https://www.lawfareblog.com/thoughts-barr-and-mueller-report
At a time when words of support, if not necessarily praise, for Attorney General William Barr are as scarce as hen’s teeth, we offer the thoughts of Jack Goldsmith, former Assistant Attorney General and head of the Office of Legal Counsel during the George W. Bush administration, now the Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and co-founder of Lawfare.
It’s an important contribution to the conversation we need to have, like it or not, about the facts of Russian interference in 2106 and the knowledge that 2020 is next up. Yet, there is not a single sign that this President is instructing his administration to focus on halting this assault on democracy in America, nor are his Congressional colleagues — quislings-in-waiting — taking action to prevent its repetition.
I don’t share Goldsmith’s views of Barr’s behavior last Wednesday — except where he admits Barr erred in describing Trump as having ‘fully cooperated’ with Mueller and in misstating there was ’no collusion,' nor do I accept Barr’s views on executive power [which Goldsmith says] 'reflect a standard conservative legal interpretation of Article II for almost fifty years now.’ There are other places in Goldsmith’s analysis where I believe he gives Barr more benefit of the doubt than his performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee merits, but because Goldsmith is both a preeminent legal and constitutional scholar and a person of unquestioned integrity, his views are important to be incorporated into the mix.
Constitutional scholars may differ over interpretations and implications of Mueller’s decision not to bring an indictment for obstruction of justice, just as they can question whether the voluminous contacts and interactions between the Trump campaign and transition with agents/proxies of the Russian government rule out the possibility of a conspiracy to impact a presidential election.
There are precious few ‘absolutes’ in this matter, owing both to its complexities and to the difficulties of determining motive and intent. But there is one matter above all that is not in question, except in the minds of Republican legislators whose principal concern is their own reelection and/or their hold on power, and/or in hearts and minds of voters who simply don’t know better or choose to be in denial:
Donald John Trump has put us here.
He is the carnage of his own making. He’s been doing it for a lifetime, and there is evidence aplenty to show for it. He’s tallied more than 10,000 lies and outright prevarications in his 805 days as President; he touts an hour-long conversation just yesterday with President Putin about the “Russia hoax;' and each and every day, he soils the flag of the country he purports to love. Clinicians know better. Malignant narcissistic personality disordered people have no such capacity. There is no room inside that empty vessel for love of anything beyond self. All else is secondary, tertiary, or worse.
And if you think Donald Trump isn’t sweating bullets about where this all might lead, here’s today’s Tweet:
After spending more than $35,000,000 over a two year period, interviewing 500 people, using 18 Trump Hating Angry Democrats & 49 FBI Agents - all culminating in a more than 400 page Report showing NO COLLUSION - why would the Democrats in Congress now need Robert Mueller to testify. Are they looking for a redo because they hated seeing the strong NO COLLUSION conclusion? There was no crime, except on the other side (incredibly not covered in the Report), and NO OBSTRUCTION. Bob Mueller should not testify. No redos for the Dems!
RGM
Give Jack Goldsmith a ‘listen,’ and stay tuned as the country works its way through these uncharted political waters with a President who is both ill-equipped to govern and undeserving of our trust, aided and abetted by a Senate majority leader and colleagues who have caved in complete capitulation to a rogue occupant of the Oval Office, who poses as a Republican and a conservative, and laughs all the way to the bank where the emoluments mount daily.
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