The Mueller Report thread

[SunsetBengal]

(04-11-2019, 11:41 AM)GMDino Wrote: Do you have a citation for that?

I didn't see where that offer was made.

https://www.businessinsider.com/nancy-pelosi-to-reject-classified-briefing-on-mueller-report-russia-investigation-2019-3

Quote:House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Saturday that she would reject any attempts by the Justice Department to provide a highly classified briefing on special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation to congressional leaders.

[Belsnickel]

(04-11-2019, 11:53 AM)SunsetBengal Wrote: https://www.businessinsider.com/nancy-pelosi-to-reject-classified-briefing-on-mueller-report-russia-investigation-2019-3

Receiving a classified briefing is not the same as being able to read the full, unredacted report.

[SunsetBengal]

(04-11-2019, 11:18 AM)jj22 Wrote: Did any of them call for the full release of the Mueller report?

Or were they content to keep Trumps exoneration secret even after the grand jury lie was exposed?

Asking for a friend who missed listening.

What lie would that be?

https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2019/04/05/judges-have-no-inherent-power-to-disclose-grand-jury-records-dc-circuit/?cmp=share_twitter

[jj22]

That it had to be redacted because of Grand Jury testimony.

The justice department can make a request. Barr testified a couple days ago he wasn't going to do that.

https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2019/04/09/ag-barr-no-plans-to-ask-court-to-release-grand-jury-info-in-mueller-report/?slreturn=20190311111643

Quote:Rep. Ed Case, D-Hawaii, questioned Barr on whether he intends to directly ask a federal judge to make sensitive information in Mueller’s report public. Although Barr has said it would be illegal to release grand jury material, he could ask the judge presiding over Mueller’s grand jury—Chief Judge Beryl Howell of Washington’s federal trial court—to permit the release.

FYI. Not accusing you of lying. Just the overall talking appoint being spread by Republicans etc.

[GMDino]

(04-11-2019, 11:53 AM)SunsetBengal Wrote: https://www.businessinsider.com/nancy-pelosi-to-reject-classified-briefing-on-mueller-report-russia-investigation-2019-3

(04-11-2019, 11:58 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Receiving a classified briefing is not the same as being able to read the full, unredacted report.

Yep.  

[Bengalzona]

(04-11-2019, 06:58 AM)GMDino Wrote: Was that during Iran-Contra or now?  

That was yesterday, not long after he forwarded instructions from Trump for Border agents to break existing laws (instructions which they promptly and properly ignored).

[Dill]

(04-11-2019, 06:58 AM)GMDino Wrote: GMDinoB-zona:"I feel I have an obligation to make sure government power is not abused." ~ William Barr with his best stab at irony.

Was that during Iran-Contra or now?  

  rep for each of you guys.

[Belsnickel]

(04-11-2019, 12:01 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: What lie would that be?

https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2019/04/05/judges-have-no-inherent-power-to-disclose-grand-jury-records-dc-circuit/?cmp=share_twitter

(04-11-2019, 12:15 PM)jj22 Wrote: That it had to be redacted because of Grand Jury testimony.

The justice department can make a request. Barr testified a couple days ago he wasn't going to do that.

https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2019/04/09/ag-barr-no-plans-to-ask-court-to-release-grand-jury-info-in-mueller-report/?slreturn=20190311111643


FYI. Not accusing you of lying. Just the overall talking appoint being spread by Republicans etc.

Okay, hold up. The idea that Barr could/should seek that exception is not a good one, and whether the exception would be carved out by the courts is a big question as well. However, the report with the GJ information unredacted could be given to certain committee chairs in Congress without any sort of judicial order by law. So it is a lie that the information can't be seen in full by some in Congress, but Barr honestly shouldn't seek that exception because the information should remain redacted for a number of reasons.

[GMDino]

(04-11-2019, 01:06 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Okay, hold up. The idea that Barr could/should seek that exception is not a good one, and whether the exception would be carved out by the courts is a big question as well. However, the report with the GJ information unredacted could be given to certain committee chairs in Congress without any sort of judicial order by law. So it is a lie that the information can't be seen in full by some in Congress, but Barr honestly shouldn't seek that exception because the information should remain redacted for a number of reasons.

I was wondering on the way to work this morning who would have the clearances to see the unredacted report. 

Jared and Ivanka? 

All seriousness aside I don't think Barr must turn it over (legally) but should.  I doubt that happens without a court battle though.

[*bfine32*]

I've said from Jump that A fully vetted/qualified member chosen by the Left should be granted full access to the unredacted report. Just don't picj Spartacus.

