Ex-FBI Director Mueller appointed DOJ Special Counsel

[montgomery]

Clearly you do not yet have children. When I say "Don't play with that because it's dangerous" I will expect my small people to respect my advice. Furthest I have got so far is "Please do not pull the table cloth".

I have children and also two grandchildren in their early 20's. And neither my children or my grand children pay any respect to grown ups who are not respectable. I would suppose that to be a value all parents would hope to be impressed on their children.

I will assume for now that you are a respectable parent and directions you give to your children are appropriate.

Or as WABS is suggesting, children learn lessons through logical consequences.

[snapper]

Wait until she drinks that gallon of chocolate milk that you told her not to drink because it upsets her stomach and then vomits the chocolate milk out.

Then, trying to calm her down, cleaning her, and stopping the dogs from licking up the spilt milk.

I just found my old collection of cassette tapes and remembering that she slapped a pizza into my old player. I have not replaced that player.

It's damned good ammunition to embarrass her these days.

We do not have chocolate milk, only fresh goats milk or bought cows milk which is pasturised, nor domestic dogs and my eldest barely 1 and only wobbling around. Sure there will be arguments - it is a given and honestly I do not care what they think of me but I will never allow them to disrespect their Pater. Central Europe is much more 'traditional' in respect for parents and ancestors terms and still largely patriarchal. My Pater never got angry with me because my Mater did - and of course some times I was out of order - but it is the Mater's job to discipline small people, even when teenagers, not their Pater's in our culture. Mine are pretty good all told and we love them so no complaints.

[montgomery]

To get back on topic for this thread. The American people by a large margin want to see the complete Mueller report and are not being fooled by Barr's fake attempt at spinning it for Trump. The polls have the margin running at least around 2/3's or better.

This likely means that the Dem spin alone is enough to keep Trump down.

Quite a contrast from the first evening when Barr released his Trump biased spin and Dems were all down in the mouth!

[montgomery]

Here's the spin from 'The Nation'.

https://www.thenation.com/article/rip-russiagate/

Just wondering if anybody on this board is buying?

[Double Edge]

You really know nothing about the military. I am not about to stop a Captain from his job nor would I tell a sailor how to do his job when I'm a soldier. I tell them what I want done. How they do it is up to them and their immediate leaders. I have no place to interfere.

I really don't care what you think of me. People have shot at me. You really think words are going to affect me? But you're not going to pollute my forum with unfounded accusations and insulting my service and my friends. I don't need your respect but you're in our forum disrespecting us, calling Canadian soldiers American lackeys and telling me that I don't know what MAD is when we were tasked to do MAD.

Funny how its you that gets called the arrogant one : )

[tbm3fan]

Considering that this thread was about the appointment of Mueller, hard to tell lately, I was wondering what Mr. Mueller is going to do now that he is done. Maybe go to Disneyland? The one in Washington D.C. or the one in Anaheim???

Well, at least I got Mueller in my response...

[TopHatter]

Considering that this thread was about the appointment of Mueller, hard to tell lately, I was wondering what Mr. Mueller is going to do now that he is done. Maybe go to Disneyland? The one in Washington D.C. or the one in Anaheim???

Well, at least I got Mueller in my response...

I would've closed it already if we weren't waiting (and waiting) for the actual Report to come out. So far all we've got is a 4 page summary of a nearly 400 page report, that does not exonerate Trump from obstruction of justice.

Can't wait to see how hard the Trump "Administration" fights to keep the full report from Congress and the public.

[montgomery]

I would've closed it already if we weren't waiting (and waiting) for the actual Report to come out. So far all we've got is a 4 page summary of a nearly 400 page report, that does not exonerate Trump from obstruction of justice.

Can't wait to see how hard the Trump "Administration" fights to keep the full report from Congress and the public.

Good decision to keep it going! This issue is going to be front and center in US politics right through the 2020 elections if I read it right. The American people are easily over 2/3's in favour of demanding the full Mueller report.

They'll still only get a redacted version but my guess is that Some committees within the US congress will get the whole thing unredacted. And then that means the beans are obviously going to be spilled wholesale to the American people.

Do you agree?

[TopHatter]

Good decision to keep it going! This issue is going to be front and center in US politics right through the 2020 elections if I read it right. The American people are easily over 2/3's in favour of demanding the full Mueller report.

