House Democrats’ Shameful Abdication of Duty By Alex Shephard

newrepublic.com
House Democrats’ Shameful Abdication of Duty
By Alex Shephard
7-9 minutes

The New Republic

April 25

A day after Democrats re-took the majority in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi knew she had a mandate. “We have a constitutional responsibility for oversight,” she told reporters. “This doesn’t mean we go looking for a fight. But it means that if we see a need to go forward, we will.”

Pelosi’s comments were hardly surprising. Democrats had campaigned on holding the president accountable by exercising congressional oversight and investigating the rampant corruption in his administration. Four days after taking back the House, the ever excitable Axios published what it deemed a “hit list,” containing “at least” 85 potential targets, including Trump’s tax returns, his family business, potential obstruction of justice and campaign finance violations, and his handling of issues like immigration and the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Even more tangential concerns—Trump’s treatment of the press, his “Space Force”—were floated as potential subjects for inquiry. The prospect was so enticing it sent Mike Allen into an incoherent tizzy. The Democrats, he told his readers, are “preparing a ‘subpoena cannon’” which was, he helpfully noted, “like an arena T-shirt cannon”—but for subpoenas.

We’re now well over 100 days into the new Democratic majority. But, as Washington Monthly’s Jeff Hauser and Eleanor Eagan reported on Wednesday, “only four committees—Oversight, Judiciary, and Financial Services and Intelligence (the last two jointly)—have authorized so much as a single subpoena” and “most committees have at most held a handful of hearings in which lawmakers directly interrogated Trump officials.” Chairs of powerful committees are allowing Trump officials to stall and, in some cases, flat-out refuse to appear before Congress. Calling himself “the most transparent president and administration in the history of our country by far,” while continuing to not release his tax returns President Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the White House would be “fighting all subpoenas.” Earlier this week, Justice Department official John Gore and former White House Personnel Security Director Carl Kline became the latest Trump officials to decline to testify before House committees—the two refused to appear to answer questions surrounding the upcoming 2020 census and the granting of security clearances, respectively. Contempt charges are possible, but thus far House leadership has done little more than denounce Trump officials for ghosting them.

It’s a shameful abdication of duty at arguably the worst possible time. Leading House Democrats, most notably Pelosi and second-in-command Steny Hoyer, have hand-waved the question of impeachment, citing the presidential elections that are fast approaching. But basic accountability measures—subpoenas, hearings—could aid the Democratic effort to retake the White House and the Senate.

The elected Democrats’ decision to cautiously wield their newfound power, rather than race forward, stands in visceral contrast to the general population’s initial response. The first two years of Trump’s presidency were marked by a number of protests—of the administration’s travel ban, of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, of Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, and of the GOP’s push for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Seemingly every major action the Trump administration took was met by vocal and visible resistance—sometimes coordinated, sometimes improvised.

That kind of direct action has all but stopped in the wake of the 2018 midterms. It’s possible that the party’s base feels more content now that Nancy Pelosi has regained the gavel and that House Democrats have subpoena power again—even if they’ve not done that much with it. Perhaps it is possible that, with the party’s presidential primary heating up, attention has shifted from the daily high crimes and misdemeanors of the Trump administration to Elizabeth Warren’s white papers, Bernie Sanders’s rallies, and learning how to pronounce “Buttigieg.”

But it’s also possible that House leadership has actively tamped down the pre-midterms energy. Pelosi and other powerful Democrats have cautioned against taking rash action. In their eyes, the blue team has a strong hand heading into the 2020 election, given the general aura of toxicity that has clouded Donald Trump’s presidency from the very beginning. There seems to be concern that oversight and accountability could backfire, squandering the precious advantages the party has accumulated in the lead-up to what will likely be a vicious general election.

They might (might) have a point when it comes to impeachment, a long slog that could get spun into the idea that the Democrats aren’t much interested in governing. But this sense of caution seems to have migrated outward and is now preventing Democrats from doing even some of the most elemental oversight.

One of the Democratic Party’s most effective messages heading into 2020 will be built around the corruption of the Trump administration. Given the plethora of scandals that have dominated—and at times threaten to capsize—the Trump administration, there is more than enough material out there. Investigations into, say, security clearances given to members of the president’s family or the cozy relationship between Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Salman could be complementary to the ongoing work of Maxine Waters’s Financial Services Committee, which, Hauser and Eagan note, has recently played a role in the resignation of Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan and Bank of America’s decision to raise its starting wage to $20 an hour.

There is a danger that the lack of vigorous oversight will appear to voters as a broader aura of complacency emanating from House leadership. Mnuchin has so far faced no meaningful penalty for failing to show for a January 24 hearing about the government shutdown. Trump’s decision to fight subpoenas of former associates, like former White House Counsel Don McGahn, probably stems from his instinct, likely egged on by his own legal team, to fight everything—but it doesn’t seem to be tempered by the gun-shy House Democratic leadership.

The aura of complacency also increasingly looks like entitlement. Democrats want to protect the advantages they believe they have heading into the general election. That’s understandable, given the horrors a second-term of a Donald Trump presidency would bring. But it may also ultimately be self-defeating. In the midterms, Democrats turned out in record numbers, in part because they wanted to ensure that Trump would finally have a check on his unbridled government. A Democratic majority in Congress isn’t there to protect the party’s political capital heading into a general election—it’s there to show how Democrats will govern if elected. That means exposing corruption and holding people accountable. Four months into the new Democratic majority, however, the party has mostly opted to keep its powder dry, fearful of overplaying its hand, or deploying the political capital a midterm landslide brought them. That’s good news for the president and his administration, who have spent the past week taking an unearned, “exoneration”-themed victory lap and acting, not without reason, like no one will ever really try to hold them accountable again.

The Court of Supremely Bad Faith By Matt Ford

newrepublic.com
The Court of Supremely Bad Faith
By Matt Ford
7-9 minutes

Once again, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues are poised to hand the Trump administration a decisive legal victory on dubious factual grounds. During oral arguments on Tuesday, the justices appeared to favor the administration’s dishonest defense of its attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. A win for Trump could have serious consequences for the census’ accuracy, and for the near future of American democracy.

It’s unrealistic to expect anyone to agree with all or even most of the Supreme Court’s major rulings. What Americans should be able to expect is that the decisions will at least be grounded in reality and coherent logic. As in other recent cases, the justices on Tuesday instead tried to craft an alternate set of circumstances in which their eventual decision would make sense, rather than applying the law to the facts at hand.

The case, Department of Commerce v. New York, is perhaps the most consequential dispute on the court’s docket this term. The Constitution requires the federal government to count every person in the United States every ten years in order to determine how many House members each state gets to elect. State legislatures also use the data to apportion their own legislatures. What’s more, census statistics are used by cities, counties, states, and Congress to decide where and how to allocate billions in government funds.

Though the government asked about citizenship when it conducted the census in the past, it abandoned the practice in the 1950s. Census Bureau statisticians estimated that reinstituting the question today would prompt millions of respondents to avoid participating. “That has been proven in study after study,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted on Tuesday. “One census surveyor described an incident where he walked into a home, started asking citizenship, and the person stopped and left his home, leaving the census surveyor sitting there.” A citizenship question would be to the detriment, specifically, of communities with a higher share of non-citizens—which may well be the Trump administration’s intent, given its undisguised hostility toward immigrants.

The administration can’t get its own defense straight. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, whose department oversees the Census Bureau, claimed that he added the citizenship question at the request of the Justice Department, which said it would use the data to enforce part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ross’s emails from 2017 later showed, however, that he asked Justice Department officials to make the formal request to justify a decision he’d already made. At the same time, Census Bureau officials urged Ross not to add the question because of its potentially deleterious impact.

“The Secretary’s decision rested primarily on one assertion, that it would improve the accuracy of citizenship data provided to the Department of Justice,” Dale Ho, the ACLU’s lawyer, told the justices. “But the administrative record revealed precisely the opposite, that it would make that data less accurate and, thus, harm the Secretary’s stated purpose of Voting Rights Act enforcement.” For that reason, Judge Jesse Furman blocked Ross from adding the question earlier this year, writing that the secretary violated federal administrative laws by acting in an “arbitrary and capricious manner.”

Instead of accepting that straightforward conclusion, the conservative justices grasped for ways to circumvent it. Justice Samuel Alito questioned whether the Census Bureau’s predictions could be explained by other factors, such as language ability or education. “I don’t think you have to be much of a statistician to wonder about the legitimacy of concluding that there is going to be a 5.1 percent lower response rate because of this one factor,” he said. “But maybe there is something more there.”

Barbara Underwood, New York’s solicitor general, explained that bureau officials reached that conclusion by comparing response rates between the 2000 census’s short-form questionnaire, which didn’t ask about citizenship, and its long-form questionnaire, which did. “In each case, every one, groups notwithstanding, there was a decline from the short form to the long form,” she told the justices. “But there was a much greater decline among Hispanics and non-citizens.”

At one point, Roberts gave credence to the government’s argument that its goal was to enforce the Voting Rights Act. “Do you think it wouldn’t help voting rights enforcement?” he asked Ho at one point. “The CVAP, Citizen Voting Age Population, is the critical element in voting rights enforcement, and this is getting citizen information.” The chief justice’s concern about the Voting Rights Act’s enforcement is somewhat unusual, to say the least. In the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, he led the conservative justices in a 5-4 decision that gutted a key enforcement mechanism in the landmark civil rights law.