WTS, many folks in this thread have 0 issue with making themselves look biased beyond reason.

[*michaelsean*]

(04-11-2019, 01:14 PM)GMDino Wrote: I was wondering on the way to work this morning who would have the clearances to see the unredacted report. 

Jared and Ivanka? 

All seriousness aside I don't think Barr must turn it over (legally) but should.  I doubt that happens without a court battle though.

As far as grand jury I believe the heads of the intelligence committees can see it.  Also anyone who can assist Barr in the pursuit of criminal cases.  So investigative agencies or prosecutors.  

Then you have the classified information.  I would guess but don't know that perhaps some Russian assets were used.  I would think very very few people can see that.

[Bengalzona]

(04-11-2019, 01:45 PM)michaelsean Wrote: As far as grand jury I believe the heads of the intelligence committees can see it.  Also anyone who can assist Barr in the pursuit of criminal cases.  So investigative agencies or prosecutors.  

Then you have the classified information.  I would guess but don't know that perhaps some Russian assets were used.  I would think very very few people can see that.

If they are on the intelligence committee, they have clearance to see everything. They just need to establish a "need to know" to justify access.

[jj22]

(04-11-2019, 01:06 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Okay, hold up. The idea that Barr could/should seek that exception is not a good one, and whether the exception would be carved out by the courts is a big question as well. However, the report with the GJ information unredacted could be given to certain committee chairs in Congress without any sort of judicial order by law. So it is a lie that the information can't be seen in full by some in Congress, but Barr honestly shouldn't seek that exception because the information should remain redacted for a number of reasons.

All I can say (again) is this is the most detailed and elaborate Hoax/Witch hunt I've ever seen. Too bad no one will get the chance to see how we got to this point, and too bad those who were responsible for it seem to be the only ones who want it exposed in full.

[GMDino]

(04-11-2019, 08:38 AM)GMDino Wrote: Now we'll see how the right feels about these charges.  

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/10/politics/greg-craig-mueller-investigation/index.html

Lawyers expect ex-Obama counsel to be indicted in case linked to Mueller probe

The leader has spoken!

President Obama’s top White House lawyer, Gregory B. Craig, was indicted yesterday on very serious charges. This is a really big story, but the Fake News New York Times didn’t even put it on page one, rather page 16. @washingtonpost not much better, “tiny” page one. Corrupt News!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2019

 

[jj22]

https://www.justsecurity.org/63635/barrs-playbook-he-misled-congress-when-omitting-parts-of-justice-dept-memo-in-1989/

Quote:On Friday the thirteenth October 1989, by happenstance the same day as the “Black Friday” market crash, news leaked of a legal memo authored by William Barr. He was then serving as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It is highly uncommon for any OLC memo to make headlines. This one did because it was issued in “unusual secrecy” and concluded that the FBI could forcibly abduct people in other countries without the consent of the foreign state. The headline also noted the implication of the legal opinion at that moment in time. It appeared to pave the way for abducting Panama’s leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega.

Members of Congress asked to see the full legal opinion. Barr refused, but said he would provide an account that “summarizes the principal conclusions.” Sound familiar? In March 2019, when Attorney General Barr was handed Robert Mueller’s final report, he wrote that he would “summarize the principal conclusions” of the special counsel’s report for the public.

When Barr withheld the full OLC opinion in 1989 and said to trust his summary of the principal conclusions, Yale law school professor Harold Koh wrote that Barr’s position was “particularly egregious.” Congress also had no appetite for Barr’s stance, and eventually issued a subpoena to successfully wrench the full OLC opinion out of the Department.

What’s different from that struggle and the current struggle over the Mueller report is that we know how the one in 1989 eventually turned out.

[GMDino]

I don't remember if there is a thread about the request to see DJT's taxes so I'll leave this here in the investigations threadhead.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/14/politics/sarah-sanders-trump-tax-returns-democrats/index.html

Quote:White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Sunday that she doesn't think congressional Democrats are "smart enough" to review President Donald Trump's tax returns should they succeed in obtaining the documents.


"This is a dangerous, dangerous road and frankly, Chris, I don't think Congress, particularly not this group of congressmen and women, are smart enough to look through the thousands of pages that I would assume that President Trump's taxes will be," Sanders told "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace.


"My guess is most of them don't do their own taxes, and I certainly don't trust them to look through the decades of success that the President has and determine anything," she said, adding that attempts to obtain the returns are "a disgusting overreach."


