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Mueller Report 'Summary' Delivered to US Congress (cnn.com)
America's recently-appointed Attorney General William Barr has submitted to Congress his summary of the main conclusions from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, CNN reports.
"While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him," special counsel Robert Mueller says, as quoted in Barr's summary.
It does, however, reiterate that there was clear Russian interference in America's 2016 election: The Special Counsel's investigation determined that there were two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election. The first involved attempts by a Russian organization, the Internet Research Agency, to conduct disinformation and social media operations in the United States designed to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with the election.... The second element involved the Russian government's efforts to conduct computer hacking operations designed to gather and disseminate information to influence the election. The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks.
Based on these activities, the Special Counsel brought criminal charges against a number of Russian military officers for conspiring to hack into computers in the United States for purposes of influencing the election.
Barr also writes that the report leaves it to him to determine whether president Trump is guilty of obstructing justice, then adds "I have concluded that the evidence...is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense."
CNN has the complete text of the four-page summary. Barr's letter concludes by saying he's still "determining what can be released."
"While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him," special counsel Robert Mueller says, as quoted in Barr's summary.
It does, however, reiterate that there was clear Russian interference in America's 2016 election: The Special Counsel's investigation determined that there were two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election. The first involved attempts by a Russian organization, the Internet Research Agency, to conduct disinformation and social media operations in the United States designed to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with the election.... The second element involved the Russian government's efforts to conduct computer hacking operations designed to gather and disseminate information to influence the election. The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks.
Based on these activities, the Special Counsel brought criminal charges against a number of Russian military officers for conspiring to hack into computers in the United States for purposes of influencing the election.
Barr also writes that the report leaves it to him to determine whether president Trump is guilty of obstructing justice, then adds "I have concluded that the evidence...is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense."
CNN has the complete text of the four-page summary. Barr's letter concludes by saying he's still "determining what can be released."
"While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him
"While the ball did not go through the goal posts, it clearly would have if the goal posts had been somewhere else instead."
I'm disappointed but not surprised. In order for anything to be pinned on Trump he'd actually have to have done something. I don't mean something criminal, I mean anything at all.
He doesn't seem to be involved at all in day to day governing let alone campaigning. He's a figurehead. It becomes obvious when he has to interact with world leaders. In that case he can't just hand it off to folks really in charge since it's expected to be him. The most telling example was that phone call with Turkey where he got talked into pulling out of Syria. He backed down on the pledge as soon as his handlers got ahold of him again.
He's still openly flaunting the emoluments clause. And that bit with Deutsche bank where they loaned him $2 billion but there's an email chain showing he likely couldn't pay it back stinks to high heaven. That said it looks like nobody cares enough to bother with those. A few attorney generals will sue but I don't think anything'll come of it. Ultimately, we here don't spill the blood of kings.
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Actually, Manafort and Cohen both been convicted of cheating on their taxes in cases unconnected to Trump and his campaign.
As for the rest, here, directly from the report:
and
and this
Wow! That's the exact opposite of what you said! There was no underlying crime of "collusion" or "conspiracy", AND there was no evidence that Trump attempted to obstruct any investigation even if there had been one.
The real question is why did our president just have a Twitter fight with a dead man?
Because it's only now that they're intellectual equals?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
From Barr's summary: "The Special Counsel states that 'while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him'"
Now picture Homer Simpson watching that soccer game: "A tie? Everyone's a loser".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Also, Trump's campaign manager, son, and son-in-law met with an agent of the Russian government for the purpose of coordinating campaign assistance. I can believe that there isn't enough evidence of a specific crime to charge them with anything, but it's still collusion and it should still be an enormous scandal.
So.. That's the point here. Mueller clearly investigated this "evidence" and found nothing that showed that there was any behind the scenes coordination between Trump's campaign and Russians. This was Bob Mueller's focus, his mandate, the whole purpose of his efforts. So He didn't find that this meeting was what many have claimed for the last 2 years.
In short, Mueller doesn't agree. Mueller is saying this meeting wasn't Trump and the Russians coordinating their campaign efforts. The Trump Tower meeting is apparently not evidence of what you've been told.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Probably you are mixing up evidence with proof here.
Evidence can be (if the case was a murder trial.) you were angry at the person murdered, you made a call to the person in the week before they were murdered and there was an argument that was witnessed between you and them.
Evidence is far from proof and it does not mean he committed a crime.
I wondered if I will get modded down for such a factual unbiased post.
You can't handle the truth! - Because I don't post left all my comments get modded down, bye bye Karma.
All of it. Seriously, what business do governments have, keeping secrets from the citizens who create them? With very few exceptions, no secrets should be allowed. They are our employees.
Obviously, there is a problem with most governments...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Muller had two years and achieved a come FAIL!!!
37 indictments, 6 guilty please, and one conviction. That doesn't sound like a fail to me.
If you want to talk about failure, look at the R's obsessive investigations of Hillary before the 2016 election. E-mails? zero indictments. Benghazi? zero indictments. But of course, indictments really weren't the objective. They just wanted to tarnish her because she was the presumptive 2016 nominee for the Ds.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
You mentioned "hundreds of crimes" they looked for.
Here are some more numbers.
Nineteen attorneys and 50 FBI agents "issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communication records, issued almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses".
