This is from the actual Mueller Report:
In interviews with this Office, McGahn recalled that the President called him at home twice and on both occasions directed him to call Rosenstein and say that Mueller had conflicts that precluded him from serving as Special Counsel.
On the first call, McGahn recalled that the President said something like, “You gotta do this. You gotta call Rod.” McGahn said he told the President that he would see what he could do. McGahn was perturbed by the call and did not intend to act on the request.
When the President called McGahn a second time to follow up on the order to call the Department of Justice, McGahn recalled that the President was more direct, saying something like, “Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the Special Counsel.” McGahn recalled the President telling him “Mueller has to go” and “Call me back when you do it.”
John Hinderaker from the Powerline has sort of weighed in on this issue and believes that the President's line of thinking actually might be more accurate than Mueller's line of thinking. Hinderaker does this by doing little more than removing portions of the report that might be seen as opinion and leaving just the facts.
Now if you read the above passage it makes it quite clear that Trump would like to see Mueller removed as Special Counsel (citing conflicts of interest). Given the fact that Trump had just interviewed Mueller for the FBI director and chose someone else, there certainly could be the possibility of a grudge. Given the makeup of the players Mueller put together, an argument could be made that Mueller did not make much an attempt to put together exactly a non-partisan team. So it's not an unreasonable position for the President to take, especially knowing (as we know now) that Trump was not actually guilty of anything.
What is missing is any direct order from the President to McGahn to fire Mueller.
Sure... in a roundabout away Trump was asking McGahn to start the ball rolling (which Trump hoped would lead to Mueller being let go). But it's clear from Mueller's own report that Trump was not ordering McGahn (or anyone else) to actually fire Special Counsel. He was ordering McGahn to talk to Rosenstein and convince him that Mueller had a conflict of interest and that he had to go. It's both a legal distinction and a distinction with a significant difference.
Moreover, the President is correct in his argument that Mueller could have been fired (the law is clear on that), and that he (Trump) could have directly ordered the firing by calling Rosenstein personally. But he didn't actually make that direct order.
Again, while some may make an argument that the President just should have left well enough along and not tried to pressure anyone to do anything. I am not sure that I disagree with that concept. But the reality is that the characterization of this (that the removal was ordered) is not an accurate accounting of what happened.
To put this in perspective, if Mueller had asked Mueller whether or not he had evidence that Trump ordered McGahn to fire Mueller, and Mueller said yes, Mueller would have no doubt charged Mueller with making false or misleading statements.
30 comments:
Powerline??
When did they win a Pulitzer prize?
It's a scam against him!
Mueller did not make much an attempt to put together exactly a non-partisan team.
They were invalid, because they were deep state conspiracists
Liberal Thomas Friedman calls for Trumps Wall.
"“On April 12, I toured the busiest border crossing between America and Mexico — the San Ysidro Port of Entry, in San Diego — and the walls being built around it,” the piece reads.
“Guided by a U.S. Border Patrol team, I also traveled along the border right down to where the newest 18-foot-high slatted steel barrier ends and the wide-open hills and craggy valleys beckoning drug smugglers, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants begin.
“It’s a very troubling scene.”
I agree with the very liberal Thomas Friedman .
"Friedman continued: “The whole day left me more certain than ever that we have a real immigration crisis and that the solution is a high wall with a big gate — but a smart gate.”
“Without a high wall, too many Americans will lack confidence that we can control our borders, and they therefore will oppose the steady immigration we need.”
a pee-you-litzer, alky?
heh.
while you might be impressed when a mutual admiration society bestows awards upon one another, the rest of us just sit back and laugh at the collection of lying fuckwits who pissed away their last remaining shred of credibility in order to cheerlead a failed coup.
hinderaker is a good guy and a smart lawyer.
much smarter than anyone at the bozo's post or the ny times.
oh, and did you hear the latest? the ny times reported that Jesus was a palestinian.
seriously.
you can't make this shit up.
there's your pulitzer prize winning reporters alky. so blinded by their JOO hatred, they can't even manage to nail down THAT little tidbit of history.
pulitzer. LMAO...
