The Mueller report’s second half: special counsels and political documents

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the many problems with the Mueller report is that it is not evenhanded, nor is it meant to be. I found the following description in a comment at National Review and it’s quite apt:

Mueller’s report is essentially a prosecutor’s charging document that does not charge anyone with a crime, yet it tells a biased story in its interpretation of what happened and what people said.

It’s biased not just because the people who worked on it may have had (and probably did have) an anti-Trump agenda. It’s inherently biased because of its very nature as a document prepared by the special counsel, which is essentially the same (with some minor differences) as a special prosecutor. His report is not necessarily made public, and yet Trump allowed it to be. Why is it not automatically supposed to be made public (not just Mueller’s report, but all such reports)? One reason is that it presents evidence, insinuations, and conclusions that wouldn’t hold up in court, and it therefore can (and will) be used to smear innocent people and create a false impression of guilt where none exists.

Remember the Ken Starr report that was used as the basis for Bill Clinton’s impeachment? That was under a slightly different governing statute:

Barr is currently operating within the confines of the special-counsel regulations, which were written as a reaction to the independent-counsel rules. Those rules expired in 1998 at the end of the Whitewater investigation. Unlike Mueller, Ken Starr, the independent counsel at the time, was obligated to send his final report to Congress rather than the attorney general. Congress then made the report public, which prompted a backlash among those who were angry that Starr had aired details of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky—an episode that went well outside of Starr’s original mandate to probe a land deal in Arkansas. “We believe that information obtained during a criminal investigation should, in most all cases, be made public only if there is an indictment and prosecution, not in lengthy and detailed reports filed after a decision has been made not to prosecute,” Janet Reno, Clinton’s attorney general, told Congress at the time. “The final report provides a forum for unfairly airing a target’s dirty laundry.”

Whereas the old rules required that the independent counsel tell Congress about “substantial and credible information that an impeachable offense may have been committed,” the new rules are much more narrow: The special counsel’s office, in its report, need only explain to the attorney general its prosecution or declination decisions. In other words, Mueller’s “solemn obligation is not to produce a public report,” Starr wrote for The Atlantic earlier this month. “He cannot seek an indictment. And he must remain quiet.”

The Democrats, meanwhile, argued that the Republican-controlled 115th Congress set a precedent for asking for and receiving highly sensitive and classified material related to the probe into Russia’s interference in the U.S. election, which Mueller then took over— and they’re demanding the same degree of transparency now.

The positions keep changing depending on who is the target.

I have long been against the entire idea of a special counsel or special prosecutor. I understand the impulse that went into the creation of the role, but the potential for harm is IMHO greater than the potential for good. I’m with Alan Dershowitz on this; he has repeatedly criticized such laws in general as both unnecessary and invitations to political machinations and manipulation.

Here’s Dershowitz on the Mueller report [emphasis mine]:

Barr takes the view — a view that I have argued for many months — that the act requirement of a crime (actus reus) cannot be satisfied by a constitutionally authorized action of the president, such as firing FBI Director James Comey. Mueller takes the view that a constitutionally authorized act can be turned into a crime if it is improperly motivated.

Mueller’s view is extreme and dangerous to civil liberties because it creates pure thought crimes. According to Mueller, the corrupt motive is the crime because surely the constitutionally authorized act cannot be criminal. The implications of this view for all Americans are frightening. They are especially frightening if applied to a president. Do we really want prosecutors or members of Congress to probe the motivations of presidents when they take constitutionally authorized actions?

Presidents, like the rest of us, have multiple motivations in virtually everything they do. Some are altruistic, others self-serving. Some are patriotic, some are partisan. A president may be motivated by revenge, friendship, family loyalty or countless other factors. We should judge presidents by what they do, not by why they do it.

In any event, neither Mueller nor Barr could find sufficient evidence of criminal motive to conclude that President Trump committed a crime. That was the right decision, even if Mueller made it for the wrong reason…

The Democratic leadership has already said that it makes little sense to try to impeach the president. Instead, they will try to hinder him by 1,000 cuts — subpoenas, hearings and other partisan maneuvers. They will use the critical contents of the Mueller report to further their partisan aims. That is one good reason, among many, why prosecutors should not issue public reports containing negative information about subjects of their investigations.

