Bluntly speaking, it was clear that this is where we would find ourselves. In Saturday's post, before we saw Barr's statement, I said as much. I'm just going to quote directly from that post. Keep in mind that I wrote this, knowing only that Mueller was not going to bring any more indictments. This was before Barr's statement claiming that Mueller had found "NO COLLUSION!!!" and an inability to reach a conclusion on obstruction of justice. Knowing only that no more indictments were forthcoming, I wrote:
Here's the thing about having a document in your possession. You get to be the one who releases the snippets that support your position, regardless of truth. So, Trump, being the most shameless, craven liar in the history of language, will instruct his toadies to go through the Mueller report, find any line that can be interpreted as saying, "NO COLLUSION!!!!," release that, and bury the rest with his tax returns and my capacity to enjoy eating mushrooms.* The only information we have ever learned from Robert Mueller has been through indictments. No more of those are coming. No law compels Barr to release the report. Why would he? Claim national security, blah, blah, blah, release some snippets that appear to exonerate Trump, and be done with it
Translation: if you didn't see this coming, you weren't paying attention. So... what does this mean? If you are, as I clearly am, a Trump detractor, how do you interpret Barr's statement on the Mueller report? In statistical terminology, do you "update your Bayesian priors" about whether or not Trump is guilty of anything, based on Barr's statement?
Since I clearly saw Barr's statement coming based exclusively on the lack of further indictments, how much do I update my priors? Not much. Why not? Not much information, since I saw it coming, but let's walk through the logic of this. The Trump apparatchiks have spent two years setting Robert Mueller up as such a frothing-at-the-mouth Trump enemy that if Mueller doesn't try to indict him, then Trump must logically be the most innocent person in the history of innocence, based on Mueller's own biases. Bullshit? Yes, but the Cult of Trump buys into this crap completely. The Leader is good, the Leader is great. They surrender their will, as of this date.
Those of us who live in the fact-based world want something more systematic. What do we know about what Mueller found? Not much. Mueller says he can't see evidence of criminal conspiracy with Russia among the Trump campaign regarding the 2016 election, but he is uncertain about obstruction of justice. That's the gist. What do we take from that?
I've been pretty clear. I think the Trump campaign engaged in criminal conspiracy, and Trump personally committed obstruction of justice. How should I update my Bayesian assessment?
One possibility is to increase my assessment of the probability that Trump is actually innocent, as is everyone in the campaign. O.... kay.
Here's where this gets interesting. It is hard to assess Mueller's conclusion without seeing the report and his reasoning, but for those of us assessing publicly available evidence, this is kind of a weirdo conclusion. Here's the quick version of what we know. The Russian government had the DNC's email system hacked, and provided the emails to WikiLeaks. Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi-- close associates of Donald Trump and informal advisors to the campaign-- acted as go-betweens, discussing the release of the documents with WikiLeaks, while talking to the campaign itself. At the same time, Trump's campaign manager was taking meetings with Russian agents to discuss Russia policy while sharing internal polling data that might, you know, be helpful to the Russians for the other thing they were doing, which was a mis-information campaign. Lots of other meetings between Russian agents and Trump campaign officials took place, about which the Trump people consistently lied, under oath, and the campaign undertook other efforts to secure more assistance from the Russian government, including the Trump Tower meeting, attended by the campaign manager and Trump's son, about which more lies were told. Manafort was, in fact, financially under the thumb of Russian oligarchs anyway throughout the whole process, and this just scratches the surface of what we know from publicly available information. This looks a hell of a lot like criminal conspiracy to me.
So, why doesn't it look like criminal conspiracy to Mueller? Without seeing the report, it's hard to say. However, I know a hell of a lot about campaign finance law, and basically, what we are talking about here is pretty close to what gets called "coordination" in campaign expenditures. Here's the deal. Let's say I'm running for office, and my good buddy is running a superPAC. That superPAC raises money without the "hard money" limits set by FECA and amended by BCRA. (Sorry, lots of acronyms.) He can do that, and spend the money however he wants, as long as we don't "coordinate." What does that mean? Let's say we go out to the golf course, because of course it's golf. I start talking about the kinds of ads I'm thinking of running, and where I'm thinking of running them, because I'm just some dude chattin' it up at the golf course. My buddy doesn't say anything. He's just there listening, and playing golf. Some time latter, his superPAC runs ads of the type I discussed in the areas I discussed.
Did we "coordinate?" Not legally. I was just musing, idly. His strategists came to the same conclusions, independently. Getting a conviction for coordination, in violation of campaign finance law is absurdly difficult.
In any real sense of the word, did we coordinate? Hell yes. Legally? Not enough that any prosecutor would bother bringing charges, or even enough that the FEC would bother trying to levy a fine.
This gets at the difference between how a prosecutor looks at the world, and how non-lawyers look at the world. If you look at the publicly available information on Trump, his campaign, their contacts both direct and indirect with Russia, and do so without drinking the Trump Kool-Aid, it is really hard to look at that meeting between Manafort and the Russian agent, in combination with the hacking, and everything else, and not see "COLLUSION!!!"
