Tag Archives: Rod Rosenstein

Robert Mueller Did Not Save Us

TrumpNestingDolls

Photo by Jørgen Håland on Unsplash

So it turns out that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was not, after all, coming to save us. Don Jr. will not be indicted (at least not by Mueller); Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway were similarly spared. Mueller — at least according to the Attorney General — concluded that although Russia assisted Donald Trump’s presidential bid in 2016, it was not in coordination with the campaign. More nebulously, Attorney General William Barr and his deputy Rod Rosenstein made the decision that the president did not commit criminal obstruction of justice, although the AG did quote Mueller’s terse assessment that “he is not exonerated,” and the summary of the report released by Barr doesn’t conclude that the president did nothing wrong but that all the elements of the crime were not met. This is pretty weak tea from two Trump appointees!

Still, this wasn’t terrific news for Democrats and Trump and his fans, including his press secretary, are declaring not just a victory but “total EXONERATION.” (This victory lap feels premature to me; I think I would have held back on the gloating until more of the full report was available, since even the summary literally says “he is not exonerated,” but who am I to stand in the way of a good football spike?) It is frustrating to deal with people who apparently did not ace the reading comprehension portions of the SAT. I, too, enjoyed the impressively edited “Russia with Love” montage of Mueller arresting all the most repellent members of the Trump administration. And I, too, long for a Jared Kushner perp walk. (Confidential to my boss: if Kushner is ever arrested, I will absolutely be late for work that day, and it will not be due to an accident on I-96.)

But I do think any criticism of Mueller’s motives is misplaced. I said when Mueller was first appointed that I would trust his conclusions, and I stand by that. I continue to believe in his integrity. If Mueller says he could not find evidence that Trump’s campaign actively worked with the Russians, then I believe him. I have a lot of questions, and I would like to see his evidence, but ultimately I believe him. (I never thought Trump colluded personally, on the grounds that he is too dumb to collude.) On the other hand, I do not trust Barr or Rosenstein, and I cannot take on faith their assertion that obstruction of justice could not be proven. They are going to have to give me something other than their word.

If you were hoping that Mueller’s report would contain so many bombshells even the Republicans would be willing to dump him, then you are entitled to be disappointed. But let’s keep some things in mind:

  • We now know for a fact that the Russians sought to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. It was not so long ago that this idea was dismissed as a liberal fantasy. We now have a former FBI director and a Republican attorney general telling us it is fact. That is important, and we cannot allow Republicans in government to ignore it. It is crucial that we do everything we can to prevent this from happening in 2020; and it is equally crucial to remember that Trump’s narrow win is forever tainted by this actuality. We do not know what would have happened without Russian meddling. Do not let anyone tell you the Democrats cannot win in 2020. We absolutely can.
  • The special counsel did not declare the president innocent of obstruction of justice. He declined to make a decision. This is perhaps the most critical reason why the public needs to see Mueller’s 700-page report. There is at least some evidence against the president, even if every element of criminal obstruction cannot be proven. The American public must see it. Call your senators and representatives and tell them you demand it. No matter how you think they will be voting, it is important that they hear from you.
  • The fact that Trump did not actively conspire with the Russians while running for president does not mean that Trump is not currently in Putin’s sway. We know he has complicated financial entanglements with Russia. We know that his campaign insisted on changing the Ukraine plank in the 2016 platform (that was the only plank the Trump campaign cared about); we saw the disgraceful press conference with Putin in Helsinki. Maybe there’s no criminal conspiracy, but you would have to willfully ignore everything Trump has said about Russia in the last two years to believe that Putin has no undue influence on the president.
  • This report does not end the investigations into the president, his businesses, his charity, his inauguration, and his family. Those investigations will continue for the foreseeable future. Trump has also already been implicated in financial crimes by Michael Cohen. The SDNY is still investigating these crimes. They are not going to go away. It’s very possible that Don Jr. and Kushner and even Ivanka and Eric are going to get swept up into these investigations as well. And the House of Representatives is also investigating a veritable smorgasbord of Trumpian misdeeds; the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee has already said he will ask the Attorney General to testify about the report.

