CF: https://evilsax.pressbooks.com/wp/wp-admin/post.php?post=6744&action=edit
UPDATE: Thank God-this is of course coming
So the (Not So)SmartSet largely fell for Bill Barr’s totally political statement-what Elizabeth Drew calls the Mueller bait and switch
Wish I could say I was surprised.
FN: Katy Kay
“iA version of Mueller’s report for release is supposedly in the works – scrubbed of classified material, grand jury testimony (which is always supposed to remain secret), or information on ongoing investigations. No one knows when it will appear (indeed, no one outside the Justice Department even knows how long the Mueller report is). But on March 25, six House committee chairs wrote to Barr demanding that he produce the report by April 2. Meanwhile, Trump and his boosters, including most of the Republican Party, get to carry on about the president’s supposed total exoneration, implanting the idea in the mind of much of the public. As is often the case with Trump’s presidency, the truth will have a hard time catching up.”
This is why I discuss the problem of awful mainstream media coverage so much in this book-because of their congenital timidity that leads them to seek safety in numbers-the pack mentality-when they get a major story wrong it is amplified a thousandfold. The good news is the American people are not fooled-they see fully realize that Trump hasn’t been cleared of anything-not obstruction and not collusion. The vague half sentence that Barr was confident in sharing at most told us that collusion is not criminally chargeable-something we should have known coming in as we were warned by folks like David Frum and Ryan Goodman-Chapter A.
But the good news is as much as the MSM has tried to mislead the people they are not fooled.
The Trump-GOP co-conspirator propaganda has been very effective with the MSM but actual Americans are not fooled.
Yes-I pointed out to Sargent that while this is great news his own Washington Post did a piece on this good news with a very misleading headline-whose intent is clearly to convince the Democrats to backoff. As Sargent himself pointed out last week this is the goal of Barr’s propaganda effort-to bully the media and Democrats into backing off. Indeed there are a number of historical corollaries to the Barr Letter-the Comey Letter: in that case a vague letter from the FBI-part of the DOJ, of course-was used to put doubt about Clinton though she was guilty of nothing; this time a vague letter from the DOJ was used to assure folks that Trump is completely innocent of anything though the truth is anything but.
For historical corollaries you then have 1992 when Barr himself-this is what he does-pardoned Casper Weinberger and five other Iran-Contra co-conspirators in the middle of Bush Sr’s reelect..
He’s not called a coverup artist for nothing.
However, in some ways the most analogous comparison is Bush V. Gore. In Bush V. Gore the facts were clearly on the side of Democrats who simply called for a recount in Florida-as dictated by Florida law. However, the GOP play from the beginning was not to win the recount but shut it down.
Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris won it for Jeb’s Brother. The winning shot was the Brooks Brothers riots that Roger Stone to this day fights with other GOP dirty tricksters over who gets credit for, then the GOP Supreme Court installed W.
Just like with Bush V. Gore Democrats are right that we haven’t even seen the report yet but the GOP is trying to build the narrative that things are already settled-without even seeing the report and that the Dems are being ‘sore losers’-just like with Bush V. Gore where the law was on the Dems’ side-there was supposed to be a recount but the GOP characterized it-with the help of the MSM-as the Dems just not accepting the result as they didn’t like it.
Even 15 years later, Democrats bemoan their inability to match the clear and singular goals and message of James Baker and his GOP team: Bush won, and Team Bush was in Florida to preserve a victory, not count votes. It was a lesson in messaging the Democrats have not forgotten.”
Have they really? Why has there been talk of them letting this go-that we’re now ‘post Mueller?’ Jerrold Nadler and especially Adam Schiff certainly don’t sound like they’re going to sleep on this but I’m not going to presume anything until we see the full, unredacted report.
A question is why aren’t people protesting and demanding to see the full unredacted Mueller report. As they recognize the coverup.
Eric Swalwell promised on an MSNBC show last week that we will see every word of the Mueller Report. We had better or don’t talk to me about 2020. If the Dems are going to abdicate on this I don’t care about 2020.
As for the false narrative that we’ve some how already seen the Mueller Report-that we should just accept the Barr Letter on faith and ‘move on’ the mainstream press itself has a lot to answer for as I argued in chapter A. In that chapter I pointed out that even Chris Hayes has fallen into the trap of while calling for the report suggesting that it won’t change much what we already know-which is rich as based on Coverup Bill Barr’s letter we know almost nothing.
