Originally Posted by
lardy
Interesting article, Bob. Despite what the attorney general, employed to be Trump's spokesman as if anyone had been in any doubt, said the report was not kind to Trump.
A few things that jump out:
Total exoneration? Not quite. "Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations...carried out through one-on-one meetings in which [he] sought to use his official power outside of usual channels"
Mueller didn't bother questioning Trump Jr as he was so out of his depth that he didn't know what he was doing with that famous Trump Tower meeting. I believe I said at the time, that Jr releasing his emails after was an absolutely dumbass thing to do.
It was also pretty clear in a number of places that Mueller was handing over responsibility for following up on the findings to Congress. Such as "we concluded that Congress has authority to prohibit a President's corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice", and "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 balances and the principle that no person is above the law". Mueller was never going to try to indict the President, but he signposted a route for the politicians to bring him to account. I'm doubtful that they will.
The word collusion was never part of the investigation, as I have said on here. A few posters like to try to stick that word to me, although I avoided it for that reason (they were struggling so I try to let them off). Mueller has a paragraph about this, "we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of 'collusion'...". But regarding that, the report says they had "insufficent evidence" to charge it, but not that they didn't get evidence of it. And the report explicitly says that "did not establish" (which appears elsewhere, including Barr's summary) does not mean "there was no evidence"
An absolute highlight is Trump saying "Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m ****ed" when he was told Mueller was taking over. That was followed by weeks of him harrassing Sessions about recusing himself.
Seth Rich, that's another name that kept popping up on here despite me frequently saying it was conspiracy nonsense. Mueller says that the whole story was made up by WikiLeaks and pushed to hide that WL were working with Russian military intelligence. Bad timing for Assange to be extradited. Most of the Trump campaign/WL contacts pages are redacted, by the way, so that's to come.
There's so much in there. There's far too much to be reported on properly and I doubt much of it will ever get followed up legally in the protagonists' lifetimes. I think it's also true that if Obama had done 10% of this then certain people would view it in a different way. And if Trump hadn't won in 2016, then he'd probably be the most high profile cellmate in the US.
To answer life on mars' question for the umpteenth time, no he's not going to be impeached for the same reason as always. Will he get away with all this? More likely than not.