Another good reason is that prosecutorial reports are, by their nature, one-sided. Prosecutors do not look for exculpatory evidence, as Mueller has admitted in this report. That is why it is important to wait for the Trump legal team’s rebuttal to the Mueller report before coming to a final conclusion.

More here from Dershowitz.

And I wonder whether the final paragraph of this article by former prosecutor George Parry will come true:

Now that we have a sentient adult running the Justice Department, the true facts about the state sponsored coup are about to be unearthed. And, when that happens, Team Mueller’s shameful report will become an insignificant albeit sleazy footnote to the exposure and massive cleansing of the deep state that is about to occur.

Jeffrey Toobin and guiding perceptions: guilt by emotion

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not the Onion. Not the Babylon Bee.

It’s just Jeffrey Toobin, Harvard Law graduate and legal analyst for CNN, giving us the benefit of his Deep Thoughts from a Deep Mind:

Hey, I’ve got an idea, Jeff. Let’s investigate you for something you didn’t do—like, for example, treason—and then leak lies about it like a sieve, lies that implicate you in massive guilt and threaten your family, your job, and everything you hold dear. And then let’s have people report on every single thing you do and say after that and analyze your emotions. Of course, you won’t be the least bit frustrated, I’m certain.

Oh, and by the way, if Trump had not been frustrated and angry, Toobin would have found that to have been evidence of guilt, too.

In this post so far, I’ve treated Toobin’s tweet as though for laughs. But really, although it has humorous aspects, it’s not funny. And the state of mind that leads someone like Toobin to write something like that for public consumption—and then to continue to be a supposedly expert and respected legal analyst for liberal media—is worth looking at.

Is Toobin stupid? No. He knows what he says is legally absurd. It’s a cliche to say that Trump makes people on the left lose their minds, but it’s not literally true. Toobin’s not out of touch with reality, and he actually does have enough understanding of the law that he knows what he says is garbage, in the legal sense.

But he’s not speaking legally there, he’s speaking quasi-legally, or rather pretend-legally. It goes like this: he’s a legal expert, has good legal credentials, and he’s talking about guilt. That’s a legal term, right? However, he’s using it in the vernacular sense, the emotional sense, speaking almost as a psychologist or a novelist to explain human behavior and its meaning, and cloaking himself in the mantle of “legal expert” to make it sound to the gullible and willing as though he knows what he’s talking about when what he is actually saying is an absurdity.

Most democrats have been waiting for the Mueller report for years, and they didn’t get what they wanted out of it, nor what they’d been led to expect. They might feel pretty shaken, actually. Toobin is providing some guidance for a way to think, a way out of the Mueller maze and to the endpoint of still believing Trump to be guilty. To people who might desperately want to preserve this belief, he offers a possible way to do it. Whether or not Toobin is successful in that endeavor or not, that’s what he’s trying to do for them, and perhaps even for himself.

Is he successful? Hard to say. Many of the responses to that tweet of his are pretty brutal (and pretty funny), but that’s mostly from people who seem to be on the right anyway. Those on the left might buy what he says, just as similar arguments were used (and accepted) against Brett Kavanaugh, whose reaction to Ford’s lies about him were labeled as being too emotional, too heated, and therefore supposedly indications of guilt rather than innocence.

It was preposterous when applied to Kavanaugh. His emotional reaction was exactly what you would imagine from an innocent man. But that didn’t stop a lot of people on the left from believing the argument then, and still believing it today.

Just so with Trump. Toobin is suggesting a version of that same argument. One of the main problems with it, though, is that it falls into the category of phenomena people can observe for themselves in their ordinary lives. How do innocent people act when falsely accused? How would I act if falsely accused of heinous crimes? Most people are well aware that the normal reaction would be outrage. And yet a lot of Democrats were able to override this common sense conclusion during the Kavanaugh hearings, and my guess is that quite a few will manage to do so again in order to continue to implicate Trump.

