Two on the Report

I'm going to minimize this because there's too much of it elsewhere, but here are two unexpected outlets to have filed such pro-Trump pieces.

The New York Times ran an op-ed by one of the editors of American Greatness.
The problem is that the Mueller investigation, as Mr. Barr explained, “did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes.”

Mr. Schiff must know this. He must have known it for a long time. But he has persisted in slandering innocent people for personal political gain. His selfishness has led to a level of civil discord and political acrimony not seen since the late 1960s. That is what I call immoral, unethical, unpatriotic and yes, corrupt.

...

And then there is the Kool-Aid brigade. These are the people outside of politics, the people who couldn’t wait to hear what Rachel Maddow had to say, who believed every breathless prediction on cable news that “new revelations could spell the end for Trump,” and who shared these nuggets with a mixture of indignation and ecstasy on social media.
He calls for an apology, but exactly as we knew would happen the Times has simply skipped on to re-fighting whether or not the "obstruction" neither Mueller nor the AG felt fit to charge is an impeachable offense. It'll be as if Russian Collusion was never a topic of discussion; what really matters is the process crime that might have been created into the investigation of whatever-it-was-I-forget.

The second is Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, an uneven publication but not generally a friendly one for the administration. He writes that 'Mueller did not merely reject the conspiracy theories, he obliterated them.'
Mueller, in addition to concluding that evidence was insufficient to charge any American with crimes relating to Russian election interference, also stated emphatically in numerous instances that there was no evidence – not merely that there was insufficient evidence to obtain a criminal conviction – that key prongs of this three-year-old conspiracy theory actually happened....

With regard to Facebook ads and Twitter posts from the Russia-based Internet Research Agency, for example, Mueller could not have been more blunt: “The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA’s interference operation” (emphasis added). Note that this exoneration includes not only Trump campaign officials but all Americans...

Regarding one of the most-cited pieces of evidence by Trump/Russia conspiracists – that Russia tried once Trump was nominated to shape his foreign policy posture toward Russia – Mueller concluded that there is simply no evidence to support it...

As for the overarching maximalist conspiracy – that Trump and/or members of his family and campaign were controlled by or working for the Russian government – Mueller concluded that this belief simply lacked the evidence necessary to prosecute anyone for it[.]
I should be rather embarrassed if I had been loudly asserting that someone was a traitor and a spy, only to discover that absolutely no evidence existed to support the theory. It's one thing to have gotten the wager wrong; intelligence work is often about judging that a thing is more likely to be true than not, or even just sufficiently likely to be true to justify taking some steps to guard against it. Here, though, what is being found is that there's literally nothing to support the idea at all -- yet they raced right off the cliff chasing it.

Apologies are indeed in order. None shall be forthcoming, I suppose.

6 comments:

Texan99 said...

People are beginning to ask whether Mueller was not already perfectly aware where the investigation was going before the mid-term elections, and why his decision to drag it out this long does not constitute an inference with an election at least as serious as anything the Russians are accused of having done.

Grim said...

Eh, of all the issues that one concerns me least. James Comey took a big hit for timing his announcements to come before major decisions had to be made: both the decision to clear Hillary right before her DNC coronation, and the decision to re-open the probe and then close it again before the elections after more emails were found on Sleezy Dude's computer.

That they took their time doesn't concern me. What concerns me is all the people they hurt, pursuing a wildly aggressive prosecution when they must have known pretty early that there was really nothing to all this. What concerns me is getting to the people who cooked up a FISA warrant and kept it going for months so they could spy on everyone Carter Page talked to, including the presidential campaign of their opponents. What concerns me is the rampant abuses exposed at the FBI and DOJ.

There's a lot to be angry about here.

ymarsakar said...

The country is run by secret combinations and cabals, Grim. I think that is far more dire an issue than whether your Republic is dead or alive.

Christopher B said...

His selfishness has led to a level of civil discord and political acrimony not seen since the late 1960s.

That's about 100 years off.

The explosion that's going to happen when Trump is re-elected with clear EC and popular vote majorities is going to be earth-shattering.

Texan99 said...

There's evidence to support the theory that Russian disinformation was employed to influence the election. It's just that the people who commissioned the Russian disinformation were first the GOPe, and then the Clinton campaign. The Deep State apparently hopped on board later, if they weren't there from the start.

ymarsakar said...

Tony blair influenced the US elections when he came to give a good sounding speech to conservatives. I must admit, his Mercury energy was quite good and persuasive, although his substance about the UN ended up being bullsh as usual.

There is no justice or fairness at a human level for those of a certain power scale. This is not monopoly game where everyone gets a fair turn and luck plays out as it will.

Statesmen would be fools NOT to influence the elections and power politics of their enemies and allies.