Other principles also bent. The late Justice Antonin Scalia used to excoriate his liberal colleagues for highlighting foreign legal precedents in domestic cases. But that taboo didn’t seem to apply in Tuesday’s case. Justice Brett Kavanaugh approvingly cited the United Nations’s guidelines for administering a national census, which encourages gathering citizenship data, during oral arguments. “Does that international practice, that U.N. recommendation, that historical practice in the United States, affect how we should look at the inclusion of a citizenship question in this case?” he asked. “The same guidance from the U.N. also says to be careful to test questions to make sure they don’t interfere with the enumeration,” Underwood replied.

None of this is surprising. Last summer, the conservative justices brushed aside the bigoted origins of Trump’s Muslim ban to uphold it as a valid exercise of executive power. In February, in perhaps the most troubling instance, the court’s conservative members not only misled the public about the facts surrounding Domineque Ray’s imminent execution, then doubled down on those falsehoods in an unrelated case last month. Those decisions give the appearance that the court’s resurgent conservative wing is focused only on the results of a case—facts and reality be damned.

Oral arguments aren’t a foolproof indicator of how the justices will actually decide a case, of course. When the ruling comes out by the end of June, it’s entirely possible that the justices will side with the coalition of Democratic-led states and legal organizations that originally brought the lawsuit. But the outcome seemed preordained to most legal observers. That’s part of the problem.

A growing number of Democrats have embraced court-packing as a solution to the conservative grip on the Supreme Court. Last month, I argued that it would be an irreversible blow to the American tradition of judicial independence. It risks turning the nation’s highest court into something resembling Britain’s House of Lords, a chamber of lifetime appointees whose membership is decided solely by the whims of each new government. Packing the courts is typically the kind of behavior that the State Department condemns when it happens in illiberal democracies and would-be dictatorships.

But those points presumed that the Supreme Court wasn’t already headed that way. If the court’s conservative justices uphold the citizenship question despite all the evidence against it, Democrats could reasonably conclude that the justices are more concerned about maximizing the Republican Party’s electoral prospects than applying the law to the facts at hand. In those circumstances, packing the court wouldn’t be what transforms the court into a purely political force. It would merely finish the job.

Trump Is Building His Own Case For Impeachment The New Republic / by Matt Ford

Trump Is Building His Own Case For Impeachment
The New Republic / by Matt Ford / 1h

Every schoolkid learns about the separation of powers at some point. Maybe a jaunty Schoolhouse Rock! episode taught them how the Constitution divides those powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Perhaps their civics teacher explained how those branches act as checks on each other to prevent abuses of power. Now President Donald Trump is eager to write a new chapter in their textbooks.

Every president squabbles with Congress about its oversight powers at some point. But Trump’s approach is different. Rather than weigh the validity of each request for information from House Democrats, he’s refusing to abide by any of them. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.” Trump isn’t just chafing against the elementary idea of checks and balances; he’s rejecting the concept itself.

At the same time, Democrats are debating whether Trump’s actions over the past two years are enough to justify his impeachment. If they decide in the affirmative, they would need to convince America that his threat to the nation’s constitutional order is so great and immediate that the 2020 election is too distant to wait for the nation’s verdict. But Trump might beat them to it.

Some of the president’s clashes with Congress aren’t that surprising. During the 2016 election, he broke with four decades of precedent by refusing to release his tax returns. That raised questions about whether he had any outstanding foreign debts, which could increase the risk of foreign leverage over him, as well as any potential conflicts of interest from his sources of income. To that end, the House Ways and Means Committee formally requested Trump’s returns from the IRS earlier this month.

There’s a federal statute from the 1920s that allows the tax committees to request any individual’s tax returns, but Trump’s personal lawyers have put forward a dubious legal argument to keep them secret. (They’ve made similar arguments to block other House committees from obtaining the returns.) It’s a cynical gambit. Even if the courts rule against Trump, the legal proceedings might still run out the clock before the 2020 election. In any event, the Treasury Department is slow-walking its decision on whether to turn them over until then.

If you’re feeling generous toward the Trump administration, you might forgive them for challenging Democrats’ novel use of an old statute. But far more mundane oversight matters are also facing stiff resistance.

Earlier this week, the White House Counsel’s Office told Carl Kline, a former White House personnel security director, not to comply with a House Oversight Committee subpoena over his role in the security clearance process for White House staffers. The White House also told lawmakers this week that it would forbid Don McGahn, the former White House counsel, and other White House aides from testifying in relation to the Mueller report. (McGahn told Mueller’s team that he foiled two separate attempts by the president to fire the special counsel.) The White House reportedly signaled it would invoke executive privilege to keep McGahn and other aides away from lawmakers—a legally questionable move given that Trump already waived that privilege so they could talk to Mueller in the first place.

The Justice Department is stonewalling House Democrats, too. After the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed the unredacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report last week, a Justice Department spokesperson described the request as “premature and unnecessary.” Attorney General Bill Barr rejected a House Oversight subpoena for John Gore, a top official in the department’s Civil Rights Division, over the Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Barr said he would comply only if a Justice Department lawyer could be present during the deposition.

In isolation, none of these standoffs would be cause for great alarm. The system is designed for a certain level of friction between the legislative and executive branches. In a way, it’s almost more troubling if there’s no friction at all. When Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress in 2017 and 2018, they largely avoided hearings or subpoenas related to the Trump administration’s myriad scandals. The House Intelligence Committee was the exception that proved the rule: Its GOP majority worked tirelessly to undermine the Russia investigation on Trump’s behalf.

In the aggregate, however, the White House’s obstinacy suggests a deeper problem. Presidents are supposed to accept the principle that Congress can act as a meaningful check on their power. Trump does not. His resistance to scrutiny isn’t limited to Congress, of course. The president habitually complains that mainstream news outlets don’t show him the deference he thinks he deserves. “In the ‘old days’ if you were president and you had a good economy, you were basically immune from criticism,” he fumed on Twitter earlier this week. Trump’s hunger for a fawning press was already bad; his authoritarian craving for the same treatment from Congress is worse.

It’s possible that this all-or-nothing approach could eventually backfire on Trump in court. It was already hard to argue that his resistance sprung from a good-faith attempt to preserve the executive branch’s powers. If anything, his categorical public refusal to cooperate with Congress only makes explicit what was already implicit. Then again, the Supreme Court still might not care. Even when faced with clear evidence of the Trump administration’s bad faith, the court’s conservative justices have chosen to pretend that nothing is amiss.

There’s a certain irony to the timing of these all-out efforts to block congressional oversight. Democrats have spent the past two years arguing that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and disinterest in the rule of law would endanger American democracy. The president doesn’t seem interested in disputing the Democrats’ portrayal of him beyond soundbites like “No obstruction!” If anything, he seems almost eager to prove them right.

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The hazy link between the attacks in Sri Lanka and New Zealand

VIEW ON WEB > Thursday, April 25, 2019

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Today's WorldView
Edited by Ruby Mellen
BY ADAM TAYLOR
BY ADAM TAYLOR
The hazy link between the attacks in Sri Lanka and New Zealand
(Eranga Jayawardena/AP; Vincent Yu/AP)</p>
(Eranga Jayawardena/AP; Vincent Yu/AP)

From some angles, the terrorist attacks that devastated Sri Lanka on Sunday look vastly different from the one that took place in New Zealand last month. They took place in different countries using different weapons. They targeted different religions and were motivated by different ideologies.

In Sri Lanka, coordinated bombings killed Christians at churches and tourists at hotels; the Islamic State later claimed credit for the attacks, which killed more than 350 people. Just a month earlier, on March 15, Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian, shot and killed 50 Muslims attending Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Still, some see connections between these events — Sri Lankan officials suggested the bombings on Easter Sunday may have been in retaliation to last month’s attack in Christchurch. Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka’s state minister of defense, told reporters Tuesday that the attacks in his country were “motivated” by the attack in New Zealand.

It’s not the only attack Tarrant may have inspired: On Thursday, Turkey detained a suspected member of the Islamic State who it believes planned to attack Australians and New Zealanders.

It is unclear if Wijewardene found specific evidence of the Sri Lankan attackers’ motivations. Such an extensive plot would have been difficult to organize — it involved eight bombings in three cities — and the Islamic State’s announcement Tuesday that it was responsible made no mention of the massacre in New Zealand.

Determining the motivations behind extremist acts can be challenging, experts say, and extremists are generally vague about their reasoning. “Terrorist organizations are often opportunistic in the way that they claim justification or rationalization for their attacks,” Nicholas Rasmussen, a former senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, told my colleagues this week.

Even if the New Zealand shootings did not directly motivate the bombings in Sri Lanka, the events are similar in that they both targeted a religious minority in houses of worship. They did so not because of local concerns, but because of delusions about a global clash of civilizations.

The nature of the relationship between the attackers in Sri Lanka and the Islamic State is not yet known. The militant group has had a hand in planning complex and devastating attacks around the world, but also regularly claims attacks it is said to have “inspired.”

Even so, the fact that a group of Sri Lankan Muslims chose to claim allegiance to the Islamic State and target the country’s Christian community and popular tourist areas suggests a global audience in mind. As Amarnath Amarasingam, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Today’s WorldView on Sunday, a locally minded group probably would have targeted Sri Lanka’s Buddhist majority.