Nothing Barr says in his summary of the Mueller report changes the fact that Trump is a terrible president who should be drummed out of office as soon as possible. He is a cruel, selfish, narcissistic grifter who repeatedly embarrasses our nation on the world stage. And so we need to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and get on with the business of electing Democrats in 2020. Defeatism is the enemy. I do not believe for one second that the Democrats who are running for president are panicking over Mueller’s conclusions. I do not believe that they have been pinning all their presidential hopes on the special counsel. Now we have to stop daydreaming about Mueller riding in on a white horse, and we have to get to work. We have an abundance of talented candidates running, and they have a lot of impressive ideas and policies and reasons for your vote that have nothing to do with Robert Mueller. I urge you to find and support your candidates of choice, while also pledging to support the ultimate nominee. We need this win. And this race is absolutely winnable. (And don’t stop with the presidential race! We also need to flip the Senate if we can at all.)

Mueller didn’t save us. That is okay. We can save ourselves.

Morning Reading, May 25, 2018

This morning:

  • Harry Litman, writing for the Washington Post, tells Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Christopher Wray to resign in protest:

    Resignations are a time-honored response for executive-branch officials and Cabinet members — think Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus in the Nixon administration — confronting orders that violate their consciences or oaths of office. We take it as not only permissible but also commendable, and at times morally necessary, for senior officials to resign rather than comply with objectionable presidential directives. Their actions are widely seen as a matter of higher duty, and an expression of fealty to law over men and office over officeholder.

  • The New Republic has a really fascinating story about John McCain and the media, and why the Washington press corps loves him so much. The thesis: that the press adores McCain because he  gives them access that no one else does, and also he seems to be interested in them as people.

    McCain understands something elemental about journalists: They love to hear good stories, and they love to tell good stories. This might seem obvious, but few politicians, in 2000 or 2018, have shown a willingness to give reporters the necessary access for such stories—nor do many politicians have personal stories as dramatic as McCain’s. Thus, most campaigns and congressional offices these days are more tightly scripted than a prime-time crime procedural on CBS.

    I have always liked McCain, as I think most people do, even though I find him frequently infuriating. How much of my affection for him is his own likability, how much of it is my connection to his PoW experience (my grandfather was a PoW in World War II), and how much of it was affected by media spin? It’s hard to say.

  • In the Nation, Laila Lalami argues that publicly shaming racists is totally appropriate:

    Schlossberg’s assertion of authority over public space is, of course, protected from government interference by the First Amendment. But that right doesn’t protect him from the social consequences of his speech, including disruption and discomfort. Those protesting Schlossberg’s actions are, in fact, exercising their own free-speech rights to object to his racism and nativism. The simple truth is that if racist behavior is insulated from social shaming, it will likely continue and multiply until it becomes accepted. What happens when a majority of Americans hold views like Schlossberg’s?

    The history of this country is replete with examples of how public space was regulated to ensure that one racial group was made comfortable at the expense of others. This is why it’s important to speak out, and speak out now. Allies can help to stop the harassment, or at least deflect it.

  • And Foreign Policy has a really interesting piece on the vote to repeal the pro-life amendment to the Irish constitution:

    As polls have shown the repeal vote maintaining a significant lead, some on the wilder fringes of the anti-abortion rights campaign have been evoking catastrophic scenarios in which Ireland becomes depopulated, baby-hating Muslims take over, and the Irish become “strangers in our own land.” Others, concerned by evidence that compassion is at play among voters, have stated in recent days that it will be possible to legislate for “hard cases” — such as pregnancy arising from rape, suicidal tendencies arising from crisis pregnancy, and pregnancies involving fatal fetal abnormalities — without repealing the constitutional ban on abortion. They are saying this despite 35 years during which there have been multiple attempts to create laws for the so-called hard cases of rape and fatal fetal abnormalities, but all have been ruled unconstitutional.

