Neal Katyal and Joshua Geitzer/WaPo on AG William Barr:
Barr tried to exonerate Trump. That’s not how the special counsel rules work.
The attorney general isn’t supposed to be rebutting the special counsel.
The point here is not to say that Trump obstructed justice or that he should be impeached. Our concern is with law and process: Corrupt intent is a complex question, especially when evaluating the behavior of the president. But Barr has put too much emphasis on whether there was an underlying Russia-related crime. That might be defensible if he were Trump’s personal attorney, making the best case he could for his client. That’s not Barr’s role, though. He’s the attorney general of the American people, and he’s been handed a report by a crack prosecutorial team that lays out 10 instances in which Trump possibly obstructed justice. Barr shouldn’t be offering a rebuttal. He should be offering the report to Congress — and then leaving it to lawmakers to determine what comes next.
Randall D Eliason/WaPo:
William Barr’s incredibly misleading words
In his four-page letter to Congress on March 24 supposedly summarizing the “principal conclusions” reached by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Attorney General William P. Barr wrote that Mueller had declined to decide whether the evidence would justify an obstruction-of-justice case against President Trump. Barr went on to note that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein had concluded the answer to that question was no. Since Barr’s letter was released, observers have puzzled over why Mueller would “punt” on the key legal question of obstruction. With the release of Mueller’s full report, we now know the answer to that question — and we also know how deeply misleading Barr was.
Two cases for censure, and not impeachment, follow.
Thor Hogan/WaPo (from January):
Democrats, don’t impeach Donald Trump
Why censure, not impeachment, is the proper way to deal with the president’s misdeeds.
Yet Tlaib’s comments disregard the political reality: Gaining a conviction in the Republican Senate is highly unlikely, and thus far, impeachment remains politically unpopular. This makes it worthwhile for House Democrats to consider an alternative path. Rather than allowing her party to get mired in an impeachment battle that will distract from its progressive message, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) could orchestrate a presidential censure. And not just one. House Democrats could adopt a series of censure resolutions, one for each investigation revealing serious misconduct.
Censure is a formal reprimand adopted by one or both chambers of Congress. Unlike impeachment, presidential censure is not constitutionally sanctioned. Thus, it does not result in removal from office. Yet it has proved to be an effective form of public shaming, especially when implemented in a nonpartisan way. Such a punishment seems well suited for this president and this moment in our national history.
There is precedent for this strategy. Members of Congress have introduced censure resolutions against at least 12 presidents. The most successful effort was the censure of Andrew Jackson in 1834, when the Senate condemned him for removing federal deposits from the Second Bank of the United States.
Karen Tumulty/WaPo:
Impeachment would be a terrible thing for our country. We have another option.
What we have seen from Trump is the opposite, both in his public behavior and the behind-the-scenes accounts in the Mueller report; under pressure, he becomes more erratic and reckless, prone to pushing legal boundaries and making policy pronouncements by tweet.
That the president did not succeed in his efforts to obstruct Mueller’s investigation, the special counsel wrote, was “largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” But there are fewer and fewer of those non-sycophants around him.
None of this is to argue that Trump should not be held accountable for his actions, or that Congress — which has a constitutional duty to provide oversight of the executive — should do nothing in the wake of Mueller’s devastating report.
But there is another option: Either house, could, with a majority vote, formally censure Trump, something that has not happened to any chief executive since the Senate censured Andrew Jackson in 1834.
While this would be dismissed in some quarters as merely a symbolic act, it would be a historic rebuke of the Trump presidency — and would, properly, leave it to the voters to decide whether they have had enough of it.
NY Times:
And for progressives who closely follow politics, the presidential race is well underway and the defeat of Mr. Trump is, they hope, just around the corner. Polls show that while a majority of Democrats still favor impeachment, support has waned in recent months as liberals move closer to a plausible end to the Trump presidency without congressional intervention.
Many Democratic voters are also as cleareyed as their elected leaders about the Republican Party’s wide-scale deference to Mr. Trump — and the implausibility of congressional Republicans aiding his ouster. The country is far more polarized now than it was when President Richard Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment, and Republican lawmakers today fear the wrath of Mr. Trump and his loyal supporters far more than they do any punishment from a dwindling band of swing voters.
A few Republicans did respond to the report with alarm, most notably Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who said he was “sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection” by the president and some in his circle. But the nonchalant reaction from the vast majority of Mr. Trump’s party only reinforced to many Democratic activists that impeachment would be fruitless.
Jack Shafer/Politico:
The Real Disappointment of the Mueller Report
It’s not that the special counsel found no collusion. It’s that he couldn’t crack the mystery of Trump’s serial lying.
