Teaching Donald Trump how to tell the truth - an Indiana echo opinion

An echo opinion published in The Herald Tribune, an Indiana newspaper- 

TRUMPISM- For thinking people, refusing to turn over a full Mueller report, about the Trump Russian investigation, his tax filings, business records and telling people not to testify is obstruction of justice, in a free democratic nation, under constitutional law. 

But, if you believe our pathological liar potus, Donald Trumiism, is telling the truth, then here is how you can help him.

Push him to release all the filings, records and full Mueller Report, plus- don’t stop people from testifying. This will rub Trump’s claim of innocence in the faces of the people he calls fake news, elite liberals, corrupt FBI, corrupt CIA, politically guided Justice Department. (In other words, Trumpziism name calling!)

Also, it will prove he’s not guilty of double-digit felonies, he’ll certainly face once he is out of office. You know, insurance fraud, tax evasion, blackmail, corrupt business practices, bribery, election fraud, etc., are all serious crimes with long prison terms for all involved.

Throw in treason with a foreign enemy, and the death penalty is on the table for all involved. So, if you want to see justice be served, then go to your next Trump rally and start chanting “Show them everything.”

From 1985 to 1994, Trump lost well over a billion dollars and only paid income tax two of those 10 years. (IMO tRump is a failed leader and a corrupted creature.)

The real art of the deal is the con (Don the con).

Tim Mahaffey, from Middletown Indiana

William Barr and his fake Senate Judiciary testimony - an echo opinion

Maine Writer question - "When will real justice prevail in American again?" Our US Attorney General is a sick joke.

Barr violated his oath of office to protect Donald Trump. 

Reported in Newsday, an echo opinion published in the Tucson Daily Star, at Tucson.com - Arizona

America needs to hear straight from Robert Mueller

After more than four hours of opaque (aka lies) testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, (Fake) Attorney General William Barr made one thing quite clear.

Fake AG gave bogus testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee

Only special counsel Robert Mueller can give the nation the honest answers it needs to determine whether President Trump’s actions during the Russia investigation were consistent with his constitutional oath to uphold the law. Barr will not.

Mueller, the former head of the FBI, is the only one who can provide a straightforward assessment of his investigation, its conclusions and its aftermath that would have a chance of convincing the American people that the truth is being told. 

Mueller needs to detail why there was no finding of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. 

Moreover, Mueller is the only one who can explain why he did not make a recommendation to prosecute Trump after citing multiple instances of conduct that would support an obstruction charge. Was it because of a Department of Justice policy not to indict a sitting president or because of a lack of evidence?

Barr's hearing provided more facade than facts, more charade than candor. Instead of true oversight, ugly partisan routines got ginned up again. Democrats pressed Barr hamfistedly on his interpretation of the 448-page Mueller report, while Republicans went back to their (stupid!) song-and-dance routine over Hillary Clinton’s emails.

But Barr’s (fake) performance was even more problematic than the Senate’s. After misleading the public with his initial four-page summary of the Mueller report, and then misleading the public again with his remarks before the report’s release, Barr went three-for-three Wednesday as he attempted to explain his infamous letter, his remarks since, and his decisions. But with each vague, evasive response, Barr showed just how little we should rely on, believe, or have confidence in the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

Sen. Kamala Harris asked him, “Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?”

Barr responded, “Could you repeat the question?” Then he fumbled  (and mumbled) to an answer: “I’m trying to grapple with the word ‘suggest.’” He finally allowed that he had no direct requests from a president who in public has often called for investigations of his political enemies.

So to Barr, his four-page summary wasn’t a summary. In his eyes, Trump wanting to get rid of Mueller wasn’t illegal. But then why did those around Trump, like former White House counsel Don McGahn, refuse to act on Trump’s requests?

After Barr’s dishonest presentation to the Senate, it’s not surprising that he refused to testify Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee. And honestly, there is nothing more he can tell us about Mueller.

Not only do we need the special counsel to provide forthright, complex answers, in proper context, about his investigation of Trump, we also need to know whether, in Mueller’s view, Barr violated his oath as attorney general in service of Trump.