    The Taoiseach, Varadkar, has firmly rejected such scare tactics. He told the Dail, the lower house of Ireland’s parliament, this week: “I would contend that it is actually our hard laws that create those hard cases. And the Eighth Amendment is too hard and forces a very hard law on Irish people and Irish women.”

    Thousands of young Irish emigrants are returning home from Britain, the United States, and farther afield to vote for change. Whatever the outcome, feminism has energized the people, reached the halls of power, and made it into Ireland’s mainstream public debate at last.

Morning Reading, May 21, 2018

This morning:

  • I thought I was all done with the royal wedding, but then this morning I read a Vox article by Dylan Matthews arguing that a constitutional monarchy is better than an elected head of state:

    Monarchs are more effective than presidents precisely because they lack any semblance of legitimacy. It would be offensive for Queen Elizabeth or her representatives in Canada, New Zealand, etc. to meddle in domestic politics. Indeed, when the governor general of Australia did so in 1975, it set off a constitutional crisis that made it clear such behavior would not be tolerated. Nothing like it has happened since.

    As Margit Tavits at Washington University in St. Louis once told me, “Monarchs can truly be above politics. They usually have no party connections and have not been involved in daily politics before assuming the post of the head of state.” But figurehead presidents have some degree of democratic legitimacy and are typically former politicians. That enables a greater rate of shenanigans — like when Italian President Giorgio Napolitano schemed, successfully, to remove Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister, due at least in part to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s entreaties to do so.

    I am sympathetic to this point of view, partly because I think the American system (where we just tack on all the responsibilities of being head of state to the president’s already overwhelming portfolio) is a hot mess. Both because the president doesn’t really have time for ceremonial duties and because the fact that the president has just survived a highly contentious, several-month-long election means that a sizable chunk of the country doesn’t feel represented by and, in fact, very likely wants nothing to do with him (or, someday, her). Some countries elect their head of state, which solves the first problem but not the second.

    To be clear, I think there are big philosophical issue with monarchies (the financial arguments against them are pretty weak to my mind) but I’m not convinced they don’t work better than elected heads of state, and if you don’t elect the head of state and it’s not an inherited position, how do you choose someone? Maybe in the future we can use a lifelike robot.

  • In the Atlantic, Joel S. Wit writes about a series of meetings with North Koreans that he attended in 2013, and what the North Koreans said then about denuclearization. His argument here is that Bolton’s “Libya model” (in which North Korea unilaterally denuclearizes and then receives rewards in return) will doom the summit and that the United States needs to be prepared to make upfront concessions of its own:

    . . . [W]hat they outlined was a step-by-step process of denuclearization accompanied in each phase by U.S. measures of their own. It is entirely different from the “Libya model” espoused by John Bolton, which involves giving up its program first and only then getting benefits in return. Indeed, the Trump administration doesn’t necessarily endorse Bolton’s view. Susan Thornton, the acting assistant secretary of state in charge of Asia, said last week that it was obvious there would be multiple steps in a long process of denuclearization, and the key issue was what happened first.

    How those differences over denuclearization are resolved inside the Trump administration, and whether common ground can be found with the North Koreans, will determine the future of the Korean Peninsula. The stakes are nothing less than the success or failure of the world’s best current chance to disarm North Korea. The Thornton approach could mean, over the long term, that it really happens. The Bolton approach would assure that it won’t.

    Wit seems a little more bullish on the summit than I am (my own view is that it’s either going to be cancelled or we’re going to be taken the cleaners, since I suspect Kim both has a much firmer grasp of the issues at hand and is less desperate for a win than Trump is). I think it’s possible we could get somewhere if we had the right people at the table, but I don’t think we do. Also, if they were so open to negotiation and ultimately denuclearizing as Wit claims, why couldn’t previous administrations get this done? I couldn’t help but wonder if Wit wrote this article before North Korea threw a fit over previously scheduled joint American/South Korean military exercises and the U.S. caved and canceled them. I’m more skeptical of the North Korean’s sincerity than Wit seems to be.
    (Also, this article introduced me to Wit’s North-Korea-centric website, 38 North, which looks excellent and informative.)

