I think that my take in my earlier post about the Mueller/Barr Report was mostly right. If anything I'm persuaded that things are worse for Trump than I thought then. I think it's clear that Barr is more of a partisan hack than many, including me, thought at the time. I still find it hard to understand what motivates people to voluntarily ruin their reputations by becoming a Trump toady. Is it just this craven need to be in the spotlight? Giuliani, yes, but Barr? That surprised me because I was inclined to believe the establishment types who described him as a conservative institutionalist. Clearly he is not. He's just another Trump swamp creature.
But mostly we've found out that Mueller has confirmed everything we already knew about Trump, his abuses of power, and his criminality if not treason. I think it's also become clearly confirmed that the Russian efforts to elect Trump were more extensive and effective than most people were willing to believe before. If it were a partisan Ken Starr type instead of Mueller who was the special counsel, the conspiracy aspect of this investigation would have been presented to the public very differently.
But I think my take in March was right that Mueller didn't want to be a political actor, that he wanted to leave "prosecution" to congress or SDNY, et al, and he has in fact provided abundant bread crumbs for them to pursue prosecution whether during or after Trump's presidency. But the idea that this was a witch hunt is silly. If anything, Mueller bent over backwards to be neutral and lenient toward Trump considering how egregious his behavior. The value of the report is its objective presentation of the facts without interpretation. But there's only one sane interpretation, which is that Trump is as awful as we thought, and that he is utterly unfit for office.
So before the full report became available, I assumed that Barr knew of things in the report that would provide some unknown exculpatory evidence to exonerate the president of conspiracy with the Russians during the campaign. That's just not the case. We learned that almost all of the reporting has been correct, that there is no exonerating evidence that was unknown, and that there is an enormous amount of evidence there was campaign coordination with the Russians through Manafort and Stone. So why no conspiracy charges? Because Mueller thought there was insufficient evidence to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt--not because such evidence didn't exist, but because he could not get hold of it because so many people lied and obstructed.
That's why perjury is a serious crime when it obstructs. It leads to the circular reasoning that allows Barr to say that there was no underlying crime, and so, therefore, there was no obstruction when in fact the Mueller report is very clear that no underlying crime was proven precisely because of the concerted effort by Trump and others to obstruct. To even consider for a minute that there's no deeply disturbing connection between the Trump campaign and the Russians is ridiculous. Mueller's Report provides all the information you need except the proverbial tape of the conversation between Trump and Putin.
That's also why you never get the mob boss on murder, you have to get him on tax evasion. Everybody knows he ordered the murders, but there's no hard evidence like a paper trail the way there is for financial crimes. So the takeaway here is that there is lots of circumstantial evidence pointing to coordination, but they weren't able to find the "tapes", so to say, to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. I feel pretty confident that Trump, once he leaves office, will be spending a lot of time in court for his financial crimes because SDNY and others have the docs to prove it. If there's any hope of getting him out of office before the election, it lies in his making a deal to resign if they won't prosecute him or his family members. That's a deal I'd make. Get this bull out of the China shop. Pence is a robotic empty suit, but he can't do the same amount of damage that Trump is doing and will continue to do.
What is clear to anybody paying attention--and gets his information from any source other than Fox News--is that Trump and his campaign wanted Russian assistance, and that they paid for that assistance with policies starting with the GOP campaign platform that have favored Putin's agenda. All of this will come out sooner or later, but probably not soon enough to justify impeachment. There is nothing in the Mueller Report to undermine this; there's just not enough to prove it.
Nevertheless, I'm inclined to think that impeachment, while justified, is a waste of time. I understand the argument of people who say congress should impeach because it's the right thing--it is--but until there's evidence that investigations that will be coming educate the American people as to how overwhelming the evidence of Trump's unfitness is, the Senate will not convict, it will be perceived by 40% of the country as a partisan coup, and all that will be accomplished is deeper levels of tribal insanity. We'll see if Trump's approval ratings start dropping in the next couple of weeks. Unless it gets into to low thirties, I don't think the Senate will budge.
American politics are just too broken for constitutional remedies to work, and that includes elections. Is there any reason for us to believe that elections will provide a remedy that we can all trust will be legitimate? The 2020 election will be accepted only if Trump will be repudiated in a landslide, and how likely is that? There was a time when I trusted the common sense and common decency of the American people, but after Trump, that seems ridiculously naive. It seems there is no snake oil too many Americans will not drink, and if the election is close again, as it's likely to be, there's no reason to believe that Russian interference couldn't throw it to Trump again.
Nothing has been done by this administration and the congressional Trump personality cult to protect the electoral infrastructure against continued Russian interference. It's clear that the GOP cult cares only about its narrow political self-interest, and since Russian interference serves those interests, there's little motivation to defend against it. To call this treason is not an exaggeration. But when everybody's doing it, then it seems ok. If people aren't ashamed, then, how can they be doing something shameful?
Well, that's the world we live in thanks to Trump, his shamelessness, and the moral fecklessness of those Americans who think any horrible thing is ok if it's their guy who doing it. Bill Clinton's sexual misadventures are freak out horrible, while Trump's quasi-treason, egregious venality, continuous lying, obstruction, and destruction of traditional norms are no big deal. But that's where we are.
I hope I'm proven wrong about the fecklessness and gullibility of the American electorate in the mushy middle, but we'll see if Trump's post-Mueller approval numbers drop by more than a few points. If we lived in saner times, they would plummet, but we're not, so they probably won't.
Could it be that people like Barr are counting on that? Could that be his calculation--that Trump and the kind of thuggish authoritarian politics he represents is the American future? Could it be that he sees himself as playing an important historical role in laying its foundation? It's otherwise hard to imagine that he would sacrifice his reputation in abetting a thug like Trump unless he believed thuggery is the new normal.