Change Research report here. And Reuters (Trump at 37%, 40 yes-42 no on impeachment) is here. Elizabeth Warren is all in.
Susan B Glasser/New Yorker:
The Mueller Report Won’t End Trump’s Presidency, But It Sure Makes Him Look Bad
Many commentators were surprised and outraged that Attorney General Barr held on to the report for as long as he did. Soon after he received it, he released a four-page summary, which now seems more than a little discordant with the tone and substance of Mueller’s actual findings. On Thursday morning, he held a twenty-two-minute press conference at the Justice Department to weigh in, once again, with his own views of how exculpatory the report is for President Trump—all before letting anyone actually read it. In his press conference, Barr made a number of dubious and highly questionable claims, such as an assertion that the White House had fully coöperated with Mueller’s investigation and that Mueller had found “no evidence” of the Trump campaign conspiring with Russia. In fact, the report details the many ways in which Trump was not only refusing to coöperate with the investigation but was doing his best to shut it down. For instance, he tried to get the White House counsel to fire Mueller and repeatedly lied about doing it. The Mueller report also notes that the lack of a conclusion about whether there was a conspiracy between Trump and Russia “does not mean there was no evidence.” But, having now read the report, I am not surprised by how the Attorney General chose to characterize it; William Barr, it turns out, is a perfect representative of the Trump Administration.
Trump 2016 was aided and abetted by the Russians. That is a hard fact. Republican spin won't change that fact, or the fact that Trump did everything he could to shut down the investigation. So the Trump administration lies, they cheat and they steal. What the Mueller report lays bare is that Republicans are corrupt to the core to go along with it.
WaPo:
Mueller laid out ‘thorough and compelling’ case of obstruction, but Barr decided Trump wasn’t guilty of a crime
The gap between Mueller and Barr — both about what the law allows and their conclusions on obstruction — immediately stoked a debate over how to address a sitting president engaging in impropriety and possibly in criminal conduct.
On one side are those who agree with Barr — if Trump wasn’t guilty of conspiring with Russians, it’s hard to prove he had criminal intent in trying to thwart that investigation. On the other side are those who look at the exhaustive evidence laid out in the Mueller report and ask: If this is not obstruction, what is?
Politico Magazine:
The Surprises in the Mueller Report
So what did we really learn about Trump, Russia and the power of the presidency? Some of the nation’s top legal minds unpack the document of the decade.
Marisa Malek: I found the most surprising part of the report to be two-fold: One, that special counsel Mueller went out of his way multiple times to dispel the notion that there is any concept called “collusion,” and that what he investigated was instead coordination and conspiracy; and two, that the report did not exonerate the president even with respect to conspiracy and coordination.
Although the report stated that there was “no evidence” of conspiracy or coordination, it left open the possibility that there may be evidence out there that the president’s associates suppressed. Some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Some information was screened even from the special counsel and his team. Several people affiliated with the Trump campaign (including Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort) lied or provided incomplete information to the special counsel about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals. Still others deleted communications or used encryption that did not provide for the long-term retention of data. And with respect to redactions within the report, the ones concerning the Trump campaign’s interest in WikiLeaks’ releases of hacked material are particularly concerning.
Subpoenas are going out from Democrats as they do oversight. Republicans don't want to talk about the Mueller report at all, except for Trump who is foaming at the mouth on twitter. Don't give me this BS that it was a win for Trump or for Barr.
David French/National Review:
The Mueller Report Should Shock Our Conscience
The campaign did, indeed, interface with the Russians — including in Trump Tower, when Donald Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with a Russian lawyer in the explicit hope of gaining dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Moreover, as the Russian investigation continued, the lies multiplied. One of the most banal and petty came from Sarah Sanders, who simply made up claims to help justify Trump’s termination of James Comey…
I’m old enough to remember the closing days of the 1996 campaign, when the Clinton administration was already beset by an avalanche of scandals. Bob Dole looked into the cameras and asked a pointed question — “Where is the outrage?” The same question applies today, but to a different audience. The lies are simply too much to bear. No Republican should tolerate such dishonesty.
Entire thread here, worth a read.
Peter Nicholas and Elania Plott/Atlantic:
Trump’s Guardrails Are Gone
The president’s more pliant senior advisers might end up indulging his ultimately self-sabotaging behavior.
All the aides who defied Trump have long since departed. Gone, too, are some of the guardrails they erected to keep Trump out of trouble. In their absence, Trump has installed more pliant senior advisers, meaning the nation could see more of the ill-considered and ultimately self-sabotaging behavior that Mueller chronicled in his nearly two-year investigation.
George Conway/WaPo:
Trump is a cancer on the presidency. Congress should remove him.