Florida echo report - Senator Rubio was muzzled about Russia intervention

The FBI believes “at least one Florida county” was successfully infiltrated, the report said. Reported by Steven Lemongello

Senator Marco Rubio R-Florida

ORLANDO SENTINEL - Rubio knew about election hacking but was restricted in what he could say in Nelson's defense

When U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson was castigated by his Republican challenger, Gov. Rick Scott, last year for saying Russian hackers had broken into Florida voting systems, Nelson’s colleague, Marco Rubio, was aware of the breach.

But Rubio couldn’t defend Nelson because a spokesman for the senator said he wasn’t allowed to divulge classified information.

Rubio, R-Miami, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Nelson, D-Orlando, warned last year about successful hacking attempts in 2016, but said he could not identify which county or counties had been penetrated, saying the information was classified.

No other senator backed him up, and Scott and fellow Republicans attacked Nelson for what GOP campaign emails called his “alarming claims” and “extremely reckless behavior.”

Scott went on to defeat Nelson in the November election by just 10,033 votes in one of the closest and most expensive statewide races in Florida history.

The Mueller Report stated that in November 2016, Russian intelligence officials “sent spear phishing emails to over 120 email accounts used by Florida county officials responsible for administering the 2016 U.S. election.” 

The FBI believes “at least one Florida county” was successfully infiltrated, the report said.

The emails contained an attached document with malicious “Trojan” software that would have permitted Russian intelligence to access the infected computer, the report stated.

Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee initially denied that any county was infiltrated, adding that the FBI had not told the state what county or counties it believed were hacked.

But Rubio on April 26 confirmed to the New York Times that such an intrusion occurred. 

Last week, Rubio said the hacking reached beyond the Sunshine State, telling news station NY1 that “the federal government has information not specific to Florida … and is unable or unwilling to personally tell the individual counties that are affected what’s happened to them for fear of losing access to that information, intelligence information in the future.”

He added that while hackers couldn’t directly change “the outcome of the election,” they were in a position “to change voter databases.”

Rubio’s office said he was made aware of the 2016 attempts as early as May 2018.

While he couldn’t reveal any classified information, he has been active in pushing measures to combat hacking. He introduced the Defending Elections from Threats by Establishing Redlines, or DETER Act, in April to prevent foreign governments from interfering with elections.

Rubio also introduced an amendment to provide security clearances to state and local elections officials, which did not become law but did spur Homeland Security to begin providing such clearances.

Nelson also said he was constrained as to what he could say about classified information. But he said in a statement to the Orlando Sentinel that Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Vice Chair Mark Warner, D-Virginia, asked him and Rubio in June 2018 “to send a letter to the 67 county Supervisors of Election to warn them of Russian intrusion in Florida.”

Nelson’s statement added, “The Mueller report makes clear why we had to take that important step as well as my verbal warnings thereafter.”

"It's clear that the election security concerns raised by Senator Nelson were legitimate,” Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman Stewart Boss said, blaming Republicans for “car[ing] more about playing partisan political games and mudslinging for their own gain than protecting the integrity of Florida's elections against foreign interference.”

Scott’s office has said he and Gov. Ron DeSantis have set up a meeting with the FBI in the next few weeks to discuss the hacking, and U.S. Reps. Stephanie Murphy and Michael Waltz have also requested a briefing for the state’s 27 members of Congress.

The identity of the county or counties infected has still not revealed. More than 50 counties used software from VR Systems, the company impersonated by the hackers.

slemongello@orlandosentinel.com

William Barr's shell game is legalistic double speak: echo opinion essay

Why did Barr use Trump speak rather than Atorney General speak when describing the key findings in the Mueller Special Counsel Report?

The Catastrophic Performance of William Barr reported in The Atlantic

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has accused William Barr of telling lies to Congress, reported in The Daily Beast.

"It may be the case that Barr knows that he’s spinning, and that he’s doing it—having had his soul eaten by Trump “in small bites,” in James Comey’s poetic formulation—to preserve his position in the mad king’s court."- Benjamin Wittes writes in The Atlantic

MaineWriter- William Barr rehearsed a major mis-characterization about the evidence provided in the Robert Mueller Special Counsel Report. In legalize double speak, Barr covered up the preponderance of evidence about how Donald Trump repeatedly and purposefully obstructed justice. There was plenty of evidence in the Mueller Report where obstruction of evidence was documented. This echo opinion essay was published in The Atlantic.

