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

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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

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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?”