Some thoughts on the Barr letter regarding the Mueller report. Until we see the full Mueller report – and I am confident that we will see it – we can’t really conclude much about the details of what Mueller discovered. This is especially true regarding obstruction of justice, which the Barr letter even acknowledges is not conclusive in either direction. With DOJ policy opposing the indictment of a sitting President, prudence dictated that they kick it to Congress to decide. So I expect we will learn much more about what Trump said and did in response to the investigation.
But we can and must accept the conclusion that criminal conspiracy with the Russian government was not found. This means something very specific too, as laid out in the letter: Internet Research Agency (IRA) trolling and the hack and release of DNC and Podesta emails to Wikileaks. Mueller indicted various Russians for their actions on those fronts. His investigation was to determine whether or not anybody in the Trump campaign coordinated those criminal actions with the Russians. He concluded that nobody in Trumpland did that.
Remember that this would NOT include coordinating with Wikileaks because Wikileaks was merely releasing already stolen emails. This would mean coordinating with the hacking itself. I hadn’t seen any evidence of that but I’m glad Mueller found no evidence of it either. As for the trolls, the connection to Trumpworld was never really established or hinted at except through some very vague conspiracy theories about Brad Parscale targeting troll campaigns based on campaign data. That was always a far-fetched theory but it’s good to know there was nothing behind it. We must accept Mueller’s conclusion here.
Trump made multiple overtures to the Russians, both publicly and behind the scenes (building a tower in Moscow and hiding that fact from GOP primary voters). They were sketchy, but they weren’t criminal actions. So we should accept the Barr letter’s summary of the Mueller report on “collusion and criminal conspiracy” in full. There may have been lots of shadiness, but if it wasn’t criminal, it wasn’t criminal.
The real conclusion here is that Democrats will need to defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box in 2020. Even if the full Mueller report shows that Trump really should be impeached for obstruction or some other crime, he will never be convicted in the Senate anyway. We still need to see the full report. Transparency is essential so we know exactly how Trump behaved during and after the campaign. That will be a part of the 2020 campaign for his re-election. Voters need to know what he did and what he didn’t do.
But ultimately it will only play one part in the larger campaign, which will consider Trumpian corruption in full. And Democrats will need to nominate a candidate who offers a different vision and set of policies that voters can rally behind. That is how it should be decided: not in secret, but in an open, vigorous, democratic campaign.