Mueller Impanels a Grand Jury

William Barr has come out essentially reversing the OLC advisory that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/opinions/2000/10/31/op-olc-v024-p0222_0.pdf

This "advisory" was always been just an "opinion," and its legal validity was something of a question even before.  Mueller was just being cautious and circumspect in following it.  But now the head of the Department of Justice has thrown it out the window totally.

Whoo-hah!

That means when Mueller is called to testify before Congress (which he will be), he will be free to A) indicate to all and sundry that yes, DJT did commit impeachable crimes, and B) he WOULD have indicted him but for the guideline.  It still falls on Congress, I think, to impeach the president because a DOJ indictment by itself would have no teeth.  The Constitutional remedy for high crimes & misdemeanors in the executive branch is still a trial in the legislative branch.

But with all legal hurdles now cleared, there's no obstacle to prevent it anymore.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Like clockwork, Trump directed Barr to open an investigation and Barr has opened an investigation.

This will blow up in his face most spectacularly.

Mueller's team have said that the Steele Dossier was NOT the impetus for the opening of a SCO, it came in after the FBI was already investigating Carter Page & George Papadapoulos & Mike Flynn for contacts with known Russian spies.

Right on page 6 of the Mueller report:

Robert Mueller wrote:

On July 31, 2016, based on the foreign government [Australia] reporting, the FBI opened an investigation into potential coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign.

No need to investigate.  It's in the public domain.

Yay.

And... I'd forgotten that last post. Surprising it took 6 months for Barr to open a criminal investigation. I still predict it will blow up most spectacularly in his face.

The courts have ruled that the impeachment inquiry is legal and valid, and as such the House gets to see the "grand jury" redacted portions of the Mueller report.  In addition, various Freedom of Information lawsuits are causing Mueller's notes and background materials to be released.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/468679-justice-dept-releases-hundreds-of-pages-of-memos-from-mueller-probe
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/02/politics/mueller-investigation-notes-trump-stolen-emails/index.html

I predict the consequences for the Trump Administration and the Bill Barr DOJ will be dire.  Lies will be exposed.  Duplicity will come to light.  The truth will come out.

And not a moment too soon.

And the revelations start leaking out:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/robert-mueller-michael-cohen-donald-trump-russia_n_5dbe1584e4b0d8b441cfdbce

Nearly ONE YEAR LATER we may finally find out what was in the report.

Maybe coronavirus won't be the only thing in the headlines anymore.

Here's another unexpected twist, Lindsey Graham says he is not opposed to having Mueller testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Wow.

McConnell will have to get Graham in line PDQ!

Here's a speculation:

After Biden is inaugurated, various "connected" legal scholars (shall we say) will advise former-prosecutor Harris not to pursue Trump legally for crimes he committed prior to and while in office.

Their reasoning will be: "If you start pulling at threads, our whole government will fall apart.  You don't know how deep this thing goes -- but trust us, it is VERY deep."

Harris will advise Biden to continue the prosecutions, because "nobody is above the law," not the president, not 2/3rds of the Republicans in Congress (and 1/3rd of the Democrats).

Biden will hem-and-haw for several weeks, weighing the relative damage of letting everybody off the hook (and thus ensuring repeats in the future) versus sending a good percentage of our elected officials in Washington to jail.  He will decide on a very limited prosecution.  He might limit it to Trump and the Trump Administration.  He might let everybody off, and submit a list of tightened regulations he wants Congress to pass.

After all, he is a political animal who has spent his entire career swimming in the cesspool.  He knows how things get done in Washington, he's seen the sausage-making.  Kamala -- and the American people -- will not be happy.

Peter Strzok was on Rachel tonite, promoting his new book "Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump."  Strzok you may recall was instrumental in getting the Mueller probe started, and has more information than almost anybody else on Trump's contacts, and his team's contacts, with Russian counterintelligence.

He contends DJT is still compromised by Putin.  He's not sure how -- or maybe the details are classified and he can't say? -- but he says DJT's behavior as president is explicable only if you assume Putin is telling him what to do.  Any sober reading of the facts leads to that conclusion.

