XPost: alt.culture.alaska, atl.general, alt.cities.chicago
XPost: alt.politics.obama.faggots

No collusion.

WASHINGTON — The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, on
Friday delivered a report on his inquiry into Russian
interference in the 2016 election to Attorney General William P.
Barr, bringing to a close an investigation that has consumed the
nation and cast a shadow over President Trump for nearly two
years.

Mr. Barr told congressional leaders in a letter that he may
brief them on the special counsel’s “principal conclusions” as
early as this weekend, a surprisingly fast turnaround for a
report anticipated for months. The attorney general said he
“remained committed to as much transparency as possible.”

In an apparent endorsement of an investigation that Mr. Trump
has relentlessly attacked as a “witch hunt,” Mr. Barr said
Justice Department officials never had to intervene to keep Mr.
Mueller from taking an inappropriate or unwarranted step. The
department’s regulations would have required Mr. Barr to inform
the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees about
any such interventions in his letter.

A senior Justice Department official said that Mr. Mueller would
not recommend new indictments, a statement aimed at ending
speculation that Mr. Trump or other key figures might be charged
down the line. With department officials emphasizing that Mr.
Mueller’s inquiry was over and his office closing, the question
for both Mr. Trump’s critics and defenders was whether the
prosecutors condemned the president’s behavior in their report,
exonerated him — or neither. The president’s lawyers were
already girding for a possible fight over whether they could
assert executive privilege to keep parts of the report secret.

[What’s next? We break it down as well as the major moments in
the case. And here’s the latest reaction to the news.]

Since Mr. Mueller’s appointment in May 2017, his team has
focused on how Russian operatives sought to sway the outcome of
the 2016 presidential race and whether anyone tied to the Trump
campaign, wittingly or unwittingly, cooperated with them. While
the inquiry, started months earlier by the F.B.I., unearthed a
far-ranging Russian influence operation, no public evidence
emerged that the president or his aides illegally assisted it.

The letter that William P. Barr, the attorney general, sent to
Congress.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/03/23/us/22dc-barr-letter- tear-PRINT/22dc-barr-letter-tear-jumbo.jpg?quality=90

Image
The letter that William P. Barr, the attorney general, sent to
Congress.
Nonetheless, the damage to Mr. Trump and those in his circle has
been extensive. A half-dozen former Trump aides were indicted or
convicted of crimes, mostly for lying to federal investigators
or Congress. Others remain under investigation in cases that Mr.
Mueller’s office handed off to federal prosecutors in New York
and elsewhere. Dozens of Russian intelligence officers or
citizens, along with three Russian companies, were charged in
cases that are likely to languish in court because the
defendants cannot be extradited to the United States.

Republicans immediately seized upon the news that no more
indictments are expected as a vindication of Mr. Trump and his
campaign. Those reports “confirm what we’ve known all along:
There was never any collusion with Russia,” Representative Steve
Scalise of Louisiana, the second-highest-ranking House
Republican, said in a statement.

Democrats, including some of those hoping to supplant Mr. Trump
in the White House in the 2020 election, insisted that Mr.
Mueller’s full report be made public, including the underlying
evidence. In a joint statement, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of
California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Senate
Democrat, warned Mr. Barr not to allow the White House a “sneak
preview” of the document.

“The White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions
about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public,”
they said.

Not since Watergate has a special prosecutor’s inquiry so
mesmerized the American public. Polls have shown that most
Americans want to know its findings, and the House unanimously
passed a nonbinding resolution to publicize the report.

Mr. Barr’s letter said he would decide what to release after
consulting with Mr. Mueller and Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy
attorney general who has overseen his investigation. Justice
Department officials emphasized that the White House had been
kept at a distance.

Editors’ Picks

A Handyman Asks: After Servicing a Home, Can I Get Paid to
Service My Clients’ Other Needs?

From a Swimsuit Model to the Trump Megaphone: The Genesis of
‘Jexodus’

Andy Cohen Is Tired of Being ‘Dad Shamed’ by ‘Momsplainers’

Mueller Has Delivered His Report. Here’s What We Already Know.
More than two years of criminal indictments and steady
revelations about Trump campaign contacts with Russians reveal
the scope of the special counsel investigation.

Only a handful of law enforcement officials have seen the
report, said Kerri Kupec, a department spokeswoman.

Although a White House lawyer was notified that Mr. Mueller had
delivered it to Mr. Barr, no White House official has seen the
report or been briefed on it, according to Sarah Huckabee
Sanders, the White House press secretary. “The next steps are up
to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process
taking its course,” she said.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers,
said he planned to remain in Washington over the weekend in part
because Mr. Barr might update Congress on Mr. Mueller’s findings.

He sidestepped a question about whether the president’s lawyers
were seeking to review the report before any of it becomes
public. White House lawyers have been preparing for the
possibility they may need to argue some material is protected by
executive privilege, especially if the report discusses whether
the president’s interactions with his top aides or legal
advisers are evidence of obstruction of justice.

