US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1582

On June 26 2019 10:46 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

Have you seen this examination he's weathered? That is meritorious by itself. Also, check the edit I made 2 seconds before your previous 2 posts.

On June 26 2019 10:43 KwarK wrote:

The report: Does not exonerate
The summary: Does exonerate

Do you think it's strange that the report included the phrase "does not exonerate" and yet the summary led everyone to believe "does exonerate"? I think that's pretty odd. It's almost as if by reading the summary they got a completely untrue understanding of what was in the report.

Given that the report was released anyway it's also pretty strange that the mechanism Barr chose was to keep the contents secret from the public, give them to the White House press office so that they could prepare a response, release a summary that caused more questions than answers, and then eventually only release the report when forced to. That seems like an unusual way of handling it unless your goal is misrepresentation. But maybe Barr is just incompetent rather than malicious. My money would be on him being both though, that's the general pattern for the administration.

On June 26 2019 10:43 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
I tell you what. If I ever need a defense attorney, I'm calling xDaunt. This guy sticks by his shit no matter what. I can applaud you that much.

Edit: I should say that you'd get me acquitted on technicality. If this was wholly up to a court of purely public opinion, you'd have me fried.

On June 26 2019 10:59 xDaunt wrote:

Frankly, I'm not a good enough advocate to be a good defense attorney. My biggest weakness as a litigator is my ability to make bullshit arguments with a straight face. That so many of you think that this is a strength of mine just goes to show how poor your reads of me are.

On June 26 2019 10:57 xDaunt wrote:

Good lord, we're descending into clown territory now. Barr's letter literally cites the "does not exonerate" line from Mueller's report. Here, p. 3, last sentence of first paragraph.

I have 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. Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.

On June 26 2019 11:09 KwarK wrote:

It does say that Mueller does not exonerate Trump right before the bit where Barr exonerates Trump.

Mueller specifically cited the constitutional considerations as his reasoning for not recommending indictment and went on to say that he did not want the failure to recommend an indictment to be considered an exoneration because they were the result of the constitutional considerations, not the result of the evidence which showed that Trump did obstruct. Barr them summarized it by saying that the constitutional considerations were not applied and that the evidence did not show Trump obstructing justice.

You have to read the whole paragraph man. All the way to the end.

Mueller says "no indictment because constitution, no exoneration because that's not what the evidence showed"
Barr says "no indictment because that's not what the evidence showed"

Barr's summary is not an accurate summary of the report.

On June 26 2019 11:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
The issue I see liberals have with the Mueller-Barr dynamic is reconciling their devotion to process and the realization that the process is designed to avoid accountability and is irreparable as a result.

On June 26 2019 11:23 xDaunt wrote:

You just can't stop digging, huh?

Let's just recap how we got here for the sake of the audience who may be confused by how far out in left field you've gone. I pointed out that Barr's summary letter doesn't misrepresent Mueller's report. You say that it does, citing to the "does not exonerate" line from Mueller's report. I point out that Barr's letter has that very sentence in it. Now in this post, you acknowledge that Barr does have that line there, but seem to insist that Barr's letter still misrepresents Mueller's report because Barr then exonerates Trump by concluding that there's no chargeable crime. Quite candidly, I could be wrong about why you brought up Barr concluding that there's no chargeable crime because it's completely and obviously irrelevant to Barr's representations of the Mueller report.

Regardless, you have once again failed to show that Barr misrepresented Mueller's report in his summary letter. It's about time that you drop that argument. It should be quite obvious by now that it's utterly baseless.

On June 26 2019 11:34 xDaunt wrote:

The problem is that they relied upon a corrupt media to keep them informed of what’s been going on without taking the time to understand any of the material themselves, so now they are struggling with a catastrophic case of cognitive dissonance.

On June 26 2019 10:23 Doodsmack wrote:


Kind of surprising tbh. I'll bet he was threatened with a subpoena.

On June 26 2019 11:46 KwarK wrote:
What Mueller says is that the evidence is too great to exonerate Trump but that legally he cannot charge Trump. What Barr's summary says is that legally he could charge Trump but there isn't enough evidence.

I have no idea how you're twisting that into an accurate representation beyond your usual lying. You can't summarize something with the opposite conclusion of the full document.

On June 26 2019 12:10 xDaunt wrote:


The only person who might be lying is you, but I don't think you are because I genuinely don't believe that you understand Barr's letter and Mueller's report. So let me make it explicitly clear for you why Barr's letter does not misrepresent Mueller's report.

Mueller says (as it pertains to the obstruction charge) that while he does not conclude that a crime was committed, he also does not exonerate Trump. Barr's letter recites this conclusion and also discusses some of Mueller's reasoning. That's the part of Barr's letter that makes representations regarding Mueller's report. That part is 100% accurate. Barr's letter then says something new. Specifically, it says that Barr and Rosenstein have reviewed the evidence in Mueller's report and concluded that here is no chargeable crime and reached a decision not to charge. That sentence is not a representation of Mueller's report. It is an independent opinion. Let me show you the structure in terms a three year old can understand:

Mueller: I like vanilla ice cream.
Barr: Mueller says that he likes vanilla ice cream. I prefer chocolate ice cream.

Only the underlined sentence from Barr talking about Mueller's preferences is a representation of what Mueller said. The italicized sentence from Barr is an independent statement that is not a representation of what Mueller said. You are erroneously conflating the two.

So again, Barr's letter does not misrepresent Mueller's report. You just don't like the fact that Barr took the step of exonerating Trump when Mueller refused to explicitly do so despite implicitly doing so in his report. But we've already had that conversation before, and I doubt that you'll understand Mueller's sleight of hand any better now than you did before.

On June 26 2019 12:20 KwarK wrote:

When summarizing the "Trump did it" report you shouldn't include your own opinion of "Trump didn't do it" as part of your summary.

On June 26 2019 12:24 xDaunt wrote:

Yeah, except Mueller didn't write "Trump did it" or anything approximating it. Instead, Mueller declined to determine whether "Trump did it." I find it quite rich that you are so insistent that Barr misrepresented Mueller's report when you can't even accurately recite what's in either Mueller's report or Barr's letter.