But what Hayes and friends are doing is creating the narrative that while we should see the full report it won’t add much to what we already know-so even though we should see it, it’s not a matter of much urgency-ergo in demanding to see it the Democrats-while correct on the merits-are kind of being sore losers again a la Bush v. Gore.
This argument of Hayes and Friends is intellectually and morally obscene. There is a great deal we don’t know about, beginning with:
But the final findings, which reportedly run to at least 300 pages excluding exhibits, could offer important insights into Mueller’s legal reasoning and explain whether the evidence he collected in the obstruction and conspiracy cases was either substantial but not enough to rise to the level of a criminal offense, or flimsy and not even close to criminal.”
This is a distinction too subtle for most in the ‘SmartSet.’
Beyond that there is so much public information we have-evidence of collusion-that needs to be seen. Adam Schiff laid out many examples last week. As powerful as his speech was he wasn’t able to include every example in 5 minutes-he didn’t mention the emails between Roger Stone and the Trump campaign on one side and Stone and Jerome Corsi on the other. This is clear evidence of coordination. What was Mueller assessment of this? Was the public evidence we’re aware of just the tip of the iceberg?
Mueller was also investigating the late Peter Smith’s stated intent in an email to senior Trump campaign staff-Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Kellyann Conway, and Sean Spicer-to work with Wikileaks pay Russian hackers for Clinton’s emails.
There was the WSJ story that he paid hackers inside a hotel room and the letter after the release of the Podesta emails that sounded like it was about a payment to the hackers for the Podesta emails.
Mueller’s report-the latest is it’s over 400 pages-will shed light on Smith’s activities. To be clear the notion that he actually paid the hackers behind the Podesta emails is a conjecture and Mueller’s Report-presuming it’s worth the paper it was printed on-will tell us if this is the case or not. But outside of that question we do know for a fact that he intended to-and told the Trump campaign he intended-to work directly with the hackers. This would be even more serious than coordination-it would be conspiracy to commit computer crimes.
Notably, last year before the Dems even took over Congress, Schiff had stated that, despite the GOP obstruction, the Democrats had made good progress on investigating Peter Smith’s role.
Again, this is potentially the most serious allegation against the Trump campaign-that they actually worked directly with the hackers.
Again, Mueller was investigating it so it should be in this 400+ page report unless Barr redacts it to save ‘President Trump’ embarrassment.
Indeed, if anything 400 pages doesn’t sound like very much considering how much information we have simply in the public arena. I worry that 400 pages is way too short to cover anywhere near all the bases .
Back in December, Garret M. Graff at Wired looked at no less than 14 questions Mueller knows the answers to:
Here are three I’m particularly interested in-they’re all important questions:
5. What has Felix Sater told Mueller?
6. What has George Nader told Mueller?
14. Was the Guardian correct in reporting that Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange?
I’ve discussed the fact in other chapters that the MSM has decided 14 is simply icky-so much so that anything that links Manafort and Assange is simply ruled out of hand-even the NYT’s own story that Manafort sought to do a deal with the Ecuadorean President in 2017 to bring Assange to the US.
Sater was supposed to testify publicly last week and this was delayed because of Coverup Bill Barr’s propaganda letter for reasons that aren’t clear-and so, worrisome-though at this point if there’s anyone we can trust it’s Adam Schiff.
Anyway we’ve already looked at 16 questions the Mueller report should answer-the 14 from Wired and mine about Roger Stone-Jerome Corsi and Peter Smith. Yet the half sentence from Barr is supposed to obviate the need to see the report? Again-I worry 400+ pages isn’t enough.
Speaking of unanswered questions let’s look at Ari Melber’s interview with glorified Coffee Boy extraordinaire, George Papadopoulos. The unanswered questions from the Coffee Boy are due to the fact that Melber didn’t ask them.
I had the chapter on Chris Hayes listed above and now I’m looking at Melber. Let’s be clear I’m not picking on these guys because they’re the worst in the MSM but to the contrary they’re among the best-which is why I’m pretty disappointed in them. And let’s face it, if this is what they are doing I don’t even want to see what a Hallie Jackson or a Chuck Todd is saying.
As many questions as Melber missed in his Papadopoulos interview I don’t even want to see this:
The question is why is Papadopoulos doing an interview tour now? Because the MSM has falsely accepted the Barr propaganda letter and now falsely inferred that every accusation of conspiracy is thereby false-going from collusion with the Russian government not being shown beyond a reasonable doubt to-not a single shred of evidence of collusion-a ludicrous inference that Schiff dismantled so brilliantly.
