The Nation’s Chief Law Enforcement Officer Is Bad News

William Barr, the new U.S. Attorney General, was confirmed two months ago. At the time, Dianne Feinstein, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s senior Democrat, was reported to have said that Barr’s refusal to commit to releasing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report was “disqualifying”. She also said she was worried that Barr “would be unable to stand up to” the president.Ā 

Brian Beutler of Crooked.comĀ suggests thatĀ Barr’s brain may have been damaged by too much exposure to Fox News. Instead of standing up to the president, he’s encouraging the creep’s worst impulses. Quote:

Barr is the common thread connecting the deceptive propaganda of Trump’s non-exoneration exoneration, and the administration’s abdication of its duty to take care that the laws of the U.S.—even ones Trump doesn’t like—are faithfully defended. The former required Barr to usurp Congress’s role as the proper arbiter of Trump’s non-prosecutable misconduct, the latter required him to subvert his own institution, and both required him to serve Trump personally, instead of the United States. Barr plainly relished the abuses of power, even if he notionally disagreed with the strategic wisdom of making frivolous arguments in court.

But Trump has never wanted for advisers who hate Obamacare and would help him conceal his wrongdoing. What he lacked before was an attorney general who was as enthusiastically contemptuous of the rule of law as he is, and willing to compromise the ideal of non-partisan law enforcement on his behalf.

Trump has spent the entirety of his presidency bumping up against institutional restraints, determined to jump them.

The notion that the conservative establishment had erected guardrails around Trump by putting ā€œadults in the roomā€ with him is an artifact of the transition, when Trump had little real discretion over who would serve in his White House and cabinet. Trump undertook basically no preparation for the presidency, so when he won the election unexpectedly, he had no choice but to defer to his party, which promised to provide his fledgling administration a thin veneer of competence.

Within hours of his inauguration, Trump’s basic unfitness for office had overwhelmed these functionaries, many of whom were less ā€œadults in the roomā€ than opportunists who hoped to milk their fiefdoms for all they could—to advance Trump’s racist, kleptocratic agenda, while keeping a foot planted within the political elite, where they expected to return eventually.

Ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is the two-faced poster child for these ā€œadults,ā€ none of whom are in the room anymore. Her presence like theirs wasn’t much of a restraint at all. Nielsen ripped migrant children from the arms of their parents and placed them in makeshift jails where more than one of them died. Trump lost faith in her not because she wasn’t willing to disgrace herself (she lied under oath to Congress, and committed crimes against humanity that will make traveling abroad a dicey proposition for the rest of her life), but because she wouldn’t defy court orders and black-letter law.

Trump purged Nielsen and the rest of her department’s senior leadership reportedly because he became convinced that more committed, less careerist officials would help him assert dictatorial power. But it’s hard to fathom that Barr’s arrival and his demonstrations of loyalty had nothing to do with the decision. Trump could have made his move at any time, but he did it now at the worst possible time for disruption, for a reason.

It’s possible that Barr would draw the line at Trump’s suggestion that border agents ignore immigration judges, but we can’t blame Trump for thinking otherwise.

Having declared Trump’s legal innocence andĀ concealed the Mueller report for him, Barr has now turned his talents to providing the administration flimsy legal cover for violating the law that requires the Treasury Department to turn Trump’s tax returns over to Congress. He appeared before the Senate Wednesday to claim Obama administration officials had engaged in ā€œspyingā€ on the Trump campaign, and now threatens to take punitive action against them.

The political establishment’s hope that Barr would serve as a new adult in the room to replace departed ones was always misplaced. He first gained notoriety as the George H.W. Bush attorney general who completed the Iran Contra coverup, and came to Trump’s attention by writing an unsolicited memo that disparaged the Russia investigation and asserted presidents can’t obstruct justice in the course of their official conduct. In between he worked in private practice, but also seems to have allowed conservative propaganda to rot his brain. In 2017 heĀ emailedNew York TimesĀ reporter Peter Baker to declare, ā€œI have long believed that the predicate for investigating the uranium deal, as well as the [Clinton] foundation, is far stronger than any basis for investigating so-called ā€˜collusion,ā€™ā€ which is something only a person overfed on a diet of Fox News would say. Reviving the debunked SPYGATE conspiracy theory is no different, except he now controls the Justice Department where he can substitute Trump’s ravings and lies and authoritarian predilections for the rule of law.

