I don’t expect this diary to get a ton of comments or rec’s. I do hope that people share the diary or the link, because I want people to have an easy, and easily understandable, guide to the Mueller Report. Even if the Democrats may not end up basing a single article of impeachment on it, the Report is a great secondary resource for impeachment articles. Obstruction of justice, anyone?
Here’s the link. Share it, please.
A Layman’s Guide to the Mueller Report
(The URL is an old one I’ve had since 2017, when I tried and failed to document all the Russian-connected bullshit roaring from the Trump campaign and White House. It doesn’t match the site, but since I already have it...)
Here’s a slightly trimmed version of the site intro:
The more I come to understand the report, the more I realize it was never going to serve as the main impetus of an impeachment inquiry. It was too restricted by the DOJ guidelines, and Mueller deliberately chose to a) be as narrowly focused as possible within those DOJ-imposed restrictions, b) be so circumspect in his language as to be obfuscatory, and c) bend himself and the report into pretzels to give Trump and his minions every benefit of the doubt. … The report serves as a great underpinning for impeachment proceedings based on more direct evidence as we now have. I imagine the House committee lawyers figured that out about five minutes after plowing through it.
Pelosi and the House committee staffers knew after they read through it that using the Report as the sole basis of impeachment would be a difficult sell to the American people. Check the Breakdown for why. Among other reasons:
The report did not determine whether the Trump campaign had "colluded" with Russia. Mueller focused on criminal activity. There is no federal crime of collusion. Instead, he focused on conspiracy, which is covered under federal law.
Evidence showed extensive links and connections between Russian assets and agents, and the Trump campaign, but the report did not conclude that crimes were committed by Trump campaign officials.
Mueller determined that the connections and links between Russia and the Trump campaign did not rise to the level of a crime, because the investigation did not conclusively prove that the campaign coordinated its activities with the Russians. Mueller could not specifically show that there was an agreement between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
Mueller refused to reach a "prosecutorial conclusion" that Trump and/or his campaign and administration officials had committed the federal crime of obstruction of justice. He considered himself bound by the Justice Department's determination that a sitting president cannot be indicted for a crime while in office.
Mueller repeatedly chose to take actions and construe judgments in order to provide "fairness" to Trump – to give Trump the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.
From the outset, the investigation was carried out in such a way that would preclude any indictments of Trump.
The Report was firm in its refusal to find Trump or any except a small number of officials (Manafort, Gates, Papadopoulos, a couple of others) criminally liable for anything. You and I both know that impeachment does not require a criminal act per se. But the Report’s refusal to hold Trump criminally accountable for anything made the Report much less useful as the single component of an impeachment proceeding.
The site is a single HTML/CSS page using an accordion script to separate the contents into four sections: Breakdown of Contents, Intro & Vol I, Vol II, and Sources & More Reading. Should be easy enough to use. It’s largely based on the Lawfare podcast The Report (stellar resource) and a breakdown of the report as provided by Just Security, with other info used as well. Links are in the site.
If you see ANYTHING wrong or improvable on the site, let me know. If you know of ANY resource that would help extend people’s understanding of what exactly is in the report, please let me know.
I really want more video clips — from MSNBC or elsewhere. Just no Fox/Breitbart/RT suggestions, please. ;)
Thanks for sharing this.