'My focus here is on the other live grenade left over from Barr’s letter: his contention that Mueller cleared Trump and his aides of any criminal liability for allegedly conspiring in Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.'
Reading through Attorney General William Barr’s March 24 letter about the Mueller investigation made me feel like a guy who’s just witnessed a brutal murder–only to be told by the cops it never happened.
To further muddy the picture, Barr has played word games of his own. In paraphrasing Mueller’s principal verdict, he declared in his letter that the “investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
Part of the problem is that Barr gives us only part of Mueller’s quote. As is clear from the bracket surrounding the capitalized “T” in the first word of the excerpt, something came before the original sentence, something that Barr has chopped off. Do the omitted words or larger context qualify the notion that Mueller was unable to “establish” criminal conspiracy? .S.
In mob cases it’s the blood oath or wiretapped daisy chain that indicts. In anti-trust cases it’s evidence of a coordinated effort by corporate giants to corner the market. Mueller appears to have been unable to find adequate proof of a political equivalent in the Trump-Russia miasma. To make sense of all this, simply imagine you’re a rich guy ogling the mansion next door, a glittering monstrosity you’ve always coveted. Suddenly you spot a cat burglar climbing through a second story window. But rather than call the cops you shout out to him that he’s in the clear, with nothing to worry about from you. In effect you are making common cause with him, an alliance of shared interest. You’re leaving him free to strip the mansion bare, and perhaps the entire neighborhood.
Another aspect of the Mueller probe, which Barr left unmentioned, relates to its counter-intelligence mission, which was first reported by the New York Times. A basic objective of any such effort would be to determine if Trump or any of his associates became prey to Russian manipulation or remain vulnerable to it.
Indeed, it appears from press reports that what initially prompted the FBI to look into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia was concern among our allies about what this might mean for their joint security dealings with us. Trump’s erratic behavior and continued intimacy with the Russians since taking office can scarcely have mitigated these worries.
Trump and his GOP allies are working hard to accomplish this, and if they succeed in delaying release of the full report itself, public quiescence in their self-serving gloss on the Mueller findings could become baked in. This in turn would likely discourage further press and Congressional inquiry into Russian meddling and leave the hackers free to commit mischief again.
The most overwrought of the conflicted scriveners who have found a new religion in Barr’s brief is Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. This normally perceptive reporter has now decided that “Russia-gate” was a media mashup. By comparison, he says, it makes press misreporting on the fake WMD threat in Iraq look like a “pimple.”
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