Sunday, October 25, 2020

Russia, Russia, Russia (and a l'il bit o' Ukraine)

This is a reminder.

This is a reminder that if you aspire to express an opinion of the Mueller Report, or the alleged collusion of the 2016 Trump campaign with Russian Intelligence, or the Justice Department's Inspector General's Report, you should have already actually read the Mueller Report and the Inspector General's Report. 

I read them both. 

The whole damn thing. 

And the other whole damn thing. 

It took about a week to get through each of them. 

What The Mueller Report didn't do was determine that there was (or wasn't) collusion. Not because there wasn't any, but because that's not what they were looking for. They were looking for actions that fit the legal definition of conspiracy. That's a pretty high bar. It's pretty hard to prove. The report, however, was very clear that Russian Intelligence was undertaking a program intended to influence the election in favor of Trump, that Trump and his campaign staff knew about it, that they didn't report that Russians approached campaign staff with offers of cooperation, and that the campaign was perfectly cool with accepting this assistance. The only thing that got them off the hook for conspiracy charges was that they were too lazy to do any actual coordination with the Russians. 

The second part of The Mueller Report addressed obstruction of justice. The report was quite clear that there was obstruction of the investigation by the president himself. Mueller made no recommendation regarding charges due to Justice Department policy stating that a sitting president cannot be indicted short of impeachment. 

No sooner had the report been issued and a follow up testimony to Congress by Mueller when Trump actively solicited another foreign government to interfere in our election by asking the president of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden and his son. The only reason that Trump is still the president is that a Republican majority Senate, pathetically tied to Trump's rise or fall, voted to not remove him from office after he was impeached.  

He was not exonerated. 

But our serial liar president tells his followers that it was a hoax and that in effect none of what clearly happened, happened. 

In addition, he and his followers are attempting to smear Vice President Biden and his family with charges of corruption that have been looked into and debunked. 

Trump is corrupt. 

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