In a logical world, the Mueller report would change a lot of minds in favor of Trump. But the world isn’t so very logical is it? I haven’t seen any polls yet that try to measure the effect of the report and all the commentary following it. But I know that the frantic and almost dizzying spinning of the MSM has a purpose, and might very well hit the mark for a lot of people who are searching for a way to maintain their hatred of Trump.

ADDENDUM:

Also, by the way, there’s this:

On Passover and liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

[The following is a slightly edited repeat of a previous post.]

Tonight is the beginning of the Jewish holiday Passover.

In recent years whenever I’ve attended a Seder, I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not really primarily religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.

Offhand, I can’t think of another religious holiday that takes the trouble to celebrate freedom. Nations certainly do: there’s our own Fourth of July, France’s Bastille Day, and various other independence days around the world. But these are secular holidays rather than religious ones.

For those who’ve never been to a Seder ceremony, I suggest attending one (and these days it’s easier, since they are usually a lot shorter and more varied than in the past). A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:

“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”

Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”

Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars of liberation only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it, and what we’ve observed in recent decades has been the difficult and sometimes failed task of attempting to foster it in places with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.

We’ve also seen threats to liberty in our own country, despite its long tradition of liberty and the importance Americans used to place on it.

Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists. Sometimes they are cynical and power-mad; sometimes they are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.

As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”

Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.

History has borne that out, I’m afraid. That’s one of the reasons the people of Eastern Europe have been more inclined to ally themselves recently with the US than those of Western Europe have—the former have only recently come out from under the Soviet yoke of being regarded as those small black and meaningless dots in the huge Communist “idyll.”

Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee of bread.

I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.

Happy Passover!

In Bangladesh, #MeToo can get a woman killed

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a terrible, sickening story:

Dozens of protesters gathered in Bangladesh’s capital of Dhaka on Friday to demand justice for an 18-year-old woman who died after being set on fire for refusing to drop sexual harassment charges against her Islamic school’s principal. Nusrat Jahan Rafi told her family she was lured to the roof of her rural school in the town of Feni on April 6 and asked to withdraw the charges by five people clad in burqas.

When she refused, she said her hands were tied and she was doused in kerosene and set alight. Rafi told the story to her brother in an ambulance on the way to the hospital and he recorded her testimony on his mobile phone.

“The teacher touched me, I will fight this crime till my last breath,” Rafi said in the video, according to BBC News. She also identified some of her attackers as students at the school.

Rafi died four days later in a Dhaka hospital with burns covering 80 percent of her body. The violence has shaken Bangladesh, triggering protests and raising concerns over the plight of women and girls in the conservative Muslim-majority nation of 160 million people where sexual harassment and violence are often unreported, victims are intimidated and the legal process is often lengthy…

Tens of thousands of people attended Rafi’s funeral prayers in Feni, and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina promised Rafi’s family when they met in Dhaka that those responsible would be punished. At least 17 people, including students, have been arrested in connection with the case, said Banaj Kumar Majumder, the head of the Police Bureau of Investigation.

In this case the woman’s family had been totally behind her, and the madrasa principal had been arrested, “infuriating him and his supporters.”

One can see why, in that atmosphere, a girl or woman would be reluctant to come forward.

More:

Police said the arrested suspects told them during interrogations that the attack on Rafi was planned and ordered by the school’s principal from prison when his men went to see him.

It was timed for daytime so that it would look like a suicide attempt, Majumder said.

And here’s a question (from “Ruffa G) I’d like answered:

I did some looking on Google, but so far I haven’t found anything from Sarsour or Omar. If you find something, please let me know.

This headline promised more than it delivered

The New Neo Posted on by

The headline reads: “Snakes force Liberian President George Weah out of office.”

So I wondered was it snakes, as in the Liberian version of Nancy Pelosi or Robert Mueller or Adam Schiff? And office, as in the presidency?

No:

Press secretary Smith Toby told the BBC that on Wednesday two black snakes were found in the foreign affairs ministry building, his official place of work.

All staff have been told to stay away until 22 April.

“It’s just to make sure that crawling and creeping things get fumigated from the building,” Mr Toby said.