[/url]
[url=https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/13/politics/trump-tax-returns-house-letter-irs/index.html]House committee sends new letter to IRS demanding Trump's tax returns


Earlier this month, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal formally requested Trump's tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service, citing IRS code 6103, a 1920s-era tax statute that was little known until recently. The law states that three people: the House Ways and Means chairman, the head of the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Chairman of Senate Finance can ask for anyone's personal tax information for their committee's use. He made a second request on Saturday.



While Neal has argued that the committee needs Trump's tax information in order to conduct oversight of the Presidential audit program, a program that is not enshrined in law, but instead has become a routine procedure at the IRS that when a new President comes into office, Sanders is arguing that the committee's use of the statute "has nothing to do with whether or not they're going to determine policy."



"This is all about political partisanship," she told Wallace.

Neal's office did not immediately respond to CNN's request for comment on Sanders' Sunday statements.



In the letter sent Saturday by Neal to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, the chairman writes that he believes his committee is well within its rights to see the President's tax returns and that he expects a decision from the IRS by 5 p.m. on April 23.

President Windmill Cancer has his spokesperson out there saying OTHERS aren't smart enough to understand Trump's taxes.

What a world.

[Dill]

This probably deserves its own thread, but I'll put it here.

Barr’s Playbook: He Misled Congress When Omitting Parts of Justice Dep’t Memo in 1989
https://www.justsecurity.org/63635/barrs-playbook-he-misled-congress-when-omitting-parts-of-justice-dept-memo-in-1989/

On Friday the thirteenth October 1989, by happenstance the same day as the “Black Friday” market crash, news leaked of a legal memo authored by William Barr. He was then serving as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It is highly uncommon for any OLC memo to make headlines. This one did because it was issued in “unusual secrecy” and concluded that the FBI could forcibly abduct people in other countries without the consent of the foreign state. The headline also noted the implication of the legal opinion at that moment in time. It appeared to pave the way for abducting Panama’s leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega.

Members of Congress asked to see the full legal opinion. Barr refused, but said he would provide an account that “summarizes the principal conclusions.” Sound familiar? In March 2019, when Attorney General Barr was handed Robert Mueller’s final report, he wrote that he would “summarize the principal conclusions” of the special counsel’s report for the public.

When Barr withheld the full OLC opinion in 1989 and said to trust his summary of the principal conclusions, Yale law school professor Harold Koh wrote that Barr’s position was “particularly egregious.” Congress also had no appetite for Barr’s stance, and eventually issued a subpoena to successfully wrench the full OLC opinion out of the Department.

What’s different from that struggle and the current struggle over the Mueller report is that we know how the one in 1989 eventually turned out.

When the OLC opinion was finally made public long after Barr left office, it was clear that Barr’s summary had failed to fully disclose the opinion’s principal conclusions. It is better to think of Barr’s summary as a redacted version of the full OLC opinion. That’s because the “summary” took the form of 13 pages of written testimony. The document was replete with quotations from court cases, legal citations, and the language of the OLC opinion itself. Despite its highly detailed analysis, this 13-page version omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion. And there was evidently no justifiable reason for having withheld those parts from Congress or the public.

[Dill]

RE: post # 437 above, here is what was missing from the '89 memo that Barr "summarized" for Congress.

Omission 1: President’s authority to violate the U.N. Charter

Isikoff was drawn to a major issue that Barr had not disclosed in his testimony. The 1989 opinion asserted that the President could violate the United Nations Charter because such actions are “fundamentally political questions.”

That proposition is a very difficult one to sustain, and as Brian Finucane and Marty Lederman have explained, Barr was wrong. The 1989 opinion ignored the President’s constitutional duty to “take care” that US laws, including ratified treaties, be faithfully executed. And the opinion conflated the so-called political question doctrine, which is about whether courts can review an executive branch action, with the question whether an executive branch action is authorized or legal.

What’s more important for our purposes is not whether the 1989 opinion was wrong on this central point, but the fact that Barr failed to disclose this “principal conclusion” to Congress.

There was a reason Isikoff considered the conclusion about the U.N. Charter newsworthy. That’s because it had not been known before. The leading analysis of the Barr opinion is in a forthcoming article in Cornell Law Review by Finucane. He observes, “The members of the subcommittee appear to have been unaware of the opinion’s treatment of the U.N. Charter and the witnesses did not volunteer this information during the hearing.”

Professor Jeanne Woods, in a 1996 law review article in Boston University International Law Journal, also observed the large discrepancy between Barr’s 13-page testimony and what it failed to disclose. “Barr’s congressional testimony attempted to gloss over the broad legal and policy changes that his written opinion advocated.… A careful analysis of the published opinion, and the reasoning underlying it, however, reveals the depth of its deviation from accepted norms,” Professor Woods wrote.

