Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigators followed "several meandering paths" in their two-year investigation, "propelled by discoveries of unusual interactions between Trump associates and Russians," The Washington Post reported Sunday night. Mueller uncovered a lot in his 448-page final report, but his team was left with "some unanswered mysteries, a lot of dead ends and, ultimately, a conclusion that the contacts they found did not establish a criminal conspiracy," the Post says.
Mueller's team had to grapple with a legal dispute with Attorney General William Barr over whether a president can even be accused of crimes, plus President Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. refused to be interviewed, and the witnesses they did have "were not ideal," the Post reports:
A few key players, prosecutors would contend, lied in interviews. Many were loyal to the president and echoed his rhetoric that Mueller's team was acting in bad faith. Some used encrypted applications with disappearing messages that could not be reviewed. Others were overseas, unreachable to American investigators. In some cases, their statements were only loosely tethered to the facts. [The Washington Post]
Ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort fits in the first three categories, and the "loosely tethered" description matches conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, the Post reports, citing an interview with Corsi's lawyer, David Gray. Corsi had offered "tantalizing leads" about Roger Stone and WikiLeaks, but his story was never quite straight and his leads always led to dead ends, the Post reports.
Trying to get actionable material out of Corsi, "it's their biggest nightmare," Gray told the Post. "The supposed best of the best were just frankly dumbfounded by the whole situation." Corsi was not charged, he added, because after six marathon interviews, "at the end of the day, they threw up their hands and said, 'We can't use any of this.'" Read more about the obstacles Mueller couldn't get over at The Washington Post. Peter Weber
liberalmonkey on April 22nd, 2019 at 11:50 UTC »
Something I noticed while reading the Mueller Report is the utter absence of Pence in it. Why? He was head of the Transition team.
firefly212 on April 22nd, 2019 at 11:01 UTC »
At first, I thought the Trump team was really crafty. But looking through the actual Mueller report, I'm sort of.. just glad they aren't. From messages that weren't delivered because of typos, through confused identities because of idiots googling names and not realizing multiple people can have the same name... it's a bit like the Hogan's Heros of election rigging. That they were successful is not a feature... they seem to have been successful *despite* themselves. 20+ contacts, but nobody coordinating (on the US side) a goddamn thing, even in attempting to do something bad, there was so much chaos and mismanagement that it's a freakin miracle that they managed to get anything done at all.
Then there's the whole obstruction thing, where it seems that, for people who mostly got fired by Trump, the one thing they did do was keep his ass out of jail by failing to follow his direct orders to break the law. The administration largely seems to be made up of two primary groups, the incompetent, who don't know what they're doing, and the self-interested, who aren't interested in doing anything for anyone other than themselves. Our nation's best hope for surviving the next two years isn't that the Senate will vote to impeach (they wont, for purely partisan reasons)... our best hope is that this battle between the morons and the sociopaths will so consume our next two years that they simply age out of the process come January of 2021.
ba14 on April 22nd, 2019 at 10:49 UTC »
If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance baffle them with your bullshit