No one’s feet will be completely clean when William Barr releases the redacted version of the Mueller report on Thursday. There will be measurements of the percentage redacted. The full report will continue to be demanded.
Without lapsing into CTs, there will be gaps that need to be filled which on the one hand will be essential for those inevitable criminal indictments. On the other hand there will be political gaps that must be incorporated into the important political work of the 2020 election. Subpoenas and Congressional testimony are ahead.
Subsequent subpoenas and testimony must proceed as even with redactions, it will be clear that an unexonerated POTUS* will be exposed further. This Trump regime nightmare must end sooner than later.
Both Barr’s letter and Mueller’s indictments make clear Russian intelligence services aimed to disrupt the 2016 election. Those intelligence operations against our democratic institutions, which persist, operate in similar ways to the aforementioned covert action. They are designed to support and advance Russia’s foreign-policy agenda while hiding the hand of the Russian government.
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The narrow wording of Mueller’s partial sentence that Barr quoted in his letter limits the question of coordination to a “tacit or express” agreement “with the Russian government.” Yet, the Russians’ interventions – which aimed, in part, to help Trump win and to denigrate Hillary Clinton — were surely meant to hide those two elements. This wording leaves open the possibility that Mueller found plentiful coordination with others who were not part of the government but were a step, or several steps, removed.
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Importantly, Barr’s letter says Mueller’s investigation does back up the intelligence community’s overall findings that Russia interfered in the election, an idea Trump has consistently refused to accept. Furthermore, the letter confirms that “Russian-affiliated individuals” made “multiple offers” to assist the campaign. Notably, no one on the campaign ever reported those offers to the FBI and everyone consistently lied about them when asked. We need to discuss, as a nation, if this is acceptable for U.S. politicians going forward. The standard of merely having “no criminal liability” is comically low for the position of U.S. president; other, higher standards of ethics and morality should be discussed.
Because Russia’s interference in our democratic institutions involves covert action, designed to hide the Russian government’s hand, drawing a conclusion about how successful Russia was with their many approaches to Trump and his team is difficult without access to the underlying intelligence that Mueller saw and the information gathered from more than 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 230 orders for communication records, and nearly 50 orders to monitor phone call records. And given the nature of intelligence, coming as it does from classified sources and methods, we, the public, may never see it.
Even if we did, it might not rise to the level of criminality, which is why setting that bar was never going to be satisfactory. Many things intelligence officers from all countries get people to do are not illegal, but they can still be unethical or even dangerous to U.S. security. Our laws also allow all kinds of unethical behavior at the nexus of money and politics.