Government

Five Important Takeaways From The Mueller Report Dumb People Keep Screwing Up

People keep dancing around some good points.

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Robert S. Mueller (via YouTube)

The Mueller Report landed on Friday and if you’re like most smart and savvy people, your response to the breaking news was, “get this off my television, bring back basketball.” Still, a bunch of other people decided to take the breathless, quasi-legal rantings about this whole investigation littering the news all weekend and mainline it all directly into their veins. It was a solid weekend bender for the junky that desperately wants to close their eyes and touch sweet oblivion as their own delusions crash against the rocks and wash over them. Did you honestly believe Donald Trump was smart enough to have masterminded an election-rigging scam? Did you legitimately believe the ragtag collection of grifters he runs with weren’t bumbling would-be influence peddlers? Just let it all crumble before you.

Anyway, while the media tries to either spin this as a mirage or trumpet it as Trump’s redemption, let’s get a few things straight:

1. Exonerated?

No… it didn’t. It even literally says of obstruction, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” I guess Trump is talking about the first section of the report that found no one in the campaign “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” But even that isn’t an exoneration because prosecutors don’t exonerate people.

One of the classic jerk moves of a prosecutorial office is to believe in their hearts that investigations are like 70s rock and just fades away so everyone can imagine it just continues forever. Findings are always phrased as “we can’t find anything… as of now” to keep that door open. It’s why those of us who generally support Jim Comey’s handling of the final days of the 2016 campaign also recognize that he would never have been in that mess if he hadn’t taken the extraordinary step of announcing an “end” to the Clinton investigation over the summer. He tied his own hands there. Mueller’s report doesn’t.

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2. Barr isn’t lying about the quotes in the report.

“Why did he send a summary? He must be hiding something!” Denial is the first stage of grief. But the odds that the report does not work its way, in whole or in substantial part, to the public eye are next to nil. Barr isn’t going to invent quotes from the report that aren’t in there. If the report says that the investigation concludes that no one from the campaign was involved in the election rigging stuff, then it really says that. It’s not smoke and mirrors.

Instead of complaining about what the letter says about the report’s conclusions, focus a bit more on what it says about the investigation itself. The letter says that Mueller made the decision not to make a prosecutorial judgment one way or the other about obstruction. It’s curious that Barr chooses not to quote Mueller here. Could Mueller have just not included any language about this decision in his report? That seems unlikely. It seems that this section of the report — at the very least — could be released today so everyone can get a better sense of Mueller’s thinking on this. There’s no argument that any grand jury materials — the reason Barr claims the report cannot be released immediately in its entirety — are implicated by just reading Mueller’s own interpretation of why he could not make a traditional prosecutorial decision. This isn’t to dispute that Mueller made this call, but for a letter eager to take direct quotes when it can, the reticence to let everyone gauge Mueller’s own language is curious.

This matters because a description of Mueller’s “decision” that reads much closer to “As discussed, making a determination on this issue would exceed my mandate so I have made the decision to present the evidence I found without making a determination one way or the other,” would make for a very different hearing before the House.

3. The erasure of Roger Stone.

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On this week’s edition of Thinking Like A Lawyer (which comes out tomorrow), we made some predictions about the impending Mueller report. Personally, I didn’t think it was a lock to be released — so I was wrong there — but I was mostly right about what would be in it. In short, Trump surrounded himself with bumbling influence-peddlers who are all waiting in line for prison, but there was no master plan to rig an election because none of these people were smart enough to do it. The claim that no one with the campaign coordinated with the Russians “despite multiple offers” reads like Russian agents kept trying to have a wink and nod relationship with dolts who couldn’t figure out what was going on.

Still, Roger Stone got indicted for trafficking in the emails the Mueller report apparently concludes were hacked by the Russians. I guess he doesn’t count as affiliated with the campaign for these purposes? Barr’s characterization of who’s in and who’s outside the campaign seems a bit convenient.

This isn’t something that the release of the full report will necessarily clear up — but if there’s one characterization in the letter worth taking with a whole shaker of salt, it’s Barr’s definition of “the campaign.” The criminal prosecutions the Special Counsel has brought should speak for themselves here.

4. America’s commitment to grand jury secrecy is disturbing.

The stated reason why Barr can’t release the whole report right now is that the Department of Justice needs time to determine what parts of the report are prohibited from public release as 6(e) material. The fixation upon keeping secret everything that happens in front of a grand jury has long enabled prosecutorial misconduct. There’s a cottage industry of legal academics arguing to abolish or at least open up the grand jury to scrutiny. In an era where investigations of police shootings of innocent minorities are routinely snuffed out at the grand jury level, the need to shed some light on the ability of prosecutors to hide their lack of zeal for protecting the public is more acute than ever.

Now the love affair with the modern-day Star Chamber is the excuse to hold back the results of one of America’s most significant investigations. Fantastic!

5. Barr is as sloppy as Mueller was meticulous.

The Department of Justice needs a lot of time to figure out where all the 6(e) material is in this report, but Barr didn’t need more than a couple of hours to decide that Mueller’s account of the evidence both for and against Trump’s obstruction of justice conclusively tilted against. That’s some quick work!

[UPDATE: Someone must have pointed out this whole problem to the DOJ because they’re now leaking to anyone who will listen that Mueller told them weeks ago that he wouldn’t be making a conclusion on obstruction in the report. So I guess this gave him a headstart to make his conclusions based on not having yet seen anything? Maybe?]

The reasoning offered that Trump wasn’t involved in the election rigging and therefore couldn’t be guilty of obstruction is so badly conceived that one marvels that Barr thought to include it in the letter at all. It only raises more red flags considering Mueller is up front that tangential prosecutable crimes beyond his specific purview of election rigging were discovered during his investigation and referred to other offices.

Just take a pass and accept the firestorm of criticism.

Because if Barr thought this answer was better for him than just vaguely saying, “I decided Mueller’s arguments against were more persuasive,” then he really is bad at this.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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