Roger, have you realized that the Trump-Putin thing, never happened?
here's your vaunted fucking pulitzer winners, lying like it's their fucking JOB:
The headlines were dismal. “US threatens to veto UN resolution on rape as weapon of war,” The Guardian blared. The BBC was more subtle but equally condemnatory: “United States Dilutes UN Rape-in-War Resolution.”
The Washington Post, meanwhile, made sure to get the “T”-word in its headline: “The UN Wanted to End Sexual Violence in War. Then the Trump Administration Had Objections.” Social media outrage radiated as users shared these stories.
To readers so inclined, the story was one more reminder of the Trump administration’s bottomless perfidy: Of course it would object to ending sexual violence in armed conflict! Of course President Trump would try to “dilute” protections for women raped in war!
Except that’s not what happened. The administration does not, in fact, wish to see more women raped in armed conflict. You can breathe a sigh of relief if you figured otherwise.
https://nypost.com/2019/04/24/team-trump-didnt-try-to-stop-un-from-cracking-down-on-wartime-rapists/
dirty cocksuckers. no wonder the left lionizes them . they're still yearning for the taste of 0linsky's shit.
When did they win a Pulitzer prize?
You mean like the ones the New York Times and the The Washington Post for pushing the Russian collusion lie and the Steel dossier.
Yeah, the gold standard of journalism.
Sleepy Joe
There is such a putrid smell surrounding our nation’s capital, such a rank odor, that it should come as no shock the stench is emanating from the rotting corpse of American democracy.
Perhaps, this was inevitable. Never in human history has so much power, so much responsibility, been invested in the peasants.
The U.S. House of Representatives was created to be their house, their check on any president who thought himself above the law.
This is the sort of crisis our Founding Fathers envisioned. Trump is the sort of egomaniac they feared. He is the kind of president who would urge his subordinates to violate the law so as to carry out his orders.
Congress must act now. This president has already invented a national crisis for political gain, lied repeatedly to the American people, and appointed an attorney general whose sole loyalty is to the White House. And Trump has warned his supporters many times that the election process is rigged against Republicans and cannot be trusted.
Take the man at his word. He has no respect for tradition. He does not believe in a United States. He would invent a crisis to win re-election.
Waiting for the 2020 election is dangerous. It might even prove fatal.
Email: philkadner@gmail.com
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/25/aoc-mistakes-fellow-democrat-older-male-republican-mocks-him-posing-cardboard-cutout-her/
Luddite Cortez fucks up again
There is such a putrid smell surrounding our nation’s capital, such a rank odor
The smell of the elite political class carving up the pork. Wonder what took him so long.
Joe Biden plagerized Trumps MAGA.
Darn Joe old dog same old plagerizer
The U.S. House of Representatives was created to be their house, their check on any president who thought himself above the law.
Who the fuck told you this Roger? The separation of powers and the three equal branches of the government were designed for all three branches to both have freedom to do what they are tasked by the constitution, while checking the power of the other two branches.
Try reading the constitution, rather than taking other people's opinions.
Not only is Roger willfully ignorant. The People he plagiarized are willfully ignorant.
The man needs help but he has to admit there is a problem.
@RyanAFournier
Every time President Trump’s Hollywood star is desecrated, it is replaced.
This means as long as his star is messed up, it will continue to be the newest, shiniest star on the Walk of Fame! #Winning
Fox News Napolitano
Last week, Attorney General William Barr released publicly a redacted version of Mueller's final report. That report concluded that notwithstanding 127 confirmed communications between the campaign and Russians from July 2015 to November 2016 (Trump said there were none), the government could not prove the existence of a conspiracy.
On obstruction, the report concluded that notwithstanding numerous obstructive events engaged in by the president personally, the special counsel would not charge the president and would leave the resolution of obstruction of justice to Congress. Congress, of course, cannot bring criminal charges, but it can impeach.
