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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Mueller frustrated with Barr over portrayal of findings
- What does that tell you?
Good timing, what with Barr testifying today.
Edited by speedyboris on May 1st 2019 at 10:15:05 AM
https://twitter.com/HouseJudiciary/status/1123584968960172033
Here's the letter Mueller wrote Barr.
Which summarized says, "You lied to the public. We're not friends anymore."
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Nope.
They were.
30 years.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on May 1st 2019 at 9:34:09 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.For those that don't want to use Twitter, the Washington Post also has it in PDF form
, as does Lawfare Blog.
Since we're now 3 years into our long national hangover (that needs to be a phrase), I think one of the big consequences of the Trump Presidency will be the fact that it is a Presidency where you have all of these power hungry Ambition Is Evil guys who pledged themselves to Trump wholeheartedly, got used up, and then You Have Outlived Your Usefulness.
The only person who has benefited consistently from Trump are Trump himself and maybe Mitch, except Cocaine Mitch himself has lost numerous policy proposals because of Trump's mercurial support (ACA for example).
Seriously, dozens of high level politicians and bureaucrats have had their careers destroyed for their loyalty to Trump.
You'd think more people would have picked up on this by now.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on May 1st 2019 at 12:01:39 PM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.It's almost enough to be a positive that so many career toadies and conservative dog whistlers have been wrecked.
A small positive to the darkness but a positive nonetheless.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on May 1st 2019 at 12:16:39 PM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.![]()
Please don't credit me: it's from either Noah or Colbert. I'm fairly sure it's Noah.
The kind used by Dastardly Whiplash?
Edited by Oruka on May 1st 2019 at 12:29:20 PM
The big consequence for this I foresee is the fact that if Trump loses the next election this is going to have a major consequence for the GOP as a whole. They embraced becoming not only the Tea Party but the Alt-Right to keep up with their President but it has resulted in numerous mass firings and a cult of personality from Trumpeteers that applies to no other policitians in their ranks.
It will get ugly and may result in a complete meltdown.
But I can't speculate the likely effects.
Oh, Fox News is in trouble. Its constant hate spewing has put them in-between a rock and a hard place. They must please Donald Trump but their advertisers are leaving in droves.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.RE: Barr's testimony, The Guardian is updating with brief snippets/summaries
for those interested.
And good God the gall with the last exchange (emphasis added):
Barr confirmed that notes were taken on the conversation, and Blumenthal asked if the committee could have them. Barr said no. “Why should you have them?” he said.
He gave his assessment of Mueller’s letter: “The letter’s a bit snitty, and I think it was probably written by one of his staff people.”
Just... wow.
Edited by ironballs16 on May 1st 2019 at 4:20:54 AM
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"Good. That's exactly what they need. The party needs to completely collapse before a new Republican Party can replace them (probably a party drawing heavily on those Democrats and ex-Republicans who aren't on board with Warren, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez).
From the WTF Just Happened feed:
William Barr is now openly defying Congress, refusing to testify under subpoena tomorrow.
The House has threatened to hold Barr in Contempt of Congress if he tries to pull this shit, so we may soon see the House's Sergeant-at-Arms walking into the Department of Justice offices to arrest the Attorney General.
Shit might be about to get wild.
Edited by TobiasDrake on May 1st 2019 at 4:35:19 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.From the NTY about the Mueller Letter:
But on March 27, three days after Attorney General William Barr cleared President Trump of criminal wrongdoing in a misleading and incomplete summary of Mr. Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation, the special counsel felt compelled to protest. In a letter made public on Wednesday, just as Mr. Barr was preparing to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the American public got its first glimpse of how the special counsel thinks and speaks about his work.
Mr. Mueller’s tone and tenor are remarkable — and a sharp rebuke to Mr. Barr.
“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions,” Mr. Mueller wrote in a letter addressed to Mr. Barr, whose characterizations of Mr. Mueller’s investigation have also come under fire by members of the special counsel’s team.
The special counsel notes in his letter that just a day after Mr. Barr’s effort to spin the findings of the investigation (which Mr. Trump crowed was a “Complete and Total EXONERATION”), Mr. Mueller raised “concern” about all the confusion and misreporting that the attorney general had caused.
“There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation,” Mr. Mueller wrote. “This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”
(Mr. Barr referred in his testimony to Mr. Mueller’s letter as “a bit snitty,” and suggested it had been written by an underling.)
For an institutionalist like Mr. Mueller, who never once spoke up to defend himself or his work from relentless attacks from the president and his Republican allies, the letter is an unusual (and welcome) breach of protocol. It is rare for a senior Department of Justice official to so sharply criticize the attorney general in a written communication that would soon be made public.
Clearly, Mr. Mueller deemed it necessary. Beginning in early March, he and Mr. Barr were in close contact and seemed to have reached a gentlemen’s agreement about the timely public release of the special counsel’s findings without compromising grand jury material, intelligence sources and methods or current criminal investigations.
Mr. Mueller noted that he had prepared detailed and accurate summaries of the two volumes of the report, one on contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, the second on potential obstruction of justice.
“Accordingly, the enclosed documents are in a form that can be released to the public consistent with legal requirements and Department policies,” Mr. Mueller wrote. “I am requesting that you provide these materials to Congress and authorize their public release at this time.”
At this time. In late March, the special counsel wanted the crux of his findings delivered to the American public immediately, to clear up the misconceptions Mr. Barr had left with his four-page summary letter to Congress. Instead, Mr. Barr took another three weeks to release the summaries and the full report, saying he needed to go through it line by line to redact any privileged material.
In congressional testimony on Wednesday, Mr. Barr justified the delay by saying he didn’t want to release the report “piecemeal,” and said that Mr. Mueller’s summaries were “underinclusive.” He asserted that the report became his responsibility after the special counsel submitted it, which is true in a formalistic sense: The regulations governing Mr. Mueller’s work call for a “confidential” report to the attorney general at the conclusion of the inquiry, which the attorney general may then release if he determined it “would be in the public interest.”
That Mr. Mueller quoted from this regulatory language in his letter to Mr. Barr shows that he cares about rules, perhaps to a fault. But it also shows that Mr. Mueller sensed the urgency of his conclusions — and that he couldn’t sit idly by as the chief legal officer of the United States actively undermined them.

Oh I remember that one: apparently her throwing staplers on her staff is fairly common.
There's probably even worse stories from where that came from, really.
Edit: For the people just joining us, this page-topper refers to Klobuchar and her poor treatment of her staff.
Edited by HailMuffins on May 1st 2019 at 9:28:01 AM