Welcome to the Daily Kos community read of the Mueller report. We are working our way through the Mueller report at a pace of roughly 100 pages per week. The introduction can be found here, Part I is here, and last week’s Part II is here.
If you’d care to join us, a free pdf of the redacted report is available from the Department of Justice. Multiple digital editions can be obtained from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and/or Apple Books. I went with the Washington Post edition, out of habit, I guess, but there are plenty of editions to choose from. After listening to the report on Audible, I realized that I would need the large paperback edition that would let me highlight the text and write notes in the margin.
This week we are looking at the first half of Volume II of the Mueller report, beginning with the Executive Summary and continuing up to Section II, Part G.
Volume II deals with the President’s obstruction of justice, defined as:
Three basic elements are common to most of the relevant obstruction statutes: (1) an obstructive act; (2) a nexus between the obstructive act and an official proceeding; and (3) a corrupt intent.
Of course, being the President, the current occupant of the Oval Office is protected by the DOJ’s policy that indicting him while he is in office is unconstitutional. That does not mean that the evidence cannot be gathered and the offenses outlined, which is what the Office of the Special Counsel has done in this report.
Obstruction-of-justice law “reaches all corrupt conduct capable of producing an effect that prevents justice from being duly administered, regardless of the means employed.” United States v. Silverman, 745 F.2d 1386, 1393 (11th Cir. 1984) (interpreting 18 U.S.C. § 1503).
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An improper motive can render an actor’s conduct criminal even when the conduct would otherwise be lawful and within the actor’s authority. See United States v. Cueto, 151 F.3d 620, 631 (7th Cir. 1998)
About Volume I, I wrote:
Throughout this section of the report, no matter who the subject of the contact was, we see repeated use of the words “the Office was unable to obtain additional evidence or testimony” and “the Office was unable to determine” or “based on the available information.” All of this strongly points to obstruction.
In Volume II we learn about some of the areas of concern. There are 11 sections, beginning with the Trump campaign’s reaction to Russia’s interference in the election and continuing through Trump’s conduct in regard to Michael Cohen. Each section provides an overview of the incident, or incidents, involving the president’s behavior.
During the presidential transition, incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had two phone calls with the Russian Ambassador to the United States about the Russian response to U.S. sanctions imposed because of Russia’s election interference. After the press reported on Flynn’s contacts with the Russian Ambassador, Flynn lied to incoming Administration officials by saying he had not discussed sanctions on the calls. The officials publicly repeated those lies in press interviews. The FBI, which previously was investigating Flynn for other matters, interviewed him about the calls in the first week after the inauguration, and Flynn told similar lies to the FBI. On January 26, 2017, Department of Justice (DOJ) officials notified the White House that Flynn and the Russian Ambassador had discussed sanctions and that Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI. The next night, the President had a private dinner with FBI Director James Comey in which he asked for Comey’s loyalty. On February 13, 2017, the President asked Flynn to resign. The following day, the President had a one-on-one conversation with Comey in which he said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”
The matter is then further broken into a detailed description of what happened as far as we know, when, and what the president did. In Flynn’s case, that included pressuring KT McFarland, who at the time was deputy national security adviser, into writing an email for the record that would claim that Trump did not order Flynn to contact the Russian ambassador.
On February 22, 2017, Priebus and Bannon told McFarland that the President wanted her to resign as Deputy National Security Advisor, but they suggested to her that the Administration could make her the ambassador to Singapore. The next day, the President asked Priebus to have McFarland draft an internal email that would confirm that the President did not direct Flynn to call the Russian Ambassador about sanctions.
McFarland declined, but the corruption that would allow the president to make this request is just stunning. It is like he was not alive during the Watergate scandal.
The report then takes up Trump’s reaction to the public confirmation of the Russian investigation and then-Attorney General Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the DOJ investigation.
