Trump

[FlameBlade]

Then went straight to Mar-a-lago.

[akiva]

[SumDumTrim]

[Phoebe]

Well, I'm convinced at this point there's nothing Trump could do or even be found guilty of that his Senate Republican enablers and batshit Fox news followers won't both forgive AND blame on Hillary and Obama, so... Good luck to us all. We are screwed. God help us have a fair election in 2020, as we might need divine intervention.

[mimekiller]

what a progressive president!

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/nation ... ty-n973081

[mimekiller]

Per discussion on twitter, why do you guys think Trump doesn't give Bernie Sanders that much of a nick name? Is this some kind of 3D chess that he sees him as mostly a populist spoiler to more serious candidate? can he just not think of a good one? He kind of said Crazy Bernie once a couple of years ago but that's it.

[mimekiller]

who da thunk it

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wash ... ng-in-2018

[Mike]

Holy shit! Zogby has shitty methodology, and the Washington Examiner is still fishing for anything that shows support for the wall? Insightful!

[FlameBlade]

Article reads to me as p-hacking.

[bralbovsky]

F.U.L.L. R.O.M.A.N.O.V. Nuke them from space. It's the only way to be sure.

[mimekiller]

Wtf is the point of Mitt Romney? Is he going to run for president? Not till 2024? Say something, idiot. Do SOMETHING. You're boring!

[SumDumTrim]

He is working on his binders.

[mimekiller]

In all seriousness, now that the Mueller Report is out I predict that within the next two months Trump’s approval rating will jump about fifty percent and stay there.

[Ronster]

[FlameBlade]

Why yes, it's absolutely bananas out there.

Caution to everyone here: nobody knows exactly what is in the full report.

Even the summary said "did not exonerate" in there.

It is entirely possible that Mueller left indictment to Congress per normal protocol set by DOJ.

Read carefully. What is the language is being used?

[mimekiller]

IT means people believed in a half baked Tom Clancy plot for over 3 years and are slowly going insane after everything they ever hoped for is dashed upon the rocks.

Sad!

[Ronster]

Flat-Earthers can't be convinced either...just sayin'

[Phoebe]

If anything in that report truly made Trump look good, it would be on Fox and Friends for the next month and we would already have had 300 tweets about it in all caps.

[Mike]

Ultimately, being cleared of collusion with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election has been the most likely outcome of this investigation for a while now, based on the information that was publicly available. Lots of people were hoping for a smoking gun that would take Trump down without anyone having to do the hard work of fighting on the issues, but it's not to be. And Mueller kept his focus very narrow, apparently looking only at the questions of collusion and obstruction, which were his original marching orders. Previous special counsels have gone far afield, following wherever evidence took them. Not in this case.

On what little we know, there is no evidence of collusion. We know the Russians interfered with our elections, and we have definitive proof that members of Trump's team were eager to work with the Russians and were glad for the benefits of their interference, but there was no actual coordination that rises to the level of criminality.

On the charge of obstruction of justice, there was not enough evidence for Mueller to indict, but he also specifically says that it does not exonerate the president. Without seeing the actual report, what that likely means is that there is significant evidence of obstruction, and likely enough to indict if someone wanted to, but not enough to get close to "beyond a reasonable doubt", meaning it's probably not worth the strife of charging a sitting president when you probably can't make the charges stick. Again, to specifically say "does not exonerate" means there IS significant evidence. Like Phoebe points out, if the full report actually made Trump look good, he'd be demanding its release immediately. That's how he operates. Having the Attorney General announce that there was no obstruction is meaningless. Barr was appointed to the position of AG after writing a public piece declaring his position that it is impossible for any president to be guilty of obstruction of justice. Trump appoints him as head of the Justice Department while facing possible charges of obstruction from that department, and then his hand-picked candidate clears him of charges of obstruction. No surprise at all.

Two things about all this: 1) This was an investigation with a narrow focus, which means it's entirely possible he's guilty of tons of other things, but those were outside the scope of Mueller's work. 2) With 2 years left until the election, this result makes further investigation much trickier and less popular, and means that the Democrats are probably best off keeping further investigations low-key and focusing more on policies and issues that matter to the electorate. I will elaborate on both:

1) Trump is likely guilty of many crimes. Mueller's report only clears him of collusion with Russia over the 2016 election. Trump has been convicted in court of using a fake charity to defraud people out of millions of dollars for personal use. Similarly, a court found him guilty a while back of scamming people with Trump University. He is named as an unindicted co-conspirator in felonies that someone is serving prison time for. And while he didn't collude with Russia to hack the election, there must be some reason why a dozen people in his inner circle all lied about contact with the Russians on the security clearance forms and in their testimony to Congress. There must be some reason why Trump sucks up to Vladimir Putin. Some reason why Trump would publicly state that he chooses to believe Putin's word over the reports of our own intelligence agencies. My guess is that Trump has made lots of money working with the Russians in the past, and we know that up until he actually won the election, he was making plans to profit off the election by building Trump Tower Moscow. This would explain why he didn't want anyone investigating collusion and why he won't release his taxes... not that he was hacking the election, but because he didn't want his financial ties coming out. They may or may not rise to the level of criminality, but my guess is that the appearance of conflict/compromise is strong enough that he'd rather hide it and have his people lie about it. And there's more than this. The man has a long history of borderline behavior, unethical behavior, immoral behavior. Some of it has risen to the level of criminality, but even if none of it did, it's more than enough for me to not want him to be president.

2) Pelosi was smart to take impeachment off the table. Ultimately, with the Senate in GOP hands, impeachment would never result in Trump being removed from office, and now that the Mueller report is out, a drawn out impeachment trial would be very easily cast as a witch-hunt, no matter how justified it might be. Too much focus on this stuff is distracting people from doing real work. Plus, for God's sake, if you're a Democrat who wants to see Trump replaced in 2020, please don't fall down the same rabbit-hole the Republicans did with Hillary Clinton. Clinton was investigated and cleared of any criminal wrongdoing by a special counsel, Congress, the FBI, etc for Whitewater, Benghazi, whatever that yellow cake uranium business was, her emails, her emails again. And yet even as Republicans are smugly waving around Barr's Mueller Report summary and saying it's time for the witch-hunt to end, Lindsay Graham (along with many others) is boldy calling for re-opening the investigation into Clinton's emails. Yes, I think there's plenty of crooked stuff about Trump that warrants investigation, but the current political climate dictates that people have to tread lightly right now and not go rehashing stuff that is settled.

As far as I'm concerned, the best result is simply beating the man on the issues and having him voted out of office in 2020. And if he loses and then goes on to suffer no consequences for his bad behavior (and even if he winds up profiting from all of this in the end), all that's fine with me. I just don't think he is good for this country as president. I don't care so much about punishing him or finding "justice" or whatever. Just vote him out.

[Phoebe]

I agree with your conclusion that the solution is just to vote him out, though that is complicated if the Republicans truly are tampering with elections in some way. However, none of us knows what's in Mueller's report. We have only some kind of tightrope walk done by an attorney who takes as his raison d'etre in the job the task of exonerating Trump. I'd like to know why all these people made plea deals and then went to jail if there was nothing more to it than that. I'd like to know why the Republicans aren't trumpeting every last page of that report from the highest mountain if it says what they claim it does. Literally not one thing here passes the smallest smell test.