Right, but in the court of public opinion (and we'll literally argue with teh right about this for the rest of our lives), about 40% will never be convinced that it was anything other than a witch hunt that took down a few good men along the way. About 40% will think that Trump should have been impeached/indicted. About 20% will be undecided....

And that's a subset of the ~40-50% of Americans who will have a clue about it in 5-10 years. The majority of Americans' view will be something like, "Oh, right, that scandal with the guy who went to jail but the president didn't know about the thing he did with the other country... was it Russia? I mean, at least Hillary wasn't president, right?"

This. Ask a normie to explain Iran-Contra to you. Even one old enough to have lived through it.

Right, it'll sound something like... "Oh, yeah, that... That was the scandal where like the guy in the military the general dude was selling guns to buy drugs from like multiple countries. Iraq was one, I think. Oliver something or other, West maybe? And like they were doing all that stuff, no wait they were flying the drugs back, it was like the FBI or the CIA or something, Tom Cruise played this guy in that movie, the one where he ****ed his wife in the plane... and I think Clinton was president."

FYP

I think in one of his many interviews Andrew McCabe said that he didn't know of any big things under investigation that we haven't already heard about in some way. But I think the report could actually put on-the-record things we kinda know off-the-record already...like Russia was helping Trump win the election through targeted advertising and fake news on social media, and that the Trump campaign and likely Trump himself knew about it and cooperated with it. And there was a quid pro quo...probably a promise or a plan to drop or reduce sanctions against Russia should Trump be elected.

The fact that none of that will make Congressional Republicans or Trump supporters even wince is the most mind-numbing part of the story imo. To celebrate Trump will walk out to Fifth Avenue and shoot someone.

William Barr was also instrumental in those pardons

Bush Sr also did the pardons after he lost his re-election bid. Assuming Trump loses everyone that was loyal will get pardoned if Trump is still in office.

Why the **** does the presidential pardon exist? Is there a Chapo episode on it? It's such a stupid concept.

Historically it was designed and used to right injustices in the criminal justice system (Obama commuting sentences of nonviolent drug offenders is an example). It was not designed for political pardons of friends and co-conspirators.

fyp

Yeah, like, unfortunately few political systems can survive people just openly using power corruptly if the public are not inclined to hold them accountable.

Prediction: the report will prominently feature the phrase "no direct evidence" and that's all you'll hear until it's out of the news cycle.

when this **** drops i'm gonna grab a bottle of wine and spend the evening reading it all the way through like a novel

I haven't been following the reporting on this much. I don't understand how Mueller is "wrapping this up" in a week or so. Aren't there still all sorts of loose ends? What about the foreign company owned by a foreign government that didn't want to cooperate and has been getting fined $50K a day? Or Andrew Miller's challenge to Mueller's appointment? They just extended the grand jury last month. This doesn't make any sense to me at all.

Is it possible this is some sort of progress report or bull**** like that? That doesn't make much sense to me either and I'm thinking this is either absolutely nothing or something absolutely nefarious.

Justice Department preparing for Mueller report in coming days

The special counsel’s office, which used to have 17 lawyers, is down to 12 now, and some of those attorneys have recently been in touch with their old bosses about returning to work, according to people familiar with the discussions. All but four of the remaining 12 lawyers are detailed from other Justice Department offices.

The end of the special counsel’s probe would not mean the end of criminal investigations connected to the president. Federal prosecutors in New York, for instance, are exploring whether corrupt payments were made in connection with Trump’s inaugural committee funding.

If Mueller does close up shop, government lawyers on his team would likely return to their original posts, but would be able to continue to work on the prosecution of cases initiated by the special counsel’s office.

That was the case for two special counsel lawyers, Brandon Van Grack and Scott Meisler, who have left the office formally but are still working on cases begun by Mueller.

When the special counsel brought the case against Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser and friend, accusing him of lying to Congress, attorneys from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington were assigned to it from the start — an indication that Mueller expects to hand off the investigation soon.

The four prosecutors remaining who aren’t part of the Justice Department are some of the special counsel’s highest-ranking lawyers: Aaron Zebley, who is effectively Mueller’s chief of staff; James Quarles, who is a senior executive in the office; Jeannie Rhee, the lead prosecutor in the case against Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney; and Greg Andres, the lead prosecutor in the trial of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman.

According to people familiar with the special counsel’s work, Mueller has envisioned it as an investigative assignment, not necessarily a prosecutorial one, and for that reason does not plan to keep the office running to see to the end all of the indictments it has filed.

is trump's refusal to sit down for an interview akin to pleading the fifth? of course it is. of course it is.