Trump initially claimed that he had been completely exonerated by Mueller -- even though the word "exoneration" and the concept of DOJ exoneration are alien to our legal system. Then, after he learned of the dozen or so documented events of obstruction described in the report, Trump used a barnyard epithet to describe it.
The Constitution prescribes treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors as the sole bases for impeachment. We know that obstruction of justice constitutes an impeachable offense under the "high crimes and misdemeanors" rubric because both presidents in the modern era who were subject to impeachment proceedings -- Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton -- were charged with obstructing justice.
Obstruction is a rare crime that is rarely completed. Stated differently, the obstructer need not succeed in order to be charged with obstruction. That's because the statute itself prohibits attempting to impede or interfere with any government proceeding for a corrupt or self-serving purpose.
Thus, if my neighbor tackles me on my way into a courthouse in order to impede a jury from hearing my testimony, and, though delayed, I still make it to the courthouse and testify, then the neighbor is guilty of obstruction because he attempted to impede the work of the jury that was waiting to hear me.
Mueller laid out at least a half-dozen crimes of obstruction committed by Trump -- from asking former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland to write an untruthful letter about the reason for Flynn's chat with Kislyak, to asking Corey Lewandowski and then-former White House Counse lDon McGahn to fire Mueller and McGahn to lie about it, to firing Comey to impede the FBI's investigations, to dangling a pardon in front of Michael Cohen to stay silent, to ordering his aides to hide and delete records.
The essence of obstruction is deception or diversion -- to prevent the government from finding the truth. To Mueller, the issue was not if Trump committed crimes of obstruction. Rather, it was if Trump could be charged successfully with those crimes.
Mueller knew that Barr would block an indictment of Trump because Barr has a personal view of obstruction at odds with the statute itself. Barr's view requires that the obstructer has done his obstructing in order to impede the investigation or prosecution of a crime that the obstructer himself has committed. Thus, in this narrow view, because Trump did not commit the crime of conspiracy with the Russians, it was legally impossible for Trump to have obstructed the FBI investigation of that crime.
The nearly universal view of law enforcement, however, is that the obstruction statute prohibits all attempted self-serving interference with government investigations or proceedings. Thus, as Georgetown Professor Neal Katyal recently pointed out, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted of obstruction for interfering with an investigation of his extramarital affair, even though the affair was lawful.
Famously, Martha Stewart was convicted of obstruction of an investigation into her alleged insider trading, even though the insider trading charges against her had been dismissed. And a federal appeals court recently upheld the obstruction conviction of a defendant who suborned perjury in order to impede the prosecution of the sister of a childhood friend.
On obstruction, Barr is wrong.
So, the dilemma for House Democrats now is whether to utilize Mueller's evidence of obstruction for impeachment. They know from history that impeachment only succeeds if there is a broad, national, bipartisan consensus behind it, no matter the weight of the evidence or presence of sophisticated legal theories.
They might try to generate that consensus by parading Mueller's witnesses to public hearings, as House Democrats did to Nixon. Yet, when House Republicans did that to Clinton, and then impeached him, they suffered politically.
The president's job is to enforce federal law. If he had ordered its violation to save innocent life or preserve human freedom, he would have a moral defense. But ordering obstruction to save himself from the consequences of his own behavior is unlawful, defenseless and condemnable.
The house of Representatives has the authority to investigate and if necessary to impeach the President.
Your ignorance is overwhelming.
Benghazi ring any bells.
Impeachment hearings
Nixon impeachment hearings.
You want a President who can do anything he wants, as long as wants as he is in Republican.
Roger is a bitter clinger.
Who the fuck told you this Roger?
the TDS has gotten so bad that the alky and all of his fellow imbecile travelers on the left are just making it up as they go along.
trump has kicked their asses since inauguration day and has shown no signs of slowing down any time soon.
every request the house has made of this administration has been met with "GO FUCK YOURSELF."
as it should be, since none of the requests have anything to do with oversight. they simply constitute harassment.
the 'orange man bad' tantrums will continue.
