Summary:

Donald Trump tried really, really hard to commit a slew of crimes but the “Deep State” mostly stopped him. And we now know the “Deep State” is just his cabinet members refusing to act on his orders to commit crimes.

And

“With respect to whether the President can be found to have obstructed justice by exercising his powers under Article II of the Constitution, we concluded that Congress has the authority to prohibit a President's corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice.”

So Mueller clearly states Donnie boy engaged in corrupt use of his authority and ought to be punished by Congress.

Trump is technically correct that there was “no collusion” in the same sense that someone who attempted murder would be able to claim “no murder!”

This post was edited by inkanddagger on Apr 18 2019 11:05am

^^ winning!

So strange that everyone around Trump has to write all these memos documenting the crazy shit he says and does.

Stupid yes, but for a guy only on the job for four days and intentionally misled by the FBI agents into thinking this was a collegial rather than adversarial meeting, it was a clear setup.
They already knew about his false statement, knew he could not reveal the truth about it even to them, and put him into a situation where his guard was down and he had no reason to suspect they were pursuing him.

This opened a real can of worms that as far as I can tell, the special counsels report simply ignores: The implications of the FBI trampling upon the president and NSA's ability to conduct sensitive geopolitical operations and diplomacy, and the perilous slapfight and power struggle between an outgoing president and transition team. It is not a secret why Flynn wanted to use shadow diplomacy and could not talk about it- because Obama was still president and Obama and Trump were actively opposing each other on these issues, with legitimate policy grievances and a very muddled and unclear precedent over what is 'proper' diplomacy at that point. The fact they even spent a few paragraphs talking about the Logan Act is a crock.

In a responsible FBI that was being as much of a boy scout as Comey purported to be, they would never impinge upon a president by interfering so blatantly in his policies outside their jurisdiction. Inserting themselves into a diplomatic feud is an utterly insane action for which I don't think there's any precedent. Can you imagine if during the Iran Deal negotiations, Comey had conducted a sting to arrest Susan Rice for lying about Benghazi on the excuse a foreign adversary could use her lies as leverage?

From what I can tell, the Mueller report seems to simply not answer to what degree Flynn was directed by Trump or was operating independently, and that matters a great deal for whether such an intervention is in the best interests of our country. That much I'd agree with. But consider that statement. Comey didn't know whether Trump was directing Flynn or not when he set him up. For all Comey knew, Flynn was conducting sensitive diplomacy on behalf of his president-elect. And to stage such an operation to create a crime to arrest Flynn on, to entrap him into a false statement that he would not have made were it not for FBI's prodding- that's an incredible attack by one arm of the executive on another.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Apr 18 2019 11:25am

I'm also reading a pro-FBI bias that infects a lot of sections and clouds their reasoning.
Look at the section on volume 2 page 76 about Trump's decision to fire Comey. Earlier in laying out the facts of firing Comey, it lays out how Trump had gripes about Comey's competence and whether he was abusing his office as a 'nut job' who was running his own hoover-style administration as a political wing. They cite other advisors who seemed to generally agree with the assessment of Comey. They explore those statements in detail. But then when they get to the 'intent' section, they lay out theories of Trump's intent and conspicuously leave out a discussion of whether he was firing Comey because he was a nut job who was abusing his office. They don't look at the obvious alternative motive. They consider whether he cared about the press coverage, or his legitimacy, or the cloud over him, sure- but don't examine the idea that maybe Comey actually brought it on himself. And in neither section, not in the facts or intent, do they discuss how Comey's firing could be justified on the basis of his oversteps in the Hillary email investigation

their own section explaining their reasoning of finding intent through circumstantial evidence lays out how they're supposed to examine whether evidence to the contrary exists, stuff like having the same idea before there was a 'motive', all that jazz
shouldn't their discussion of intent examine the scenario to deconstruct whether Trump had a legitimate grievance? They note his actions that could construe no malicious intent like how he left McCabe in charge even though he had a similar mindset to Comey and openly professed it. But they kind of stop there

https://twitter.com/RepAdamSchiff/status/1118898255142715394

this gonna be good

Maybe they looked at all the instances of Trump praising Comey in person.

Ya know what's amusing to me? The Dems think the easiest way to win in 2020 is to impeach Trump. They're probably right.
However, they are beating this dead horse so much that it's gonna back fire on them. Not only don't they have the goods to impeach Trump with... just "not letting go" is gonna make them look like idiots, which will cause them to lose in 2020.

okay guys
I nearly fell asleep about a dozen times, but I unironically read through all 448 pages, appendixes and all, trump's "my best recollection" written replies and whatnot

I have to say, its a little bit disturbing what an insanely inordinate amount of investigative resources went into the mueller report policing Trump's twitter feed and private statements for any whiff of obstruction of justice, whereas the actual Russian hacking seems like an afterthought. The majority of the entire report seems to be parsing Trump's intent and giving his every action a colonoscopy, even though right in appendix A, his responsibility was to investigation russian hacking and the possibility of collusion. Instead it seems like 75-90% of the what Mueller was doing was "muh process crimes"

when I juxtapose the extreme attention to detail and discussion of public tweets and derisive mockery Trump makes on stage at rallies, compared to the farcical proceedings we saw with Mueller's team seemingly unprepared for trial at the Concord Management hearings- it sure casts a bad light.

when an investigation comes to the conclusion that there were no underlying crimes, and then spends 75-90% of its time probing whether the investigation was compromised by someone making a political spinjob false statement or saying that "paul manafort has a wonderful family", its a legitimate question whether this special counsel was a farce.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Apr 18 2019 12:41pm