In New Zealand, Tarrant was thinking internationally, too. On a Twitter account created just days before the shootings, he published a 74-page manifesto that offered a lurid vision of his racist worldview. During the attack, he used a mounted camera to live-stream his violence to an online audience. Despite attempts to restrict access to the manifesto and the footage online, the information quickly spread.

Tarrant offered his own version of a pledge of allegiance, claiming he had contacted a reborn Knights Templar group — a militant order with a fearsome reputation in battles against Muslim adversaries in the medieval Crusades — and received the blessing of Norwegian extremist Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in attacks on Oslo and a nearby island in 2011. This idea may have been aspirational: Breivik’s lawyer has cast doubt on the idea his client could have had contact with the outside world.

There is no indication Tarrant had the backing of an international group, and he would not have needed it anyway. Still, both he and the more-organized terrorists in Sri Lanka chose to attack the same soft target — and the vulnerability of the their victims resonated around the world.

Experts worry about simplifying the response to the attacks along religious lines, looking at it simply as a battle between Christians and Muslims. This lens ignores the myriad differences in terrorism across regions. “What explains violence in Sri Lanka probably doesn’t explain violence in Paris,” Shaun Casey, director of Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, told The Washington Post this week.

Neither the Islamic State nor far-right attackers such as Tarrant can be said to speak for an entire religion, and they don’t claim to.

The Islamic State might consider the Muslims who died in Tarrant’s rampage as “takfir,” a complicated term that indicates excommunication, or a nonbeliever, for living in a Western, Christian-majority country. Though some far-right terrorists have claimed to be motivated by Christianity, Tarrant’s manifesto stated his Christian identity was “complicated.” Instead, his extremist beliefs appear to be tied to racial identity.

But terrorist attacks are not primarily aimed at rallying your peers. They are aimed at terrorizing your enemies, and it’s not surprising that they work. Globally, Muslims and Christians are the victims of violence and persecution, and emphasizing the supposed conflict between the world’s two largest religions often is politically expedient.

“I think Islam hates us,” President Trump said before his election. He also suggested all foreign Muslims should be banned from the country (watered-down versions of this ban have been the subject of repeated court cases). After the shootings in Christchurch, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan played videos of the attack at campaign rallies and pledged to make the perpetrator “pay for it.”

For religious communities on either side, the net result is a vicious cycle. Hilmy Ahamed, vice president of the Muslim Council of Sri Lanka, said the Christchurch attack had some positive effects for Islamic communities. “The New Zealand attack opened the eyes of the world to the crisis the Muslims are facing,” he told CNN.

But Muslims in Sri Lanka are scared. “The Christians have always been brotherly with us, but some other people may want to take revenge, or take advantage, especially in rural areas where people are not protected. So we fear,” Shafi Mula, the manager of a mosque in Colombo, told The Post’s Pamela Constable. “We fear.”

END END END END END END OF

• Meanwhile in Vladivostok, Russia, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The meeting marks Kim’s latest trip abroad to meet another world leader, but it comes amid a lack of progress in both denuclearization talks with the United States and plans for inter-Korean cooperation with South Korea.

"I hope Putin makes clear that Russia is ready to support a deal, but first you need a deal,” Alexander Vershbow, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center on Strategy and Security in Washington, told The Washington Post, referring to hopes for a U.S.-North Korea denuclearization deal.

• As The Post’s Jeanna Whalen reports, Kim is likely to seek Russia’s help in easing U.N. sanctions during his summit. Whelan notes that coal exports that violate these sanctions and help finance the country’s nuclear weapons program are on the rise, in part through a complicated system of ships. One known as the “White Honest,” was caught in Indonesian waters with a Sierra Leone flag last year:

"North Korea conducts its illicit trading with a fleet of ghost ships that paint false names on their hulls, steal identification numbers from other vessels and execute their trades via ship-to-ship transfers at sea, to avoid prying eyes at ports.

“In the case of the Wise Honest, a globe-trotting North Korean salesman arranged the shipment by holding meetings at Pyongyang’s embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia — and then paid an Indonesian broker through bank transfers facilitated by JPMorgan Chase, according to bank documents and other evidence gathered by the monitors.

“While the interception of the Wise Honest initially looked like a victory for enforcement, Indonesia recently defied U.N. monitors’ instructions to seize the coal, allowing it to be transferred to another vessel that promptly set sail for Malaysia, Griffiths said. He called this a ‘clear violation’ of sanctions and has asked Malaysia to investigate. Indonesian and Malaysian officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.”

• Ahead of Trump’s own state visit to Britain this June, there are some signs of trouble. The Post’s John Wagner reports:

"A day after accepting an invitation from Queen Elizabeth II for a state visit to Britain, President Trump on Wednesday promoted a baseless accusation that the United Kingdom had helped the Obama administration spy on his 2016 presidential campaign.

“Taking to Twitter, Trump cited a report, attributed to the conservative One America News Network, that cited an accusation of British spying made by Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and blogger who has spurred controversies over other false claims as well.

“‘WOW! It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out, and when it does, it will be a beauty!’ Trump wrote.

“The spying claim was roundly denied by U.S. and British intelligence officials when it surfaced two years ago.”

As Wagner notes, Britain’s main intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters, dismissed the claim again, dubbing it “nonsense” in a new statement.

• So, Trump’s next visit to London looks set to be as awkward for everyone involved as last time (even the orange diaper-wearing baby blimp is making a reappearance). But will it be any different than last time? Well, the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman sees one positive in the new date, in that Melania Trump is coming this time too:

"The truth is, the Trumps, with their visible mutual loathing, are like a satire on the anachronistic expectations about how a First Family should look and I, for one, have high hopes about Melania ending them once and for all on this trip, as she whacks Trump’s hand away outside Windsor Castle. And when that happens, we can definitively say this state visit was totally worth it.”

Amal Clooney speaks during a Security Council meeting on sexual violence at United Nations headquarters on April 23. (Seth Wenig/AP)</p>
Amal Clooney speaks during a Security Council meeting on sexual violence at United Nations headquarters on April 23. (Seth Wenig/AP)

Really?

When Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, and Nadia Murad, an Iraqi Yazidi were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October for their work to stop the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, there was widespread praise from all parts of the world, including the United States. But when the Trump administration was asked this month to do its part, and to pass a U.N. resolution to end sexual violence in war, things suddenly looked a bit more complicated.

Yes, the U.N. Security Council passed that resolution, but only in a watered-down version, diluted by the Trump administration. European allies are furious. They’ve grown accustomed to a U.S. administration with interests that are often diametrically opposed to theirs, including on trade, Iran and the European Union. But sexual violence in war?

The move to weaken Tuesday’s resolution followed weeks of U.S. objections to remove all references in that paper to reproductive and sexual health, which the U.S. delegation feared would be understood as support for abortions.

In practice, this could give nations accused of committing or backing such violence a pretext to justify a lack of progress in supporting victims. Also removed from the final resolution were references to expanded U.N. monitoring that would keep track of violations of the resolution. That could mean that perpetrators will have to fear less international scrutiny than originally planned.

The United States wasn’t alone in its opposition to the original resolution: Potentially encouraged by the U.S. move, China and Russia threatened to join the protest, even though both had previously supported or abstained from similar resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly. After the references to reproductive health were removed at U.S. request, both nations abstained on Tuesday, and the resolution passed 13-0.

The approved resolution still supports measures to end the use of sex as a weapon of war, some U.S. allies suggested that the country’s objections were threatening the dignity of women worldwide.

And the U.S. resistance appeared especially contradictory for an administration that has often portrayed itself as championing the rights of Yazidi women, who have faced sexual violence by the Islamic State in recent years. Human rights groups argue the move sends the wrong message, after decades in which sexual violence has become a more systematically used weapon of war. — Rick Noack

For more on Sri Lanka, a piece in the Atlantic notes how the attacks show that the Islamic State is using language to broaden its reach, and one in Foreign Policy points out the multiple warnings that could have prevented the attacks. Meanwhile, an op-ed in The Post calls for the U.N. secretary general to speak out more strongly against human rights abuses, and one in the Guardian calls attention to new legislation in Congress that could help undocumented migrants, brought to the country as children, stay in America. 

ISIS’s newest recruiting tool: regional languages
When ISIS claimed responsibility for the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka, it did so in Arabic and English—and in languages spoken in just a few regions across South Asia.
By Krishnadev Calamur | The Atlantic  •  Read more »

Sri Lanka's perfect storm of failure
There were many chances to stop the Easter Sunday attacks. The government missed them all.
By Lydia Khalil | Foreign Policy  •  Read more »

Why the U.N. chief’s silence on human rights is deeply troubling
Today’s crises are too acute, the civilian victims too numerous, for Guterres to reduce his job to mediator in chief.
By Kenneth Roth | The Washington Post  •  Read more »

I won a Pulitzer. Yet Trump wants to deport me because I'm undocumented
New legislation introduced in the House and Senate offers immigrants the chance to give back to their communities.
By Erika Espinoza | The Guardian  •  Read more »

The Los Angeles tech scene has long lingered in the shadow of Silicon Valley, but as the L.A. Times reports, that could change as the prospect of humans landing on Mars becomes more realistic. Elsewhere, Buzzfeed looks at how a reality show has, for better or worse, revived Waco, Texas, and The Post reports on how one high school is implementing a new dress code... for its mothers. 