They'll still only get a redacted version but my guess is that Some committees within the US congress will get the whole thing unredacted. And then that means the beans are obviously going to be spilled wholesale to the American people.

Do you agree?

The problem is that the thread has been hijacked into an unseemly brawl. Normally it would be simply locked and new thread started. Who knows, depending what happens with the Report, maybe we'll do just that. It's immaterial at the moment in any case.

What do I think:
Congress will almost certainly get "a" report. Barr has promised one by mid-April. Fine, I'm inclined to give it until then (as if I have a choice).
Unlike most members of Trump's dumpster fire Administration, Barr doesn't seem to be a completely incompetent and/or corrupt piece of a shit.

There's an op-ed from The Atlantic that's worth a read on this subject

[TopHatter]

Bill Barr Has Promised Transparency. He Deserves the Chance to Deliver.
APR 1, 2019
Benjamin Wittes


Heres a radical idea: For the next two weeks, lets give Attorney General William Barr the benefit of the doubt.

I understand why so many people are suspicious of Barr and are lining up to denounce himand there may well come a day, and it might come soon, when I will get in line and join them.

Barrs initial letter summarizing the top-line conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation allowed President Donald Trump to claim exoneration and vilify those who had called for the investigation, even as it managed not to answer any substantive questions about LAffaire Russe. Whats more, the letter put the attorney generals personal stamp on the exoneration of the president for obstruction of justice, an outcome that is apparently not what Mueller himself intended. It is not clear to me why Barr needed to do this, and it certainly had the effect of helping the president seize control of the narrative. So I understand why many people are suspicious.

Yet I am still inclined to give Barr the benefit of the doubt on the release of the Mueller report, if only in a kind of trust but verify sort of way. The reason, in short, is that Barr has promised numerous times to show his work. He has promised to do so in the short term. The equities he has insisted on protecting are, in my view, reasonable ones. And he has taken in his most recent letter an appropriate, even gutsy, stand on executive privilege with respect to the White House. He has, in short, described a reasonable process by which Congress and the public should shortly get access to Muellers findings. I am inclined to assume him serious about this until he fails to deliver on what he has promised. There will be plenty of time to criticize his failures if and when they materialize.

Lets unpack this a bit.

Barr has said since his confirmation hearings that he is committed to maximum public access to Muellers findings consistent with the law. Since Mueller delivered his report, he has stood by this and said he means to expeditiously review a 400-page document and release as much as he can. His time frame has clarified over the past week, from soon to weeks not months to mid-April, if not sooner. Congressional Democrats are demanding the report by Tuesday. This difference is not material. If the Justice Department releases Muellers report in a capacious and reasonable fashion in mid-April, that is a perfectly fine outcome.

Barr has also laid out what material he believes he must redact from the document. On some of these matters, he is simply correct. For example, Barr says he means to remove grand-jury material; it is actually unlawful, criminal even, to disclose grand-jury material without the authorization of the court. In the short term, there is no way to give this material to Congress, let alone make it public; it would require substantial litigation to do so.

Moreover, Barr says he means to redact material the intelligence community identifies as potentially compromising sensitive sources and methods. Note that he is not saying he will redact all classified material. But it is quite irresponsible to demand that the attorney general dump in the public domain sensitive intelligence matters in a fashion that could burn collection capabilities or human sources. There is no way the attorney general is going to release a 400-page document summarizing a counterintelligence investigation without a careful review for national-security information. And going through a lengthy document with a lot of information from different sources in a review for both national-security and grand-jury material takes timelegitimately. Getting it done in a few short weeks would require having a team working on it around the clock.

Barr also says he will redact material that could affect other ongoing matters, including those that the Special Counsel has referred to other Department offices. This strikes me as reasonable as well. Mueller has kicked a variety of matters back to the Justice Department. Do we really want Barr to screw up those investigations by prematurely releasing the departments analysis of them? We didnt want Mueller to do this. I dont want Barr to, either. This category of redaction is potentially subject to abuse, but I am not going to assume preemptively that it will be abused.

Finally, Barr says he will redact information that would unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties. Depending on how one reads the words unduly and peripheral, this could either be a reasonable effort to protect drive-by reputational harm to people quite removed from the core public interest in this matter or it could be a loophole big enough to drive a truck through that could protect, say, the presidents kids. So again, could this be a mechanism to black out large segments of the report? Yes. But I see no reason to assume that this is what Barr wants to do, given his more general public commitments to maximum transparency in this matter.

