Barr is giving his speech now. Report to come out around noon. Democrats couldn't wait a few hours for the report so they already started accusing him of all kinds of crazy shit.
Reading the report now. There was collusion, there was obstruction. Official link: https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf Link to an OCR'd searchable version: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6oazscptx6gxs48/report_ocr.pdf
I don’t think he should have used Trump-Speak to frame that report. Now he’s saying there’s ten cases of “possible” obstruction but no collusion. And he’s calling press conference. This should have all the smooth precision of a prison riot.
I’m reading through a lot of excerpts because I don’t have the time to go through each page, but from what I’m seeing, there is plenty of communication with the Trump campaign and Russian officials especially between Cohen, Kusher, and Papadopoulous. Manafort was actively negotiating future policy with regards to Ukraine during the campaign. And all that would be needed was a “wink” from Trump.
And the other reason why the Trump tower meeting that was created in an effort to illegally obtain campaign materials from a Russians was that Trump Jr. was too stupid to know he was acting willfully. Essentially, that behavior wouldn’t have passed the “beyond a reasonable doubt” test of criminality, but the behavior itself was intentional and was done in effort to obtain useful materials for their campaign from a foreign government.
Yeah, they almost had him on this collusion thing. Missed by a cunt hair. Totally. When is Mueller testifying? I'm so sick of this dumb shit. Maybe at some point this country can move on to a real issue. You know, maybe.
Nah I hope the democrats drive it straight in the election. Alas for the most part they’ve moved on the the full bore push on his tax returns.
The DOJ just dropped 400 pages of detailed wrongdoing and ya'll act like the President is completely exonerated. Never change.
They believe they'll get more out of it in an election than they will in an impeachment proceeding when Republicans will refuse to convict no matter what. Whether that's the right call or not, I guess we'll see.
Part of it is because the truly criminal stuff is out at other us atty offices. Stuff still redacted. But make no mistake, that report lays out in stark detail a completely unhinged person at the helm. Who’s campaign had extensive communication with the Russians. And the only reason some of it cannot be determined is because the intent was hard to prove(because they are dumb) and the other part was that mueller determined to leave it to congress based on the legal framework he was using.
The thing about impeachment is not whether the senate will convict, but to see how Trump deals under oath. What documents get produced. They might try to negotiate an exit deal before hearings begin. Otherwise, they could wait for more indictments to drop from other districts and see how much more he gets implicated in other stuff. The one thing Trump cannot do is testify under oath. It’s not that he’s a fucking liar. He is. But he also has no understanding of what the truth is. His whole life is him living lie-to-lie. No strategy. Nothing beforehand matters. He went from saying Mueller acted honorably after Barr’s 4 page joke. To calling him a dirty cop 5 minutes later.
No one said he was exonerated, but if after two years of this collusion crap you want to harp on people sick of hearing about it, have at it and knock yourself out. I'm done arguing about it. People believe what they want to believe. Polls suggest most Americans place Russia at the bottom of issues they actually care about. To me, for good reason. It's as if they know they don't have a strong case. Lol, just kidding yo.
If Trump was a Democrat he'd have been impeached ten times over by now. Never confuse the Republican party's complete disregard for the rule of law with Americans having a weak case against the President.
Do you really believe that? Had Hillary won she would have actually been guilty of election tampering, not to mention a mountain of corruption quid pro quo crimes, and had no shortage of *gasp* foreign influence. You think the democrats would have given a shit and impeached her? I don't. Trump is very much impeachable, but... there's a problem. It's just your regular run of the mill fraud and corruption scandals so many of them engage in themselves. Gee, I wonder why they don't want to go down the impeachment route they would have such a compelling case for. What a fucking mystery.
It's amazing to me how Hillary is so obviously guilty of crimes and yet a unified Republican government can't get so much as a search warrant for them. They don't want to go down the impeachment route because they know the Republicans will not vote to convict no matter what evidence is presented. They know Republicans will politicize it and use it against them in the next election (just like McConnell threatened to do if they protected the 2016 election), so the question becomes: is it worth it? Pelosi seems to think it isn't, that it's far more worthwhile to put their efforts on the 2020 election.
Gotta love bipartisan politics. Nobody wants to admit they cover their own because otherwise Donald and Bill would be in prison. It’s not a bipartisan issue, it’s a social class issue.
*Framed as a partisan issue*. The other side is so guilty. Our side would never. They're the good ones.