And the 2020 election will be a repeat of 2016.  On steroids.

And ALL of the top people at DOJ and FBI and NCIS and every other agency alarmed by the Russian interference in 2016, have since been fired -- on Putin's orders.  There may be NOBODY left who is brave enough, or foolhardy enough, to go up against the Putin/Trump cabal this time.

The election will be rigged every-which-way DJT & team can figure to rig it.  It's entirely possible -- they seem WAY too confident to me -- that they have already concocted some scheme they think will be foolproof.

Fasten your seatbelts, we're in for a bumpy ride.


My speculation, in the last post, that Congressional Republicans are implicated too, is a bit too "tin foil hat" for my tastes but it would explain the otherwise inexplicable.

Reading Strzok's book, he makes the point that there are two types of foreign assets.  There are the agents who KNOW they are agents for a foreign government, and actively undertake espionage.

And then there are the unknowing agents.  They may have NO IDEA the friend they're passing information to is relaying it to Moscow.  They may have NO IDEA they're getting fake information, from a Russian agent posing as something else, or by a news organization that takes its scoops from Russian agents or people who know Russian agents.  There may be (is there really any doubt?) whole ecosystems sprung up from disinformation that, at its heart, can be traced back through maybe six or seven layers to sources in the Kremlin.

The "tin foil hat" conspiracy I mentioned above really requires no more than a lot of credulous people confirming each other's' biases.

Given that, the size & scope of the disinformation campaign in the United States is pretty jaw-dropping.  Something like 41% of the population believe these counter-realities.

How does one effectively combat such cyber-terrorism / info-terrorism?

Three days after appearing on Rachel's show Strzok appeared on 'Meet The Press' today. His analysis is still jaw-dropping.

And probably accurate.

Among the things he says in the book, is that the Steele Dossier, while not 100% verifiable, is accurate as far as can be proven.  And that it was not the impetus for the Mueller probe, but it bolstered discoveries they'd already made in investigating Carter Page, Michael Flynn and George Papadapoulis, so they included it as a classified appendix to the Mueller report.

Strzok's book is a first-person account of all the events and conclusions I noted above on March 26, 2019.  Everything is right-down-the-line consistent. We're in a clear constitutional crisis.  Why can't the Republicans we that?

So the attacks on Justice (and justice) since then are all the more appalling.

Quite frankly, I have no idea what it would take to make the GOP snap back into reality.

Nearly finished with "Compromised."  Excellent writing, very readable even though a lot of thorny issues and a cast of thousands complicates the story.

Strzok does not shy away from humiliation over his e-mails disparaging Trump, or his unmentioned (but obliquely referenced) affair with Lisa Page.

But the OVERWHELMING takeaway from this book is that the lack of a swift removal of Trump from power, when it became apparent very early in his administration that he was unfit for the office, bespeaks a very basic failure in our processes.  We'd never been tested like that before, and hopefully never will be again.  But we failed, failed terribly, to protect the country.

One reason Trump was never removed from office may be his “insurance policy,” Mike Pence, whom everyone agrees (to a man) is a friggin’ idiot.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the office of Vice. Maybe it should be the #2 vote getter in the election, in most cases the opposition candidate.

On Rachel tonite, Andrew Weissmann, one of the lead investigators on the Mueller probe.  His new book "Where Law Ends: Inside The Mueller Investigation" comes out tomorrow and explains how Trump drew a red line at his finances, and Mueller agreed not to investigate DJT's extensive financial ties to Russian organized crime.  The alternative would have led to DJT shutting down the investigation totally.

Weissmann contends it was a mistake to buckle under.

I -- and Rachel -- and history -- agree.  If Mueller had stood up to Trump and his investigation had been shut down, it would have indicated to Congress where the next Special Council needed to start work.

The Mueller Report instead ended up being a toothless, mushy, gloppy bowl of oatmeal that served nobody.  It was a total waste of three years (valuable years!) and $32 million dollars.  History will judge it, and Mueller, harshly.

Especially in light of what's happened since.

Of course, to Robert's credit, it's not just The Trump Organization he would have been up against. Russian organized crime is not to be taken lightly.

