Back in 2017 the story broke that Trump and his goons tried to get damaging information on Hillary Clinton from a Russian government official. The emails were clear solicitation of foreign interference with a presidential election. You know, the whole “if it is what you say, we love it” thing, which must be illegal.
Now he’s getting indicted for some of the other blatantly illegal things he did while president. So what’s going on with that one?
I get that there were probably hundreds of illegal things he did, and some will never get prosecuted, but this seemed like one of the worst, and most red-handed of them all.
Is it just being forgotten or did I miss something?
Report concluded that there might have been illegal activity, but he doesn’t have authority to do anything about it, so he referred his findings and those that had power to do anything about it didn’t.
Full report: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5955118-The-Mueller-Report
And one of the main people who put an end to it was then-Attorney General William Barr. He basically said “Mueller says Trump didn’t obstruct” when Mueller’s actual report basically said he can’t say for certain either way (obstruct or not) and provided a mountain of evidence that could be seen as obstruction. Most legal professionals see Mueller’s report as “we can’t say he’s guilty without charging and convicting, so we’re just going to say the door’s open and hand over the evidence.” Barr’s interpretation was complete bullshit.
The other giant elephant in the room is charging a sitting president with a crime. It’s never been tested in the US whether it can actually happen or not, but there are a lot of strong arguments against. The damage that can do to a country is extreme… I see it as a matter of absolute last resort. One that’s more likely to come after impeachment and removal unless absolutely necessary. And that’s one ugly situation that’s basically showing complete dysfunction to the world.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/20/1118625157/doj-barr-trump-russia-investigation-memo
To be fair, complete dysfunction isn’t new. Absolutely nobody in the world would be surprised, the whole US government has shut down at times because of squabbling about the budget.
The system works
His boys were essentially found “too dumb to crime” because of a weird requirement of knowing that it was illegal to ask for it, also, they didn’t assign monetary value to the potential info, so it wasn’t a crime…
I think the gist is Mueller investigated Trump and the shady Russia stuff and had enough to charge him with obstruction but did not due to DOJ policy (to not charge a sitting president). He laid out a plan for congress to do something about it, congress impeached but the GOP controlled Senate blocked it.
So I guess some of that could be dug up? But there are bigger fish to fry now, considering the current indictments.
Congress did not impeach based on the mueller report.
Congress impeached because of the IG report based on the NSC whistleblower report of the Zelenskyy call, where Trump attempted to blackmail the president of Ukraine to do him a favor in exchange for him approving the sale of a shipment of javelin missiles.
And then again because he led an insurrection against the government he was leading to prevent peaceful transition of power on January 6.
But not because of the Mueller report.
You’re right that the DOJ didn’t charge him (as sitting president) from Mueller’s report, but he was not impeached for that matter. The impeachments were for 1) soliciting foreign interference, and obstruction and 2) incitement of insurrection.
It was Trump Jr and Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager.
Robert Mueller investigated the incident for the Justice dept. He concluded Jr. was to dumb to know what he was doing. This isn’t plausible because he had Manafort advising him.
They called someone during the meeting, probably Donnie Sr, but it hasn’t been proved.
Manafort was convicted on charges but I don’t think they were related to this incident.
Mueller obviously intended to never prosecute anyone in the Trump family.
presumably the russian spy was found with bullet holes in his head at the bottom of a staircase. natural causes gets everyone, in the end.
Why you brin’ing up old shit?
That’s the most bizarre spelling of ‘bringing’ I’ve ever seen.
Pretty much because all these indictments are also bringing up stuff that happened a few years ago. It’s clear that it just takes that long to do the whole process, and maybe they had to wait until after he was president anyway. So I started thinking about all the other shit he did, and this one stood out as one of the worst.
If you don’t brine your old shit it goes off.