Trump has noticed, and is adjusting to a new, less constrained, far more dangerous phase of his presidency.

Unquote.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi responded to Barr’s recent behavior:

ā€œLet me just say, I’m very, very dismayed and disappointed that the chief law enforcement officer of our country is going off the rails yesterday and today,ā€ Pelosi told reporters at a Democratic Party retreat in Virginia.

ā€œHe is attorney general of the United States of America, not the attorney general of Donald Trump.ā€

So far, that isn’t true. He’s doing the job he was hired to do: protect his boss, not the United States.

Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray

John Gray is an English political philosopher. He took the title for Straw Dogs, published in 2002, from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: “Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs”.

In the first line of the book’s acknowledgments, Gray says is trying “to provide a
view of things in which humans are not central” [page ix]. He is generally thought to be an opponent of “humanism”, but he has a distinctive definition of the term:

Humanism can mean many things, but for us [?] it means belief in progress. To believe in progress is to believe that, by using the new powers given us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals. This is the hope of nearly everybody nowadays, but it is groundless. For though human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive [4].

It might clarify his position by contrasting it with a description of humanism from the Humanists UK website:

Roughly speaking, the word “humanist” has come to mean someone who:

(1) trusts the scientific method when it comes to understanding how the universe works and rejects the idea of the supernatural (and is therefore an atheist or agnostic)

(2) makes their ethical decisions based on reason, empathy, and a concern for human beings and other sentient animals

(3) believes that, in the absence of an afterlife and any discernible purpose to the universe, human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same.

Regarding (1), Gray is an atheist, so no difference there, but he thinks science and the scientific method are overrated. He admits science has contributed to impressive technological progress, but doesn’t think scientists are especially rational and certainly doesn’t think science can solve all of, or even most of, our problems, a view he seems to attribute to all humanists and most citizens of the modern world.

Concerning (2), Gray doesn’t think highly of ethics either. He blames Christianity for pushing the idea that there is one set of rules that everyone should follow. He says “humans thrive in conditions that morality defends” [107], “moral philosophy is very largely a branch of fiction” [109] “justice is an artifact of custom… ideas of justice are as timeless as fashions of hats” [103] and “values are only human needs, or the needs of other animals, turned into abstractions” [197]. According to Gray, being ethical is nothing more than getting along with other people, and getting along depends on their expectations, which may or may not correspond to what people in other cultures and circumstances, including religious figures or philosophers, expect.

Finally, Gray agrees with (3) that the universe has no discernible purpose. He would probably agree that seeking happiness and helping other people can give (some) people a sense of meaning, but he denies that there is any particular or any preferred way to be happy. He argues that we don’t have free will and are no more able than any other animal to control our behavior or make ourselves happy.

Gray seems very sure of his positions. He writing is like a series of pronouncements. If I had to characterize his point of view in one word, it would be “pessimism”. We are no better than other animals. In various ways, we are worse. He twice refers to our species as homo rapiens. We excel at eliminating other species. Progress, aside from scientific or technological progress, is an illusion. Overall, the hunter-gatherers who lived thousands of years ago had better lives than we do.

I really don’t know what to make of this book. Reading it is like getting a punch in the stomach. In the end, I’d say that Gray makes a convincing case that homo sapiens is an especially troublesome species. But the fact that we write and read books like Straw Dogs indicates that we have special talents that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Perhaps those special talents have allowed us and will continue to allow us to make more progress than Gray thinks.

Last Words For Now On That Situation

From Victoria Bassetti, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice:

Eighty-eight words. That’s all we have of the Mueller report. After 22 months of near-total silence, Robert Swan Mueller, III, has spoken — just not to us. Last Friday, he submitted a report of unknown length on his investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election to Attorney General William Barr [NOTE: It’s reported to be more than 300 pages long, in fact, apparently longer than required by the Special Counsel statute]. Barr in turn has deigned to make public a few extracts of the report, sprinkling a bit of it into his own letter to Congress.

