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.

The REAL Reason Trump Won’t Do Infrastructure

All over the country people will be going here or there this memorial day weekend traveling on crumbling roads, dated bridges, and passing through tunnels badly in need of updating. President Trump this week stormed out of a meeting with Democratic leaders in congress in which they had planned to discuss funding for a $2 Trillion dollar infrastructure package. In typical Trump form, the President walked into the meeting, stood at the head of the table for something like three minutes, cried because Nancy Pelosi said she believed he’s been involved in a cover up, railed against congressional investigations of his presidency, and swore that he would not negotiate with Democrats on getting anything done until they stopped investigating corruption within his administration. He then stepped out onto the Rose Garden and delivered a statement complete with big note cards, about how he’s the most transparent president in history, he doesn’t “do cover-ups”, and how the Democrats Considering impeachment are just trying to scuttle his successful presidency. (blah blah blah I’d like to point out the astounding level of projection coming from the GOP, which is in fact the only party that has done any scuttling over the last 30 years, see Nixon Presidency, see Obama presidency, and Clinton Presidency, but I digress) Once again the work for which the American people have enlisted civil servants has failed to get done under Trump, and the president blames the rule of law while we get a bucket of double-talk dumped on our heads.

This is perhaps not as straight forward an impasse as it might seem, however. Trump’s anti-oversight theatrics were also very convenient because they disguised the fact that he cannot now, or ever, deliver on his signature promise to create a “great” infrastructure program. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has signaled that he has absolutely no interest in a big infrastructure plan if it requires rolling back any part of the GOP’s 2017 corporate tax cut. You see, this Republican party has abolished the days of history in which both parties could come together and agree on a certain course of action that might benefit their constituents, even if it meant that people and businesses had to pay taxes to live in a nice country. Time and again Republican leadership has proven to whom their allegiances lie, and it’s not to the middle class. The 2017 tax bill cuts taxes heavily for multimillionaires and billionaires, and offers some temporary tax cuts to some middle class Americans. The average tax cut for the middle class has been about $500 and they have an expiration date, 2025. Obviously, this has ballooned the tax deficit in this country to absurd levels (something Republicans bemoaned endlessly during Obama’s presidency.) This has left Trump with lots and lots of BIG promises, and no way of financing their fulfillment (not to mention the damage that will occur when they don’t get fulfilled) that doesn’t strap the cost onto the backs of the middle class. Perhaps the real reason that there was no place set for the president at that infrastructure meeting, and why he’d had pre-made note card graphics ready for use at his Rose Garden propaganda display is not that Nancy Pelosi accused him of a cover up, but because the Republican Senate and Mitch McConnell will not budge on their position of 0 corporate cooperation with the government to accomplish projects that this Country needs to thrive, and perhaps to survive the coming crises that will arise as a result of climate change and shifting world economic power. We have a GOP with deeply libertarian values of limiting government, and nonexistent civic responsibility for big business wealth traps. I could go on about how short sighted this libertarian ideology is, and how it’s more often than not served as a cover for billionaires to create moral equivalency for themselves while they rob the American people blind and take us one tiny step at a time closer to our roots as the wild west. That’s a conversation for another day.

Donald Trump is between a rock and a hard place, he must either choose to don the persona of a weak, embattled president who has been stymied by investigations which he simultaneously paints as “The greatest hoax in the American history”, “an attempted coup”, and a “complete and total exoneration” As if these are all compatible narratives, Or he must admit that his political ineptitude, and his choice to tie himself into a parasitic GOP that for the last 50 years has resorted to cheap tricks, and dirty political virtue signals to harness power for the interests of big business and the very rich while claiming conservative, evangelical, and southern ideologies in order to gain the undying support of a less discerning section of the populace. Donald Trump’s incompetence is perhaps not a bug, but a feature of what the GOP wants to see out of this administration. Republicans don’t actually want to see anything get done by the government. Mitch McConnell has described himself as the “grim reaper” of any legislation backed by the Democratic House. To me, this sounds like a complete dereliction of duty, and an abandonment of the purpose for which he was elected, but to Republicans this sounds like one more knife in the back of a big daddy government that liberal cucks need to tell them how to live their lives. Oh no, these Libertarian ideologues in the GOP love to see liberal snowflakes cry, even if it means cutting their own legs off to make it happen.