“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs hosts the office of the president, so it did an internal memo asking the staff to stay home while they do the fumigation,” he said.

The office of the president has been based in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since a fire in 2006 gutted the nearby presidential mansion.

A FrontPage Africa news website video shows workers trying to attack the snakes when they appeared near the building’s reception.

“The snakes were never killed,” Mr Toby said. “There was a little hole somewhere [through which] they made their way back.”

Isn’t that just like a snake.

The Mueller Report, the persistence of Russiagate, and the conspiracy theory phenomenon

The New Neo Posted on by

The reactions to the Mueller Report on the part of the press and the Democrats have been exactly as expected—ignoring collusion and focusing on supposed obstruction—and Mueller gave them plenty of red meat to energize them in their continued campaign.

Lots of people on the right are talking about what’s going on, but my favorite go-to-guy for anything legal, Andrew C. McCarthy says it soberly but says it best (and all the more meaningfully because McCarthy used to respect Mueller, was a long-time friend of his, and is no big fan of Trump) in an article entitled “Mueller completely dropped the ball with obstruction punt” [emphasis mine]:

The most remarkable thing about special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report is how blithely the prosecutor reversed the burden of proof on the issue of obstruction…

Most important, the special counsel found that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that the president’s frustration wasn’t over fear of guilt — the typical motivation for obstruction — but that the investigation was undermining his ability to govern the country. The existence of such a motive is a strong counter to evidence of a corrupt intent, critical because corrupt intent must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in an obstruction case…

In his report, Mueller didn’t resolve the issue. If he had been satisfied that there was no obstruction crime, he said, he would have so found. He claimed he wasn’t satisfied. Yet he was also not convinced that there was sufficient proof to charge. Therefore, he made no decision, leaving it to Attorney General William Barr to find that there was no obstruction.

This is unbecoming behavior for a prosecutor and an outrageous shifting of the burden of proof: The constitutional right of every American to force the government to prove a crime has been committed, rather than to have to prove his or her own innocence.

This is what I’ve been harping on for quite some time—that the anti-Trump Russiagate conspiracy theorists are requiring him to do something impossible, which is to prove his innocence. This is a violation of our entire system of law, but they don’t care, because their eyes are on the prize, which is to destroy Trump. The Mueller Report isn’t going to stop them, and wasn’t ever going to stop them, and in fact has given them plenty to go on with its “outrageous shifting of the burden of proof.”

McCarthy continues:

This is exactly why prosecutors should never speak publicly about the evidence uncovered in an investigation of someone who isn’t charged. The obligation of the prosecutor is to render a judgment about whether there is enough proof to charge a crime. If there is, the prosecutor indicts; if there is not, the prosecutor remains silent.

If special counsel Mueller believed there was an obstruction offense, he should have had the courage of his convictions and recommended charging the president. Since he wasn’t convinced there was enough evidence to charge, he should have said he wasn’t recommending charges. Period.

Anything else was — and is — a smear. Worse than that, it flouts the Constitution.

Outrageous. And yet that’s where we are.

The left and other anti-Trumpers would convict Trump of anything and everything, and forget about the Constitution they profess to hold dear (at least, some of them profess it; some think it’s just something a bunch of oppressive old white men wrote).

Now Trump is basically accused of thoughtcrime. He thought about maybe doing some things that would have at the very least interfered with the process of the investigation (such as firing Mueller), but desisted. As McCarthy writes:

…the special counsel’s evidence includes indications that the president attempted to induce White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire the special counsel (in June 2017), and then (in January 2018) to deny that the president had made the request.

Mueller’s report further suggests that the president dangled pardons…

Trump never fired Mueller, although he could have and arguably it would have been perfectly constitutional and legal to do so (and certainly more than understandable, especially since Trump knew that Trump was innocent and was probably in the process of being framed). He didn’t do things he was supposedly contemplating for a while, and whether he decided not to do them on his own or whether some aide or other convinced him not to is quite irrelevant. He didn’t do them, and he cooperated fully and completely with the investigation.

