The Mueller Report (2019) lays out the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, former head of the FBI who looked into the Russiagate scandal. The full 448-page report has yet to be made public, but a version with about 10% of it blacked out (redacted) by Attorney General William Barr came out on April 18th 2019.
For two years, from May 2017 to March 2019, Mueller and his investigators found out what they could about three questions:
- Did Russia interfere in the US elections in 2016?
- Did Donald Trump or his men conspire with Russia to win the election?
- Did Trump, as president, obstruct justice?
Answers: Yes, Probably not, Almost certainly yes.
Evidence: There is plenty of evidence to show that Russia did in fact interfere and that Trump did obstruct justice. But Mueller could not find enough to charge Trump or his men with conspiracy.
No collusion: Or, more precisely, no conspiracy, the term the FBI and the law uses. Trump’s men talked to Russians countless times and lied about it, but there seems to have been no there there. Or no smoking gun that Mueller could find among the lies and incomplete evidence (some of it had been destroyed). It seems that Russia kept Trump and his men at arm’s length, probably fearing that they would screw it up. Or at least that is the sense I get from reading the 30-odd pages of the executive summaries.
Russian interference is a fact. Russia did it in two main ways:
- Russian trolls: The Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in St. Petersburg, had been carrying out what it calls information warfare on the US since 2014. At first it was just to sow discord in the US, but during the 2016 election it was about defeating Hillary Clinton and electing Donald Trump. On top of trolling the Internet, they unleashed bots, placed ads, and even staged what were meant to seem like grass-roots rallies.
- Russian hackers: In early 2016 the GRU (Russian army intelligence) hacked into the computers and computer accounts of the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Then from July to October they made some of the emails and files they found public by way of DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks.
Obstruction of justice: Trump fired James Comey, the head of the FBI who was looking into Russiagate before Mueller, and then repeatedly tried to get Mueller fired too. He also tried to get witnesses to lie for him and promised pardons if they did. Fortunately, not everyone was willing to lie for him.
No charges against Trump: Mueller did not charge Trump with a crime because only Congress clearly has the power to charge (impeach) and convict a sitting president.
Impeachment: Mueller gave Congress more than enough to impeach and convict Trump on obstruction of justice. But whether the Democrats in the House have the courage or Republicans in the Senate have the honesty to remove Trump from office remains to be seen. If they chicken out, the 2020 election will be the second line of defence.
– Abagond, 2019.
Source: Mainly the executive summaries in the Mueller Report (PDF, 139 MB).
See also:
- How to remove a US president
- How to survive an autocracy
- Watergate
- 2015: Donald Trump
- 2016: Hillary Clinton 2016
- Hillary Clinton for president
- Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches – based on what turned out to be a GRU WikiLeaks dump
- Hillary Clinton and the news media
- 2016: Russian trolls
- 2016: Jeff Sessions
- 2017: Steele dossier
- 2017: Russiagate
- 2017: Russian hackers
- 2017: Trump Derangement Syndrome
- 2017: The Comey hearing
- 2017: Michael Flynn
- 2018: Russiagate update #1
- 2018: Bob Woodward: Fear
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Bolches yarboclos
These clowns are only making Trump stronger.
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Interestingly, when the report had come out, the news media in Russia broadly declared that the Russia-allegations were disregarded there.
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It was very naughty of the Russian trolls to let people know how the Democratic party rigged the primaries in favor of H. Clinton and made her say all the things she said to her elite backers. The people don’t have the right to know what their leaders think of them!
When are you going to get around to protesting the “extraordinary rendition” of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for doing the work that presstitutes are loath to do?
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For those on this blog who have not yet swallowed Abagond’s hysteria on Trump and Russiagate.
Words of wisdom from the wise Noam Chomsky:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vVXlLgifxQ)
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@gro jo – Thank you for the link to Noam Chomsky. He is indeed wise.
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Trump has business and other “ties” to Russia (more than I cared to discover before he became President) and I think it’s likely that Russia preferred Trump given the potential for a thaw in relations. However I’ll never buy the notion that alleged Russian-backed exposés of American politicians’ dirty laundry constituted successful “hacking” of the elections. They’d have to have changed votes by technological means for me to accept that they constructively undermined the legitimacy of the polls.
I’ve been side-eyeing the Democratic party because I am:
1) Not buying the notion that exposing political corruption or dishonesty is “collusion” instead of “whistle-blowing”.
(Assange is a journalist)
2) Not turning a blind eye to religious bigotry and mass murder because the terrorists happen to be considered non-white.