Fiduciaries are people who hold legal obligations of trust, like a trustee of a trust. A trustee must act in the beneficiary’s best interests and not his own. If the trustee fails to do that, the trustee can be removed, even if what the trustee has done is not a crime.
So too with a president. The Constitution provides for impeachment and removal from office for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But the history and context of the phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” makes clear that not every statutory crime is impeachable, and not every impeachable offense need be criminal. As Charles L. Black Jr. put it in a seminal pamphlet on impeachment in 1974, “assaults on the integrity of the processes of government” count as impeachable, even if they are not criminal.
Kim Wehle/Bulwark:
Six Preliminary Takeaways from the Mueller Report
It's a far cry from exoneration.
Mueller nonetheless declined to state that the president obstructed justice, in part because Department of Justice policy forbids indicting him—and for Mueller, it wouldn’t be fair to ping Trump without actually charging him. This is a critical wrinkle in the obstruction story. Although Barr seemed to suggest publicly that the DoJ memo barring indictment of a sitting president was irrelevant here, that’s not what Mueller said.
Mueller—ever the stand-up guy—appeared to take two DoJ policies and blend them together to reach his “non-conclusion” conclusion on obstruction. He wrote that “[a]n individual who believes he was wrongly accused can use [the trial] process to seek to clear his name.” But “a prosecutor’s judgment that crimes were committed, but that no charges will be brought, affords no such adversarial opportunity for public name-clearing before an impartial adjudicator.”
Because Mueller couldn’t charge and try Trump before an impartial adjudicator per DoJ policy, he wasn’t going to make “a formal public accusation akin to an indictment” in a report, either.
This is a far cry from exoneration. Thus, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Yoni Applebaum/Atlantic:
The Mueller Report Is an Impeachment Referral
The special counsel has concluded he can neither charge nor clear the president. Only Congress can now resolve the allegations against him.
But if Mueller believes a president could be held to account after he leaves office, he also spelled out another concern with alleging a crime against a sitting president: the risk that it would preempt “constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct.”
The constitutional process for addressing presidential misconduct is impeachment.
As I wrote for this magazine in January, impeachment is best regarded as a process, not an outcome. It’s the constitutional mechanism for investigating whether an executive-branch officer is fit to serve. It requires his accusers to lay out their evidence in public, provides the opportunity for witnesses to be cross-examined, and ultimately forces the House of Representatives to decide whether to impeach—that is, to approve charges that will force a trial in the Senate—or to drop the inquiry, thereby clearing the accused.
Meanwhile, 2020:
Tom Nichols/USA Today:
A president determined to defend the nation would take the Mueller report as a mark of shame, and then support a full and bipartisan investigation of the security of our election process. A president who takes seriously his oath as commander in chief would, in a better administration, be in shock to realize the astonishing level of penetration of his inner circle by agents of the Russian Federation. He would clean house and demand to know how his own campaign and how people who might still have access to the West Wing became threats to national security.
A commander in chief who cared about the country would put the Russians on notice, and would do everything in his power to protect the institutions of American democracy.
None of that will happen because Donald Trump is less concerned about his role as commander in chief than he is about his own safety and reputation. Leave the lawyers to argue over whether laws were broken about things like obstruction; let Congress debate what price, if any, to exact in the political process. Let us forget about William Barr’s shameful display on Thursday morning, and accept that he is yet another Trump appointee who is willing to commit political suttee and throw his reputation on the burning bier that is Donald Trump’s administration.
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
The Mueller Report Could Alienate the Voters Republicans Need
The special counsel’s findings validate the concerns of anyone who feared how Donald Trump would wield presidential power.
The Mueller report may not dislodge significant elements of Trump’s electoral coalition, some of whom thrill to his behavior and others who accept it in the same implicit bargain as do Republicans in Congress. But it seems highly likely to reinforce the doubts of the nearly 55 percent of Americans who expressed unease, if not outright revulsion, about him as president through their votes for other candidates in the 2016 election and for Democrats in the 2018 House races.
In 2016, many of Trump’s voters, uncertain of him but desiring change and dubious of Hillary Clinton, consciously took a flier: According to exit polls, about one-fifth of his supporters said they doubted that he had the experience to succeed as president, and about one-fourth said they doubted that he had the temperament. (Those numbers were even higher among ambivalent college-educated white voters.) Especially after the brutal bill of particulars that Mueller identified about Trump’s behavior, those voters now face a reckoning on their choice. No member of Congress, no potential executive-branch appointee, and, above all, no voter can claim any illusions about what a Trump second term might look like, especially if enabled by a Congress fully controlled again by Republicans.