Tweet du jour via Virginia Heffernan:
She is referring to the NYTimes and Washington Post articles that the office of the Special Counsel prepared summaries of the Mueller report and expected that those summaries would be what AG Bob Barr would report. The summaries were much more damaging to the president.
But Barr took his red pen to the summaries and included only 42 words of Mueller’s report in his summary. Now some of the members of Mueller’s team are concerned that the public will be influenced by Barr’s narrative that “there’s nothing to see here, move along”.
It appears there is quite a bit more than nothing. From WaPo’s version of the story:
But members of Mueller’s team have complained to close associates that the evidence they gathered on obstruction was alarming and significant.
“It was much more acute than Barr suggested,” said one person, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity.
There was immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work instead,” according one U.S. official briefed on the matter.
[…]
Summaries were prepared for different sections of the report, with a view that they could made public, the official said.
The report was prepared “so that the front matter from each section could have been released immediately — or very quickly,” the official said. “It was done in a way that minimum redactions, if any, would have been necessary, and the work would have spoken for itself.”
Mueller’s team assumed the information was going to be made available to the public, the official said, “and so they prepared their summaries to be shared in their own words — and not in the attorney general’s summary of their work, as turned out to be the case.”
Commence the prepared “oh you people are just playing politics” talking points from Rudy Giuliani who was interviewed by the loathsome Laura Ingraham:
“They are a bunch of sneaky, unethical leakers,” he said. “And they are rabid Democrats who hate the president of United States.”
So unexpected from Laura to take Donald’s side when Laura, who, if I recall correctly from David Brock who knew her back in the 90’s, was one of the “Elves” who worked tirelessly to bring down Bill Clinton using Vince Foster’s tragic suicide. Oh, I’m sorry, the Clinton’s trivial real estate investment in Whitewater. Wait, maybe it was Hillary’s billing records. No, no, that wasn’t it. It was something to do with a blow job between consenting adults and was none of our goddamn business. Well, it wasn’t our business until Ken Starr turned over every lurid detail to the New York Times.
Never let it be said that Laura doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I can’t imagine too many people who hated a president more than Laura hated Bill Clinton. Regardless what you may think of his dalliance with Lewinsky or Juanita Broaddrick’s changing story, he WAS. the president and the endless, pointless, expensive investigations that went absolutely nowhere were about as hateful and disrespectful of the president and the country as you could get.
Laura loved every minute of it. She and Ted Olsen’s wife were buddies in elfdome until 9/11. I’m wondering if it ever crossed Laura’s mind that maybe Barbara Olsen might be alive today if Clinton hadn’t been distracted and/or endlessly criticized for “wagging the dog” with respect to going after Osama Bin Laden the way he wanted to back in the 90’s after a series of attacks on our embassies in Africa.
I would say I am digressing but I have to wonder why Marty Baron would let quotes from an actual fascist propagandist’s show stand in WaPo without any mention of Laura’s lurid past or current seemingly inexhaustible enthusiasm for defending Trump’s dishonor.
It does lead me to wonder why Bill Barr is climbing to the top of the water tower with a bucket of whitewash to defend Donald’s reputation. I can’t think of a good reason why a guy who directs the Justice Department would go out of his way to trash his own reputation and diminish the power of that department. Anyway, I can’t think of any good reason that doesn’t somehow reflect badly on Barr’s personality, attraction to bad guys he secretly thinks are hot, or doesn’t stem from that time when Tip O’Neill gave him a swirly in the Senate bathroom back in the 90’s.
Yes, partisanship has never been this bad. You’d think the Democrats would have been rewarded for all the times they listened to David Broder types and tried compromise and bipartisanship with Republicans. Like that was ever going to happen. But as Adam Schiff said last week, we have to ask ourselves if it’s OK for the president and his campaign and family to have done what they have already admitted to. That’s not a partisan question. That’s a moral question.
As for Barr, IBW has a poster somewhere about how voting for Trump was a test of character. The same could be said of writing a completely unbelievable 4 page summary of a 400 page report in defense of Donald Trump. It was a test of Barr’s character and he has utterly failed.
As Wolfgang Pauli said of a scientifically improbable paper he was asked to critique, Barr’s summary “is not only not right; it is not even wrong”.
We’ll know how not right or wrong it is when the actual report is publicly available.
It’s coming. You can’t keep stuff hidden for long these days.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
You rang?
