Lawfare’s “The Report” podcast.
This is 12 hours or more of cogent, clear-headed, but detailed and sometimes legalistic analysis of the Mueller Report. It is nowhere near finished; there will probably be 8 or more episodes to follow.
I’ve spent a lot of time listening and digesting this, episode by episode, with frequent ‘rewinding” and re-listening to certain bits. Particularly illuminating — and at times galling — are the summative legal explanations towards the ends of each segment as to why Mueller and his team chose to indict, or more often not to indict, on each of the many, many possible charges posed by the conclusions of the report.
There are a raft of reasons why Mueller chose not to push for indictments against Trump (he doesn’t rely on that bullshit OLC opinion nearly as often as you would think), Trump Jr., Flynn, Kushner, and so many other flagrantly criminal shitbags. I would say that, in the end analysis, Mueller not only bent over backwards, he contorted himself into pretzels to give Trump and his criminal cohorts the benefit of the doubt.
I have no doubt that the Democrats’ highly competent legal teams drew similar conclusions when they read the report. They didn’t need Lawfare to connect the dots for them.
(Thanks bunches, Bobby.)
Those legal contortions, by Mueller and his team, are in there for everyone to see. If and when we had mounted impeachment proceedings upon the release of the report — in the wake of Barr’s criminally false mischaracterization of the report and the public’s uncertainty and confusion over what the report actually meant.
I had to watch hours on end of MSNBC and CNN reporting, and read dozens of news articles, to figure out what the hell the Mueller report was and wasn’t saying, and that was after plowing through the report myself. So did most of us, and we’re committed to understanding the ins and outs of this whole thing. The Fox/Breitbart crowd, if you sort out the idiots who only need Hannity to call bullshit on the report to stop any cognition whatsoever and scream “Bullshit! Bullshit!” in chorus, had to have Hannity, Carlson, Ingraham and a few others tell them in detail why the report “exonerated” Trump (of course it did not) so they could start screaming “Bullshit” in unison with the other angry sheep. What does that mean? Bitter partisanship among the electorate, regardless of how much they understand the findings of the report or not.
But forget about that. Not every Republican lawyer is a giggling idiot like Giuliani or the Fox/Pravda brain eaters. If the Democratic lawyers saw how many legal contortions Mueller displayed to let Trump and his goons off the legal meathooks, so did the Republican lawyers. If Nancy Nance and the Funky Bunch launched a formal impeachment inquiry, every hearing that was based on a particular aspect of the report’s findings would be marred by Republicans objecting, “But didn’t Mueller conclude that he could not legitimately prosecute [name your shitbag] for [name your offense]? Let’s turn to page 263 in our hymnals and read aloud.” Every hearing turns into a partisan squabble about Mueller’s findings. “How can we impeach Trump if Mueller concluded that he could not legitimately be found guilty of this specific charge?” “Well, just because he might not be guilty in a court of law of this charge doesn’t mean we can’t impeach him. It’s a clear abuse of power/obstruction of justice/whatever.” “But your mighty hero Mueller said he wasn’t guilty of it!” And around and around in a partisan dance we would have gone. You and I would be screaming that he is eminently impeachable (and we would be right, but never mind that for now), the other guys would be screaming that Mueller himself found Trump “not liable” for charge after charge, and the rest of the electorate would call bullshit on the whole filthy partisan thing, and go back to watching Temptation Island.
TL;DR version: We would have lost. Both in the House and in the court of public opinion. The Mueller report is too opaque and too legalistic for most Americans to grasp. And Mueller gave the Republicans too many legal “outs” for us to use his findings to impeach Trump.
That’s why Pelosi slow-walked impeachment until the whistleblower report fell out of the sky. I have no reason to believe she knew a thing about that report until we all knew about it (Schiff may have given her a slight heads up, but he had no way to know if the report was going to amount to a hill of beans), but she knew from a tactical, strategical and political viewpoint, as well as a legal viewpoint, the Mueller report as it stood was not going to get us where we needed to be regarding impeachment. So she waited and hoped that something else would break. And it did.
I don’t agree with Pelosi on everything, but I agree with her on this: moral victories are bullshit. Trying to impeach Trump and getting our asses handed to us might have been the moral thing to do, but it would have backfired spectacularly in a political sense, and given Trump an advantage in his re-election campaign that we absolutely do not want to give him. So, fuck a moral victory. I want a real victory. And piss on “holding the Republicans accountable.” Yeah, we could stomp and grumble about how they “proved what shitbags they were” by voting against impeachment. And we would be right. But they would be howling to the heavens, “WE WON! WE BEAT PELOSI! WE BEAT MUELLER! YAAAAAHHH!” Which one do you think is going to get all the traction? Which one is going to resonate with the electorate?
The Mueller Report makes a great supplement to our impeachment articles. But the whistleblower report(s) and other, more clear-cut events and reports need to be the leading edge of the articles the Dems file.
Nancy knew what she was doing. Get off her back.