But this thoughtcrime offense is what the left is running with. And really, what choice do they have? The right sees them as looking foolish, but their fans see them as bravely leading the way. Ultimately they may end up destroying themselves (as Roger Simon points out in this piece). But for now I don’t see that they have any alternative but to keep going in the direction they’ve been going. It may be “time for Democrats to accept reality” (the title of this opinion piece by Elizabeth Harrington. But if they were to do so and move on, to what can they turn?

Some form of Russiagate has been their meat and potatoes for the entire Trump presidency. For a while it drove cable news and MSM ratings and readership, and although those rates have been falling lately, what else do the news purveyors (or the Democrats, for that matter) have? Joe Biden? AOC and the Green New Deal? Beto’s empty platitudes? The latest outrage from Ilhan Omar? So they turn back to the tried-and-true, seizing the lifeline Mueller gave them. And even though they know other things are coming—such as IG Horowitz’s report—they think if they repeat the Big Lie often enough it will somehow work its magic.

Maybe it will. I certainly don’t know. But I certainly hope not, because if that is the case we are headed for disaster.

Do the MSM and the Democrats believe their own conspiracy theories about Trump? I think that some do and some don’t, but the believers are quite numerous and it gives their drive more conviction. As with just about all conspiracy theories, we have the leaders and the followers, and the Democratic politicians and the press are the leaders here, and the Democratic voters are the followers. It helps if the leaders are true believers, but they don’t necessarily have to be.

Conspiracy theorists cling to their theories in the face of knowledge that contradicts those theories. Just take as one example the Kennedy assassination. I am pretty sure (based on previous experience here with my posts about the subject and the comments on those threads) that some of you ascribe to various such theories. They are very popular, have gone on a long long time, and have given rise to an enormous industry of books and many many websites to share and promote such theories. And they are 100% false.

I’m not going to argue it again; I refer you in particular, though, to this post of mine as well as this one. There’s much in there that’s relevant to now; the only difference is that the conspiracy theorists in the Kennedy case want to say that Oswald was innocent (or a co-conspirator) and that other people were behind him, and in Russiagate the conspiracy theorists want to say that Trump is guilty and to exonerate both themselves and the people who set Russiagate in motion.

On the question of whether the MSM believes its own Russiagate conspiracy theories, we have this relevant quote from Vincent Bugliosi about the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists :

The conspiracy theorists are so outrageously brazen that they tell lies not just about verifiable, documentary evidence, but about clear, photographic evidence, knowing that only one out of a thousand of their readers, if that, is in possession of the subject photographs. Robert Groden (the leading photographic expert for the conspiracy proponents who was the photographic adviser the Oliver Stone’s movie JFK) draws a diagram on page 24 of his book High Treason of Governor Connally seated directly in front of President Kennedy in the presidential limousine and postulates the “remarkable path” a bullet coming from behind Kennedy, and traveling from left to right, would have to take to hit Connally—after passing straight through Kennedy’s body, making a right turn and then a left one in midair, which, the buffs chortle, bullets “don’t even do in cartoons.” What average reader would be in a position to dispute this seemingly common-sense, geometric assault on the Warren Commission’s single-bullet theory?…But of course, if you start out with an erroneous premise, whatever flows from it makes a lot of sense. The only problem is that it’s wrong. The indisputable fact here—which all people who have studied the assassination know—is that Connally was not seated directly in front of Kennedy, but to his left front.

The point is that brazen lies don’t necessarily have consequences, and they convince many people. And if the truth doesn’t point the way one wants it to, unscrupulous people with a lot invested in their previous stories will turn to lies to bolster their credibility, and sometimes it works. They count on the relative ignorance of the public.

[NOTE: I may have more to say about this another time, but for now this post has gotten plenty long enough.]

Use it or lose it

The New Neo Posted on by

She’s not the dancer she used to be, I’m quite certain of that. Not even close. The legs are much weaker and not fully straight, the arch less pronounced, the turnout barely there, and her elevation is probably nil.