God help us all if trump wins reelection.
Joe Biden's already getting slammed by #Woketarians over his Instagram announcement.
Can you spot the offense?
No? How about I zoom up on the part of it containing the offense?
Can you spot it now?
This offense is so grave that, as you can see in the comments, one Democrat searches around for reasons to explain such a horrible thing and comes up with the excuse, "maybe the Russians started it?"
Do you see it yet?
No?
Well I didn't either.
My guess was that they were taking Biden's hand on Obama's shoulder to be "possessive" and "colonialist" or some bullshit?
But no, that's not it.
A friend had to explain it to me.
The "anti-racists" immediately saw the "N" on Obama, which was really just the last letter of Biden's name, and thought "N***er."
But you didn't see that, so you are a racist, and their brains all immediately filled with the all-caps word "N***ER," which means, see, they're not racists.
Gaslit enough yet?
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/381050.php
Na, nothing Trump did was obstruction.
This was obstruction.
Sanctuary court: Massachusetts judge charged with obstruction after helping illegal escape ICE
Federal prosecutors announced charges Thursday against a Massachusetts judge who assisted an illegal immigrant in escaping from her courtroom, according to court documents, thwarting the deportation officer who had been waiting to pick him up.
Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph, a state judge in Newton, Massachusetts, was heard on a court recording saying she wasn’t going to allow U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to grab the man.
She ordered the ICE officer out of her courtroom, then allowed the illegal immigrant to be taken out the back where he was released through another door, prosecutors said.
“This case is about the rule of law,” said U.S. Attorney Andrew E. Lelling, who said Judge Joseph intentionally interfered with the enforcement of a federal law. “We cannot pick and choose the federal laws we follow, or use our personal views to justify violating the law. Everyone in the justice system — not just judges, but law enforcement officers, prosecutors and defense counsel — should be held to a higher standard.”
Roger
Congress having an authority to do something, and claiming that the very reason the House was created was to "check the President" are two distinctly different things.
- One is a reasonable way of describing things as they are
- The other is an stupid (dead wrong) way of describing things
We all know which direction you will always go.
btw... Robert Mueller found no collusion and no coordination. So however the 127 contacts were described, none of them involved anyone from "Russia" that had anything to do with the election meddling.
There are a 150 million Russians Roger. Mueller indicted a few dozen of them. The other 149,999,950 or so had nothing to do with the election meddling.
All of those 127 contacts involved those 149,999,950 people who had nothing to do with the criminal actions. Nothing illegal or unethical or anything with people from this country talking to people from other countries.
But I guess you are "still" grasping for straws here.
Take it up with Napolitano.
The president's job is to enforce federal law. If he had ordered its violation to save innocent life or preserve human freedom, he would have a moral defense. But ordering obstruction to save himself from the consequences of his own behavior is unlawful, defenseless and condemnable.
You will stay by his side even if the point where he declares a National emergency on a corrupt election, because you can't remove a President who has created the best economy in history.
Coldheartpupprtry.com
Take it up with Napolitano.
Suddenly Roger, you are taking the word of a Fox Analyst over Robert Mueller?
I would have to check what Napolitano is looking at, but my best guess is that bulk of the 127 "contacts" were Paul Manafort talking to Konstantin Kilimnik, which in real life are two political consultants from Eastern Europe talking back and forth about political consulting things. Something they had no doubt been doing going back before Manafort worked for Trump.
But in the seedy world of assumption journalism, Kilimnik "had ties to the Kremlin" and these contacts were "proof of collusion".
So easy to be fooled, when you desperately want to be fooled.
Poor old out of favor and out of date Joe.
Huffington Post Top 5 stories all negative about Joe.
Roger is a quisling .
“Call me back when you do it.”
That's not a direct order?
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