Omission 2: Presumption that acts of Congress comply with international law

Woods also noted that the OLC opinion failed to properly apply the so-called “Charming Betsy” method for interpreting statutes. That canon of statutory construction comes from an 1804 decision, Murray v. The Schooner Charming Betsy, in which the Supreme Court stated, “an act of Congress ought never to be construed to violate the law of nations if any other possible construction remains.” In other words, Congress should be presumed to authorize only actions that are consistent with U.S. obligations under international law. As Professor Curtis Bradley has written, since 1804 “this canon of construction has become an important component of the legal regime defining the U.S. relationship with international law. It is applied regularly by the Supreme Court and lower federal courts, and it is enshrined in the black-letter-law provisions of the influential Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States.”

Barr’s opinion not only failed to apply the Charming Betsy presumption in favor of international law; the opinion applied what might be called a “reverse Charming Betsy.” Barr had reasoned that “in the absence of an explicit restriction” concerning international law, the congressional statute should be read to authorize the executive branch to violate international law. “Because, as part of his law enforcement powers, the President has the inherent authority to override customary international law, it must be presumed that Congress intended to grant the President’s instrumentality the authority to act in contravention of international law when directed to do so,” the opinion stated (emphasis added).

That part of the OLC’s analysis has not withstood the test of time. Indeed, there was good reason to keep it buried.

Omission 3: International law on abductions in foreign countries

Finally, Barr’s testimony failed to inform Congress that the 1989 opinion discussed international law.

Barr’s written testimony said that the opinion “is strictly a legal analysis of the FBI’s authority, as a matter of domestic law, to conduct extraterritorial arrests of individuals for violations of U.S. law.” During the hearing he added that “the opinion did not address … how specific treaties would apply in a given context.” The State Department’s legal adviser who appeared alongside Barr supported this characterization of the opinion by saying:

“The Office of Legal Counsel, as the office within the Department of Justice responsible for articulating the Executive Branch view of domestic law, recently issued an opinion concerning the FBI’s domestic legal authority to conduct arrests abroad without host country consent. Mr. Barr has summarized its conclusions for you. As Mr. Barr has indicated, that opinion addressed a narrow question — the domestic legal authority to make such arrests…. My role today is to address issues not discussed in the OLC opinion — the international law and foreign policy implications of a nonconsensual arrest in a foreign country.”

But the OLC opinion had addressed some questions of international law and how a specific treaty—the U.N. Charter—might apply in such contexts. The 1980 opinion, which the 1989 one reversed, included strong statements about the international legal prohibition on abductions in other countries without the state’s consent. In analyzing Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, the 1980 opinion quoted from a famous United Nations Security Council resolution which condemned the abduction of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina by Israeli forces. The 1980 OLC opinion stated, “Commentators have construed this action to be a definitive construction of the United Nations Charter as proscribing forcible abduction in the absence of acquiescence by the asylum state.”

The OLC’s 1989 opinion took a very different view. It stated, “The text of Article 2(4) does not prohibit extraterritorial law enforcement activities, and we question whether Article 2(4) should be construed as generally addressing these activities.” The opinion also engaged in what many legal experts would consider controversial if not clearly wrong claims about international law. As one example, the 1989 opinion stated, “because sovereignty over territory derives not from the possession of legal title, but from the reality of effective control, logic would suggest there would be no violation of international law in exercising law enforcement activity in foreign territory over which no state exercises effective control.” The fact that the opinion had to resort to such a claim of “logic,” rather than jurisprudence or the practice and legal views of states, indicated its shallowness.

In fairness to Barr, these statements of international law were not the principal conclusions of the opinion. And, once again, it is not so relevant to our purposes whether these statements of law were wrong. What’s relevant is that Barr represented to Congress in his written and oral testimony that the OLC opinion did not address these legal issues, even though it did.

[JustWinBaby]

My good god.....Is there a scenario that doesn't involve sociopathy scuicidal finger tickling?

[jj22]

Unfortunately, there isn't much that can be believed from Barr's summary. He was hired because of the coverup he led the last time he was in this position. This should alarm all Americans, but Trump supporters know he's guilty and thus will ignore Barr's past and bias.

At least Sessions (disagree with his policy) loved his country. Barr has already proven to side with politics over country. Only question is will Americans and the media ignore this, or will they take his summary as gospel (again).

We know from the Clinton investigation if it was a Dem, Americans wouldn't stand for it (taking a known political hack for his word after he's proven to have lied and turned on his country before). Hell they would demand it's full release (and get it).