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.

3 Reasons Why Congress Should Impeach Donald Trump.

Firstly, impeachment has been used to call out misleading, dishonest, and corrupt conduct by Presidents even if it didn’t end up in removal from office. Bill Clinton was brought to trial by a Republican House on two articles of impeachment, Lying to a grand jury, and attempted obstruction of justice. The Senate did acquit him of all charges. Bill Clinton had committed no crimes, and because he had been a sexually loose kind of man, it ended up costing him much during his presidency. These charges were ultimately determined to be unsubstantial, and this means that more than twenty years later, the same Republican Party that ran what ended up as being little more than a political smear campaign that dragged innocent people’s names through the mud, wasted the American people’s time and attention, and lowered the standard for American political dialogue in ways that we have yet to fully understand the consequences of is painting modern Democrats’ efforts at investigating the most corrupt presidency that we’ve ever seen as a “witch hunts” and in the word’s of Donald Trump himself, “Probably the greatest Hoax our country has ever seen.” Trump’s actions cannot go unchecked, lest the standard to which we hold the office of the presidency should be forever tainted, and our country forever changed. Democrats cannot back down from the fight. The Republican party since Nixon has been so rife with this kind of hypocrisy, narrative muddying, virtue signalling, and cheap tricks to keep their party in power, that their voter base can no longer tell when they’ve been mislead. To fail to Impeach Trump says that all of that wrongdoing, and any conceivable future for American Politics will get a pass from Democrats.

Secondly, In Today’s media landscape, far more people would have access to the testimonies of key witnesses that will certainly have a great effect on public opinion leading up to the 2020 election. Moderate, establishment democrats fear the political blow back that they believe could result from divisive impeachment proceedings. Nancy Pelosi remembers well watching Newt Gingrich’s leading of the failed impeachment attempt in 1998, and the end of his Speakership in the House. But Donald Trump is not being falsely accused, and given the full evidence, it will be clear to congress and to the American People that the president is intensely corrupt, and that he is a danger to the health of our democracy. Thus the senate will have to either lie to the American People, or it will have to find him guilty. It is of paramount importance that the Senate is forced to prove whether it will respect the constitution, or whether it will protect it’s political interests. They must be brought to account for their answer. It’s easy to forget in the complex world of political maneuvering that the TRUTH being clear to the American people is more important than the power that can be harnessed as a result of our ignorance. Donald Trump IS guilty. He IS corrupt, and his dirty laundry MUST be aired publicly.

Last but not least, Even if we find that Donald Trump is not in any way improperly bought or sold by the Russians (which he is), his disinformation campaign in the wake of Robert Mueller’s report is enough to prove that this President will not hesitate to act in his own interest, regardless of the cost to the Country. He has regularly mislead the public about the nature of the Mueller Report’s findings, outright lying to the faces of his supporters and his critics alike. He has consistently mischaracterized the Mueller Report as a definitive statement of “No Collusion, No Obstruction” in a daft, sing song repetition ever since it was released in it’s redacted form, and he has declared executive privilege over the undredacted version to prevent its release to Congress, even in the face of a congressional subpoena by the House Judiciary Committee. The Mueller report didn’t even investigate into Collusion, which is not a legal term recognized by the Department Of Justice, he found that the evidence that he examined was not sufficient to Charge the president with direct “Coordination or Conspiracy” with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election. And Although the Mueller report laid out a pretty damning view of the President’s activity as it relates to attempted obstruction of Justice during the FBI’s investigation, He stopped short of charging the President with Obstruction of Justice, later citing a DOJ policy memo from the 70’s that states that a president cannot be indicted for a crime while in office. Recently, an open letter published by Medium, and signed by over 700 lawyers stated, “Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”