The President wanted McGahn to talk to Sessions about the recusal, but McGahn told the President that DOJ ethics officials had weighed in on Sessions’s decision to recuse.1579 The President then brought up former Attorneys General Robert Kennedy and Eric Holder and said that they had protected their presidents.1580 The President also pushed back on the DOJ contacts policy, and said words to the effect of, “You’re telling me that Bobby and Jack didn’t talk about investigations? Or Obama didn’t tell Eric Holder who to investigate?”1581 Bannon recalled that the President was as mad as Bannon had ever seen him and that he screamed at McGahn about how weak Sessions was.
Eventually, Sessions resigned. But before that, he wrote a letter of resignation at the request of the president. Trump refused to accept the resignation, but kept the letter, which could have given him leverage over Sessions the next time Sessions did something Trump did not like. Although he eventually returned the letter to Sessions, the personal corruption of this evil man seems to have very few limits and absolutely no scruples.
Then-FBI director James Comey’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he refused to state that the president was not under investigation, infuriated Trump, who was already angry that Comey had not let the matter of Michael Flynn “go.” Trump’s small-minded, petty, vindictive nature refused to allow Comey to resign, but insisted he be fired while he was visiting an FBI office in California and that he not be allowed to fly back to Washington on the FBI aircraft. He was furious when he learned that the FBI flew Comey home, anyway. Trump then tried to pin the blame for Comey’s abrupt termination on a letter written by Rod Rosenstein at Trump’s request.
Trump’s efforts to first eliminate and then restrict the jurisdiction of the special counsel illuminates the efforts this small man would employ to accomplish his wishes. The conflicts of interest were so slight as to be absurd, but Trump continued to push them, insisting that White House counsel Don McGahn tell Rosenstein to fire Robert Mueller.
When the President called McGahn a second time to follow up on the order to call the Department of Justice, McGahn recalled that the President was more direct, saying something like, “Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the Special Counsel.”1864 McGahn recalled the President telling him “Mueller has to go” and “Call me back when you do it.” 1865 McGahn understood the President to be saying that the Special Counsel had to be removed by Rosenstein.1866 To end the conversation with the President, McGahn left the President with the impression that McGahn would call Rosenstein.1867 McGahn recalled that he had already said no to the President’s request and he was worn down, so he just wanted to get off the phone.1868
When he failed to get Mueller fired, he insisted that Corey Lewandowski, his onetime campaign manager, tell Jeff Sessions to restrict the investigation into future Russian involvement in our campaigns. According to Lewandowski’s notes:
The President directed that Sessions should give a speech publicly announcing:
I know that I recused myself from certain things having to do with specific areas. But our POTUS . . . is being treated very unfairly. He shouldn’t have a Special Prosecutor/Counsel b/c he hasn’t done anything wrong. I was on the campaign w/ him for nine months, there were no Russians involved with him. I know it for a fact b/c I was there. He didn’t do anything wrong except he ran the greatest campaign in American history.
After each description of the president’s behavior, the report examines whether or not there was an obstructive act, what the nexus to an official proceeding was, and what the president’s intent was in committing the obstructive act.
It is clear, in reading of Trump’s actions, that Attorney General William Barr had not read the special counsel’s report before declaring that it somehow exonerated Trump. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was right when she claimed that, had anyone else committed these crimes, they would already be in jail.
At the halfway point of reading the Mueller report, I am furious. This man should have been stopped long ago, long before he entered the political arena. His behavior and his insistence on his right to behave in the manner that he does have more in common with mob bosses than with legitimate businessmen. And, like a mob boss, he is intent on flexing what he sees as his muscle. He believes that the government and the nation belong to him, and if he wants to use tanks and warplanes to prove that point, he will. I can only hope that the weather gods interfere, because no one on the ground appears to have the authority or willpower to do so.
Next week we will finish up the rest of the report, just in time for Robert Mueller’s testimony to Congress. What struck you about this section? I have only touched on a couple of examples of his egregious behavior. Which ones bother your the most?