If Cyrus Vance is smart -- which I believe he is -- he'll be filing a lot of charges against the FORMER president starting Wednesday.  He'll file them in NY State courts, where presidential pardons cannot reach, and he'll file them against all of the president's accomplices too.

We should see a deluge of new state charges in the next week.  The cases will be overwhelming, in evidence and number.  It should be pretty awe-inspiring.

Biden came out yesterday and said he does not want his administration to be consumed by investigations of the Trump Administration.

Of course, Cyrus Vance Jr is under no such illusions.

Another thought just occurred to me: the International War Crimes Tribunal.

Trump & his administration could certainly stand trial in the IWCT for separating children from their parents and putting them in cages.

Sadly, I doubt Biden will change the American approach. Even if he wants to, the system won't let him. "American exceptionalism" crops up in more than one guise.

NoCoPilot wrote:

On Rachel tonite, Andrew Weissmann, one of the lead investigators on the Mueller probe.  His new book "Where Law Ends: Inside The Mueller Investigation" comes out tomorrow and explains how Trump drew a red line at his finances, and Mueller agreed not to investigate DJT's extensive financial ties to Russian organized crime.  The alternative would have led to DJT shutting down the investigation totally.

Weissmann contends it was a mistake to buckle under.

I -- and Rachel -- and history -- agree.  If Mueller had stood up to Trump and his investigation had been shut down, it would have indicated to Congress where the next Special Council needed to start work.

The Mueller Report instead ended up being a toothless, mushy, gloppy bowl of oatmeal that served nobody.  It was a total waste of three years (valuable years!) and $32 million dollars.  History will judge it, and Mueller, harshly.

Tonite Chris Hayes had Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence on the show, the two Trump supporters who organized the January 6 rally (permits, microphones, stage, security). They felt Trump doublecrossed them by sending the assembled mob to the Capitol, which was NOT under permit or secured or controlled. They appeared before the Jan6 inquiry yesterday and today because they felt Trump "threw them under the bus."

The interview was interesting, because Dustin took issue with Chris's introduction. He accused Chris of "fake news" for saying that Paul Gosar had promised everybody pardons if they stormed the Capitol (an accusation Gosar also disputes). Stockton said he and Lawrence were long-time friends of Gosar, and "he would have pardoned us regardless." But there was no agreed-upon tit-for-tat on January 6. Seems like a rather thin distinction to me.

He also badgered Chris to admit that the whole Mueller Russian-interference investigation has turned up bupkis. Chris wouldn't admit to that.... But that *IS* the prevailing narrative on the right.

Gosh, I wonder if the redacted portions of the Mueller Report will ever be released, or if the evidence he uncovered of Russian interference will ever be properly investigated?

Eric Trump wrote:

We weren't smart enough to collude.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/12/16/eric-trump-uncut-podcast-not-smart-enough-comment-newday-vpx.cnn

They WANTED to--everyone admits--but they weren't bright enough to get anything started.

With a couple dozen post-election federal and state charges against Trump working their way to the surface--one HOPES--I can't help but wonder:

Now that "the sitting president" is no longer sitting, will ANY-FUCKING-BODY resurrect the ten pre-election criminal counts outlined in the Mueller Report?  Or are they just lost to history forever?

A smart prosecutor would dig back to the MR, since all the research is already done.  Instead of two dozen new charges, it should be 35 going back six years.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Now that "the sitting president" is no longer sitting, will ANY-FUCKING-BODY resurrect the ten pre-election criminal counts outlined in the Mueller Report?  Or are they just lost to history forever?

DOJ has come out saying Barr's decision to not prosecute the ORC for obstruction was wrongly decided.  Does that mean they're going to re-open and prosecute?  All the investigation's already done, it'd be a slam dunk.

I did not realize the Mueller Report was getting a second hearing, apparently at Trump's request.  This could turn out very badly for him.

Quote :

Danchenko’s lawyers have called the case an example of prosecutorial overreach and have said that the answers Danchenko gave to the FBI were all technically true, even if they weren’t particularly illuminating.