Republicans tried to pretend the Barr Letter somehow exonerated Trump. It didn’t. Trump’s poll numbers are mostly unchanged. Shame on MSM which mostly, at least at first, simply echoed White House propaganda that Trump was somehow now in the clear. Several of his top people have gone to prison. Others, like Maria Butina, will be sentenced shortly. Mueller assigned prosecutions to other jurisdictions. So, this is hardly over. Especially since Republicans really don’t want anyone to see the full report. Now why do you suppose that would be?
House Committees will get the full unredacted Mueller Report. DoJ will be made to understand there are three equal branches of the federal government, and legislative is one of them
NYT OpEd this AM by Jerrold L. Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who will issue subpoenas to get the report.
We require the report, first, because Congress, not the attorney general, has a duty under the Constitution to determine whether wrongdoing has occurred. The special counsel declined to make a “traditional prosecutorial judgment” on the question of obstruction, but it is not the attorney general’s job to step in and substitute his judgment for the special counsel’s.
That responsibility falls to Congress — and specifically to the House Judiciary Committee — as it has in every similar investigation in modern history.
He tells us, for instance, that he declined to charge the president with obstruction in part because there was no underlying crime to obstruct.
Did he discuss that conclusion with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — who, while a federal prosecutor, routinely charged individuals with obstruction without charging the underlying crime? Did the attorney general forget that the special counsel indicted 37 other people, including the president’s campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman and former national security adviser, for various crimes, including conspiracy against the United States?
Given an opportunity to win over public opinion after the Barr Letter, Trump instead got defensive and threw bombs instead. It’s almost like that’s all that Trump ever knows how to do.
The public largely doesn’t trust the White House on Russia, and the White House’s attempts at spin may have backfired.
Given that the mainstream media headlines were initially quite favorable for Trump, it could have been a moment for the White House to demonstrate more magnanimity than usual, and to improve trust by appearing eager for the release of the full Mueller report.
Instead, as is often the case, the White House’s strategy in the wake of the Barr letter seemed largely aimed at pleasing their base and dunking on Democrats rather than winning over swing voters.