Even though Mr. Mueller’s report is complete, some aspects of
his inquiry remain active and may be overseen by the same
prosecutors once they are reassigned to their old jobs in the
Justice Department. For instance, recently filed court documents
suggest that investigators are still examining why the former
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort turned over campaign
polling data in 2016 to a Russian associate who prosecutors said
was tied to Russian intelligence.

Mr. Mueller looked extensively at whether Mr. Trump obstructed
justice to protect himself or his associates. But despite months
of negotiations, prosecutors were unable to personally interview
the president.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers insisted that he respond only to written
questions from the special counsel. Even though under current
Justice Department policy, a sitting president cannot be
indicted, Mr. Trump’s lawyers worried that his responses in an
oral interview could bring political repercussions, including
impeachment, or put him in legal jeopardy once he is out of
office.

Mr. Trump has helped make Mr. Mueller a household name,
attacking his investigation an average of about twice a day as
an unfair, politically motivated attempt to invalidate his
election. He never forgave former Attorney General Jeff Sessions
for recusing himself from the Russia inquiry, an action that
cleared the way for his deputy, Mr. Rosenstein, to appoint Mr.
Mueller.

Mr. Trump reiterated his attacks on the special counsel this
week, saying Mr. Mueller decided “out of the blue” to write a
report, ignoring that regulations require him to do so. But the
president also said the report should be made public because of
“tens of millions” of Americans would want to know what it
contains.

“Let people see it,” Mr. Trump said. “There was no collusion.
There was no obstruction. There was no nothing.”

In court, the evidence amassed by the Mueller team has held up.
Every defendant who is not still awaiting trial either pleaded
guilty or was convicted by a jury. Although no American has been
charged with illegally plotting with the Russians to tilt the
election, Mr. Mueller uncovered a web of lies by former Trump
aides.

Five of them were found to have deceived federal investigators
or Congress about their interactions with Russians during the
campaign or the transition. They includes Mr. Manafort; Michael
T. Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser; and
Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and longtime fixer.
A sixth former adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., is to stand trial in
November on charges of lying to Congress.

Those who know Mr. Mueller, a former F.B.I. director, had
predicted a concise, legalistic report devoid of opinions —
nothing like the 445-page treatise that Ken Starr, who
investigated President Bill Clinton, produced in 1998. Operating
under a now-defunct statute that governed independent counsels,
Mr. Starr had far more leeway than Mr. Mueller to set his own
investigative boundaries and to render judgments.

[Make sense of the people, issues and ideas shaping American
politics with our newsletter.]

The regulations that governed Mr. Mueller, who is under the
supervision of the Justice Department, only required him to
explain his decisions to either seek or decline to seek criminal
charges in a confidential report to the attorney general. The
attorney general was then required to notify the leadership of
the House and Senate judiciary committees.

Despite pledging transparency, Mr. Barr may be reluctant to
release the part of Mr. Mueller’s report that may be of most
interest: who the special counsel declined to prosecute and why,
especially if Mr. Trump is on that list.

The department’s longstanding practice, with rare exceptions, is
not to identify people who were merely investigative targets to
avoid unfairly tainting their reputations, especially because
they would have no chance to defend themselves in a court of
law. Mr. Rosenstein, who has overseen Mr. Mueller’s work and may
have a say in what is released, is a firm believer in that
principle.

In a May 2017 letter that the president seized upon as
justification for his decision to fire James B. Comey as F.B.I.
director, Mr. Rosenstein severely criticized Mr. Comey for
announcing during the previous year that Hillary Clinton, then a
presidential candidate, would not be charged with a crime for
mishandling classified information as secretary of state.
Releasing “derogatory information about the subject of a
declined criminal investigation,” Mr. Rosenstein wrote, is “a
textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are
taught not to do.”

Weighing that principle against the public’s right to know is
even more fraught in the president’s case. If Mr. Mueller
declined to pursue criminal charges against Mr. Trump, he might
have been guided not by lack of evidence, but by the Justice
Department’s legal opinions that a sitting president cannot be
indicted. The department’s Office of Legal Counsel has
repeatedly advised that the stigma and burden of being under
prosecution would damage the president’s ability to lead.

Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the head
of the House Judiciary Committee, has argued that the
department’s view that presidents are protected from prosecution
makes it all the more important for the public to see Mr.
Mueller’s report.

“To maintain that a sitting president cannot be indicted, and
then to withhold evidence of wrongdoing from Congress because
the president cannot be charged, is to convert D.O.J. policy
into the means for a cover-up,” he said before the House
approved its nonbinding resolution to disclose the special
counsel’s findings.

Some predict that any disclosures from Mr. Mueller’s report will
satisfy neither Mr. Trump’s critics nor his defenders,
especially given the public’s high expectations for answers. A
Washington Post-Schar School poll in February illustrated the
sharp divide in public opinion: It found that of those surveyed,
most Republicans did not believe evidence of crimes that Mr.
Mueller’s team had already proved in court, while most Democrats
believed he had proved crimes that he had not even claimed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/politics/mueller-
report.html
 

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)