The Mueller Report is ANYTHING but an exoneration of Donald Fredovich
On the other hand, it documents some pretty disturbing stuff we already did know.
The president's supporters try to ignore this fact, trapped as they are in the Matrix of the artificial reality in which they live, but the Mueller probe didn't exactly come up empty. Not only did his investigation nab 12 Russian spies involved in the cyberattacks on the DNC and Clinton campaign (incredibly, the president and his supporters continued to insist that it "could have been anyone" long after the American intelligence community concluded that it was the Russians, even siding with Putin and the FSB over the FBI and CIA), but Paul Manafort, the president's campaign chairman was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for violating fiance laws. Among other things he lied to banks in order to get money to finance pro-Russian political activity in Ukraine.
A Manafort aide, Konstantin Klimnik- who is believed to have ties to the FSB- received detailed polling information from Manafort and discussed a pro-Russian peace plan for the Ukraine conflict with him. Manafort lied about both to Mueller. Klimnik was charged with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice for having allegedly tried to tamper with witnesses giving evidence to Mueller.
Roger Stone, the president's finance chair, has been charged with lying to Congress and with witness tampering.
Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, like Manafort, "flipped" on the president, cooperating with Mueller after being charged with lying to the investigators. The same was true for Trump campaign aide Rick Gates. Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen also turned state's evidence, much to the president's disgust, after being convicted of various financial crimes as well as violating Federal campaign lawys by helping Trump use money raised for his presidential campaign pay off a porn star with whom the president had an affair, violating campaign finance laws.
Here is a key point, which the President's supporters choose to ignore: the Cohen indictment mentions an inindicted co-conspirator, "Individual 1-" who is none other than Donald John Trump. As a result of the Mueller investigation, Mr. Trump is personally vulnerable to criminal prosecution once he leaves office.
Campaign aide George Pappodopoulos also went to jail for lying to investigators. I could go on, but there's no point. Mueller found insufficient evidence to indict the president. But he hardly exonerated him. Several people close to Mr. Trump and his campaign are going to prison for illegal dealings with an unfriendly foreign power Mr. Trump blatently defended against well-founded charges by our own intelligence community and in whose economy Mr. Trump has far-reaching investments. High-ranking officials in the Trump campaign felt the need to lie under oath, and perhaps the most suspicious thing of all was Mr. Trump's loud and insistent denunciation of the investigation itself as a "witch hunt."
If it was a "witch hunt," it was the most successful one in history. And it seemeth passing strange that a president under investigation would seek to discredit the result of that investigation in advance unless he had reason to be afraid of what it would find. But that is precisely what Mr. Trump has been doing, loudly and verbosely, ever since the Mueller probe began.
And there lies perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Mueller report: it comes right out and details the president's attempts to put pressure on former FBI Director Comey to end the investigation of Michael Flynn, as well as various efforts to interfere with and disrupt the Mueller investigation.
Mueller, of whom Mr. Trump has taken such a paranoid view, decided that there was not conclusive evidence adequate to show that Mr. Trump personally violated the law. Yet his own report details no fewer then ten incidents which might well be considered tantamount to obstruction of justice, and for which, had he chosen to, Mueller could well have sought to have him indicted had he not been a sitting president (the question of whether a sitting president is immune from prosecution is a disputed point of constitutional law).
Mueller chose to take a charitable, conservative prosecutorial view of these matters. But even if they were not criminal offenses, combined with his complicity in the use of campaign money in violation of campaign finance laws- a matter in which the president is an unindicted co-conspirator)- to pay off Stormy Daniels, they absolutely would constitute adequate grounds to begin impeachment proceedings.
This is not to say that they should, and I hope that they don't. Our poor country needs a clear, clean repudiation of Donald Trump and all the corrupt, sick things he stands for. Impeachment, no matter what the evidence (Trump folks not being particularly impressed by evidence), would only divide us further and make our national rejection of this abberation in our political life less decisive and clear-cut than it needs to be.
But let's not have any nonsense about the Mueller investigation which the president and his supporters so desperately feared and which they tried so very, very hard to derail in any way exonerating our most corrupt and dishonest of presidents. In due course, the American people will render their verdict on the evidence with which Robert Mueller has presented us all.
If only the consequence of out utterly essential national repudiation of the abberation that is Donald Trump would not so likely be the empowerment of the crazy Left, after Trump's destruction of the Republican party as a viable vehicle for opposing it left our nation without a defense.
Americans sometimes have to be pushed to the brink before doing what they have to do. I hope we recognize already in 2020 that neither of our political parties are worthy of our trust. If not, I can only hope that following Trumpism with a dose of the opposite flavor of crazy will convince the American people that come what may, something has to be done- however drastic- to restore sanity and get America on track again.
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