The crux of the Mueller report, as conveyed by Barr, lies in two sentences. The first, that the investigation ā€œdid not establishā€ that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government. As to whether the president obstructed justice when he tried to derail the investigation, Mueller notes that Ā ā€œwhile this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.ā€

With his feral flair for spin, President Donald Trump moved quickly to ignore the actual conclusions and market the Barr letter with its grand total of 88 words from Mueller as a ā€œcomplete and total exoneration.ā€ Or asĀ one Twitter wagĀ put it: ā€œClassic Trumpian paradigm: ā€˜I got away with it = I didn’t do it.ā€™ā€

Pay particular attention to two of Mueller’s phrases: ā€œdid not establishā€ and ā€œdid not exonerate.ā€ Lawyers will know that those two phrases actually hint at the opposite of a complete Trump vindication. The first suggests that there was in fact some proof — just not enough to establish criminal wrongdoing beyond a reasonable doubt. We do not know how much evidence Mueller uncovered, but his wording intimates more than the bare minimum. Otherwise, he would have simply said there was no case to be made. He is, after all, a famously direct and to the point man. As for ā€œdid not exonerate,ā€ that’s as close as a prosecutor gets to saying, ā€œYou were in the wrong, but we can’t convict.ā€

All told, the small parts of the Mueller report that peak out from Barr’s letter suggest difficulty building a criminal case but nothing even close to a clean bill of health. That’s why releasing the full Mueller report is so important. While the headline is clear — no more indictments — the details matter enormously. It’s not far different from a visit to the emergency room where an ER doctor tells you: ā€œNo, you’re not having a heart attack right now but look at that cholesterol level, artery blockage, shortness of breath, and, oh there’s a spot on the X-ray.” Great to learn about no heart attack; not smart to walk out before hearing the rest of the diagnosis.

Mueller’s eighty-eight words of consultation filtered through a second party are not enough. And the need for a comprehensive account of what the investigation found has only been made more urgent by President Trump’s recent series of attacks on the very idea of the investigation. On Sunday he called the investigation ā€œan illegal takedown that failed.ā€ The following day he threatened retaliation. ā€œThere are people out there who have done very bad things, I would say treasonous things against our country. And hopefully, people that have done such harm to our country — we’ve gone through a period of really bad things happening — those people will certainly be looked at,ā€ the president said.

Full disclosure of the Mueller report would reveal whether a host of concerns — about Russian attacks on our election system, Russian efforts to infiltrate and work with the Trump campaign, the campaign’s response to those efforts, and finally Trump’s efforts to pervert the administration of justice for his own purposes — were valid or not.

A decision on when and how much of the report to release rests in the hands of Barr — who is also, presumably, the man on the receiving end of the president’s demand to investigate the investigators. During his confirmation hearings earlier this year, Barr told senators that his goal with regard to the Mueller report ā€œwill be to provide as much transparency as I can consistent with the law.ā€ A larger challenge lies before him: to provide as much transparency as he can for the health of our democracy.

From the “What A Day” newsletter at Crooked Media:

The deadline six House committee chairs set for Attorney General William Barr to turn over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full report is April 2, but Barr has already informed House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler that he’ll miss the deadline. Barr also will not commit to providing Congress the full report, and only provided Nadler the report’s official page count on the condition that he not share the number publicly.Ā 

Nearly a week after Mueller submitted his report, all we know about it, beyond what’s in Barr’s highly political three-and-a-half page summary, is that it is somewhere between 300 and 1000 pages long.

This is an unacceptable state of affairs, and it’s past time for House Democrats to use their official powers to either obtain the report itself, make its details public, or get some answers from the Justice Department.

Here’s what Democrats can do.