As Coachella raged, the L.A. tech world made plans to live on Mars
What do NASA engineers, synthetic biologists and Silicon Valley VCs do for Coachella? Throw a party to talk about colonizing space.
By Sam Dean | The Los Angeles Times  •  Read more »

“Fixer upper” is over, but Waco’s transformation is just beginning
HGTV stars Chip and Joanna Gaines helped convert a sleepy Texas town into a tourist mecca. But not everyone agrees on what Waco’s “restoration” should look like.
By Anne Helen Petersen | Buzzfeed  •  Read more »

A high school’s new dress code bans leggings, pajamas and silk bonnets — for parents
The policy has been called "classist" and "discriminatory," especially since it targets parents at a majority-minority high school where many students come from low-income households.
By Antonia Farzan | The Washington Post  •  Read more »

More than 1,000 indigenous Brazilians gathered outside Congress on Wednesday for an annual three-day campout to protest what they see as rollbacks of indigenous rights under President Jair Bolsonaro. Tents dotted the congressional building’s lawn, where indigenous leaders sang, danced and sold crafts while wearing traditional feathered headdresses with their faces painted red and black. The event began its 15th edition with a sense of animosity toward Bolsonaro, a far-right politician whose policies are called by indigenous leaders the biggest setbacks to their peoples’ rights in recent history. (Eraldo Peres/Associated Press)

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Trump’s defiance puts pressure on Congress’s ability to check the president
Since taking office, President Trump has consistently treated Congress as more of a subordinate than an equal.
By Seung Min Kim  •  Read more »

A white supremacist who murdered James Byrd Jr. was just executed for his 1998 hate crime
The crime prompted a national discussion about hate crime legislation.
By Eli Rosenberg and Lindsey Bever  •  Read more »

White House rejects Democrats’ call for Stephen Miller to testify on immigration
Miller is the mastermind behind the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
By Colby Itkowitz and Rachael Bade  •  Read more »

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Should Democrats Impeach Trump? Wrong Question. By Alex Shephard

newrepublic.com
Should Democrats Impeach Trump? Wrong Question.
By Alex Shephard
5-6 minutes

April 24

Hours after the Mueller report was released, Majority Whip Steny Hoyer—the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives—appeared to slam the door on impeachment. “Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point,” Hoyer told CNN’s Dana Bash, citing the just-released Mueller report. “Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months and the American people will make a judgment.”

But that door was, almost instantly, again cracked open. Hoyer quickly walked back his comments in a tweet after an uproar from prominent liberals and from his own caucus. Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Adam Schiff, chairs of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, respectively, each used the Sunday news shows to communicate that, after reviewing all the evidence, they would still consider impeachment. While the president and his all-too-familiar surrogates spent the weekend doubling down on claims of “exoneration” that have no basis in fact, they have been more than met with a chorus of calls for Democrats to hold accountable a flagrantly corrupt president who has repeatedly flouted the rule of law.

Democrats who favor leaving the door open to impeachment, and those who don’t, agree in broad terms that Trump is unsuitable for office. But the practicality and feasibility of casting him out has oddly taken center stage in a debate that should be focused on presidential malfeasance: advocates arguing that keeping impeachment on the table energizes a Democratic base eager for action, and could demoralize a Republican one forced to watch its leaders defended the swampiness of the Trump administration; detractors waving a Clinton-era bloody shirt, warning impeachment only gives the president a galvanizing issue for the 2020 election.

Whether there will ever be enough Republicans in the Senate willing to vote with Democrats to convict Trump of whatever articles of impeachment the House might draft—and such a scenario deserves heaping helpings of skepticism—and whether a failed impeachment effort would hurt Democrats at the polls, those are questions that exist wholly in the political realm. But making political considerations the driving question of impeachment would be a mistake for Democrats trying to claim the mantle of the party that believes in the rule of law.

The point of the next several months is to build a national dialogue about the Trump administration’s rampant corruption. There is no vexing, existential, binary quandary that needs an immediate answer. “To impeach, or not to impeach,” that is not the question. Impeachment, after all, is a process—a lengthy one at that—and not a magic wand. Democrats can and should build the case against Trump—and, perhaps, the impeachment case against Trump—publicly, in the form of hearings and other investigations. Through the public testimony of Robert Mueller and William Barr, and of administration officials and Trumpworld associates like former White House Counsel Don McGahn, former Communications Director and Trump confidant Hope Hicks, and, perhaps, members of Trump’s own family, a narrative of this administration’s high crimes and misdemeanors is likely to emerge.

Contrary to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comments last month—“Impeachment is so divisive to the country ... I don’t think we should go down that path”—it is that path that will help locate a national point of consensus. Pelosi may have been right in concluding Trump is “just not worth it,” but the Constitution is.

For other Senior Democrats, however, there is a third path, and it’s probably the best one—one that takes into account the president’s wrongdoings, and likely the politics, as well. Now that the Mueller report is out in the open, House hearings can probe the president’s many scandals—not only looking at obstruction of justice and “collusion,” but also a host of other issues, from the Trump administration’s shameful handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria to the president’s financial dealings and cozy relationship with strongmen, industrialists, and oligarchs.

It’s a wide-angled approach, but one that endeavors to put the scope of the president’s misconduct on full display. These hearings may very well turn up impeachable offenses, but they also have the secondary effect of highlighting the Democrats’ best message heading into 2020: That they are a party bent on restoring good government, not just on ousting a bad president.

America’s Messiah Complex By Colin Dickey

newrepublic.com
America’s Messiah Complex
By Colin Dickey
10-13 minutes

April 24

For the past four decades, it seems, we’ve all been drinking the Kool-Aid when it comes to cults. In the wake of the spectacular human tragedy of Jonestown (from which the oft-quoted idiom about Kool-Aid comes), we’ve defaulted to seeing cults as homicidal and suicidal. Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple sits at the apex of this pyramid of doom, of course—but before he became a paranoid drug addict who led his followers to deprivation and mass death in Guyana, Jones was an outspoken advocate for racial integration, a fervent communist, and voracious reader who worked indefatigably for Civil Rights in his racist home state Indiana. Is it at all possible to examine those aims as well as the destruction he later wrought? How can we make sense of the utopian dream that lies just beyond the field of bodies?

AMERICAN MESSIAHS: FALSE PROPHETS FOR A DAMNED NATION by Adam MorrisLiveright, 432 pp., $28.95

Adam Morris’s American Messiahs: False Prophets for a Damned Nation attempts this difficult task, tracing a series of cults and communes through history from the founding of the American Republic to the fall of Jonestown. Morris makes plain that “the impulse to purify the group through separation from mainstream society, now regarded as the signature of a cult, could not be more fundamental to the nation’s history.” What else were the Puritans, after all, if not a fundamentalist, break-away, apocalyptic cult? The history of the United States is one of such groups, always eager to divorce themselves from the world in search of purity.

Morris’s book does for American history what Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium did for pre-modern European history: Rather than accept that the United States is ever proudly marching forward toward progress, enlightenment, and democracy, American Messiahs makes plain that we have always been a nation waiting on the cusp of the Millennium, and that time and time again we’ve turned to the prophets shouting that the End is close.

Morris doesn’t go into the wide panoply of American cults, focusing instead on six leaders: Public Universal Friend (who was born Jemima Wilkinson), Ann the Word (born Ann Lee), Thomas Lake Harris, Koresh (née Cyrus Teed), Father Divine (aka James Baker, Jr.), and, of course, Jim Jones. Each of these figures is well deserving of her or his own book (and to be certain, most of them—particularly Jones—have been the subject of several). By bringing them together, Morris succeeds in creating a lineage that spans the first 200 years of American history. From colonial New England to northern California, to Florida and back to Depression-era Harlem, American Messiahs offers a parallel history of a nation through its self-appointed deities.

Public Universal Friend, the first messiah of the young United States, was born in 1758, and was still unmarried when, at 23 years old, she came down with a fever that by all rights should have killed her. After six days of delirium, she awoke, announcing that she was no longer Jemima Wilkinson and that her body had been requisitioned by God for humanity’s salvation. The Friend now used male pronouns (though he insisted he was neither male nor female), and began delivering sermons of an impeding Apocalypse, riding through New England gathering up converts. Going by various titles, including not just the Public Universal Friend, but also “the All-Friend,” “Friend of Sinners,” and “the Comforter,” he brought neither friendship nor comfort to what he perceived as the hypocrites of New England society. “Wherever he went,” Morris writes, “the Friend had made himself disagreeable among well-to-do Quakers and old-light Congregationalists by chastising those who made their fortunes off the slave trade and selling rum to Native Americans.” Attracting a modest but respectable following, the Friend ultimately moved his flock to Utica, New York, to establish a utopian commune—where things gradually fell apart, as greed, selfishness, and inequality among the congregants exacerbated already difficult living conditions. The Friend died in 1819, but first he established a template for other prophets to follow: Call out the hypocrisy of America, gather up converts under an apocalyptic and utopian banner, start a heaven on Earth, and watch it all go straight to hell.

Each of the messiahs profiled by Morris brought with them various idiosyncrasies, but none could top Cyrus Teed, aka Koresh, whose theology led to perhaps the most gruesome post-mortem life of any god or prophet. Teed had built a successful commune (the Koreshan Unity) in southwestern Florida with his puritanical critique of mainline churches, which, he argued, “prostituted” their members through the debased institution of marriage. Through celibacy and religious purification, Teed instructed his followers, they would “translate” from their corrupt, mortal forms to a bisexual, immortal new body. (Teed’s cosmology didn’t stop there; among his many arguments, he preached that we lived on the inside of a hollow globe—directly above our heads is China, only it’s blocked by the sun.) He also told his followers that he was the living God, and that upon his death he would be the first to translate into this new, utopian form. So when Teed died in December, 1908, the Koreshans put his corpse in a bathtub and waited.