But man, what an achievement! This woman is 77, and her back is ramrod straight, her face beautiful without makeup, and the whole thing is just so impressive. I am convinced that, in addition to love of dance and an iron and indomitable will, one of her secrets is that she never stopped dancing in the first place:

Andrew C. McCarthy on Mueller, Barr, and obstruction

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew C. McCarthy writes:

The attorney general [Barr] stated that the special counsel evaluated ten incidents with an eye toward whether they amounted to an obstruction offense. Barr elaborated that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein disagreed with Mueller on whether these incidents even could have amounted to obstruction as a matter of law.

It is important to grasp what that means, and what it doesn’t, because I’ve heard some inaccurate commentary. Barr was not saying that Mueller found one or more of these incidents to constitute obstruction; Mueller was saying that the incidents involved actions that could theoretically have amounted to obstruction.

A concrete example may make this easier to grasp: the firing of FBI director James Comey. Before a prosecutor considered evidence regarding that incident, there would be a preliminary question: Could the president’s dismissal of an FBI director amount to an obstruction offense as a matter of law? If prosecutors were to decide that, even if the evidence showed corrupt intent on the part of the president, a president’s firing of the FBI director cannot constitutionally amount to an obstruction crime, then the prosecutors would not bother to investigate and make an assessment of the evidence.

What Barr is saying is that he and Mueller did not agree, with respect to all ten incidents, on whether the incident could legally amount to obstruction. What the attorney general therefore did was assume, for argument’s sake, that Mueller was correct on the law (i.e., that the incident could theoretically amount to obstruction), and then move on to the second phase of the analysis: Assuming this could be an obstruction offense as a matter of law, could we prove obstruction as a matter of fact? This requires an assessment of whether the evidence of each element of an obstruction offense – most significantly, corrupt intent – could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

I’ve noticed over time that one of the obstacles to the public’s making sense of things like the Mueller report—in addition to the press and politicians issuing tons of partisan spin on it—is that legal issues are involved that require a certain sophistication of logic and judgment. They are certainly not impossible to understand for a person without legal training. But their meaning is not immediately obvious, and therefore they very easily lend themselves to distortion.

One of the things I really really like about Andrew McCarthy is that he has a gift for writing clearly about such things in ways that should be easily understood—if people read what he writes. I doubt that even a small percentage of liberals read Andrew McCarthy, although I wish a lot of them did.

Reporting on the Mueller Report

The New Neo Posted on by

As far as I can tell, the Mueller Report is exactly and precisely as expected.

Here’s the summary by Professor Bill Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:

Trump won. Big League. People are [poring] over the details of the report, but the top line is that Mueller found no collusion and would not reach a determination on obstruction.

You can find the entire report (redacted version, of course) here as well as at the Legal Insurrection post I already linked.

Also as expected, the report says it does not “exonerate” the president. Actually, it couldn’t possibly do so, for reasons I’ve stated many times, most recently in my post from two days ago entitled “Anticipating the Mueller Report, in which I wrote this:

It’s a no-brainer to say the Democrats will react as though it indicates Trump was guilty of obstruction at the least and perhaps more, no matter what it actually says. The longer version will give them ample opportunity to nitpick over each word and phrase…

Here’s Byron York on the matter, with a list of five things the report won’t resolve. Most of them won’t be resolved because they cannot be resolved; short of finding someone else’s fingerprints and DNA in a murder case, plus a confession, a person can’t be proven innocent (maybe not even then). Russiagate is not a case involving that sort of forensic evidence anyway, and more importantly, Trump’s opponents have no intention of ever accepting any finding that doesn’t implicate him.

The Democrats will do what they will do, of course.

And here Bill Barr explains to a word-challenged reporter what “unprecedented” means:

And about “obstruction of justice”:

One of the Democrats’ basic problems is that “attempting” to obstruct the investigation doesn’t make a lot of sense. If Trump had really wanted to obstruct the investigation, he could simply have terminated it. And Mueller acknowledges that the administration fully cooperated with the investigation in every way. So the “attempts to obstruct” come down to Trump expressing outrage at the fact that a baseless, partisan investigation was hampering his administration. Arguably Trump should have brought the Mueller farce to an end, but he didn’t.

Nothing will stop the Democrats from going on and on about it, except the next story that emerges that gives them hope of destroying Trump.

Here’s a great cartoon found at that Powerline link:

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a whole slew of articles from National Review.]