  • Subpoena the report. This is the most obvious step they can and presumably will take, but it would likely tee up lengthy legal battles over what the administration has a right to withhold. On the other hand, the threat of a subpoena might allow Democrats to secure a public and airtight commitment from Barr to share the entire report minus the narrowest omissions (say, to protect ongoing investigations) by a specific date.
  • Subpoena Mueller.Ā There has been a lot of chatter about Barr’s forthcoming testimony to Congress, but he has already revealed himself to be an unreliable narrator. Mueller remains widely trusted, but he can’t speak out of turn. Subpoenaing him would unshackle him, personally, and leave it to the administration to decide whether to silence him—but by silencing him, they’d give up the game.
  • Begin impeachment proceedings.Ā House leadership has made clear that Democrats are terrified of impeachment, but that may be the only way they can successfully secure Mueller’s grand jury materials, which are otherwise bound by strict secrecy requirements. That’s what happened during Watergate, and it should be on the table today.
  • Lose their shit.Ā It sounds silly, but a sustained Democratic message that the administration is hiding something, and that they must release the full report might just work better than anything else. Last year, Republicans generated days of anticipation by making the Twitter hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo go viral. This was about an absurd, conspiracy theory-ridden document that their own party wrote, but they were able to create a widespread sense that the government was hiding something explosive from the public. That’s what’s actually happening now, and Dems shouldn’t shy away from building public pressure.

The Democratic toolbox also includes holding Barr and other officials in contempt of Congress and threatening to withhold funds from certain Justice Department components or programs. But the key is to demonstrate that concealing Mueller’s findings is unacceptable, and they won’t get away with quietly burying it. Asking nicely, which has been the Democrats’ disappointing approach to oversight thus far, will not suffice here.

Today, Republicans on the House intelligence committee publicly called upon the committee’s chairman, Adam Schiff, to step down at a hearing that was supposed to be about whether President Trump’s business negotiations with Moscow—which he lied about throughout the campaign and well into his presidency—left him compromised.

Schiff’s response was to deliver Republicans the shaming they deserve.Ā 

Hopefully this is a lesson Democrats will heed about who they’re dealing with. When they returned to power, Democrats set about trying to restore comity on their committees, after enduring years of Republican abuse. They were not rewarded for their kindness because Republicans understand that they’re not there to make friends. [End quote]

Personal Postscript:

#ReleaseTheReport

It’s Not Over At All

From attorney George Conway:

Attorney General William Barr’s letterĀ revealed something unexpected about the obstruction issue: that Mueller said his ā€œreport does not conclude that the President committed a crimeā€ but that ā€œit also does not exonerate him.ā€Ā The report does not exonerate the president?Ā That’s a stunning thing for a prosecutor to say. Mueller didn’t have to say that. Indeed, making that very point, the president’s outside counsel, Rudolph W. Giuliani,Ā called the statementĀ a ā€œcheap shot.ā€

But Mueller isn’t prone to cheap shots; he plays by the rules, every step of the way. If his report doesn’t exonerate the president, there must be something pretty damning in it about him, even if it might not suffice to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. And in saying that the report ā€œcatalogu[ed] the President’s actions, many of which took place in public view,ā€Ā Barr’s letterĀ makes clear that the report also catalogues actions taken privately that shed light on possible obstruction, actions that the American people and Congress yet know nothing about.

At the same time, and equally remarkably, Mueller, according to Barr, said he ā€œultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgmentā€ regarding obstruction. Reading that statement together with the no-exoneration statement, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Mueller wrote his report to allow the American people and Congress to decide what to make of the facts. And that is what should — must — happen now.

From columnist Greg Sargent:

One glaring analytical error we’re seeing in the coverage of Robert S. Mueller III’s findings is the idea that we’re suddenly in a ā€œpost-Muellerā€ political world. The suggestion is that there’s been a sudden, clean break from a rapidly receding past in which the special counsel’s activity threatened President Trump, to a new future in which it does not.

The reality is quite different. In fact, while Mueller’s no-conspiracy finding does close one chapter of this affair, the Mueller probe and its spinoffs added substantial new material to the building caseĀ against Trump’s corruption, and they have spawned other investigations that will keep that process moving forward….

Because of all these investigations and their consequences, Trump has been implicated in a criminal hush-money scheme…Ā Ā We have also learnedĀ from Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen that Trump may have gamed his assetsĀ for insurance and tax fraud purposes — and that clues to these potential crimes may lie in his tax returns. Cohen also says those returns might shed light on his family’sĀ extensive history of tax fraud.