All that and they found nothing he hasn't posted to Twitter. Why? I have a theory.
Let's compare some other investigations.
Investigating Bill Clinton turned up Gennifer Flowers, Jaunita Broderick, Leslie Millwee, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, etc. In short, it revealed he's a serial sexual predator and that was the bombshell.
Investigating Gary Hart turned up Donna Rice. Bombshell, Gary Hart was a womanizer.
With enough investigation might we find that Trump, too, likes to "grab em by the pussy"? We knew that before the election. He doesn't make any effort to paint himself as the all American boy, a good boy. His jackass is on full display for everyone to see and he likes it that way. Perhaps, investigating Trump reveals that he's exactly the asshole he portrays on Twitter.
There is evidence, but someone decided it wasn't enough to convict the president.
You keep consoling yourself with that delusion sweetheart
I'd like to take this moment to point out that the president has not in fact been convicted of anything. Reality may not agree with your feelings, but it's still reality.
It's important to avoid selection bias. The best example I've seen was a city wondering if subway funding needed to be increased or decreased. They thought measuing how much the subway was used would be good information for making this decision, so they hired someone to poll the city's residents to see how often they rode the subway. The person initially asked people at random in public spaces how often they rode the subway. He grew frustrated that very few people rode the subway, meaning he was collecting very little data for the number of people he was asking. That's when he got the brilliant idea of going onto the subway and asking people there.
The problem is, asking people riding the subway how often they use the subway introduces two selection biases. (1) It eliminates everyone who doesn't use the subway from your sample. And (2) people who ride the subway more often are more likely to be encountered in your polling (you're 10x as likely to randomly encounter someone who rides 10 hours a week as you are someone who rides 1 hour a week), skewing your polling data high. To properly measure subway ridership, you have to do a random sample orthogonal to subway use, which means asking random people in public places was the proper way to do it. A random telephone poll would probably have been best.
Similarly when you target one specific country for investigation, you're introducing a sampling bias. If you accuse a restaurant of being infested with roaches, and that prompts an investigation that finds roaches in the restaurant, that doesn't prove your accusation. All that proves is that the restaurant has roaches, not that it is "infested." Other restaurants may have roaches too. In fact, for all you know, the restaurant you accused may actually be the cleanest building in the city, and even your own house has more roaches than that restaurant. But by limiting the investigation to just that one restaurant, you can misleadingly create the impression that your accusation that the restaurant is infested with roaches is true.
Over and over, I saw this sampling bias being abused by those wishing to push the Russian interference story. e.g. Google and Facebook reported they searched their 2016 records for ads purchased by Russian agents, and found some. But in order for that to mean anything, they should have also searched for ads purchased by anyone else, and compared. I suspect if they had, they would've found attempted interference by China, by the EU, by Mexico, by Canada, by Anonymous, etc. The magnitude of the "Russian interference" (a few dozen to a few hundred people, and around six dollar figures in magnitude ) makes me suspect all these investigations found was the random noise that just happens everywhere all the time.
I didn't vote for Trump and I think is Presidency has been a travesty. But I think the abuse of statistics and manipulation of facts through selection bias by the media and those pushing this story is an even bigger travesty. If you really, truly believe that those few Russians managed to affect the outcome of the election using that little money, then every politician would be tripping over themselves to hire those guys. The amount of money spent in that election was staggering - tens to hundreds of dollars per vote. Trump actually spent close to the lowest at $5 per vote. Yet these people pushing this Russian interference angle somehow believe that these Russians were able to affect the election for pennies per vote.
If this report had found that the Russians had spent tens or hundreds of dollars per vote to interfere with the election, then I'd agree there was something worrying going on. But the amount of interference I've seen reported seems more like just the normal noise that comes from normal people from the sketchy side of the population's bell curve doing their normal sketchy things.
His businesses have been performing less since he has been in office
It's not since he's been in office. His businesses have always not performed. Back in the 80s, he floated his company on the public market (i.e stock exchange). For the ten years he personally ran that company, it never turned a profit even though at the exact same time, everyone around him was making money hand over fist. However, while this was happening, he bled his casinos dry and was proud of it.
In fact, a careful investigation of his businesses show they either fail outright (over one dozen and counting), or simply never turn a profit. Look at his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland. To date, none of them has earned money for him. The have lost money year after year. Even more interesting is he is pouring tens of millions more into his Scotland courses using cash, but no one knows where that cash if coming from since he is already so highly in debt.
Here's something else to consider. Several court cases have held the purpose of a business it to make a profit. Yet, none of the con artist's businesses turn a profit. One has to wonder if the investigations (yes, plural) by the Southern District of New York will find anything about his interesting note.
But we have the AG's summary.
Which is inadequate. We need to see the full report. And congress agreed unanimously.
It's pretty clear from the summary, nobody in Trump's campaign was colluding with the Russians. This clearly includes the Trump Tower meeting.
Then why did Trump and his associates keep lying about it? That certainly didn't help him look innocent.
I'll accept what Mueller found out. But we need to see the full report.
I suppose you could invent a wild conspiracy theory to explain Mueller's report... After all it seems this whole thing was based on a conspiracy theory, so why not go whole hog?
Trump has himself to blame for the conspiracy theories. See above.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.