Clearly Papadopoulos is strutting around as if he’s vindicated and Melber and Kasie Hunt and Friends agree-they think he is vindicated.
Again, my disappointment in Ari is he is one of the best interviewers out there-even when he picks up a bad MSM meme he usually makes it more watchable because of his style-his lawyerly style that usually mitigates in the search for truth.
However, he has fallen for the same canard that not charging collusion means absolutely no collusion and so his show hasn’t been as watchable as usual. His interview with the Coffee Boy and wife-Ms. Simone Mangiante-Papadopoulos-did offer us some real revelations. In particular George revealed that not only they both know Joseph Mifsud before meeting but he approached her at the European Parliament to ask her what she knew about Mifsud.
So essentially they met through Mifusd. This is stunning.
So this was a major scoop by Ari-but, it hardly seems that he truly appreciated the import of what he discovered. So this is yet another question Mueller will presumably, hopefully, had better, answer in supposedly little more than 400 pages-what part does Ms. Papadopoulos play in all this?
Regarding coincidences-Malcom Nance:
Ms. Papadopoulos went on to inform us that she and George will call their son Joseph Mifsud.
But there were some pretty important questions totally missed by Melber.
1. One of Ari’s favorite phrases is I’m going to push you on this. But he utterly failed to psuh Papadopoulos at all on Chicago sports bar patron’ Jason Wilson’s assertion that Papadopoulos confided to him in March, 2018 that he did tell Jeff Sessions about Mifsud’s claim of incriminating emails on Clinton.
This contradicts both what the very much Glorified Coffee Boy said publicly after his sentencing in September of 2018 and what his own lawyer stated in the sentencing memo. If Wilson is telling the truth-not clear why he’d lie-then the Coffee Boy lied to the public-and if he told that to Mueller he committed perjury again-oops he perjed himself again, got lost in the game, the Air and Kasie think he’s been cleared, but he’s not that innocent
2. Ari failed to push the Coffee Boy on the fact that whatever the Mueller Report says about Trump-and we haven’t see it yet-nothing in the Barr Letter ‘cleared’ Papadopoulos-which is not surprising as only 23 of Mueller’s own words were used-none that referred to the treasonous Coffee Boy-Papadopoulos is actually under investigation again.
Ari didn’t push him on that while laughing about the idea that prison is Trump Country-Ari failed to see the irony..
What’s interesting is that while the MSM thinks it’s important to always preface any quote from Michael Cohen with ‘but he’s a convicted perjurer’ they don’t do the same with the Coffee Boy-both Ari and Kasie Hunt totally normalized him.
And in fact Papadopoulos’ own credibility is very much open to doubt.
Yes we’re supposed to believe that this fellow Charles Tawil forced him effectively at the point of a gun to accept $10,000 dollars from.
Mr. Tawil previously denied the accusations of his affiliation with western intelligence agencies but with recent inflammatory comments by Mr. Papadopoulos, including an offer to Congress to inspect the $10,000 in the belief that it would lead back to the Obama administration, Mr. Tawil struck a more direct tone in an exclusive interview with this reporter.
“The guy is a pathetic liar” Mr. Tawil said of Mr. Papadopoulos. “I met him when he was out of a job and offered him a job and gave him, on his demand, a loan, cash as he requested because he did not have an account in Europe.”
“He mentioned that I am working with Mossad or the FBI or some crap like this. He is a lunatic”
A lunatic that Ari Melber treated with great respect-I guess now that Trump is ‘vindicated’ and is innocent everyone in TrumpWorld is the same right? Maybe Manafort should be released as there was nothing there. Bob Barr says so.
Yes I’m being sardonic but this the canard Melber and friends have setup.
“The $10,000, per Mr. Tawil, was a loan on the request of Mr. Papadopoulos who was seeking to extend his European pre-honeymoon with his new wife, Simona Mangiante. Mr. Papadopoulos has previously stated that the payment was insisted upon by Mr. Tawil, a claim that the Israeli-American denies vehemently.”
I mean someone forces $10,000 on you against your will? Happens to me every day…
This would have important for Melber to bring up for a couple of reasons-for the substance of the particular issue of Tawil and what really happened-his explanation that the Coffee Boy begged him for it sounds a lot more plausible-but also as it more generally shows him to be a pathological liar. Certainly at a minimum Melber should have ‘pushed him’ on his credibility.