All that has led to aĀ plethora of other investigations into multiple Trump organizations, which largelyĀ grew out of the Mueller investigation. Some of what we learned has created new avenues of inquiry for House Democrats, whoĀ are looking into everything fromĀ Trump’s role in the hush-money scheme, to whether Trump’s lawyers coached Cohen to lie to Congress about his Moscow project, to his financial entanglements with Russia….Ā 

Given that the White House is resisting all Democratic subpoena requests — something that we should remember in tandem with likely Trump efforts to keep Mueller’s findings buried — it’s hard to say where all this will end up. But one thing that’s clear is that the focus on Trump’s corruption will continue to intensify and broaden.

The emerging narrative is that demoralized Democrats are debating how to ā€œmove onā€ from Mueller. But Democrats don’tĀ haveĀ to get drawn into that debate. That’s because the Mueller probe and its spinoffs have actually made the political terrain a lotĀ moreĀ fertile for the focus on Trump’s corruption than before. And the ongoing ripple effects of those investigations will continue to do so.

For example, in one development today:

House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Elijah Cummings has requested ten years of documents related to President Donald Trump’s past financial dealings….

The request comes after testimony from Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, raised questions as to whether Trump inflated or deflated the value of his financial assets during the course of past business transactions….Cohen said that Trump would inflate his total assets in order to obtain more favorable treatment from banks (in addition to deflating his assets in order to reduce his tax burden).

In his letter toĀ [tax and accounting firm] Mazars LLP, Cummings requested ā€œall statements of financial condition, annual statements, periodic financial reports and independent auditors’ reports.ā€ He also asked for ā€œall engagement agreements or contracts related to the preparation, compilation, review, or auditing of the itemsā€ used to determine Trump’s net worth—specific, it appears, to his use of brand value to inflate that net worth.Ā 

And this:

The head of the House Intelligence committee wants to know if [the completion of the Special Counsel’s inquiry into potential criminal conspiracy regarding Russia] means the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into the same question has also concluded.

Rep. Adam Schiff [announced] that he’s begun negotiations with the intelligence agencies to get an answer to one of the many unknowns about the Mueller probe currently hidden behind the veil of Attorney General William Barr’s letter on SundayĀ purporting to summarize it.

ā€œAt this point, we don’t know whether any of the counterintelligence findings are part of the Mueller report,ā€ Schiff said. ā€œWe have initiated discussions with the intelligence community to make sure that we obtain whatever is found in the counterintelligence investigation, or whether that [inquiry] is still ongoing.ā€

In January,Ā TheĀ New York Times, citing in part the FBI’s former top lawyer, James Baker,Ā reportedĀ that the bureau opened a counterintelligence inquiry into Trump’s ties to Russia in May 2017 after the president fired Director James Comey, who was then in charge of the overall Russia probe. Mueller, soon empaneled as special counsel, inherited that investigation.

Current and former FBI and Justice Department officials have characterized a counterintelligence probe into a sitting president—with its implication that the president, wittingly or not, posed a threat to national security — as unprecedented….Ā 

The bureau’s counterintelligence investigations seek to understand the surreptitious activities of a foreign power and their possible connections to Americans. Since their objectives are not necessarily to bring charges, their standards of evidence are well below those of criminal inquiries. It is possible that Mueller closed the counterintelligence inquiry, and it is possible that Mueller passed it back to the FBI. Schiff wants to know either way.

Selected Comments on Evil and Rank Stupidity

As the worst people in America continue to run most of the federal government, here are a few choice comments from the Twitterverse.

First, from Michael Cohen, columnist for The Boston Globe:

A lot of crazy things have happened over the past 2.5 years … but that so many people are simply accepting the conclusions of the Mueller report based on the word of an attorney general who wrote an unsolicited 19 page memo bashing Mueller’s probe might be the craziest.

The idea that any of us would take the word of Barr about the conclusions of Mueller’s report at face value, without seeing the underlying evidence, is practically surreal.

And don’t get me started on media criticisms: have we all just collectively forgotten that more than a dozen Trump campaign aides met with Russian officials and virtually all of them lied about it? Or that Trump repeatedly & flagrantly tried to interfere w/the investigation?

Were journalists simply supposed to ignore that? Were they supposed to ignore the fact that Trump’s son, campaign manager and son-in-law met with Russian officials promising dirt on Hillary Clinton (and lied about it) as if this wasn’t evidence of attempted collusion?

