March 26, 2019
We have all been sitting in stunned silence since the Mueller report landed with a thud, wondering how two years of investigations could have ended like this. Mueller maintained his monk-like silence, content to deliver his confidential report to Attorney General Bill Barr, a reliable Republican hatchet man with a reputation for erasing Republican scandals. True to form, Barr condensed an 87 page report into a four page summary which never quoted a complete sentence from Mueller, but managed to definitively state that there was no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government and to conclude that, in his own judgement, Trump had not obstructed justice, (Source: “4 things we learned from Barr’s summary of the Mueller report,” by Daniel Bush, PBSNewshour.org, 3/24/19).
Those of us who foolishly pinned all of our hopes on Mueller delivering the coup de grace to this lawless, wildly unfit charlatan were left deflated. Yet, rank speculation aside, there is no way to know from the snippet taken out of context what doomed a collusion finding. The only way to really know what Mueller concluded is to read the actual report in its entirety. Proof that the truth is far more complicated than Barr would have you believe is evident in how quickly McConnell blocked Chuck Schumer’s effort to release the full report, (Source: “McConnell blocks Schumer effort to call for public release of Mueller report,” by Rebecca Shabad and Frank Thorp V, NBCNews.com, 3/25/19). Continue reading “Slow motion coup”