One important area in which Barr has said publicly that he wont be doing any redactions is the area of executive privilege. This is actually a big deal. The White House made noises about reviewing the document for supposedly privileged material. But on this point, Barr has publicly, if somewhat backhandedly, taken a stand. In his letter on Friday, Barr wrote that although the President would have the right to assert privilege over certain parts of the report, he has stated publicly that he intends to defer to me and, accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review.

There are two ways to read this passage. One is as an invitation to the White House to assert privilege. The other is as a kind of dareas putting the White House on notice that Barr takes the presidents public statement of deference to him on this subject as, well, a presidential statement that has resolved the matter. He thus has said publicly, in effect, that he wont consider executive privilege a factor unless he is specifically instructed to do so.

In brief, then, Barr has laid out a short time frame in which he has promised to make a capacious set of disclosures subject to a few discrete areas of necessary confidentiality. While these are, to be sure, potentially abusable, they are on their own terms legitimate. And Barr has taken off the table executive privilege, at least as a default matter in the absence of presidential action. This all seems pretty reasonable to me.

If the Mueller report does not come out promptly in a form that allows the public to understand and evaluate its findings, there will be plenty of time to fight then over what was withheld and to fault Barr for removing too much, or for removing material in a politically inflected fashion. But until that happens, Im going to assume his good faith.

Call me naive. Call me old school. Call me not in touch with the ethos of the moment. But Ill assume that Barrs oath of office meant something to him.

If thats wrong, the plate of crow with my name on it will still be warm in mid-Aprilor maybe sooner. Link
___________

[tbm3fan]

I would've closed it already if we weren't waiting (and waiting) for the actual Report to come out. So far all we've got is a 4 page summary of a nearly 400 page report, that does not exonerate Trump from obstruction of justice.

Can't wait to see how hard the Trump "Administration" fights to keep the full report from Congress and the public.

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly as I am not satisfied with the mini Cliff note synopsis of the Cliff note pamphlet...

[montgomery]

The other shoe has just dropped and all the speculation that Trump will get away with this thing is behind the curve and redundant.

Mueller's people have just said that Barr's release of his version of the report is contrary to their conclusions.

There is now zero chance that Trump and Barr will be able to keep it under wraps and Barr's lies will be doubly damaging after his feeble attempts to spin all the shit in Trump's favour.

I highly suspect that Mueller is as honest as he is thought to be and was biding his time in the knowledge that his investigating team wouldn't allow Barr to get away with the lies he fabricated to replace the real report.

Never underestimate how truly bad things can get under the Trump regime.

[snapper]

Seems that Barr in his 4 page 'summary' may have not entirely accurate...

[montgomery]

Seems that Barr in his 4 page 'summary' may have not entirely accurate...

Ya think? That's like saying monsoon rains are just a light sprinkle!

RT.com has dramatically stepped up it's spin for Trump and against Mueller. That's my gauge of how much shit is hitting the fan! The interesting thing about all this is in finding out the whole reason why Russia/Putin is putting so much effort into political spin for Trump.

[TopHatter]

Trump questions why Democrats should get Mueller report

Washington (AFP) - US President Donald Trump questioned Saturday whether Congressional Democrats should have access to a redacted version of the Mueller report that cleared him of conspiring to collude with Russia during the 2016 election.

Attorney General Bill Barr has indicated he will hand over a restricted copy of the 400-page report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that edits out "sensitive" details sometime next week.

"Why should Radical Left Democrats in Congress have a right to retry and examine the $35,000,000 (two years in the making) No Collusion Mueller Report when the crime committed was by Crooked Hillary, the DNC and Dirty Cops?" Trump tweeted. "Attorney General Barr will make the decision!"

Trump had previously said the decision to release the report would be "totally up to" his attorney general, while his press secretary Sarah Sanders in March said "I don't think the president has any problem" with its publication.

The president's latest comments come days after he called the probe an attempted "coup," while Barr promised to investigate FBI "spying" on Trump.

Trump has described former FBI officials who initially decided to investigate him as "dirty cops."

Three years on from his election victory, he is still railing against his former Democratic White House opponent Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server for government business and threatens to reopen an investigation into the matter.
___________

Well that certainly didn't take long. I guess someone on his staff finally got it through Trump's dementia-addled brain that the Mueller Report is probably crammed with damning evidence of obstruction of justice and the numerous incidents where his people tried to jump in bed with the Russians.