There's an NY Times article that basically says to curb your enthusaism about the report, but it will like provide evidence and leads that the other, broader investigations (house investigators, SDNY, etc) will be able to use.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/o...p_id=753468813

^^^ That's written by Neal Katyal, who drafted the special counsel regulations. And it would be a decent explanation as to why we're getting a report when there are still a lot of loose ends. Idk.

So in other words, there's no bombshell in the report we didn't already know, since everything passed and nobody cared, Trump declares victory, poll numbers rise, but a bunch of investigations go on of which Trump declares more witch hunt they're all out to get him because he thinks like that 24/7/365 and R voters will eat it up because they're as narcissistic as he is and since he's been under investigation the entire time, it'll be a plausible enough argument for the barely paying attention masses.

All of this outcome a big thanks to James Comey and Andrew McCabe, your firings were the only good thing Trump actually did.

Looks like the scope of the report got narrowed, because ya know the Clinton investigation was totally about the blowjob at first. Also didn't they just arrest Stone.

Not just pardons, but they all got breaks anyway, is manafort the only one actually in jail now?

The bolded will be an INCREDIBLY effective political argument. Specifically, something like, "Total witch hunt! Mueller had two years and wasted millions of dollars and found NOTHING! Totally exonerated me!! Now the Democrats in the House have nothing better to do than presidential harassment!!! TOTAL! WITCH! HUNT! All to find excuses for losing an election they should have won!!! The real collusion was all with Crooked Hillary, when's that investigation???"

This will drive the right into a frenzy, it will win him back a lot of "moderate" Republican support, and it will probably get the middle ~20% of the country thinking that the witch hunt stuff is true. My guess, if this is the way things go, is that about 55-65% of the country ends up believing that Dems are on a witch hunt and Trump did nothing wrong.

If the Mueller report is a dud, I think it's going to blow up in the Democrats' face big time if they continue all of these House investigations and subpoena administration officials... which obviously they have to... So they better create some seriously dramatic made-for-TV moments in the hearings to get some attention on Trump administration crimes and make these cronies look like the grifters and criminals they are.

Yeah, definitely agree there's a lot of danger of getting politically owned here. One thing I've been uneasy about over the last couple years is that I think Trump, being just unimaginably narcissistic, would be on this WITCH HUNT! tip with or without being in any actual danger from the investigation. Normal people are like "lol, screaming like a stuck pig, clearly has **** to hide" but it's not necessarily true for narcissists, as merely being accused of imperfect will make them angry regardless of whether the accusations are true. From a Psychology Today article on NPD:

Remember when that Gold Star Muslim father attacked him at the Democratic Convention?





He didn't do this because what this guy said actually mattered at all, or because he thought there was any truth to it. He purely and simply can't help himself when he gets attacked, he has to reply.

Of course, I think there is actually substance to the Russia allegations. But I'm not so sure that the degree of Trump's bluster is a good guide to how close Mueller is getting to anything dangerous. And I think repeatedly screaming WITCH HUNT! about an investigation that probably isn't going to get anywhere is an interesting political strategy, because then the next time you scream about something repeatedly, people will be inclined to believe you, on top of the normal benefits in convincing people that simple repetition provides anyway. Obviously I don't think this is a conscious political strategy on the part of Trump, but it might end up working out for him if the Dems are not careful.

I doubt anything is directly connected to Trump because he's too dumb to understand a conspiracy like this. Members of his campaign no doubt worked with Russia and helped Trump win with Trump not knowing, caring, and understanding anything that was going on.

However, he is to some degree ultimately responsible for this. Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law. He could have known about this if he wanted to buy opted to know as little as possible about what was being done in his name.

I think he knew about it all but probably didn't have a lot of personal involvement. Why would he need to? Going to be pretty difficult to get a smoking gun considering he never uses email, etc.

Like you can see what level of importance the campaign assigned to this considering they let Roger Stone mastermind it. Campaign management was not as thick as Trump at any point.

He is known as a micro manager he knew. Whether he or his people were smart enough to keep plausible deniability. Idk they dont seem so smart.

LOL at anyone who thinks that this report isn't going to be devastating. Trumps own hand has been played 100% face up so far. Nobody goes to the lengths he's gone to obstruct justice when they are innocent. He's in up to his neck just based on how he's acted wrt Russia since inauguration + the obstruction. Right now it's more likely than not that he was 100% compromised before he even ran because of his participation in money laundering.

There are two questions here: 1) is he up to his neck in it 2) can Mueller prove that. 1) is lolobviously true, he's been up to his neck in shady deals for decades. 2) we haven't even had a sniff of yet. He's lazy, not detail oriented and doesn't use email. His involvement was probably limited to sitting in meetings and going "fine, yes, good" at appropriate times while watching a TV in the corner. Proving that beyond a reasonable doubt might be tricky.