US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1411

After the Special Counsel submitted the confidential report on March 22, I determined that
it was in the public interest for the Department to announce the investigation’s bottom-line
conclusions—that is, the determination whether a provable crime has been committed or not. I
did so in my March 24 letter. I did not believe that it was in the public interest to release additional
portions of the report in piecemeal fashion, leading to public debate over incomplete information.
My main focus was the prompt release of a public version of the report so that Congress and the
American people could read it for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

The Department’s principal responsibility in conducting this investigation was to
determine whether the conduct reviewed constituted a crime that the Department could prove
beyond a reasonable doubt. As Attorney General, I serve as the chief law-enforcement officer of
the United States, and it is my responsibility to ensure that the Department carries out its law enforcement functions appropriately. The Special Counsel’s investigation was no exception. The
Special Counsel was, after all, a federal prosecutor in the Department of Justice charged with
making prosecution or declination decisions.
The role of the federal prosecutor and the purpose of a criminal investigation are well defined. Federal prosecutors work with grand juries to collect evidence to determine whether a
crime has been committed. Once a prosecutor has exhausted his investigation into the facts of a
case, he or she faces a binary choice: either to commence or to decline prosecution. To commence
prosecution, the prosecutor must apply the principles of federal prosecution and conclude both that
the conduct at issue constitutes a federal offense and that the admissible evidence would probably
be sufficient to obtain and sustain a guilty verdict by an unbiased trier of fact. These principles
govern the conduct of all prosecutions by the Department and are codified in the Justice Manual.
The appointment of a Special Counsel and the investigation of the conduct of the President
of the United States do not change these rules. To the contrary, they make it all the more important
for the Department to follow them. The appointment of a Special Counsel calls for particular care
since it poses the risk of what Attorney General Robert Jackson called “the most dangerous power
of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that
need to be prosecuted.” By definition, a Special Counsel is charged with investigating particular
potential crimes, not all potential crimes wherever they may be found. Including a democratically
elected politician as a subject in a criminal investigation likewise calls for special care. As
Attorney General Jackson admonished his United States Attorneys, politically sensitive cases
demand that federal prosecutors be “dispassionate and courageous” in order to “protect the spirit
as well as the letter of our civil liberties.”

The core civil liberty that underpins our American criminal justice system is the
presumption of innocence. Every person enjoys this presumption long before the commencement
of any investigation or official proceeding. A federal prosecutor’s task is to decide whether the
admissible evidence is sufficient to overcome that presumption and establish guilt beyond a
reasonable doubt. If so, he seeks an indictment; if not, he does not. The Special Counsel’s report
demonstrates that there are many subsidiary considerations informing that prosecutorial
judgment—including whether particular legal theories would extend to the facts of the case and
whether the evidence is sufficient to prove one or another element of a crime. But at the end of
the day, the federal prosecutor must decide yes or no. That is what I sought to address in my
March 24 letter.

In Volume II of the report, the Special Counsel considered whether certain actions of the
President could amount to obstruction of justice. The Special Counsel decided not to reach a
conclusion, however, about whether the President committed an obstruction offense. Instead, the
report recounts ten episodes and discusses potential legal theories for connecting the President’s
actions to the elements of an obstruction offense. After carefully reviewing the facts and legal
theories outlined in the report, and in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other
Department lawyers, the Deputy Attorney General and I concluded that, under the principles of
federal prosecution, the evidence developed by the Special Counsel would not be sufficient to
charge the President with an obstruction-of-justice offense.
The Deputy Attorney General and I knew that we had to make this assessment because, as
I previously explained, the prosecutorial judgment whether a crime has been established is an
integral part of the Department’s criminal process. The Special Counsel regulations provide for
the report to remain confidential. Given the extraordinary public interest in this investigation,
however, I determined that it was necessary to make as much of it public as I could and committed
the Department to being as transparent as possible. But it would not have been appropriate for me
simply to release Volume II of the report without making a prosecutorial judgment.
The Deputy Attorney General and I therefore conducted a careful review of the report,
looking at the facts found and the legal theories set forth by the Special Counsel. Although we
disagreed with some of the Special Counsel’s legal theories and felt that some of the episodes
examined did not amount to obstruction as a matter of law, we accepted the Special Counsel’s
legal framework for purposes of our analysis and evaluated the evidence as presented by the
Special Counsel in reaching our conclusion. We concluded that the evidence developed during
the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an
obstruction-of-justice offense.
*

On May 01 2019 13:49 JimmiC wrote:



Exactly what I expected. Goodnight GH. Here is hoping we return to talking about US politics tomorrow.