Do we all have collective amnesia over the president taking the word of Putin, repeatedly, over US Intel agencies on the question of Russian interference in the election?

Let’s be clear: none of know what Mueller found. None of us have seen the evidence. Until we do none of us know anything.

Next, from Will Wilkinson, Vice President of Research at the Niskanen Center:

The crescendo of furious gaslighting following Barr’s propaganda summary suggests a plan was place to exploit the gap between the submission of the report and public revelation of what’s in it to delegitimize Mueller’s actual findings and the ongoing investigations.

Trump’s “one weird trick” is the shameless public delegitimization of anyone aligned against his interests.

Our idiot media still isn’t capable of understanding how to not be co-opted by Trump’s reality-bending propaganda machine, and continues to get played like a burgled Stradivarius.

Barr’s cover-up gambit means Mueller will certainly be called to testify under oath in the House.

That’s why we’re getting the full-on blitz to mischaracterize his findings: to lock the media and public into a favorable narrative nowhere in evidence, before he actually speaks.

The media’s atrocious gullibility, which is letting this happen without serious resistance, is even more scandalous than the credulity that herded public opinion behind the invasion of Iraq. Because we already *know* this administration does nothing but lie.

The Trump machine is making a lot of political hay with necessary legal distinctions. Barr says Mueller didn’t establish conspiracy or coordination between the campaign & “the Russian government,” which doesn’t imply there wasn’t plenty with Russians hard to pin as agents of Putin.

Barr says Mueller supplies evidence of obstruction, then uses the fact that he doesn’t establish conspiracy to a certain legal standard (which doesn’t at all rule it out, in fact) to argue in a shady way that there was nothing to obstruct, so he let’s Trump off scot-free.

Trump has gone to pains to confuse people into accepting that the legitimacy of congressional oversight depends on a prior, narrow legal finding of criminality, which it has done everything it can to prevent.Ā 

Trump’s hand-picked AG (confirmed by a lapdog Senate, with a record of shielding presidents from scandal) telling us what the report says & sitting on it doesn’t settle anything. But spinning it like it does to prevent congressional oversight tell us a lot. This is far from over.

From Julian Zelizer, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University:

This week is starting to remind me of the 2000 presidential election. This is what I was thinking.

Republicans declare victory before the results are actually in.

Republicans count on the national media to quickly repeat their conclusion. Pack journalism gets to work.

When serious concerns emerge about the results, Republicans stand by the initial declaration of victory.

Meanwhile, charge that Democrats are being ā€œsore losersā€ by asking legitimate questions about what is going on.

The GOP then tries to force an ending to the controversy by running out the clock.

After the Supreme Court stops the Florida recount in December 2000, Republicans act like there is a clear mandate and national consensus about the results. Never look back.

From Ryan Cooper, National Correspondent for The Week:

The discourse around this report has revolved far too much around who gets to gloat about making correct predictions, and whether the media exaggerated this or that, which risks letting the content of the report get lost in the noise. Better by far to focus on the actual facts at hand, which are not at all favorable for Trump.

Contrary to many blaring news headlines, the quoted sentence of the report doesĀ notĀ say there was no evidence of coordination, but that it “did not establish” it. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as the lawyer saying goes.

The Trump administration’s approach here — carried out in concert with Attorney General Barr — is pretty clearly to try to muddy the waters around the Mueller findings to make it appear as though Trump is completely free of sin.

In reality, just what is publicly known about the Mueller investigation is incredibly damning. A foreign government interfered with a U.S. election, the Republican candidate embraced it, and the rest of the party leadership connived toĀ preventĀ bipartisan actionĀ to stop it.

Seven Trump or Republican associates, including Trump’s campaign manager, national security adviser, and personal lawyer, have been convicted of various felonies in the biggest white-collar crime investigation in years, and another is on trial.

Finally, from Michelle Goldberg, columnist for The New York Times:

The media’s biggest failure in Russiagate is letting Trump get away with pretending to be exonerated by a four-page letter from Trump’s own AG that quotes Mueller saying his report “does not exonerate him.”