Barr is a disgrace and should resign, Jim Jordan should replace him, why hide behind the old Howdy Doody facade anymore, we got it, under individual 1 it’s the DONJ (department of No justice). If he, Barr, wanted to wreck the Justice Departments tattered reputation any more than he has he need not bother its toast just. Even The orange grifter’s fans are totally pissed for being lied to, huh, somehow, they get this lie, go figure.
Here are 2 major issues we voters need to spearhead: Individual 1 and the Republican Party have always been simpatico, soul mates their primary goals the same; they both seek to develop and maintain Conservative political power (unspoken white male power) and Individual 1 seeks to develop and maintain white national conservative political power. Not much light between those two platforms and both have done and will continue to do whatever they can to maintain that power while do the ON me that congress that grifter routine to fool their followers. That do anything “Main Goal” has been to populate the third branch of our government with unelected primarily white male conservative federalist as overseers of a very rich non conservative diverse country.
RD, a truly excellent, if infuriating, summary and reminder of just what has been going on for decades. The double standards and hypocrisy are staggering. $90 million (at ’90’s rates) and seven years spent by Kenneth Starr, with the media breathlessly following all of it, and drawing Whitewater diagrams on their front pages. Now, when Republicans have taken over, we are supposed to let them do what they want. If someone had the time and research skills, they could write a wonderful book showing all the comments made at the time by Republicans, and their completely antithetical comments now.
And maybe even worse, Republicans have no ethics whatsoever; they will cavalierly cheat and lie and hide things for their own ends. Every single word of that Starr report was put out, for the media to roll around in. Not one single sentence of the Mueller report has yet been put out. And yet much of the media thinks that’s okay. Children wouldn’t be fooled by this, but I guess some of the adults are. “Oh, you wonder what’s on the paper? Well, you can’t see it, but I’ll read a couple of words from some sentences, okay?”
I think that most of us grow up with some sense that things are supposed to be played fair. We played softball and touch football on the blacktop in elementary school, and refereed our own games. A few kids would shade the calls in their favor, but most admitted when they were out of bounds on a play. The idea was that playing fair is more important than winning. The Republican Party was never good, but there used to be some Brahmin Republicans who seemed to have some values. What we have now are thinly veneered gutter types who have no sense of morality whatsoever. One could spend one’s entire day thinking about how every little statement ever made by Bill or Hillary is dissected and criticized, while Republicans say anything they want, and then lie about what they said. How people like Kavanaugh can do all sorts of bad things, and are covered for and even lauded, because the Republicans want the votes on the Court. How Barr was put in as AG specifically to hide the Mueller Report. How Republicans pardon their own criminals, while yelling “lock her up.”
I just watched a movie,, “Mark Felt,” about the man who was “Deep Throat” during Watergate. I did not know the story. He was a a career FBI person who believed in the institution, and who was aware of what Nixon was trying to do to the FBI. He took great personal risk to leak out the information which brought down Nixon, and he got nothing for it, but his own sense of doing the right thing. It is what we are mostly lacking in our country now. The Republicans are evil, and will commit any lie or hypocrisy for their own ends. They revel in it. They are scarcely human, except for the lust for power.
I listened to the Trumpcast podcast with Heffernan discussing this situation with Rick Wlison (GOPer who wrote a book called, “Everything Trump Touches Dies) and Molly Jong-Fast.
Wilson falls into “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” category, for me.
He is distraught about the deadly effect of Trump on the GOP brand and the country, but mainly about the GOP.
They talked about why Barr (and Guilliani) are willing to destroy their reputations for Trump. It comes down to the last moment in the spotlight, the last moment of power, fame and influence, which they apparently crave more than a legacy that isn’t terrible.
And they said that they had heard that the Mueller summaries were more devastating to Trump than anyone may realize.
Plus, there is a possibility that Barr shut down the investigation. Since Mueller is a chain of command guy, he shut it down and would have also included this information in his final summary.
Such crazy times.
I think it’s safe to say there is enough evidence at this point to lock him up. The real question is how long is it going to take? The justice dept seems in no hurry. This should be handled a lot more swiftly but sadly I see it dragging out all primary season.
I want to know why nobody has suggested that Barr be charged with obstruction of justice, along with Trump. As Attorney General he has a legal responsibility to NOT obstruct Justice and to see that the laws are faithfully executed. Am I missing some reason why he is not being held up for something more than ridicule? Like jail time!
alive50 – I have had the very same thought all week about Barr.