It’s clear that Papadopoulos is always on the take for cash windfalls. I pointed out in Chapter B that while the MSM has acted as if the Barr Letter somehow debunks every piece of evidence in Russian collusion this is an absurd amount of reverse engineering based on spotty logic. There’s the assumption that the Dossier was debunked-did you hear Barr mention the Dossier?
So from when comes this leap on logic?
3. And this leads us to a question related to the dossier-Sergei Millian.
Federal authorities out of Washington DC, working in coordination with Robert Mueller’s team, have in recent days sought to arrange an interview with the author of a letter sent to Congress last month that claimed that ex-Trump adviser George Papadopoulos coordinated with Russians in the weeks following the 2016 election. The person who wrote the letter is expected to travel to DC for an interview with the FBI about the claims, per two U.S. officials involved and the author of the letter. All three have requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic
The FBI’s interest in the letter and its writer signals that federal authorities are taking the allegations seriously and continue to investigate Papadopoulos even after he served 12 days in a federal prison for lying to investigators about his interactions with a Maltese professor who claimed that Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails.
Patrick Boland, A spokesman for Congressman Schiff and Caroline Polisi, a lawyer for Papadopoulos did not immediately return a request for comment. Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller’s office declined to comment.
Separately, this reporter has in recent weeks communicated with the author of the letter in which evidence was shared that proved their proximity to Papadopoulos in late 2016 and early 2017. The evidence includes messages and photos and the person’s identity was independently corroborated by a family member of Papadopoulos who confirmed that they had been aware of Papadopolous’s association with the person. Though none of the major claims in the letter have been substantiated, some of the underlying details have. Messages from Papadopoulos to the confidant included the phrase “I am set for life.” The Papadopoulos associate said that this message was in reference to a Russian business deal.”
So what deal with the Russians did the Coffee Boy believe would set him for life? It seems he may have still been working with Sergei Millian about a Trump Tower Moscow deal-it’s supposed to have ended in June, 2016 after the Washington Post report about the hack of the DNC-timing in itself suspicious.
But Rudy Giulani later stated-and had to walk back-that efforts to secure the deal continued to the election and after.
The FBI’s renewed interest in Papadopoulos and his purported Russian ties come as Papadopoulos and his wife, Simona Mangiante, have detailed his interactions with an alleged source for the Christopher Steele dossier, the enigmatic Sergei Millian.
The story surrounding the interactions between Millian and Papadopoulos has changed numerous times in recent months. On a podcast with Dan Bongino in early November (timestamp 43:35), Papadopoulos says that Millian reached out on LinkedIn in July 2016 and the two met in Chicago. In October 2016, Millian once again asked Papadopoulos to meet, saying that he had an interesting private sector offer. According to Papadopoulos, Millian said, “I have a deal for you for $30,000 a month, a great office in Manhattan, it’s simply PR…for some ex-Minister in Russia, but the qualifier is that you have to work for Trump at the same time and you can’t tell anybody.”
This version of events conflicts with the story told by Mrs. Papadopoulos. Speaking to the Daily Caller, Mrs. Papadopoulos stated that Millian “offered her husband a job working for the Russian energy company Bashneft.” Bashneft is a subsidiary Rosneft, the Russian conglomorate that Mr. Steele alleged was involved in a quid-pro-quo with Carter Page and other members of the Trump team.
The conflicting narratives about the offer from Millian to Papadopoulos in late 2016 add intriguing context to the underlying claims of the letter sent to Schiff.
Speaking of Carter Page and Rosnet, Ari Melber also had Page on and the words I’m going to push you on that didn’t come up once. With such a target rich environment Melber didn’t push him on Rosnet and the fact that Page was at Rosnet headquarters the day the Russian state oil company sold a 19.5% stake to the Qatar authority.
The Dossier had asserted Page was offered a 19% stake in exchange for getting Trump to change the GOP platform on Russia-Page had said he thought it was doable. Then a 19.5% stake was sold and Page was in the building? Yep-coincidences take a lot of planning.
So all the Trump co-conspirators are being allowed to strut around acting all ‘vindicated’ when we haven’t seen the report and haven’t seen a word regarding any of them.
Again, I’m certain Melber’s interview with Papadopoulos was better than Kasie Hunt’s.
Melber did have a pretty good interview with Randy Credico-who certainly seemed squirrely when he was asked about his messages to Roger Stone about how ‘Hillary Clinton’s campaign will die this week.’