Florida’s humidity was (to put it extremely mildly) unkind to the corpse, and the congregants who shuffled by the bathtub containing Teed’s mortal coil had differing feelings about his transformation. One would later write of the “very marvelous transformations” that his body underwent:

    by no means good looking, oh no—some would call it hideous—not a trace of any of our Master’s features are recognizable but a perfect likeness of Horus the great Egyptian god…. Still it was not repulsive to the majority of us. I would like to look at it over and over again.

Other Koreshans were less awed. Teed’s own sister remarked bluntly, “That thing ought to be put in the tomb.” It was a while before the Koreshans accepted the obvious: Teed’s body was not in a chrysalis undergoing metamorphosis—it was decomposing rapidly. It took a full week before they let the coroner bury him.

Why these particular prophets? Morris had so many colorful, charismatic figures to choose from, but what seems to unite these six is their politics. In differing ways, each of these figures set out to critique some fundamental component of American culture: capitalism, the nuclear family, morality and sexual identity (like the Friend, Teed imagined a coming body that transcended sexual difference). The Friend’s critique of New England’s mercantile class would gradually be sharpened by his ideological descendants. Teed, for example, recognized early on that American sexual politics were bound up in economics. “The Koreshans welcomed anyone,” Morris writes, “who agreed that women’s emancipation and the overthrow of monopoly capitalism could not be achieved independently. Capitalist competition and women’s subjugation were mutually reinforcing phenomena.”

Cults fascinate and terrify because of their megalomaniac leaders and their connections with violence, to be sure. But they also arise out of legitimate critiques of capitalism and moral fallibility. “American messiahs,” Morris reminds us, “tend to arise from progressive movements within left politics because they identify capitalism and exclusionary social hierarchies as sources of evil that will inevitably damn the nation to perdition.” America, a supposedly democratic society built on inequality and injustice, has always provided hypocrisies for self-styled prophets to position themselves against. Too often, though, these genuine critiques are buried beneath the idiosyncrasies, excesses (and sometimes violence) of their leaders.

Father Divine, the charismatic Harlem preacher, has since come to be known for his outsized megalomania, his predilection for Cadillacs and other excesses, but contemporary Civil Rights leaders and sociologists long acknowledged (if at times begrudgingly) his importance to New York’s black community in the years before World War II. Divine was legendary for his free meals to anyone who wanted them (his Sunday feasts attracted thousands, lasting well into the night), and for his ability to find his followers reliable and steady employment, elevating them out of poverty. “It would be fair to say that Father Divine’s Peace Mission,” Morris explains, “has, for the most part been deleted from the history of black struggle in America for its tacky theology, its unappealing blend of communistic lifestyle and respectability politics, its disavowal of racial identity, and most of all, its iconoclastic leader: a squat, bald, dark-skinned man whose followers called him God and their Redeemer.”

And, then, of course, there’s Jim Jones. Of the figures profiled in American Messiahs, it is Jones whose story will be most well-known. Less known is his early career as a courageous campaigner for civil rights in a deeply racist Indiana, operating the state’s first integrated church and brazenly taking on the KKK—a bright and promising future that was eclipsed by the Peoples Temple’s stunning conclusion with hundreds of deaths. Jones (like Divine) has been summarily removed from the roster of civil rights activists for fairly obvious reasons: Little he did was so singular that it couldn’t be replicated by others, and the damage and harm done far outweighed their good deeds (exponentially so in the case of Jones).

But while their civil rights messages may not have been particularly novel, what set them apart was their desire to be set apart: they, like Teed and the Universal Friend, argued that the system cannot be changed from within, that only by breaking away from the fabric of capitalism could any meaningful change be possible. As Morris writes, the “American messianic impulse is based on a fundamentally irrefutable truth first observed by the Puritans: the injustices of capitalist culture cannot be reformed from within.” Dismissing cult leaders as nothing more than delusional narcissists hungering for free love and freer money misses what makes them so compelling in the first place: The blunt recognition that the system won’t save us.

As such, they are, Morris reminds us, “symptoms of the system’s health, not its disease.” For all their terrible faults and tragic ends, the figures who are the subject of American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation weren’t wrong in their initial critiques of American inequality—an inequality that will continue to outlast these momentary attempts to change the country’s course. As long as we have a monstrous system, we will also have to contend with these monsters on the margins trying to save us from it. The problem, after all, is right there in the subtitle to Morris’s book: These particular prophets may be false, but the nation is still damned.

Cri de Cœur Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Cri de Cœur
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 1h
TPM Reader RS chimes in …

At the ripe old age of 68 and as one living in the southern U.S., I am the prototype Trump supporter. Problem is, I can’t stand the man; I can’t stand to see him and I can’t stand to hear him. Put simply, he makes my skin crawl! I, like many of your readers, have been disappointed by the Democrats’ seeming cowardice when it comes to standing up to Trump’s shenanigans.

At least Elizabeth Warren is willing to stand up and call a spade a criminal! The man is an ignorant, narcissistic, serial adulterer, a pathological liar, a misogynist, and a wannabee authoritarian (or should I say, “dictator”). We have gone well past the scandal of the month to the scandal “du jour!” I am simply worn out by the constant lies, obfuscation, misdirection, and destructive policies of an administration that seems hell-bent on destroying every progressive program, person, or proposal from anyone with a “D” next to their name.

I am also a Christian (a preacher, actually) who sees those with whom I should be in agreement as enemies of truth, morality and integrity. Christian principles? Pshaw! The teachings of Jesus? Fugetaboutit! The words of Bill O’Reilly from 2007 echo in my memory: “But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have.” Is that what this is all about? Is this why Bill Barr is willing to sell his soul to the devil? Is this why subservient Republicans bow down to “Dear Leader” and allow the president to embarrass them (and himself) in service to white supremacy? I wonder. Could it be that protecting the “white, Christian, male power structure” takes precedence over all other considerations? Is that what this is all about?

I wish I had the answers. Truth is, I am prepared to do whatever it takes (legally, of course) to rid ourselves of this cretin we call “President of the United States.” In the words of J.F.K., I am ready to, “…pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Yes, I am frustrated and depressed, but I am not ready to give up on the “American Dream.” I am ready and willing to fight for the promise of America! Beating Trump in 2020 is not enough. We must work to totally obliterate everything he and his criminal enablers stand for; from the destruction of the environment to the undermining of our most cherished political traditions to the very concept of truth itself. I pray I am not alone! And I pray, in the words of the Great Emancipator, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” To which I can only say, “AMEN!”

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The Mueller Report’s Lasting Damage to Trump By Walter Shapiro

newrepublic.com
The Mueller Report’s Lasting Damage to Trump
By Walter Shapiro
8-9 minutes

When transcripts of Richard Nixon’s Oval Office tapes were released during Watergate, they were punctuated by the White House with the prissy editing notation: “Expletive Deleted.” As edited by Attorney General William Barr’s blue pencil, the Mueller report has added a new phrase to the political lexicon: “Harm to Ongoing Matter.”

Some of Barr’s redactions appear to be the legalistic equivalent of the cavalry riding over the hill to save Trump in the last reel of an old Western. Discussing the Russian hacking of Democratic computers during the 2016 campaign, Mueller and his team provocatively wrote, “In addition, some witnesses said that Trump was aware that [Harm to Ongoing Matter] at a time when public reports stated that Russian intelligence officials were behind the hacks, and that Trump privately sought information about future WikiLeaks releases.”

Before Republicans shout “no collusion” with the repetitiveness of a mobster invoking the Fifth Amendment, they should be challenged to come up with a benign interpretation of the missing words in the above sentence.

The Mueller report didn’t deliver the smoking gun of unrealistic liberal fantasies. (“The money is being wired to the Cayman Islands. Love, Vlad.”) But beyond making clear how close Mueller came to recommending the indictment of a sitting president for obstruction of justice, the report is brimming with tantalizing clues about the uncanny synchronization between the Trump campaign and the Russians—and may increasingly diminish the public’s confidence in giving the president another four years.

During the 2016 Democratic convention, Trump made his provocative appeal about Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” Trump apologists have long insisted that the former reality-TV host was joking. But as Mueller’s team dryly notes, referring to Russian military intelligence, “Within approximately five hours of Trump’s statement, GRU officers targeted for the first time Clinton’s private office.”

Up to now, Trump’s approval ratings as president have proven impervious to everything from the firing of FBI Director James Comey to the cruel child separation policy at the border. Even Barr’s initial letter, which mendaciously claimed that Trump was fully exonerated by Mueller, failed to move the needle. According to the polling averages at FiveThirtyEight, Trump’s approval has been stuck at 42 percent for more than a month.

As a result, the standard TV talking point (uttered gleefully on Fox News and mournfully on MSNBC) is that nothing about the final curtain of “Waiting for Mueller” has changed Trump’s fate. This may sound like an extreme example of the triumph of hope and despair over experience, but never dismiss the power of political gravity. Nixon collapsed in the polls during the mid-1973 Senate Watergate hearings and then drifted slowly downward until his resignation in August 1974, when just 24 percent of the public approved of him. Even a year before Nixon flew into exile at San Clemente, 57 percent of Americans already agreed in a Harris Poll that “Watergate has turned out to be the worst scandal in our history.”

