It Is Finally Out!! Now What??

The LONG awaited Mueller report is FINALLY out, in redacted version, all 448 pages! I do not intend to read it, although I have probably already seen more excerpts from it on the news in less than one day than Trump will ever read. As expected, it does conclude that Russia interfered “in a sweeping and systematic fashion” in the 2016 election. Despite almost a month of intentionally prejudicial propaganda from both Trump and his now chief henchman AG Barr of “No collusion, no obstruction!”, the report not surprisingly details many totally inappropriate if not technically or likely provably illegal interactions between Trump campaign and administration officials and Russians, and is certainly damning in terms of actions which can be clearly construed as obstruction of justice on at least 10 occasions. Unfortunately, along with the inherent complexity of the report and underlying events, Trump, Barr and Trump’s other surrogates have probably already been able to sufficiently muddy the waters for the average citizen about whether or not there was collusion and/or obstruction. Despite his feigned façade of objectivity, Barr has very clearly and not surprisingly declared himself as a Trump surrogate and defender in the way he has handled the rollout of Mueller’s report. This includes his extraordinary press conference hours before the report was released, in which he reiterated Trump’s misleading “no collusion, no obstruction” mantra and gave several clearly misleading statements about the report and White House cooperation, acting like Trump’s personal attorney rather than the US Attorney General. Did he actually think no one would read and understand the entire report? As a result, Barr now has little more credibility than Trump. By the way, the parts of the press conference I saw showed Rod Rosenstein standing motionless like a robot behind Barr, not even blinking! The report mostly confirms the numerous press reports over the past two years about various issues which Trump et al constantly decried as fake news. Trump will probably continue to trumpet his own fake news “no collusion, no obstruction” slogan indefinitely. It will be interesting to see Republicans and Trump surrogates trying to twist themselves into pretzels to agree with Trump’s and Barr’s conclusions once the report’s findings are more widely disseminated. I think most of them will just keep harping on the intrinsically misleading bottom line that since there was no criminal indictment of Trump, there must therefore be no obstruction, even though Mueller made it very clear that he was following the Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted! The sad thing about all of this is that, like anything else that comes out about Trump and his administration, probably at least 95% of the public will not change their opinion about Trump based on the Mueller report, no matter what it says or could have said!

So what now? The ball is clearly in the court of the House Democrats, who now face a complicated political minefield, which is probably just what Trump at al were hoping for.  Mueller has left a clear roadmap for what will be many months of extensive investigations, which will be resisted whenever possible by the White House and probably also the Justice Department. There will be a contested subpoena to allow Congress access to the unredacted report, which even if successful will probably not change anything. Mueller and Barr will be asked to testify soon, which will be a must-see if done in public. It is clear that there are already documented impeachable actions, and who knows how many more of these may surface as a result of congressional investigations. There is already considerable disagreement among Democratic House members about impeachment. Based on public statements prior to and even since the report’s release, it seems clear that at this point the Democratic leadership has made the calculation that it is not politically advantageous (or too politically risky) to impeach Trump. This is mostly because it is quite clear that he would not be convicted in the Republican-controlled Senate and therefore not removed from office, and especially given the degree of polarization and political extremism, impeachment could potentially backfire on the Democrats in key swing states. On the other hand, if they do not fulfill their constitutional duty and try to impeach in the face of clear evidence of impeachable actions, segments of the Democratic base may become disaffected. Although I was previously in favor of impeachment if feasible even with the certainty of acquittal in the Senate, thinking that the political damage to Trump would be insurmountable in the next election, I am now completely uncertain what would be the best course politically for Democrats, given that the 2020 election will again come down to a small group of mostly midwestern swing states, and things could still potentially go either way no matter how bad Trump polls nationally. Another potential option would be a House censure of Trump, and possibly also of Barr, but that would accomplish little. It is also scary that without any concerted efforts by the administration to prevent further Russian election meddling (which Trump would doubtless welcome again), that could affect the outcome of the next election, as it may well have in 2016! Altogether depressing!