(Sincere condolences to the families of almost 300 church-goers and vacationers blown to smithereens in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday; sigh, smh, beam-me-up)
3) Not accepting that a religion is a race and to disagree with certain bodies of ideas is tantamount to racism.
(That is an anti-blasphemy stance by stealthy mischaracterization)
I really hope that Democrats are not banking on me swallowing those things.
I get the sense that they’re diverging from what I consider to be principles worth standing up for. Rather, the same actions are wrong or right depending on who did them.
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As far as Conspiracy Theories go, the best I read was that Trump and Putin have agreed to get into an arms race. If China races, they will collapse like the Soviet Union did. If they don’t, they would be ripe for a military action.
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Congress needs to start hearings right away on Trump and his obstruction of justice and hold him accountable. He needs to be impeached.
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@ gro jo
How have I been hysterical about Russiagate?
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“Russian interference is a fact. Russia did it in two main ways:
Russian trolls: The Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in St. Petersburg, had been carrying out what it calls information warfare on the US since 2014. At first it was just to sow discord in the US, but during the 2016 election it was about defeating Hillary Clinton and electing Donald Trump. On top of trolling the Internet, they unleashed bots, placed ads, and even staged what were meant to seem like grass-roots rallies.
Russian hackers: In early 2016 the GRU (Russian army intelligence) hacked into the computers and computer accounts of the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Then from July to October they made some of the emails and files they found public by way of DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks.”
1) You failed to state the impact of such Russian interference. 2) Where’s the evidence that these Russians are doing what they do at the behest of the Russian state? No, a few claims by former Russian trolls isn’t enough to prove Russian state interference. A cost/benefit analysis of such claim makes it dubious at best and downright stupid at worst. The boys in the Kremlin aren’t that dumb, in fact, the whole “Russia, Russia, Russia” meme is redolent of the claim that the Chinese are selling telecom equipment to the world that they bug, and killed 40 million of their citizens during the 1958- 1961 famine.
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@ gro jo
It is clear to me why Fox News and RT try to deflect from Russiagate, but it is not clear why you, Chomsky and people of his ilk on the left do it.
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I’m surprised to see some voices of reason in the comment section. It’s usually filled with unthinking parroting of left wing talking points.
The only reason people are “[trying to deflect from Russiagate]” is that a team filled with Hillary supporters spent almost 2 years and $30M searching for Russian collusion and found zilch, zero, nada. The Russians didn’t even know how to contact the Trump campaign after he won the election.
Meanwhile, there is substantial evidence that Hillary’s campaign paid $10M for known Russian lies that formed the primary basis for spying on Trump’s campaign, and that this went way up and was something Obama knew about. Also, Hillary’s pay for play “charity”, which happened to take in huge donations from Russian uranium purchasers after Hillary’s State Department cleared the sale of huge amounts of U.S. uranium to Russia (along with raking in substantial donations from paragons of women’s rights like Saudi Arabia), and which just happened to tank after Hillary lost the presidential race (almost as if people felt they could no longer pay her for future favors by making donations to the “charity”) was pretty obviously treasonous.
Anyway, I’m torn. On the one hand, it’s encouraging to see some people here thinking reasonably about something (it helps that no Black people are directly involved I guess).
On the other hand, it’s important that leftist craziness (impeaching Trump for Hillary’s crimes) be allowed to proceed so that Trump can be assured of victory (and retaking the House) in 2020. So, please everyone here, support Abagond’s calls for impeachment!
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No big mystery why I “deflect from Russiagate”. It was Democratic party bs. LBJ knew that Nixon interfered with the Vietnam peace negotiations. Legally, he could have indicted Nixon and his campaign treason but did nothing about it because politics is a rough game played by both sides.
Were Trump’s people playing footsie with the Russians? It wouldn’t surprise me since the USA is an empire.
Empires attract courtiers, Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc. but nobody will look into how they ‘interfered’ in US elections. Courtiers need lobbyists such AIPAC, Paul Manafort and others who can look after their interests.
The nonsense in the whole Russian troll claim is that a few voices on the internet matter as far as statecraft is concerned. The decision makers in any nation worthy of that name go about their business impervious to the noise on the Net. If you want to know what the Russians are up to, read what they write.
https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/pubcol/A-new-world-order-A-view-from-Russia–19782
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Sarah (hatchet face) Huckabee-Sanders needs to be fired as well because she is a liar. But then again so is everyone in that whole administration. The rot and stink start from the head up.