Beyond the legal arguments, beyond Barr’s transparent efforts at Trumpian spin, the Mueller report represents the 2019 version of the Watergate hearings. Sadly, there is no folksy Sam Ervin or mainstream Republicans like Howard Baker willing to be persuaded by the evidence. But the dense, yet often riveting 448-page Mueller treatise offers the definitive word about what we know about Trump’s relationship with the Russians and his efforts at obstruction of justice. Vindicating many investigative articles denounced as “Fake News,” Mueller’s handiwork has an authority and a gravity that no journalist can match.

Part of the joy of the Watergate hearings was the parade of colorful minor witnesses like Tony Ulasewicz, the retired New York detective, with an accent lifted from 1930s movies, who delivered hush money in cash to the plotters behind the break-in. The Mueller report offers its own comic-opera moments.

Shortly after Trump was proclaimed president-elect, a Russian official from the embassy called Trump press secretary Hope Hicks at the victory celebration. But the former Ralph Lauren model failed to understand his accented English, so he emailed her the following morning from a Gmail account with the subject line, “Message from Putin.” With the competence that is a trademark of all Trump advisers, Hicks emailed foreign-policy visionary Jared Kushner with the plea, “Can you look into this? Don’t want to get duped but don’t want to blow off Putin!” The president’s son-in-law decided to vet the legitimacy of the message with ubiquitous Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But Kushner had forgotten Kislyak’s name—and had to desperately call Russian expert Dimitri Simes, the president and CEO of the Center for the National Interest, for help.

Mueller offers new intriguing details about a post-election meeting in Trump Tower featuring Kislyak, Kushner, and soon-to-be-disgraced national security adviser Michael Flynn. Kislyak helpfully suggested that he had generals in Moscow eager to brief the Trump transition team on Syria. When Flynn pointed out that the transition team lacked secure communications, Kushner brightly suggested that they could have the secret conversation from inside the Russian embassy. If Kislyak had not objected, Kushner would have blundered into one of the most humiliating moments in recent diplomatic history: letting generals in Moscow lecture an incoming president’s transition team about a major Middle Eastern point of contention from inside the Russian embassy.

Mueller’s report confirms most of the already known details about the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower set up by Donald Trump Jr. and attended by Kushner in hopes of getting derogatory information from the Russians about the Clinton Foundation. The idea for this meeting was so sketchy that, Mueller reveals, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort (yes, Paul Manafort) warned the Trump family members to be careful since they would never gain anything useful from the encounter.

Mueller portrays Trump and his associates as a gang of grifters too incompetent to pull off a full-fledged conspiracy, endorsing the dim-bulb theory of their legal innocence. As his report explains in an uninflected tone, “On the facts here, the government would unlikely be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the June 9 meeting participants had general knowledge that their conduct was unlawful.”

Like the Watergate hearings, the Mueller report produced unlikely heroes who did the right thing during their brief moments in the spotlight. Take Jody Hunt, who in 2017 was chief of staff for Attorney General Jeff Sessions. As the note-taker at the meeting when Sessions told Trump that Mueller had been appointed special counsel, Hunt made the instantaneous decision to record the president verbatim as he shouted, “This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”

If only.

My advice to you: Instead of obsessively parsing the overnight polls on Mueller and checking for any cracks in Trump’s solid wall of GOP support, relax for a week as things settle down and public opinion begins to coalesce. Most 2020 swing voters will never read the Mueller report, nor did they squander Thursday afternoon watching the pundit parade on cable TV. But in the weeks ahead, especially when Mueller testifies on Capitol Hill, these up-for-grabs voters will repeatedly hear the stories about Trump and the Russians.

And, hopefully, they will begin to ask themselves, “Why did the Russians so badly want this man in the White House?”

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 11h

I’ve seen a number of headlines today saying the Mueller Report puts Democrats on the spot. What are they going to do about? Are they duty bound to impeach? I remain in the same place on impeachment – more an indulgence than a step forward as long as there’s so much that needs investigating and Republicans remain in lockstep support of the President’s criminal behavior. I stress what should be obvious: impeachment is no more than inviting the Republican Senate to remove Trump from office. Claiming that the Report puts Democrats on the spot is akin to those miserable homes where no one has the power to take on the abusive raging father so they start abusing the dog because they need someone to lash out at. The simple fact is that the only reason we’re seeing even one word of Mueller’s Report is because Democrats won a House majority in November.

I think we can see, going on 24 hours out, that some of the details of the Report are beginning to sink in: a thoroughly lawless, criminal, persistently ridiculous administration and one supported in power, consistently protected by an entire political party. One of the striking things to me about the Report is how little in it is actually surprising. It’s hard to think of a single part that is genuinely new. Indeed, it’s difficult to find any major portion that hasn’t been reported in some fashion, in general if not specific terms. We know a lot more about the President’s obstruction. But the gist is the same.

It’s not that Democrats couldn’t be handling this better. There’s actually a key mistake I think they are making. When people believe deeply in something, when they’re outraged or highly motivated in some way, they often want more than conventional politics can easily give them, at least more than it can give them quickly. When it comes to oversight and investigations I’m usually that person saying that huffing and puffing more won’t change things. There’s a process, a legal process or an investigative one. This is as much a characterological tendency as an investigative one, and if you’re a longtime reader you likely recognize it in me. But there’s one key thing I fear the House investigators are getting very wrong, one way that they’re not catching up with the Trump era and Trump era rules. They are treating the oversight litigation and related legal processes as essentially legitimate. They’re not.

White House’s always have some tug of war with investigative committees over document production. Some level of that is a normal part of the process. That’s not what’s happening here. The President is refusing every request, subpoena and, notably, blocking cases where the Congress has the explicit statutory right to receive and review documents with no questions asked. In oversight terms, it’s an open declaration of war. As a process matter, with a lawless White House, the main recourse is to the courts. But treating these as ordinary legal processes is a big, big mistake. It creates the impression these are just standard legal processes that take time and must run their course. That creates a facade of legitimacy that must be torn down in the political realm.

In every portion of this Democratic leaders in the House need to be vocally and consistently making clear that what we’re dealing with is not a legal process but an on-going coverup, an unconstitutional refusal to obey the Congress’s lawful, constitutional mandate. That doesn’t force the President’s hands in itself of course. But it prevents lying to the public, pretending that what is happening now is a legitimate judicial process as opposed to a war on the constitution itself.

The President is a chronic lawbreaker. The Democrats have power in one half of one branch of government. The Democratic victory in the House in November is only reason we are seeing even one page of the Mueller Report. Ending Trump’s lawlessness won’t be easy as long as Republicans are committed to supporting his law breaking and the Courts are corrupted with Republican appointees committed to keeping him in office rather than enforcing the law. The demand is that the President must follow the law and his supporters who are keeping him in power, abetting his lawbreaking, must be held accountable.

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Democrats Are Hoping You Don’t Understand What “Impeachment” Entails By Alex Pareene

newrepublic.com
Democrats Are Hoping You Don’t Understand What “Impeachment” Entails
By Alex Pareene
5-6 minutes

The 1974 vote in the House of Representatives to give the Judiciary Committee broad subpoena power for its investigation into whether or not President Richard Nixon committed any impeachable offenses passed 410-4. Some political observers might see that tally, with more than 100 Republican members of Congress voting to try to get the whole truth of the Watergate affair out in the open, and bemoan the death of a more bipartisan era.

But those same observers ought to be cheered by the response of Steny Hoyer, the number-two Democrat in the House, to the long-awaited Mueller report this week. “Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point,” he said yesterday to CNN’s Dana Bash. “Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months and the American people will make a judgement.” Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House intelligence committee, said that impeachment would be pointless “barring a bipartisan consensus,” because “you don’t bring a case if you don’t think you’re going to be successful just to try the case.”

This happens to be the same position taken by Republican members of Congress. I’m happy to say that the spirit of bipartisanship lives on. The belief that our political institutions are capable of holding anyone accountable for malfeasance has died.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election shows multiple attempts by President Donald Trump to obstruct the investigation, clearly driven by panic that Mueller’s team would uncover something disastrous for his presidency. Trump was fairly explicit on this point from the very beginning. When he was informed of Mueller’s appointment, he raged at his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. “Oh my God,” he said, according to notes taken by Sessions’s chief of staff. “This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”

Trump was, as he often is, incorrect. He perhaps overestimated the scope of Mueller’s inquiry, which was limited strictly to Russian electoral interference. He almost certainly underestimated the political cowardice of his political opponents.

If Trump is fixated on testing the limits of his power, constantly suggesting (and sometimes outright demanding) his subordinates violate the law on his behalf, his congressional opposition is led by people, like Hoyer, terrified to exercise their own power. They’re worried that an acquittal in Mitch McConnell’s Senate would be seen, by the public and the mainstream press, as a vindication of Trump rather than another lesson in the lengths the Republican Party will go to cover for a clearly unfit and crooked president. But it doesn’t even have to go that far.