Let’s hear it for Norman Podhoretz, the original neocon

The New Neo Posted on by

Norman Podhoretz is eighty-nine years old and still going strong, not to mention sharp as a tack.

Case in point, this interview. Unfortunately, the Podoretz interview itself is behind an impregnable paywall, so that link is to a post at Ace’s that contains lengthy excerpts from the interview such as this one:

So for a while I was supporting Marco Rubio and I was enthusiastic about him. As time went on, and I looked around me, however, I began to be bothered by the hatred that was building up against Trump from my soon to be new set of ex-friends. It really disgusted me. I just thought it had no objective correlative. You could think that he was unfit for office–I could understand that–but my ex-friends’ revulsion was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him.

They called them dishonorable, or opportunists, or cowards–and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, and various others. And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump. By the time he finally won the nomination, I was sliding into a pro-Trump position, which has grown stronger and more passionate as time has gone on…

…[S]ome of them have gone so far as to make me wonder whether they’ve lost their minds altogether. I didn’t object to their opposition to Trump. There was a case to be made, and they made it–okay. Of course, they had no reasonable alternative. A couple of them voted for Hillary, which I think would have been far worse for the country than anything Trump could have done.

But, basically, I think we’re all in a state of confusion as to what’s going on. Tom Klingenstein has made a brilliant effort to explain it, in terms that haven’t really been used before. He says that our domestic politics has erupted into a kind of war between patriotism and multiculturalism, and he draws out the implications of that war very well. I might put it in different terms–love of America versus hatred of America. But it’s the same idea.

Please read the whole thing.

By the way, when Podhoretz uses the phrase “my soon to be new set of ex-friends,” he’s harking back to a book he wrote in 2001 entitled Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.

Interestingly enough, Irving Kristol was another early neocon. Kristol senior is now deceased, but Bill Kristol is his son. And in a strange (or maybe not-so-strange) parallel, John Podhoretz (another NeverTrumper, although I’m pretty sure he’s not nearly as strongly so as Bill Kristol) is Norman Podhoretz’s son.

As someone remarked in one of the comments to a piece on Norman Podhoretz’s interview, I wonder what Thanksgiving conversation is like at the Podhoretz house.

Victor Davis Hanson on the progressive revolution

The New Neo Posted on by

Hanson writes:

The reelection of Obama had convinced progressives that he had discovered electoral magic: record voter registration, turnout, and block voting of “minorities” that could overcome the old Perot, Reagan Democrat, silent majority, and tea-party dinosaurs in the critical swing states. This chemistry, they thought, would be inherently transferrable even to multimillionaire white establishmentarians like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden (but only if they were reeducated and thus made the necessary confessionals about their own white privilege and shared disdain for “deplorables” and “the dregs of society”).

Suddenly, everything seemed possible as woke activists, à la French Revolution, accelerated the possible into the already passé…

By spring 2019, we were light years beyond the revolution’s beginning in summer 2008 — and heading into hard-socialist territory and beyond.

Indeed, the once edgy community-organizing Obama himself had become a tragicomical figure. He spent a bit of his post-presidency warning against a “circular firing squad” of Democratic cannibalism but otherwise was hell-bent on becoming worth $100 million in “I built that fashion”—and was never again heard uttering another “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money” sermon…

…few leftist revolutionary cycles ever halt in mid course, whether in 1789 France, 1917 Russia, 1946 China, or 1960 Cuba. The philosophy is always that today’s radical is yesterday’s sell-out to be replaced by tomorrow’s genuine far harder leftist…

Hanson’s essay is very good, as always. But I think he’s missing something. That “something” is the patience of the left, which has been working on this not just since 2008 but for a long long long long time, on many fronts and levels. Say what you will about the left, but they certainly have perseverance.

I wonder, also, whether Obama’s recent warnings are of the practical sort,—as in “Shh! Don’t show your cards; you need to be a little more sly and quiet about what you really believe and what your goals are, or you won’t get elected”—or whether he really is at least somewhat less radical than the current crop.

But yes, leftist revolutions always end up eating their own—sometimes sooner rather than later.