Except for pausing to explain that Trump suppressed information that would call into question the legitimacy of his election—and that he feared that incessant probing might uncover criminal activity by him, his campaign or his family—the Mueller report offers no firm theory on what motivated Trump’s constant deceptions. Likewise, Mueller’s assessment that Trump obstructed his investigation on at least 10 occasions lacks a firm explanation for why he would engage in such risky acts. For instance, why did Trump, whose sense of loyalty usually runs one way, put his neck out so far for Flynn by instructing Comey to lay off? Consider a counterfactual in which Trump dumps Flynn at the first opportunity and doesn’t interfere with Comey’s Russia investigation. No Comey sacking, no Mueller, hence no pattern of obstruction. Obviously, Comey probably would have uncovered some damaging Trump information, but those revelations would have been limited compared with what Mueller revealed because so much of the damning information in the report is about Trump's efforts to undermine Mueller.
Peter M. Shane/Slate:
William Barr Must Resign
There is no way for him to credibly continue to run the Department of Justice.
An inability to prove the elements of criminal conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt hardly belies the Trump campaign’s tacit encouragement of or assent to Russian wrongdoing. Collusion of that sort is amply shown by the Mueller investigation’s documentation of over 100 contacts between the campaign and Russians hoping to tilt the election to Trump. Indeed, for encouragement, one need look no further than candidate Trump’s July 27, 2016, statement: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Barr’s discussion of obstruction of justice is even worse for Trump. In his four-page account of the Mueller report, Barr said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had determined from the Mueller report that no criminal obstruction of justice had occurred. He said they were not basing their conclusion on a view that sitting presidents could not be indicted: “Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.” At today’s press conference, Barr tried to make it sound as if Mueller’s decision not to charge the president was also made without regard to that theory…
In an earlier work discussing the importance of government lawyers to maintaining the rule of law, I wrote of the essential “self-discipline for those immediately involved in [executive branch decisions] to actually concern themselves with perspectives and interests other than the partisan agenda they all share.” The attorney general today showed none of that discipline. Worse, his leadership surely sends a message to other Justice Department lawyers as to their expected priorities. This kind of leadership and the debasement of government lawyering it augurs will take years to repair, as it did in the wake of Mitchell himself. There is no way to begin that job until Barr is out of office.
WaPo:
Armed with Mueller report, Democrats confront challenge of Trump’s messaging machine
Of the 18 Democratic candidates running for president, none came out to call for impeachment proceedings against Trump in the first 24 hours after the report’s release. Only two, former housing secretary Julián Castro and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have called for forcing Trump out of office since then.
Most strategists planning for the general election campaign against Trump expect to focus far less on Trump’s behavior and personal qualities than Hillary Clinton did in the 2016 election.
“If in a year I am talking about the Mueller report, I am losing,” said Jefrey Pollock, a Democratic pollster who advises the presidential campaign of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.). “Because the election is going to be about the economy.”
By leaving behind the daily spectacle of Trump’s provocations, they see a chance to return to the 2018 playbook to focus on issues that more directly affect voters. They won that year’s midterm elections with economic arguments and a focused message about Republican efforts to reduce access to affordable health care.
“Donald Trump wins in a reality show and loses in reality,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “If he is able to brand things like a reality show host, he will win the debate. But that only works until people start to see the consequences.”
Megan Garber/Atlantic:
The Perverse Paradox of the Mueller Report
Donald Trump’s outrageous behavior described by the special counsel is, at this point, so deeply familiar that it has lost its power to outrage.
But the president and his surrogates were not merely fighting for the narrative as a matter of history. They were also arguing for something in the present moment: the notion that the Mueller report and its conclusions are so insignificant—so thoroughly unsurprising—as to be laughable. Dog doo. TOLD YA!!! The Mueller report is commonly compared to the Starr Report, and to the report that was produced decades before by the Senate Watergate Committee. But the most apt analogue might be the Iran-Contra report, authored by the independent counsel Lawrence Walsh. That assessment, like its most recent successor, found that the personal conduct of the president (Ronald Reagan) in the Iran-Contra affair “fell well short of criminality which could be successfully prosecuted.” It also concluded, however, that the president had “created the conditions which made possible the crimes committed by others.” That document, too, navigated the tension between criminality in particular and wrongdoing in general; it, too, suggested both Americans’ great capacity for outrage and their equally great capacity for cynicism. (Some of the participants in the affair would receive presidential pardons; Reagan’s role in the scandal would be relegated, for the most part, to the haze of history.)
And on it goes.
Really, there is an impact from the Mueller report. Question is whether it’s a slow bleed or one time change. People don’t change their mind all at once. And we are not talking about hard core Trumpists.
The Hill:
Conservative CNN host. S.E. Cupp on Saturday said that special counsel Robert Mueller's report showed that President Trump is "unfit to lead" but added that Congress should refrain moving to impeach him.
"This president is unfit to lead," Cupp said on CNN's "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered." "He has shown time and time again his utter disdain for our democratic process, separation of powers, the law. He’s got to go. But not by impeachment."
"The reality is without bipartisan support for such a drastic and disruptive maneuver it will only rip us apart even further, and that benefits Trump, not America," Cupp continued. "Beat him at the ballot box. Beat him with ideas and policies. Beat him with an agenda that doesn’t divide us further, that isn’t just designed to piss off half the country or punish people who voted for him."
Cupp, who also has criticized Democrats for focusing on the wrong issues, concluded that beating Trump with "respect, hope and optimism" shouldn't be hard.