  • Slawomir Sierakowski writes in Foreign Policy about the collapse of the left wing in Europe:

    In his latest research paper, titled “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right,” the economist Thomas Piketty presents an interesting theory of how we ended up here. Analyzing electoral results in France, Britain, and the United States and comparing them to data on voters’ income and education, he found that in the 1950s and 1960s, left-wing parties drew most of their support from poorer, less-educated voters. Since then, the political left has gradually become associated with well-educated voters, giving rise to a “multiple elite” party system in the past two decades: Highly educated elites now vote for the left, while high-income elites vote for the right. In other words, elites control both the left and the right.

    Under these conditions, the working class, which does not feel represented by the left, is giving its support to populist parties, and only the center-right remains to confront them. The European political spectrum has been reduced to the mainstream right and the populist right, with the mainstream gradually evaporating as it absorbs the ideas and rhetoric of the populists.

  • And I guess I’m going to have to talk about the Constitutional crisis that the president is absolutely determined to provoke. Two pieces on this caught my eye this morning: one by Theodore B. Olson in the Weekly Standard and another by Benjamin Wittes in the Atlantic.
    Olson (who turned down an offer to represent Trump a few weeks ago) argues that the president can’t be required to testify before a grand jury because Mueller hasn’t yet shown it is legally necessary.

    The importance of all this to the president is that it is unlikely that he can be forced to give grand jury testimony simply to satisfy Mueller’s curiosity and submit to a potential perjury trap. He could, in short, put Mueller to his proof—make Mueller show that the president’s testimony was necessary to prosecute someone else. And that such evidence could not be obtained elsewhere. That is a high bar, indeed, and one that at this point Mueller has not shown he would be able to surmount.

    I am not a lawyer! But I don’t really understand this argument: Mueller hasn’t shown he would be able to surmount the bar, however high it is, because he hasn’t yet tried. All we know about potential subpoenas of the president come from leaks or from the not-necessarily-reliable chatter of Rudy Giuliani. So why would we assume that Mueller can’t make the case if he wants to? It just seems odd to me to argue that Mueller hasn’t shown something when he’s never, to my knowledge, attempted to make a legal argument for it. I am a little surprised at how insubstantial this article seemed; I usually think Olson is smart and thoughtful even when I disagree.
    Meanwhile, Wittes is decorously freaking out over the president’s tweet yesterday:

    I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!

    Which, I grant you, is a pretty extraordinary tweet coming from the president of the United States. As Wittes says:

    It’s a statement of intent to issue a specific investigative demand of the Justice Department for entirely self-interested and overtly political reasons. And Trump published it in the absence of a shred of evidence that might support the demanded action. If we take his tweet at face value, the president is announcing that he will on Monday “officially” “demand” the Justice Department launch a specific investigation of activity that would be criminal were it true—about whether the DOJ and FBI spied on the Trump campaign for an improper purpose and whether the Obama administration demanded such action of them.
    This is a nakedly corrupt attempt on the part of the president to discredit and derail an investigation of himself at the expense of a human intelligence source to whose protection the FBI and DOJ are committed.

    As Wittes also says, though, given that Trump is Trump it’s hard to know how much this means. It could mean that tomorrow he’s going to order Rosenstein to pursue a full-fledged investigation (Rosenstein said yesterday he had asked the OIG to look into it, which may or may not appease the president); or, it could mean that he needed a nap and by the time he woke up this morning he’d forgotten about it. Who knows? My guess is that Rosenstein’s statement yesterday will be enough to calm him down and forestall a Monday Afternoon Massacre. So we’re OK for the short term, but the long term could get sticky.