Trump, Mueller and Barr: Google

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

Let’s be clear. Mueller punted. Mueller failed.

Scream all you want to the high heavens for the release of the full Mueller report. It won’t matter. We know the key findings.

I’ve been biting my lip, so to speak, for days, weeks and months, refusing to engage in the kind of speculation that has fueled the traffic of news websites and the ratings of television news and comedy shows.

Everybody has been putting their faith in Muller, from the New York Times editorial board to CBS’s Stephen Colbert and the crew of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

I never elevated a picture of Republican prosecutor Robert Mueller to my cover picture or profile pic on Facebook or Twitter. I’ve watched many of my friends who are Democrats do this, putting their faith in Mueller like some put their “faith” in Jesus.

I hope they all remove those photos now. Your trust and faith was not warranted.

When the world comes crashing down because of whatever disaster befalls us now, Jesus is not going to be there to save you. I figured all along that Mueller would not save American democracy from the likes of Trump. But I waited, and waited, and gave him the benefit of the doubt.

What’s clear here is that at the end of the day, Mueller, working under executive branch Department of Justice guidelines, was not willing to put the Republic at risk of bringing down another corrupt president outside the electoral college framework. That’s what’s really going on.

That was the discussion Mueller had with his team, which included until the end Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, the Republican who named Mueller to his post after Trump fired James Comey, the former director of the FBI who botched the release of information in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Democrats are already trying to blame Trump appointed Attorney General William Barr for the coverup. But he did exactly what he said he would do. He concluded that Mueller’s failure to draw clear legal conclusions about President Donald J. Trump obstructing justice is legally useless since Mueller could not draw clear conclusions that Trump committed the crime of conspiracy to collude with Russia to win the presidential election in 2016 in corrupt fashion.

It reminds me of federal judge U.W. Clemons’ ruling in the first prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Unless you can get into the mind of the defendant and prove intent to commit a crime, a jury should not convict.

But we don’t have to psychoanalyze Trump. We have his public statements, from speeches and Twitter.

Even until the final days of waiting, I held out some hope that Mueller and his team might find a way to do the right thing and provide a legal roadmap for how to remove this corrupt president who was illegitimately elected from power.

He didn’t do that, so where do we go from here?

At least the New York Times editorial board provides some wisdom, even while seeming to go along with Barr and Mueller in exonerating Trump.

… while Mr. Mueller may not have found sufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy, let’s not lose sight of what we already know, both from his investigation and from news reports over the past two years.

We know that the Russian government interfered repeatedly in the 2016 presidential election, by hacking into computer servers of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. We know that it did this with the goals of dividing Americans and helping Donald Trump win the presidency. We know that when top members of the Trump campaign learned about this interference, they didn’t just fail to report it to the F.B.I. They welcomed it. They encouraged it. They made jokes about it. On the same day that Mr. Trump publicly urged the Russians to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails, they began to do just that. And we know that when questioned by federal authorities, many of Mr. Trump’s top associates lied, sometimes repeatedly, about their communications with Russians. None of this is in dispute.

That Mr. Mueller couldn’t find sufficient evidence that Mr. Trump or anyone involved in his campaign had coordinated directly with the Russians may be explained by the fact that they didn’t need to. They were already getting that help.

Many Democrats are now turning to hope for the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, Washington and Northern Virginia. Yes, let those investigations proceed.

But without clear guidelines from the special prosecutor, there will be no move to impeach Trump and remove him from office. House Speaker Nanci Pelosi had already signaled there would be no move to impeach Trump anyway. And Democrats put their faith in her?

There will be an election in 2020. And now Trump has his “exoneration” from Mueller to run his campaign on. It will be the centerpiece of his campaign. And it could prove successful. We could be looking at another four years of this corrupt sideshow of a presidency, while the planet burns.

What we needed from Mueller was at least a call for further investigation into Trump’s crimes and those of his associates. Now what we will get are Trump pardons, of everybody involved

Rather than losing public support, Trump will now gain public support. His poll numbers will go up overnight.

Where is the Democrat who could be nominated in the summer of 2020 who could beat Trump now?

Anyone but Trump? I’m not holding my breath and neither should you.

The only hope now is if enough Democrats actually show up at the polls in 2020 to vote Trump out.

We will ultimately see if there are enough voting liberals, progressives, women, African-Americans and Hispanics to overcome the votes of Libertarians who just don’t want to pay taxes, emboldened racist white guys, and blind Christians.

Dog help us all.