From a prosecutor's perspective, though? Prosecuting criminal conspiracy is very different. How did Mueller reach that conclusion? We have no idea. However, keep in mind this basic point. A defense attorney would ask this question: Did Manafort's meeting with the Russian agent address the hacked DNC emails or their use in the campaign? No? OK, then. It doesn't show criminal conspiracy related to the hacking of the DNC's email system. See how this works? If you are reading this pretentious, little blog, you probably hate Trump somewhere in the neighborhood of how much I do, but you need to look at this from a prosecutor's perspective. How does the law work on criminal conspiracy here? That's not the same question as whether or not a sane, objective person would look at the facts and say, "damn, these dudes are in bed with Russia!" (I hope they changed the sheets!)
So, how do we update our priors? Right now... I don't. I'd really like to read the report. However, my assessment of "COLLUSION!!!" is based on publicly available information, not Mueller's assessment of whether or not he can prosecute what the law considers criminal conspiracy. Those aren't the same things. If you had a tape of my meeting with my superPAC-running buddy at the golf course, you still couldn't prosecute us for coordination. From the perspective of anyone who actually wants the line of division between principal campaign committees and superPACs, though, that tape should be enough to tell you that the line of division isn't there. Legally, you can't prosecute, but philosophically, that line of division ain't there. This is the territory in which Mueller may be operating, although without reading the report, it is hard to tell.
Still... Manafort, who was a financial pawn of Russian oligarchs, was handing private polling data over to the Russians in a meeting about Russia policy, about which he was caught lying. We are interpreting this, how? OK, Bobby, I really want to know what you thought of this.
And that's sort of the basic question. If not coordination, then why all the meetings with the Russians, and all the lies about those meetings? My best guess, with limited information, is that this gets at the distinction between what a normal person would call coordination, and what is prosecutable, in the same way as that hypothetical superPAC-candidate discussion on advertising strategy. Bluntly put, "collusion," yes, but collusion isn't a crime. Criminal conspiracy is another matter, and Mueller didn't see evidence of what rises to the level of prosecutable crimes called "criminal conspiracy."
OK, now on to obstruction of justice. Again, it is hard to assess Mueller's reasoning without the actual report, but how do you update your Bayesian priors? Trump's immediate response, of course, was to lie. Mueller says that he doesn't exonerate Trump, so Trump responds by saying that it's a complete exoneration. That alone should give you some skepticism about Trump, even in this matter. When someone is that shameless a liar, your default as an observer might not be the "innocent until proven guilty" standard that exists in jurisprudence. With Trump, my standard is "lying until proven... never mind. He's just lying."
Anyway, there are several aspects to obstruction. Firing Comey, dangling pardons, conspiring with Manafort after Manafort's plea deal... What's going on here? Much of the commentary has been that you need "corrupt intent" to be guilty of obstruction, and without a crime, there's no corrupt intent. However, by that rationale, Mueller should have cleared Trump completely on obstruction because it looks like he cleared Trump on criminal conspiracy. No crime, no corrupt intent, no obstruction. Of course, Trump has committed plenty of crimes that are not conspiring with the Russian government, like the campaign finance violations involved in the payoffs to silence women. As long as there is a corrupt intent to cover some crime, there is obstruction, but how that relates to Flynn, in Mueller's mind, I don't know. This is the weird part, as far as I'm concerned.
I truly don't get how Mueller would clear Trump and his campaign completely on coordination with Russia and then leave obstruction open, if that's what's going on. Trump's defenders here actually do have a point. Obstruction charges require corrupt intent, and no crime means no obstruction, as I understand it. So, I don't see how Mueller can clear Trump completely on everything, and then get wishy-washy on obstruction.
Of course, that doesn't mean there couldn't be a way to get there. I'd just need to read his report, but that ain't gonna happen. Barr will never let that happen.
So, where does that leave a Trump detractor on obstruction? You have to believe that Trump was trying to cover up something that he shouldn't have been covering up when he fired Comey, or it isn't obstruction. If there really wasn't any "COLLUSION!!!," then what is that thing?
And here's what Mueller didn't touch: anything about whether or not Trump is influenced by Russia. In all likelihood, Mueller was not investigating whether or not Trump is being unduly influenced by personal financial considerations, or anything like that, which many of us who don't trust Trump think is a real issue. Consider, for example, all of his lying about the Trump Tower project in...
Oh, right. Moscow.
Trump is, indisputably, weirdly deferential to Vladimir Putin. Why? This is something that Mueller was not charged with investigating, and it doesn't even require "COLLUSION!!!" Trump's financial dealings, as we know from Trump's idiot kids, have been tied to Russia for years. It could be as simple as financial ties going back years. For whatever reason, though, Trump is weirdly obsequious towards Putin, and can never bring himself to even admit that Russia did the hacking. None of this exactly screams "innocence," but nor does it have anything to do with whether or not Trump or his campaign participated in Russia's 2016 efforts to elect Trump. You don't have to believe that Trump or Manafort or anyone coordinated with Russia or WikiLeaks regarding the DNC hacks to be concerned about how servile Trump is towards Vladimir Putin, and whether that means Trump is in Putin's back pocket, or just enamored of psychopathic dictators, neither is an option in which a sane person finds comfort.
So, according to Barr, Mueller has found no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, but could not reach a determination on obstruction of justice. After an extensive, two-year federal investigation, a major political figure has escaped without clear evidence of prosecutable crimes. I think we all know what the proper response is.
Spend the next decade chanting, "LOCK HIM UP!!! LOCK HIM UP!!!"
*Apparently, this was too obscure a reference. For those who don't get it, look up Stormy Daniels and "mushrooms."
