First Thoughts on the Mueller Report

I find it significant that there are, by my count, 10 redactions in the Report's Table of Contents alone.  (Haven't counted those in the body of the document yet.)  Most of the items blacked out were categorized as HOM, or Harmful to Ongoing Matters.  In other words, even knowing, via the Table of Contents, more specifically what these items were might be harmful to ongoing investigations.

Working our way through the Table, from beginning to end, we find redactions associated with:

• The Trump Campaign and the Dissemination of Hacked Materials - two such items in this category
• Russian Hacking and Dumping Operations - two more such items in this group
• WikiLeaks - four redactions here
• Application of Evidence to Certain Individuals - two final HOMs

That's just the Table of Contents.  But the bombshells aren't far behind.  In the first two  paragraphs of page 9, the legal basis for the Mueller investigation and Report, as well as the initial conclusions of those, are stated quite clearly.  The Russians tried to bollix up the 2016 Presidential election.

To quote the Report:

The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.  Evidence of Russian government operations began to surface in mid-2016.   ...   a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Only page 9, and it already sounds dire for the Trump campaign.

Next post - a discussin, from the Report, of the much-bandied-about word collusion.

It's Not Light Reading

The full text of Robert Mueller's report is available here.  Short of blinding headaches, I hope to read the whole thing.  It's a PDF, a tad short of 450 pages.  So far, the redactions I've seen are quite light.

Pages 9 through 11 inclusive are an introduction to the report as a whole.  Substantive material, albeit in the form of an "executive summary", begins on page 12.

The Mueller Report

It's going to take me days, if not weeks, to absorb and understand what the Report tells us.  I imagine it's tbe the same for all of you.

So, for the short-term foreseeable future, I'll discuss only one point a day, gleaned from the report, and give you my thoughts on what the point portends - for the Trump Administration, for the Congress, and for us as participants in our democracy.

Back atcha with the first installment tomorrow.

What I'd Give to Be That Quick!

At one of his two campaign events in Iowa on Tuesday, South Bend Indiana Mayor, and Presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg let his light shine.

Buttigieg is openly gay; he's talked about that, and his Episcopalian faith, before. In Iowa yesterday, Mayor Pete was heckled by a group of folks who've been in effect tracking him on his campaign.  These are non-Iowans who object to Buttigieg's sexual orientation and choice of lifestyle.

 

Smoothly and with both humor and grace, Buttigieg tried to break up the heckling without attacking the hecklers.  He acknowledged that the men in question had the right to voice their opinion.

 

Then came the humor.  Mayor Pete told the crowd The good news is, the condition of my soul is in the hands of God but the Iowa Caucuses are up to you,

 

I'm With Tribe

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe tweeted yesterday, in response to Donald Trump's practice of intimidation-by-tweet, and in particular to Trump's use of that tactic against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D - Minnesota).

Professor Tribe called Mr. Trump a reckless fomenter.  I couldn't agree more.

Conspiracy Theories and the Mueller Report

I'm reading a book  called Conspiracy Theories , by the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein.  In it, Sunstein tries to explain why folks gravitate toward such ideas.  Among his categories of reasons:

• informational (AKA it sounds sensible)
• reputation-driven (AKA someone hears the theory from someone in whom they believe)
• political (AKA someone in the public eye exploits an unanticipated event)
• emotional (AKA an unanticipated event touches soon-to-be-adherents deeply)

Sunstein's categories lead me to wonder which the Trumpies will use on Thursday, to counteract the much-redacted-but-possibly-still-revealing Mueller Report.

My guess?  They'll  use them all.  Over and over.

Live-Streaming Hate

In an appearance today on MSNBC. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D - PA 5th) related something very disturbing.  Scanlon, vice-chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said a hearing on hate crimes in that Committee was live-streamed on several platforms, most prominent among them YouTube, and that the streaming resulted in responses so objectionable, obscene, offensive, reprehensible, and  depraved,
that even Merriam-Webster's Thesaurus didn't have enough words to describe them.

As a result, the comments section was taken down.  After which the streaming was moved to a site sponsored by the far right.  Which resulted in more than one instance of this tail-chasing exercise.

You get the drift.  What are we coming to as a society?