Is Impeachment On The Table, Madame Speaker?

Short version: Russia helped Trump and Trump welcomed their help. Whatever Barr and Trump cooked up for Fox and Trump's dumbbell 35% of the country, Mueller's report is a cornucopia of collusion and obstruction-- every damn thing you ever thought he and his treasonous enablers might have done. Mueller's got it all in there-- except for the pee-tape and a confession from Trump and his family of grifters. Soon after he read the report, Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, stated flatly: "Whether these acts are criminal or not, whether the obstruction was criminal or not, or whether these contacts were sufficiently illicit to rise to the level of criminal conspiracy, they are unquestionably dishonest, unethical, immoral, and unpatriotic." He left off one word: impeachable. Next move is Pelosi's.

Mueller certainly found that Putin was gung ho on making sure Trump would become president. He kept in touch and his gang and Trump's gang occasionally worked together to further the same ends, which Trump had Cohen continue with the Trump Tower Moscow project-- while overtly lying about it to the voters. There's no doubt that Mueller believed Kushner-in-law and Junior were both committing criminal acts.

Mueller makes it clear that there was very active coordination in regard to the stolen DNC e-mails and that Trump personally knew what was going on before anything happened. Manafort appears to be a key intermediary and went as far as targeting Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for the Kremlin's attention.

And on top of that-- lot and lots and lots of obstruction of justice-- and really blatantly so. The first thing he did when he heard Mueller had been appointed Special Counsel was to say his "presidency is over." I guess he wasn't counting on a risk-adverse Nancy Pelosi letting him off the hook. Trump dangled pardons in front of every one of his enablers and co-conspirators.

Garrett Graf's take for Wired-- The Mueller Report Is Much Worse For Trump Than Barr Let On-- makes the point that if Trump isn’t guilty of obstruction of justice, who ever could be? Mueller's report outlined spent well over 100 pages outlining how Trump "reacted to and fumed over the Russia probe, seeking to undermine it, curtail it, and even fire the special counsel himself." Barr's behavior since getting his hands on the report has been an integral part of the cover-up and p.r. campaign to give Trump cover. Barr misrepresented Mueller’s reasoning for not making a "traditional prosecutorial decision" on the obstruction half of his investigation... "Moreover, Mueller makes clear that part of the reason he couldn’t find a prosecutable conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia was because he was stymied by lies, obstruction, and evidence deleted by his investigative targets. 'The Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report,' Mueller wrote. In one specific example, Mueller says he was unable to reconcile the purpose of a long-mysterious meeting in the Seychelles because two key figures, campaign chair Paul Manafort and Blackwater founder Erik Prince, had deleted their exchanges about the meeting."

Barr should resign or be impeached

The attorney general has implied that Mueller left that choice to Barr. In truth, the report makes clear that Mueller felt constrained by the Justice Department policy that a sitting president could not be indicted. Don’t mistake lack of prosecution, in other words, for absence of wrongdoing. “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president did not obstruct justice, we would so state,” Mueller’s report says. “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Mueller then points to Congress, not the attorney general, as the body appropriate to answer the question of obstruction. As Mueller wrote in what seems to be all but a referral for impeachment proceedings, “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balanced and the principle that no person is above the law.”

That the contents of the Mueller report diverges so sharply from Barr’s portrayal has long seemed possible, based on his initial summary and subsequent appearance before Congress. Barr was appointed, after all, after writing a memo casting the Mueller investigation as illegitimate. In the hours leading up to the report’s release, that suspicion increased sharply.

Ninety minutes before the public had a chance to read the report, Barr held an odd and at times curt 22-minute press conference in which he re-summarized his views, presenting an argument that made him sound more like the president’s personal defense attorney rather than the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. “The special counsel found no collusion,” said Barr. “That’s the bottom line.” Barr went on to stress how frustrating the Russia probe was to the president, asking reporters to consider Donald Trump’s emotions and mental state.

Barr further praised Donald Trump for “fully cooperating,” ignoring the president’s refusal to sit for an interview with Mueller’s investigators, along with the fact that Trump tried at least once to fire the special counsel, consistently attacked the legitimacy of the investigation in public, and openly encouraged witnesses not to cooperate. Barr also never mentioned that a half-dozen of the president’s top campaign aides-- including the former campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, national security advisor, and personal lawyer-- have all pleaded guilty to crimes stemming from the probe.

The true scope and implications of Mueller’s work didn’t sink in until over an hour later, when the report itself was posted to the Justice Department’s website. It quickly became clear that the report didn’t line up with the rose-colored glasses with which Barr had presented it over the preceding month.

The contrast was especially stark in the matter of obstruction. The 10 episodes the report details include a Trump lawyer’s attempt attempt to keep national security advisor Michael Flynn from implicating the president, and Trump’s attempts to pressure White House counsel to cover up or stall the investigation of national security advisor Michael Flynn in the opening days of the presidency, and Trump instructing White House counsel Don McGahn to deny that Trump had ever ordered him to fire Mueller. Trump also, the report says, complained that McGahn kept notes of their meetings.

There was, Mueller also concludes, good reason for the president to attempt to obstruct the ongoing FBI probe. “The evidence does suggest indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal or political concerns,” Mueller wrote.

After reading through the numerous episodes, it seems almost nothing short of a miracle that Mueller’s probe appears to have wrapped up on his own terms, though not for lack of effort on Trump’s part to derail it. Instead, Mueller paints a picture of a commander-in-chief who fought back in private and public against the probe, but was ultimately saved from his worst instincts by aides like McGahn, who cooperated extensively with Mueller’s probe and testified for some 30 hours before his team. “The President's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful,” the report reads, “but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

Hoyer was whining immediately afterwards, telling CNN's Dana Bash that "based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point. Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months and the American people will make a judgement." Even CAP disagrees: their Moscow Project insists that "the Mueller report, like the Watergate roadmap, should be considered an impeachment referral." Pelosi and Hoyer and the timid members of their always timid caucus need to get it through their skulls that "The parallels between the Watergate roadmap and Mueller’s report could not be clearer. Like Jaworski’s report, the story Mueller tells is incredibly damning. His report describes a concerted effort by the Trump campaign to further an unprecedented attack on American democracy, followed by a years-long attempt to cover up their actions." If Pelosi and Hoyer can't do their duty, they should both resign already. 

Individual One by Nancy Ohanian