But who would charge Barr?? I agree that he is obstructing justice, they all are. But the idea of Republicans is to stack every aspect of government with themselves, so that they are law enforcement, judge, jury, pardoner. The “Mark Felt” movie was interesting, because it showed how Nixon put in another horrible FBI Director to replace the deceased Hoover, with the goal of completely stopping the investigation into Watergate. That’s what Trump tried to do by firing Comey and McCabe and the others. That’s why they fired Bharra. Who is left to indict Trump’s AG? But I sure wish that Congress would drag Barr in to testify, circus or not.
I keep typing my password to the UCLA basketball site, where I write posts criticizing the apparent coaching hire. I write so many, that I now mistakenly type that password in here. I’m not worried about that site, because who cares is someone takes my password; after this stupid hire is confirmed, I will not be following, anyway.
Back to politics and things, my brother sends me many articles, most of which I do no read; but I read one about how “MSNBC ratings fizzle, after Mueller report.” Well, of course, we haven’t seen one sentence of the Mueller report. And this “fizzling” was for two or three days; the idea being that liberals were depressed over the “findings,” and thus did not watch. So dutifully, some executive at MSNBC was interviewed, and he said something about, “we’ll have to pivot (cover the elections).” A dumb article, a dumb read on things from the executive. But sure enough, they’re covering the Iowa caucuses which are next January or so, showing poll, showing Sanders speeches. Quite tedious and even depressing to see them ,move away from the predations of Trump. Remember that the head of that station is right-winger Andrew Lack, who apparently wanted to move the station more to the Right, but could not, because some of the shows were leading their time slots for cable news ratings. Now he may have the excuse to do so.
Among the other disgraceful things Trump is doing, he is playing with the stock market. He is demanding quantitative easing. This is to get the market to go higher, which helps him politically. It also undoubtedly helps his particular stock holdings. This is absolutely wrong. No President does this, but Trump. He wants to make a stock go down, he attacks the company. He wants to a sector of the market go up, he announces some scheme. He wants to appoint a political flunky to Fed Chair.
The market is going up now. I am certainly no expert on markets. But I know that 95% or so of market transactions are now done by machines. There are few “regular folks’ in the stock market, except by virtue of 401 K plans which are run by big firms with more machines.. So the machines can drive up the price of stocks, as long as other machines do not drive them down. They are in essence playing with paper money. Yes, supposedly the price of a stock is related to its actual worth, profits, price to earnings ratio. But it doesn’t have to be for any extended period. Lack of regulations on corporations, the fact that corporations are buying back their own stock with the windfall from the billionaire tax cut, are driving up stock prices. But it’s mostly artificial, and will end at some point. The 401Ks will go back down, the billionaires will have taken their money out, and the economy will be even worse for the average person. But Wall Street and Trump have only two goals now: Make immense profits in the short term; and get him elected again due to the inflated stock market making enough voters think that the economy is doing well. Let us very much hope that it will not succeed.
As a regular person who does her own investing, via a brokerage account attached to my checking account, I am very concerned.
I do my own research and I am seeing a theme emerging from the dozens to hundreds of articles from various financial publications I’ve been reading.
One of the fundamentals of capitalism is periodic, cyclic recession. In the best case scenario, it is mild, doesn’t last for long and allows for resetting of prices for goods and services. The worst case is a recession to depression scenario, where millions lose savings, jobs and homes.
There is, and has been, general agreement by economic experts that we are overdue for a recession based on economic indicators.
Trump’s attempt to control the Fed’s policy is horrifying to even the most cynical money grubbers on Wall Street.
They are appalled because increasing interest rates, as the Fed would normally do to diminish the effect of a slowing economy, provides boosts to financial entities and encourages an economy based on saving rather than spending. For the mercenary money types, it provides shelter in the storm via investment and return from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, etc.
Quantitative easing is an emergency measure, such as applied by Obama’s Fed chairs, although probably much longer than should have been. QE has no business even being considered at this point.
And yes, the markets are controlled by algorithmic trading programs, although they can’t replace humans in responding real time to unexpected changes to companies’ fortunes or geopolitical events.
It has been well over a year, or more, since the market has moved significantly up, due precisely to Trump’s mucking about with all things financial.
For what it’s worth, I am keeping cash on the side and have been since Nov 2017. My investments are blue chip, long term companies with low P/E, cash on hand and monthly dividends. Very conservative, for now.
It’s a scary time.