CIRCLE WITH A DOT

That’s Bob Mueller’s legacy. He uncovered the truth when it was difficult to do so and held people accountable. That’s a sharp contrast to the president who has criticized him. Bob Mueller was fair and decent, and he played by the rules, including respecting the rule of law, which may seem quaint in the time of Trump. Ultimately, criticism of Mueller’s report and his work is an indictment of what Trump has done to our country. The Mueller investigation and its results speak for themselves. -30-

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It’s especially important to remember, as Trump, today, launches attack after attack against the investigation into the 2016 election and the people who conducted it, that the Mueller investigation confirmed the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia was behind the attack on the DNC’s computers and developed important and specific information about the full nature of the attack Russia launched. Mueller’s charges included computer hacking, conspiracy, and financial crimes. Given that context, it’s shocking that in order to try to protect himself, Trump was willing to put national security at risk, attempting to derail the investigation into Russia in order to save himself./7

Of course, the fact that Mueller was able to investigate and uncover much of this means Trump didn’t succeed with his efforts to obstruct. Some people suggested that means what Trump did wasn’t all that bad. As Barb and I wrote at the time, “Nothing could be further from the truth. To protect the integrity of our criminal justice system, prosecutors are able to hold accountable people who attempt to interfere with an investigation, not just people who have the luck to be successful. Allowing an individual to avoid accountability because they weren’t successful or because investigators were unable to develop proof of underlying crimes would ensure that the most successful obstructors avoid justice.”/6

That would have meant no investigation into Russian interference in 2016, an information gap that would have left the country vulnerable to future attacks.
The president engaged in witness tampering, with one of the worst examples being dangling the prospect of a pardon to keep Paul Manafort from cooperating with the Special Counsel’s investigation.
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We also laid out some of Trump’s most significant obstructive conduct per the Report:

Trump asked his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to arrange for Mueller to be fired in June, after he started work. Trump denied he’d done this when a reporter broke the story about the requested firing in 2018.
Trump tried to get McGahn to deny reporting about his conduct as it surfaced, and once threatened to fire McGahn if he wouldn’t. McGahn refused. Trump summoned McGahn to the Oval Office and ordered him to create a false record that denied that Trump ordered him to fire Mueller, which would be a federal felony if proven.
After Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused from overseeing the investigation, Trump repeatedly tried to compel him to “unrecuse” (no such thing exists) and tried to get Corey Lewandowski to threaten Sessions that he would be fired if he wouldn’t. Trump wanted Sessions to limit the Special Counsel to investigating future elections. /4

Barb McQuade and I wrote a summary of the part of the investigation that delved into obstruction. You can read it here. “Attorney General William Barr did the country a disservice,” we wrote, “when he withheld the Mueller report from public view for weeks, while claiming Mueller concluded there was ‘no collusion, no obstruction.’ That is not what the report says.” We noted, “We start by acknowledging Mueller’s decision that he was bound by DOJ policy that prohibits indictment of a sitting president. Whether that policy is correct or not, prosecutors must follow the rules. Mueller did.”/3

Some of the key results of the Special Counsel investigation:

Thirty-seven indictments, including six former Trump advisers, 26 Russian nationals, a California man, a London-based lawyer, and three Russian companies. Seven were convicted. And perhaps most significantly, Mueller developed compelling evidence that Trump obstructed justice. Repeatedly. Mueller said publicly that the investigation did not exonerate Trump.
Among the specifics: Trump associates repeatedly lied to investigators about their contacts with Russians, and President Trump refused to answer questions about his efforts to impede federal proceedings and influence the testimony of witnesses.
A statement signed by over 1,000 former federal prosecutors, including me, concluded that any other person who engaged in the obstructive conduct attributed to Trump would have been indicted.
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@emassey0135 Thanks for this. I stopped at The Hobbit, but I just shared it with my DIL who just got back from a trip to NZ to Lord of the Rings world or whatever it's called.

From #berniewagenblast Only illegal oil is moving in tankers. https://theconversation.com/why-shadow-tankers-are-the-only-ships-still-moving-through-the-strait-of-hormuz-277785

Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell Sr., is a conservative Christian institution based in Lynchburg, Virginia. Falwell Jr., who took over the university after his father died in 2007, was an advisor to Trump. Falwell Jr. resigned after a sexual scandal in 2020, but Liberty University has maintained a key role in connecting the Trump administration to the evangelical community.

Green stressed that anyone interested in the DOL legal internship should “ABSOLUTELY apply” because “the person conducting the interviews is Vittoria D’Addesi, a 2025 graduate of Liberty Law, along with a representative of the White House Liaison Office.”

@Linza I hear you. Shades of Tonkin Gulf. War has been my whole life.

Trump’s attack on Iran scorns the will of the people and their constitutional right to decide whether they want to pay for a war with their money and their lives. That disdain for democratic government reveals that Trump’s military adventure against Iran is also fundamentally an attack on the United States of America./end

The president is supposed to get Congress’s buy-in to go to war in part because that requirement forces an executive to convince the American people that a contemplated military action is worth their tax dollars and their lives. But Trump made little effort to explain his Iran attack to the American people, and they oppose it. Morris notes that support for attacking Iran has held fairly steady for months and remained so after the strikes, with 34% in favor of them and 44% opposed. This is “incredibly low” support for a foreign war, Morris writes, and support for military action tends to be highest at the start of a war./5

Trump launched his attack while lawmakers were not scheduled to be in Washington, D.C., for a week, but Democrats are demanding Congress return immediately to vote on whether to continue military action against Iran. Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) said in an interview: “This is one of the most dangerous efforts that Trump is undertaking in the second term: trying to normalize war without Congress, trying to normalize the idea that a president can just do whatever they want when it comes to foreign policy.” Huge though this is, there is a larger issue behind it: Since taking office again, Trump has gone out of his way to define tariffs, deportations, and so on as part of national security policy./4

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall pointed out that as his power diminishes, Trump “is leaning heavily into the presidential prerogative powers where his power is most untrammeled, where the loss of political power doesn’t really matter. Almost no presidential power is more clearly in that character [than] the president’s control over the military.”

And that is the crux of the matter. For all the vagueness of Trump’s justifications and goals in attacking Iran, he has launched a war—his word—on his own, assuming the powers of a dictator./3

🧵 Last week, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, both of whom have deep financial ties to the Middle East, would guide the decision of whether to strike Iran. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been lobbying for U.S. strikes on Iran for a long time, and hours after Snyder wrote, Washington Post journalists Birnbaum, Hudson, DeYoung, Allison, and Mekhennet reported that Trump decided to attack Iran after Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman made “multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack” while at the same time publicly calling for a diplomatic solution./2

#heatherCoxRichardson Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder noted in Thinking About… that Trump’s personal corruption is another interpretive framework for thinking about his decision to go to war. Trump’s sudden foray into regime change after years of attacking other presidents who tried it raises the question of whether he is acting for other countries in the Middle East he considers his allies.

“Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration,” Snyder wrote, “one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis.” Snyder noted that Gulf Arab states eager to curb Iran’s power “have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family.”