Underreported Odds and Ends from the Mueller Report

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | April 19, 2019 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | April 19, 2019 |

Good morning. Here are some less covered odds and ends from the Mueller Report:

— Check out the front page of the NYTimes today.

Here’s the front page of The Washington Post today.

Historic front page of Friday's Washington Post: Mueller details Russian interference, Trump's attempts to disrupt probe. pic.twitter.com/UZ4ZOusKKd

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) April 19, 2019

Here’s what the home page of Fox News looks like.

Credit to The NYTimes and The Post for getting it right. Fox News is talking about sass. Fox News is a joke. No offense, but your Fox News friends and relatives are a joke for watching Fox News. They are willfully stupid.

Did you know that James Murdoch — Rupert’s son, who sits on the Board of Directors of News Corp — maxed his political contribution to Mayor Pete? Somehow, that makes me even angrier: An obscenely wealthy liberal is exploiting white nationalism and the nation’s stupidity to prop up a corrupt President, but hey! He gave $3500 to Mayor Pete.

— I said exactly this thing yesterday on Slack.

this is a good take from @mattapuzzo and @adamgoldmanNYT https://t.co/lSEUXxY3ak pic.twitter.com/cYmMHuiKZw

— Eli Yokley (@eyokley) April 19, 2019

I’m not so sure anymore, though. If we’d have received it all at once, Americans would have fixated on one or two things and ignored the rest of it, because it would have been too overwhelming. Ninety percent of the revelations would have been lost.

Speaking of, there are still a few revelations from The Report that are noteworthy but buried beneath the avalanche of other news.

— The Russian disinformation campaign was hugely effective. At least 70 U.S. newspapers quoted Russian bots in their election stories.

— The Trump Tower meeting was not the only meeting in which the Russians offered dirt on Hillary Clinton. There was a second meeting mentioned in the Mueller Report, but it was redacted because it’s still under investigation.

— Maybe the Trump campaign didn’t “conspire” or “coordinate” with the Russians, but they bloody well had advance knowledge of the Wikileaks dumps.

— From The Daily Beast: “Julian Assange not only knew that a murdered Democratic National Committee staffer wasn’t his source for thousands of hacked party emails, he was in active contact with his real sources in Russia’s GRU months after Seth Rich’s death. At the same time he was publicly working to shift blame onto the slain staffer “to obscure the source of the materials he was releasing.”

And don’t forget who was helping him: Sean Hannity.

— This footnote basically suggests that Trump can (and should) face criminal liability for his actions after he leaves office.

#AlwaysReadTheFootnotes

MUELLER, p. 390, footnote 1991: "A possible remedy through impeachment for abuses of power would not substitute for potential criminal liability after a President leaves office." pic.twitter.com/dw5IiEsOmA

— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) April 18, 2019

— Yeah. This.

After reading much of the obstruction section, I'm convinced that Trump's lawyers need their own lawyers.

— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) April 18, 2019

— Meanwhile, here’s Sarah Sanders trying to … spin her lies. At least she agreed to appear somewhere other than Fox News. I dare the President to do the same.

“That’s not a slip of the tongue Sarah, that’s a deliberate false statement.”@GStephanopoulos presses @PressSec Sarah Sanders on the culture of lying, exposed by the #MuellerReport, in the White House. https://t.co/wBBIUQ2Xfo pic.twitter.com/d5A4MOgqi1

— Good Morning America (@GMA) April 19, 2019

— It kind of got lost in the rest of the day’s news, but we should not overlook the fact that, ahead of the Report’s release, William Barr basically justified Trump’s obstruction of justice by saying that it was OK, because he was angry because he was being investigated for a crime he didn’t commit. Uh, that is not a legal argument.