On May 01 2019 18:58 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
Barr is not going to have a fun day tomorrow after lying to congress before. I'm sure the defense will be 'he could never know Muellers true feelings' or something like that but he should have been able to mention the disagreeing letter and phone call he got from Mueller when asked if Mueller supported his conclusions.

https://twitter.com/ChrisVanHollen/status/1123411712672190464

On May 01 2019 18:58 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
Barr is not going to have a fun day tomorrow after lying to congress before. I'm sure the defense will be 'he could never know Muellers true feelings' or something like that but he should have been able to mention the disagreeing letter and phone call he got from Mueller when asked if Mueller supported his conclusions.

https://twitter.com/ChrisVanHollen/status/1123411712672190464

On May 01 2019 18:58 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
Barr is not going to have a fun day tomorrow after lying to congress before. I'm sure the defense will be 'he could never know Muellers true feelings' or something like that but he should have been able to mention the disagreeing letter and phone call he got from Mueller when asked if Mueller supported his conclusions.

https://twitter.com/ChrisVanHollen/status/1123411712672190464

On May 01 2019 19:52 brian wrote:


i was already going to post that Barr testifying to congress is pointless, if he’s willing to shill for Trump to the entire country twice, there’s no reason he won’t do it a third time.

in the immortal words of all our republican friends, a man who has previously been shown to lie under oath has no credibility. at this point having him testify is just a disgrace to conngress.

Abrams is widely remembered in Central America, but particularly from his time in the Reagan administration, when he tried to whitewash a massacre of a thousand men, women and children by US-funded death squads in El Salvador, when he was assistant secretary of state for human rights.

He shrugged off the reports as communist propaganda, and insisted: “The administration’s record in El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement.”

Abrams also helped organise the covert financing of Contra rebels in Nicaragua behind the back of Congress, which had cut off funding. He then lied to Congress about his role, twice. He pleaded guilty to both counts in 1991 but was pardoned by George HW Bush.

had been treated unfairly.

On May 01 2019 18:58 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
Barr is not going to have a fun day tomorrow after lying to congress before. I'm sure the defense will be 'he could never know Muellers true feelings' or something like that but he should have been able to mention the disagreeing letter and phone call he got from Mueller when asked if Mueller supported his conclusions.

https://twitter.com/ChrisVanHollen/status/1123411712672190464

On May 01 2019 22:07 xDaunt wrote:

I hope Democrats do push this line of thought today because Barr will make them look like fools. Mueller’s objection wasn’t to Barr’s conclusion not to prosecute. It was to how Barr’s summary letter impacted media coverage of the investigation.

On May 01 2019 22:12 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:

That's the DoJ spokesmans defense

but

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
There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. 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.”

is not about the media but about the shitty summary.

On May 01 2019 22:40 xDaunt wrote:
This really isn’t that hard. If Mueller disagreed with the decision to prosecution not to prosecute or with Barr’s reasoning for not to prosecute, he would have stated as such in his report. We don’t have to guess anything. Regardless, van Hollen either has no idea what he is talking about, or he is lying about what has happened.

On May 01 2019 22:43 Gorsameth wrote:
How can Mueller complain in his report about Barr's decision not to prosecute based on the same report?
Is he a time traveller?

On May 01 2019 22:46 xDaunt wrote:

My point is that Mueller can’t disagree based upon what is and what isn’t in his report. Mueller himself declined to prosecute. And keep in mind that his report was issued after multiple conversations with Barr about its contents and conclusions.

On May 01 2019 22:43 Gorsameth wrote:
How can Mueller complain in his report about Barr's decision not to prosecute based on the same report?
Is he a time traveller?