Democrats who preemptively declare impeachment off the table are mistakenly (or intentionally) conflating one possible end result of the impeachment process for the process itself. The Republican members of Congress who voted to open an impeachment inquiry into Nixon’s conduct didn’t necessarily want it to end in his removal from office; even up until his resignation, it was an open question whether there were enough votes in the Senate to remove him. They were trying to get at the truth about the administration’s actions, and using impeachment to gather evidence. (They didn’t even limit themselves to Watergate. The committee eventually also voted on whether to impeach Nixon for the illegal bombing of Cambodia and for failure to pay taxes.)

As Patrick Blanchfield says, impeachment, even if it “fails” in the Senate, is a chance to take a moral stand against corruption and unaccountable elites. As Jeff Hauser writes, it is a chance to weave the disparate (and quickly forgotten) scandals of the entire Trump presidency into a single narrative that the easily distracted (and even more easily spun) mainstream press can follow.

The problem is, Hoyer apparently doesn’t want to do those things. What Hoyer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who ruled out impeachment well before anyone read the Mueller Report) want is to write op-eds about how many bills they are passing, despite the fact that those bills (like, uh, impeachment) will never get through the Senate.

Democratic leadership seemingly believes that the party can’t let its candidates campaign on promises to materially improve the lives of voters while also letting its elected officials carry out the responsibilities of their offices. They also believe, deep in their bones, that the country is not on their side. They believe going after Trump too directly will stir his mighty base, rather than imagining that full and transparent investigations into his various fraudulent and corrupt activities may demoralize his staunchest supporters—just as Trump himself was demoralized at the prospect of Mueller’s investigation—while also persuading those people who aren’t already in the cult of MAGA that this administration, and the party that abets it, need to be soundly defeated.

Once again, we can celebrate a modern example of bipartisanship: a deep conviction, on both sides, that the only legitimate force in American politics is white grievance.

What Mueller Really Said On Obstruction Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

What Mueller Really Said On Obstruction
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 7h

This is not to call out longtime TPM Reader EB, with whom I just had a good exchange about this. But I reprint a portion of EB’s note because many other readers seem to be under the same misimpression. And it is a very important one. I’m happy to say our team got this right. But it’s eluded most other news outlets, at least inasmuch as the story gets reduced to headlines and glosses about Mueller’s judgment on obstruction of justice. To be clear, by the end of the day, a lot of the big outlets had this right. But it’s not how it played in headlines or the quick cable news summaries. From EB …

I think it’s safe to assume that from the get go Mueller had no intention of indicting Trump because of the DOJ policy. Then he comes out and says, from what I can tell without reading the full report on my own, that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him with a crime. What’s up with that? He never saw his job as indicting and prosecuting Trump, so why come a conclusion regarding criminality?

Mueller definitely did not say this.

What he said is technical and admittedly somewhat elliptical. But the gist of what he said is this: He agreed with the longtime OLC guidance that a President should not/cannot be indicted in office. He further argued that since the President cannot be indicted in office it is unfair to accuse him of a crime. Why would it be unfair? When someone is indicted for a crime they have the opportunity to defend and vindicate themselves in a judicial process. If Mueller were to accuse the President of a crime without indicting him, the President would have no such recourse, no judicial process in which he could defend or vindicate himself.

Set aside whether you agree with that analysis. The key point is that Mueller accepted the OLC no-indictment reasoning and found a corollary to that reasoning: that he could not accuse him of a crime at all. “Fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgement when no charges can be brought.” He then said explicitly that even though he would not accuse the President of a crime he would rule out a crime if the evidence warranted it. But it didn’t warrant it. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.”

By implication, reading the totality of the document, it’s pretty clear the Special Counsel did believe he did commit a crime. That is borne out in the discussion of the 10 instances of obstructive behavior. Implications of course are not definitive statements. Different people can draw different implications. But the document is crystal clear on this point: nowhere does Mueller say he did not find sufficient evidence to say Trump committed obstruction. He very specifically said that OLC guidance and the Special Counsel’s Office own legal analysis barred him from rendering judgment at all.

This is all pretty technical. And if you’re really curious you should read the entire second volume of the Report. But the explanation of this reasoning is contained in a very short passage, only two pages. It’s pages 1 and 2 of the second volume of the Report and pages 213 and 214 of the official PDF document.

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What Barr Did Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by David Kurtz

What Barr Did
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by David Kurtz / 4h
There is still so much to unpack.

We’ll have more later on what exactly Attorney General William Barr did by taking it upon himself to decide not to prosecute President Trump for obstruction of justice. But the enormity of the decision — and how much power it seized from special counsel Robert Mueller, Congress, and future prosecutors after Trump leaves office — was deliberately obscured by the notoriously misleading-in-hindsight Barr letter of March 24 and the delay in releasing the redacted Mueller report.

The Times’ Charlie Savage and its graphics team did a masterful job of comparing the Barr letter’s strategically misleading excerpts of the Mueller report to the actual Mueller report. You should give it a look.

Barr’s power grab to protect the president is breathtaking and would have been much more difficult to pull off politically if it had been done openly and transparently. Instead, as we all now know, it was slow-rolled over a period of weeks.

The March 24 letter remains, and may for all time be, Barr’s singular act of complicity in Trump’s corrupt presidency. But go back and read his first letter, the one from March 22 notifying Congress that he had received Mueller’s report.

It is steeped in the arcana of the Justice Department regulations establishing the special counsel and governing his conduct. It reads as if Barr is hewing closely to those regulations, neither wanting to do more than they allow, nor less. Cautious, prudential, sober. Where he deviates from the regulations, he wanted the public to know, he was doing so in the interest of greater transparency. He wanted credit for that.

Nowhere in the March 22 letter to Congress does Barr say — nor does he suggest or even hint — that he is about to disregard Mueller’s entire approach to the obstruction investigation and take that decision as his own to make. Barr portrayed himself as merely a conduit, a messenger as it were, relaying the Mueller findings to Congress.

Recall the first Barr letter was on a Friday. The infamous second letter, full of the misleading characterizations and misdirection that we now know concealed the substance of what was happening, landed two days later on a Sunday. In the intervening 48 some-odd hours, Barr stood those same DOJ regulations on their heads, disregarding the independence of the special counsel and upending Mueller’s careful approach to the obstruction question, which was itself constrained by the pre-existing OLC guidelines on indicting a sitting president.

In Barr’s telling, it was Mueller’s failure to make a call on obstruction that forced him to step in. We now know that wasn’t true. In Barr’s telling, the lack of an underlying collusion crime meant there was no motive for Trump to obstruct justice. We now know Mueller found substantial evidence that Trump had other motives to obstruct justice.  In Barr’s telling, Trump’s “sincere belief” that Mueller’s probe was undermining his presidency absolved him of the corrupt intent necessary to sustain obstruction of justice charges. We now know that Mueller assessed that same belief as itself motive for Trump to obstruct the probe.

Barr has been everything Donald Trump wanted in an attorney general. It will take the Justice Department years to recover.

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Who Will Say No to Trump Now? The New Republic / by Matt Ford

Who Will Say No to Trump Now?
The New Republic / by Matt Ford / 5h

April 19

Over the past two years, many Americans feared that President Donald Trump would trigger a constitutional crisis by firing special counsel Robert Mueller and shutting down the Russia investigation. Mueller’s final report makes one thing clear: The investigation survived not because of the president’s faithfulness to the rule of law, but because of the faithlessness of Trump’s subordinates when they were instructed to subvert it.

“Comey did not end the investigation of Flynn, which ultimately resulted in Flynn’s prosecution and conviction for lying to the FBI,” Mueller wrote in his 448-page report, which was released with partial redactions on Tuesday. “McGahn did not tell the acting attorney general that the special counsel must be removed, but was instead prepared to resign over the president’s order. Lewandowski and Dearborn did not deliver the president’s message to Sessions that he should confine the Russia investigation to future election meddling only. And McGahn refused to recede from his recollections about events surrounding the president’s direction to have the Special Counsel removed, despite the president’s multiple demands that he do so.”

Their unwillingness to carry out the president’s wishes saved all of them from obstruction of justice charges, Mueller wrote. The special counsel explained that while his report “does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” There’s another troubling takeaway from Mueller’s account, though. One can’t help but notice that all of the people listed by Mueller no longer directly work for him. Would their replacements also be willing to stand up to the president?

After all, Trump infamously fired James Comey, the former FBI director, in May 2017 because of the Russia investigation. He also fired Jeff Sessions, who ignored Trump’s pleas to un-recuse himself from the inquiry while serving as attorney general, last November. Rick Dearborn, the White House deputy chief of staff who declined to pressure Sessions on Trump’s behalf, left the White House early last year. And Don McGahn, who disregarded Trump’s orders to fire Mueller on two separate occasions, left his post as White House counsel last October. (Corey Lewandowski never held a government job; he currently works as a TV commentator.)

The question is no less urgent now that the Russia investigation is over. Other inquiries are still active that could draw the president’s ire. Foremost among them is the Southern District of New York’s ongoing investigation into the Trump Organization, which began with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s conviction for illegal hush-money payments. Federal prosecutors in D.C. are reportedly probing the Trump inaugural committee’s donors and expenditures. Mueller also listed more than a dozen redacted matters that he referred elsewhere in the Justice Department, though it’s not clear whether any are connected to Trump or his associates.

Sometimes, Trump’s underlings would defy him in lackadaisical ways. Mueller’s report details how Trump summoned Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, in July 2017 and instructed him to tell Sessions to curtail Mueller’s inquiry or consider himself fired. Lewandowski failed to schedule a meeting with Sessions, who had already recused himself from the case, then tried to get White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn to pass along the message instead. According to Mueller, Dearborn agreed to deliver the note but didn’t follow through. Trump does not seem to have followed up on the matter. He harshly criticized Sessions in a New York Times interview the same day, which seems to have sated Trump.

