And they’re getting a big boost from Facebook.”

A democracy requires the possibility of consensus, people must be able to look at the same facts and reach some common understanding about the nature of any given problem if there’s to be any hope of taking steps toward solving it. Allowing mere “clickability” to determine the profitability of content poses an obvious danger to the maintenance of constructive political discourse because, as any mildly self aware person will tell you, our reasons for any particular small decision like a click, or the fact that our eyes naturally dart across the screen to view one thing as opposed to another are pretty rarely within our control, and almost never within our full view as individuals. The human mind has evolved, it seems, not for maximization of certain scholarly intuitions or mental habits for vetting information and reasoning through arguments that are required to form a nuanced view of any topic, but instead, left untended the human mind prioritizes much more primal motivations.

Although these Social Media platforms to which Americans have so readily assigned a central seat in the space of our daily waking attention have created an effective infrastructure for delivering useful information to vast numbers of people very quickly, they do not come without their risks. These risks have become increasingly salient since 2016, the year the Russian government launched an internet hacking and disinformation campaign to assist a reality TV celebrity and failed real estate tycoon into winning the election for President of the United States of America, hacked into two voter databases in the South, and succeeded.

I want people to start reflecting accurately on what these technologies are, They are a human-machine interface, capable of hacking our attention and subconscious in various ways to accomplish any number of ends, depending on how they are used. Humans have evolutionary programming just like all creatures, and thus have certain predictable reactions which are quite easily exploited by clever engineers with questionable incentives. The fact is, that by exposing ourselves to these platforms, we are allowing a whole range of others, many of whom are far more aware of these risks than we are, and who may or may not share even our most basic political interests such as… Oh, I don’t know, Citizenship in the United States to have the opportunity to compete for direct, mercenary access to our stream of consciousness.

The threat doesn’t only lie with Russia, or Macedonians. In many cases this is something that we as Americans are doing to each other, Tynan states,

“Even smaller sites are making bank on the surge of interest in the Republican nominee.(Trump) Liberty Writers News, a two-person site operating out of a house in the San Francisco Bay Area, generates income of between $10,000 and $40,000 a month from banks of ads that run along the side and bottom of every story.”

We have to rise to a higher standard than these cheap excuses for political media. We need a generation to rise up and make way for measured, intentional political commentary in this space of cyber communication. And no, that doesn’t just mean clicking the share button, and it doesn’t mean sharing Trump memes. We need real Americans with real opinions and experience to take personal responsibility for the things that they expose others to through their social media account shares. There would be no false incentive if it were not for our propensity to believe and spread these falsehoods. Congress has been asleep for three decades on this front, and at least in the very near term cannot be counted on to make meaningful legislation that can protect our elections and so it is up to us as citizens to take back our dialogue.