Credico was clearly knocked off balance and his explanation-that he was just basing all these big predictions on public information-wasn’t terribly convincing-if this was all part of public knowledge why was Stone asking him rather than simply reading the public information himself?
What Melber could have added to the picture is the rather astonishing fact that Credico is close to a top Wikileaks lawyer-and that he lived in her father’s place for many years.
Melber is also right that one of the many loose ends of the whole Roger Stone-Jerome Corsi-Randy Credico nexus is why it was a matter of such great importance for Stone to assert his sole backchannel to Wikileaks was Credico-after all this is what Stone perjured himself regarding?
What is the matter of substance Stone was trying to conceal? Even if Corsi was the more direct channel to Assange on the Podesta emails what information if any did Credico provide him? One thing is clear is that when you look at the Stone-Credico texts it’s clear Credico was deliberately giving the impression he know a lot more about what Assange was doing than simply public statements.
So these are additional questions the Mueller Report needs to answer. See why I think 400 pages is kind of short?
P.S. If you want to see the epitome of the MSM attitude post Barr’s Propaganda Report see this piece by Jonathan Bernstein:
Let’s be clear-what Sargent says is correct but Barr’s own words are a little less acceptable. I mean those are two big errors just in the headline-it wasn’t Mueller it was Barr and he wasn’t cleared. But when you look at Bernstein’s actual piece it’s even worse than that.
Sargent sees the real irony-that despite the absurd claims that Trump was exonerated the public doesn’t believe it-not obstruction or ‘even on collusion.’ Berstein clearly thinks Trump really was cleared-of everything maybe even of Birtherism, not showing us his tax returns, of emoluments, and children being separated from their parents and put in cages.
I guess Bernstein and his MSM friends have worked so hard to normalize Trump that now he really seems normal to them and they can’t understand these ‘loony leftists’ who want to impeach him or something? Why would you want to do that? He’s doing such a great job. He says it himself every day.
UPDATE: Ok so some very good news. First Jerrold Nadler had a strong NYT op-ed on the need for Congress to see the full report-and the Dems intention to do what is necessary to get it.
“We — the members of the Judiciary Committee, the House of Representatives and the entire American public — are still waiting to see that report. We will not wait much longer. We have an obligation to read the full report, and the Department of Justice has an obligation to provide it, in its entirely, without delay. If the department is unwilling to produce the full report voluntarily, then we will do everything in our power to secure it for ourselves.”
“The entire reason for appointing the special counsel was to protect the investigation from political influence. By offering us his version of events in lieu of the report, the attorney general, a recent political appointee, undermines the work and the integrity of his department. He also denies the public the transparency it deserves. We require the full report — the special counsel’s words, not the attorney general’s summary or a redacted version.”
“We require the report, first, because Congress, not the attorney general, has a duty under the Constitution to determine whether wrongdoing has occurred. The special counsel declined to make a “traditional prosecutorial judgment” on the question of obstruction, but it is not the attorney general’s job to step in and substitute his judgment for the special counsel’s.”
“That responsibility falls to Congress — and specifically to the House Judiciary Committee — as it has in every similar investigation in modern history. The attorney general’s recent proposal to redact the special counsel’s report before we receive it is unprecedented. We require the evidence, not whatever remains after the report has been filtered by the president’s political appointee.”
This promise of action was followed by action.
However, the MSM is still being the MSM. Poppy Harlow reported this on her show as well as the news that 25 members of the Trump Russia House got unauthorized security clearances.
But Ms. Harlow immediately blunted its impact by bringing in a guest who she says is a ‘life long Republican’-who was in Ken Starr’s perjury trap regarding Clinton.
This is typical-to bring in the Trump and GOP rebuttal before even speaking to the Democrats and buttonholing the substance of the news that is bad for ‘President Trump.’
UPDATE 2.0: In this case this former Ken Starr staffer actually told the truth-Barr’s reasons for withholding important parts of the report don’t carry water. For Grand Jury testimony you just appeal to the court for it-the Watergate Congress received the GJ testimony-and he also pointed out that Congress also needs not even solely Mueller’s summary 400 page report but the underlying evidence-which would be thousands of pages.
In any case this CNN show-with Jim Sciutto is much better than MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson’s show this morning. Jackson’s first 17 minutes are about Joe Biden’s allegedly inappropriate touching.
And MSNBC is allegedly the ‘liberal network’-not before 6 PM at the earliest!