At other times, his subordinates defied him more directly. McGahn told Mueller about two separate instances where Trump ordered him to call Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and fire Mueller. McGahn didn’t carry out the order in either event because he knew it would trigger a constitutional crisis on par with Richard Nixon’s purge of the Justice Department during the Watergate crisis. “McGahn was concerned about having any role,” Mueller wrote, “because he had grown up in the Reagan era and wanted to be more like Judge Robert Bork and not ‘Saturday Night Massacre Bork.’”

In these episodes and others detailed by Mueller, what saves Trump from disaster is a group of subordinates who try to dampen his worst impulses instead of inflaming them. The president seemed to understand this dynamic on some level. When his rage subsided, those subordinates rarely seemed to face immediate consequences for their disobedience. “[McGahn] had not told the President directly that he planned to resign, and when they next saw each other the President did not ask McGahn whether he had followed through with calling Rosenstein,” Mueller wrote about one of Trump’s attempts to fire him.

Over time, however, those staffers have left Trump’s orbit after losing his favor. Among those who remain are figures like Stephen Miller, the domestic-policy adviser whom Mueller describes as drafting the original letter in May 2017 to fire Comey. Mueller’s account notes that other Trump advisers like McGahn, Steve Bannon, and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus tried to dissuade the president from his decision. Miller isn’t described as one of them. In other circumstances, he’s worked to undercut Trump officials who resist his extreme and often legally dubious immigration policy proposals. Miller persuaded Trump to purge the Department of Homeland Security’s upper ranks last month in favor of like-minded hardliners.

What’s more, Trump’s experiences with the Russia investigation don’t seem to have deterred him from trying to interfere in the Justice Department’s affairs. In February, the Times reported that Trump called acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker last fall to ask if he could place Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, back in charge of the Trump Organization investigation. Berman had already recused himself from the case, and Whitaker apparently did not follow through on the president’s thinly veiled request. The Times noted that Trump “soured” on Whitaker soon thereafter.

Trump also now has an attorney general who may be more amenable to his meddling: Bill Barr proved himself to be a loyal foot soldier for the president over the past month. His March letter to Congress announcing the end of Mueller’s inquiry obscured the gravity of the special counsel’s findings. Then, on Thursday, Barr gave an obsequious press conference where he painted the report’s damning contents in the best possible terms for the president. Barr even defended Trump’s behavior over the past two years, telling reporters that Trump had been “frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks.”

A recurring subplot in the Mueller report’s obstruction section is Trump’s weary quest to find the unscrupulous lackeys who would do his bidding, no matter the legal or political repercussions. The past two years have shown the chaos and damage that Trump could create when held back by his own staffers. What’s in store for the country now that those tenuous checks on his worst impulses are gone?

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The Mueller Report’s Lasting Damage to Trump By Walter Shapiro 8-9 minutes for The New Republic

newrepublic.com
The Mueller Report’s Lasting Damage to Trump
By Walter Shapiro
8-9 minutes

When transcripts of Richard Nixon’s Oval Office tapes were released during Watergate, they were punctuated by the White House with the prissy editing notation: “Expletive Deleted.” As edited by Attorney General William Barr’s blue pencil, the Mueller report has added a new phrase to the political lexicon: “Harm to Ongoing Matter.”

Some of Barr’s redactions appear to be the legalistic equivalent of the cavalry riding over the hill to save Trump in the last reel of an old Western. Discussing the Russian hacking of Democratic computers during the 2016 campaign, Mueller and his team provocatively wrote, “In addition, some witnesses said that Trump was aware that [Harm to Ongoing Matter] at a time when public reports stated that Russian intelligence officials were behind the hacks, and that Trump privately sought information about future WikiLeaks releases.”

Before Republicans shout “no collusion” with the repetitiveness of a mobster invoking the Fifth Amendment, they should be challenged to come up with a benign interpretation of the missing words in the above sentence.

The Mueller report didn’t deliver the smoking gun of unrealistic liberal fantasies. (“The money is being wired to the Cayman Islands. Love, Vlad.”) But beyond making clear how close Mueller came to recommending the indictment of a sitting president for obstruction of justice, the report is brimming with tantalizing clues about the uncanny synchronization between the Trump campaign and the Russians—and may increasingly diminish the public’s confidence in giving the president another four years.

During the 2016 Democratic convention, Trump made his provocative appeal about Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” Trump apologists have long insisted that the former reality-TV host was joking. But as Mueller’s team dryly notes, referring to Russian military intelligence, “Within approximately five hours of Trump’s statement, GRU officers targeted for the first time Clinton’s private office.”

Up to now, Trump’s approval ratings as president have proven impervious to everything from the firing of FBI Director James Comey to the cruel child separation policy at the border. Even Barr’s initial letter, which mendaciously claimed that Trump was fully exonerated by Mueller, failed to move the needle. According to the polling averages at FiveThirtyEight, Trump’s approval has been stuck at 42 percent for more than a month.

As a result, the standard TV talking point (uttered gleefully on Fox News and mournfully on MSNBC) is that nothing about the final curtain of “Waiting for Mueller” has changed Trump’s fate. This may sound like an extreme example of the triumph of hope and despair over experience, but never dismiss the power of political gravity. Nixon collapsed in the polls during the mid-1973 Senate Watergate hearings and then drifted slowly downward until his resignation in August 1974, when just 24 percent of the public approved of him. Even a year before Nixon flew into exile at San Clemente, 57 percent of Americans already agreed in a Harris Poll that “Watergate has turned out to be the worst scandal in our history.”

Beyond the legal arguments, beyond Barr’s transparent efforts at Trumpian spin, the Mueller report represents the 2019 version of the Watergate hearings. Sadly, there is no folksy Sam Ervin or mainstream Republicans like Howard Baker willing to be persuaded by the evidence. But the dense, yet often riveting 448-page Mueller treatise offers the definitive word about what we know about Trump’s relationship with the Russians and his efforts at obstruction of justice. Vindicating many investigative articles denounced as “Fake News,” Mueller’s handiwork has an authority and a gravity that no journalist can match.

Part of the joy of the Watergate hearings was the parade of colorful minor witnesses like Tony Ulasewicz, the retired New York detective, with an accent lifted from 1930s movies, who delivered hush money in cash to the plotters behind the break-in. The Mueller report offers its own comic-opera moments.

Shortly after Trump was proclaimed president-elect, a Russian official from the embassy called Trump press secretary Hope Hicks at the victory celebration. But the former Ralph Lauren model failed to understand his accented English, so he emailed her the following morning from a Gmail account with the subject line, “Message from Putin.” With the competence that is a trademark of all Trump advisers, Hicks emailed foreign-policy visionary Jared Kushner with the plea, “Can you look into this? Don’t want to get duped but don’t want to blow off Putin!” The president’s son-in-law decided to vet the legitimacy of the message with ubiquitous Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But Kushner had forgotten Kislyak’s name—and had to desperately call Russian expert Dimitri Simes, the president and CEO of the Center for the National Interest, for help.

Mueller offers new intriguing details about a post-election meeting in Trump Tower featuring Kislyak, Kushner, and soon-to-be-disgraced national security adviser Michael Flynn. Kislyak helpfully suggested that he had generals in Moscow eager to brief the Trump transition team on Syria. When Flynn pointed out that the transition team lacked secure communications, Kushner brightly suggested that they could have the secret conversation from inside the Russian embassy. If Kislyak had not objected, Kushner would have blundered into one of the most humiliating moments in recent diplomatic history: letting generals in Moscow lecture an incoming president’s transition team about a major Middle Eastern point of contention from inside the Russian embassy.

Mueller’s report confirms most of the already known details about the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower set up by Donald Trump Jr. and attended by Kushner in hopes of getting derogatory information from the Russians about the Clinton Foundation. The idea for this meeting was so sketchy that, Mueller reveals, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort (yes, Paul Manafort) warned the Trump family members to be careful since they would never gain anything useful from the encounter.

Mueller portrays Trump and his associates as a gang of grifters too incompetent to pull off a full-fledged conspiracy, endorsing the dim-bulb theory of their legal innocence. As his report explains in an uninflected tone, “On the facts here, the government would unlikely be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the June 9 meeting participants had general knowledge that their conduct was unlawful.”

Like the Watergate hearings, the Mueller report produced unlikely heroes who did the right thing during their brief moments in the spotlight. Take Jody Hunt, who in 2017 was chief of staff for Attorney General Jeff Sessions. As the note-taker at the meeting when Sessions told Trump that Mueller had been appointed special counsel, Hunt made the instantaneous decision to record the president verbatim as he shouted, “This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”

If only.

My advice to you: Instead of obsessively parsing the overnight polls on Mueller and checking for any cracks in Trump’s solid wall of GOP support, relax for a week as things settle down and public opinion begins to coalesce. Most 2020 swing voters will never read the Mueller report, nor did they squander Thursday afternoon watching the pundit parade on cable TV. But in the weeks ahead, especially when Mueller testifies on Capitol Hill, these up-for-grabs voters will repeatedly hear the stories about Trump and the Russians.

And, hopefully, they will begin to ask themselves, “Why did the Russians so badly want this man in the White House?”