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Bliff were you on vacation?
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Herniath, yes I was.
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LOL!
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Trump was elected because the U.S. is full zenophobic rascist people.
Empire is constantly interfering inn the elections of free people around the planet and as gro jo points no one complaining about Isreal, Saudi Arabia ect.
So that empire got a taste of their own bs is ok with me. We elected Yeltsin and then bragged about in Time magazine.
If the economy is good when Trump runs he will get relected.
The yield curve inversion predicts a recession around election time. That might nock him out.
Yang for president.
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Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
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Heather Cox Richardson:
(https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-22-2020)
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Here’s my take on the “Russia thing” once again:
I’m sure Trump has financial ties to Russian entities. It’s also possible that the Russian political consensus was that a Trump win would be good for Russia. I think it’s also likely there was Russian funded propaganda in Trump’s favor.
However, I’ve never been convinced any of this had such an impact on the outcome of the 2016 elections to be considered to cause the result. In particular, I’ve found the phrase “Russia hacked the election” to be extremely hyperbolic as it implies Russian agents changed votes through technological means when there is no evidence such a thing happened. Yet the phrase was repeated on shows such as Rachel Maddow’s in the aftermath of the elections and during the Mueller probe.
I don’t consider the Wikipedia DNC leaks as election interference. Questionable activity within a major political party is information that American investigative reporting should be revealing if the media weren’t in bed with the political class. Citizens are supposed to have access to the kind of information that would enable them to make voting decisions. That’s how democracy is supposed to work. There shouldn’t be a system of “omertà” in which the media participates.
So the bottom line for me is that, in the end, enough Americans in the right places voted for Trump and that’s why he won in 2016. Russian activity was a sideshow. Clinton was a polarizing politician who, during a time dominated by anti-establishment sentiment, was under constant investigation right up to the election. Trump, on the other hand, was a political outsider with “drain the swamp” rhetoric topped by sprinkles of racist dogwhistles. So Americans elected Trump, in an victory eked out on the margins in key swing states in accordance with the rules of the electoral college.
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The last statement above made me reflect on the norms of American democracy. The Republican party had the Senate and the House in 2016, and is increasingly stacking the courts with its preferred judges even though it didn’t win more votes than the rival party in the last presidential elections. In a very real sense it’s governance for the few, normalized by the way the system works.
Consider also that every state gets two senators while only 30 of the 50 states are more populous than the territory of Puerto Rico (~3.2 million who don’t get to vote in presidential elections). Puerto Rico’s population is just less than Utah’s and more than Iowa’s. Only the top 7 states have more people than Cuba or Haiti (~11 million).
Isn’t it fascinating that most American states would be less populous independent states than some “small countries”? The distribution of America’s 300+M people is very uneven. The fact that they all get two senators makes the voice of sparsely populated states disproportionately powerful. The 39M Californians get the same two senators as 700,000+ Alaskans. Both the senate and the electoral college end up working in favor of the Republican party.
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@ Origin
A couple of months ago, Teen Vogue published an article that detailed why we still labor under a screwy electoral college system and two senators per state.
The article, “How the Electoral College Is Tied to Slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise” by Maya Francis, described the series of compromises groups of White males made at the highly contentious Constitutional Convention of 1787. According to the article:
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/electoral-college-slavery-three-fifths-compromise-history
I know, Teen Vogue of all publications!
It has always been a rotten system, ripe for gaming. From the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, White terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan gamed the system with extreme and unrelenting violence against free Black people and their descendants. Their objectives were political and economic suppression.
After the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Powers That Be transitioned from direct violence to more indirect means of maintaining power. Gamification came in the form of gerrymandered districts and the rise of the Carceral State coupled with felony disenfranchisement laws. Once they had enough votes on the Supreme Court, they added Voter ID laws and a host of other hurdles to the voting system.
These refinements were built on top of the structure of the Electoral College which is blocks the popular vote.
No matter how the system was gamed, maintaining White Power and White Supremacy were always the primary objectives. That was true in 1787 and it is true today in 2020.
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@Afrofem
No matter how the system was gamed, maintaining White Power and White Supremacy were always the primary objectives. That was true in 1787 and it is true today in 2020.
True. The system changes means but never the aim. For example, if schools are forced to desegregate then invent the school-to-prison pipeline. There is an incredible, reflexive agility of adjustment to perpetuate racist systems that seems to come from a place deep in the collective psyche.
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