One of the things that is clear from the truncated version of the Mueller Report is that it wasn't nearly a complete investigation. As I think I recall from a long day of reading and listening, it was Adam Schiff who said that Mueller and his team left the massive issue of Trump's finances virtually untouched, which means all of those known and incredibly shady financial deals with Putin's oligarchs, the German bank which was laundering money for such oligarchs and others didn't go into informing Mueller's conclusions and decisions.
Another thing we know, he didn't go after Donald Trump jr. Ivanka and the rest of Trump's family members who were thick as the thieves they are in it. He chose to not force their testimony to a grand jury. The only person among the talking heads I heard who had the same reaction I did to that was Elie Mystal at The Nation, of all places:
Mueller didn’t subpoena Donald Trump. Or Donald Trump Jr. Or Ivanka Trump. Or Eric Trump. Or Jared Kushner. His failure to directly ask those five principles a single in-person question represents a failure of his investigation. It’s a failure that will haunt this country for some time.
Mueller’s reasons for not subpoenaing Trump are what the scientists would call “bad.” The report says that investigators sought a sit-down interview with Trump, but were rebuffed. It says that they received written answers from Trump’s team, but these were “inadequate.” The report includes those written responses, and Trump’s lawyers use the phrase “can’t recall” 37 times, which puts Trump’s memory on par with a goldfish. Mueller concludes that the cost of issuing Trump a subpoena that would delay the investigation as Trump fought all the way to the Supreme Court outweighed the benefits of securing his testimony.
That’s unacceptable. You can’t hold yourself out as a nonpolitical prosecutor only concerned about the facts, and then make a decision to not secure additional facts based on a purely political calculation. Getting Trump to testify under oath about Trump’s intention behind all of the acts he committed that look like obstruction of justice is crucial to the inquiry of obstruction of justice. You are just not investigating obstruction of justice if you do not attempt to get those facts, and saying, “Well, he’d resist,” is simply not what we deserved from the special counsel.
It was Mystal on one of the news shows yesterday who pointed out Mueller must have known that Donald Trump's mob boss manner of operating, the kind of gangster speak that his lawyer, Michael Cohen, laid out in his testimony to the House judiciary committee, meant if you were going to get him you had to go after the next generation of his crime family. Something that Mueller chose not to do.
My question, asked before the truncated report was released was if Mueller or his boss for most of that time, Rod Rosenstein would have treated middle class or poor people the way they treated the Trumps and Kushner, I can't believe they gave the benefits, THE PRIVILEGES they granted to them to poor people who fell into their professional focus. I doubt Robert Mueller would refuse to question a blue-collar class suspect because he thought he was stupid or that he would lie to him, one of the excuses for not going after Donald Trump jr. I doubt they'd let a 17-year-old kid off like they did the scion of a mobster in his late 30s. Elie Mystal sensibly asks why the people who Mueller prosecuted and got prison time shouldn't think they were unfairly treated with harsher justice as the Trumps were handled with kid gloves.
I don't, not for a second, believe that Trump being a Republican is not a part of it, either.
I do think Robert Mueller did, obviously, kick this over to the Democratic House which, as Mystal says, might have been better for Mueller but it is not better for the country. In doing that Mueller certainly knew he was giving William Barr, a man he has known professionally and personally for a long time, he knows Barr's character as exposed in his past lying to Congress about his work for the Bush I administration and his devotion to giving Republican presidents fascistic power as a devotee of the unitary executive excuse for doing that. Mueller also knows there is absolutely no chance that if impeached, Trump will not be convicted in the Republican controlled Senate.
There is some reason to sympathize with some of Mueller's decisions on a professional, lawerly basis, his decision to not come to the obvious conclusion that Trump, as he confessed to Lester Holt on national TV, that he fired Comey to end the investigation into Russian contact with his campaign, because of the Department of Justice policy to not indict a sitting president. The very policy that that other deputed to be honorable man, James Comey violated when it was Hillary Clinton running as a Democrat. That is the clear statement in Mueller's Report that William Barr, knowing lied about from two days after Mueller gave him his report. The only reason Mueller gives to not state the obvious was that policy.
But that policy, itself, is an invitation to a criminal like Trump to commit these kinds of crimes in office. It should be changed.
If Robert Mueller's chosen failure was him going along to get along in his own, Republican establishement or if it was part of a larger strategy may become clearer. That's not important at this point. What's important is that this report isn't a product of a complete investigation and it can't be sold as such, though that is how Barr has pushed it before it was publicly known and how the media will try to sell it in their own lazy-assed, Republican enabling manner. I think it's necessary for Democrats to get Mueller on the record, in front of the cameras admitting that his investigation didn't completely investigate even the known crimes of the Trump regime and his crime family who are a part of that.
William Barr, clearly, supports the idea of a crime mob presidency, that's what the fascism of his unitary executive theory, cooked up in places like Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, ground zero in the destruction of American democracy. The extent to which Robert Mueller is OK with that will be apparent for the length of time he stays silent on the preliminary character of his report. Tic-toc, Mueller. You've already let too much time go by.
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