The Big 5

Ben Wittes (Lawfare Blog) at The Atlantic:

I spent the week after the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report going through it section by section and writing a kind of diary of the endeavor. My goal was less to summarize the report than to force myself to think about each factual, legal, and analytical portion of Mueller’s discussion, which covers a huge amount of ground.

Here are five conclusions I drew from the exercise:

1. The president committed crimes
2. He also committed impeachable offenses
3. The president was not complicit in the Russian social-media conspiracy
4. Trump's complicity in the Russian hacking operation, and his campaign's contacts with the Russians, present a more complicated picture
5. The counter-intelligence dimensions of the entire affair remain a mystery

Some randomly selected takeaways:

No, Mueller does not appear to have developed evidence that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was involved in the hacking operation itself. And no, the investigation did not find a criminal conspiracy in the veritable blizzard of contacts between Trumpworld and the Russians. But this is an ugly story for Trump.

The attempt to get McGahn to write an internal memo disputing the story (that 45* tried to get McGahn to fire Mueller) is the crucial fact here. The president’s conduct might otherwise be defended as a mere effort to lie to the press, but one doesn’t order the creation of false internal documents for purposes of denying a published story. So the question is, first, whether what Mueller described as Trump’s “repeated efforts to get McGahn to create a record denying that the President had directed him to remove the Special Counsel” would have “the natural tendency to constrain McGahn from testifying truthfully or to undermine his credibility” if he told the truth. The second question is whether such a corrupt outcome was specifically intended by the president.

A third example is the president’s public dance with Paul Manafort, in which he dangled the possibility of a pardon and praised Manafort’s bravery for not “flipping,” and in which his private counsel allegedly suggested that Manafort would be taken care of. Notably, Trump got what he wanted in this case. Manafort did not end up cooperating to Mueller’s satisfaction. Indeed, Mueller concluded that Manafort had breached his plea deal by failing to cooperate and by lying to investigators. So the reality here may well be that the president’s obstructive conduct did, in fact, obstruct the investigation. The president hinted that Manafort should not “flip” and that he would take care of him—and Manafort acted in a fashion consistent with his relying on those assurances. I think this activity, assuming it can be proved, is criminal.

There is no way around it. Attorney General William Barr’s efforts to clear President Donald Trump, both in his original letter and in his press conference the morning of the report’s release, are wholly unconvincing when you actually spend time with the document itself.

For what it’s worth, here’s what I see in the story Mueller has told on Trump engagement with the Russians over the hacking. I see a group of people for whom partisan polarization wholly and completely defeated patriotism. I see a group of people so completely convinced Hillary Clinton was the enemy that they were willing to make common cause with an actual adversary power who was attacking their country to defeat her.