William Barr has been speaking like a slight of hand political lawyer rather than as the U.S. Attorney General. Obviously, given the preponderance of evidence about how Donald Trump obstructed justice, William Barr has decided to abdicate his oath of office by creating confusing mis-information.  Barr is engaged in political delusion

Attorney general William Barr misled the public in seven key ways. An echo legal opinion essay written by Benjamin Wittes, the editor in chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. 

I was willing to give Bill Barr a chance. Consider me burned.

When Barr was nominated, I wrote a cautious piece for The Atlantic, declining to give him “a character reference” and acknowledging “legitimate reasons to be concerned about [his] nomination,” but nonetheless concluding that “I suspect that he is likely as good as we’re going to get. And he might well be good enough. Because most of all, what the department needs right now is honest leadership that will insulate it from the predations of the president.”

William Barr white washed the Mueller Report and, as a result, he must resign.

When he wrote his first letter to Congress announcing the principal conclusions of the Mueller report, I wrote another piece saying, “For the next two weeks, let’s give Attorney General William Barr the benefit of the doubt” on the question of releasing the report in a timely and not-too-redacted fashion.

I took a lot of criticism for these pieces—particularly the second one, in which I specifically said we should evaluate Barr’s actual performance in regard to releasing the Mueller report, and thus wait for him to act, rather than denouncing him preemptively.

Barr has now acted, and we can now evaluate his actual, rather than his hypothesized, performance.
It has been catastrophic. Not in my memory has a sitting attorney general more diminished the credibility of his department on any subject. It is a kind of trope of political opposition in every administration that the attorney general—whoever he or she is—is politicizing the Justice Department and acting as a defense lawyer for the president. In this case it is true.

Barr has consistently sought to spin his department’s work in a highly political fashion, and he has done so to cast the president’s conduct in the most favorable possible light. Trump serially complained that Jeff Sessions didn’t act to “protect” him. Matthew Whitaker never had the stature or internal clout to do so effectively. In Barr, Trump has found his man.

Ironically, the redactions on the report—the matter on which I urged giving Barr the benefit of the doubt—are the one major area where his performance has been respectable. On this matter, he laid out a time frame for the release of the report. He met it. His redactions, as best as I can tell, were not unreasonable, though they were aggressive in some specific areas. 

To whatever extent he went overboard, Congress has a far-less-redacted version. The public, in any event, has access to a detailed account of Mueller’s conclusions. On this point, Barr did as he said he would.

Where Barr has utterly failed, by contrast, is in providing “honest leadership that insulates [the department] from the predations of the president.” I confess I am surprised by this. I have never known Barr well, but I thought better of him than that.

The core of the problem is not that Barr moved, as many people worried he would, to suppress the report; it is what he has said about it. I have spent a great deal of time with the Mueller report, about which Barr’s public statements are simply indefensible. The mischaracterizations began in his first letter. They got worse during his press conference the morning he released the document. And they grew worse still yesterday in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Barr did not lie in any of these statements. He did not, as some people insist, commit perjury. I haven’t found a sentence he has written or said that cannot be defended as truthful on its own terms, if only in some literal sense. But it is possible to mislead without lying. One can be dishonest before Congress without perjury. And one can convey sweeping untruths without substantial factual misstatement. This is what Barr has been doing since that first letter. And it is utterly beneath the United States Department of Justice.

Barr did not lie in any of these statements. He did not, as some people insist, commit perjury. I haven’t found a sentence he has written or said that cannot be defended as truthful on its own terms, if only in some literal sense. But it is possible to mislead without lying. One can be dishonest before Congress without perjury. And one can convey sweeping untruths without substantial factual misstatement. This is what Barr has been doing since that first letter. And it is utterly beneath the United States Department of Justice.
The dishonesty only begins with the laughably selective quotation of Mueller’s report in Barr’s original letter, the scope of which Charlie Savage laid out in a remarkable New York Times article shortly after the full report was released. I urge people to look at Savage’s side-by-side quotations. The distortion of Mueller’s meaning across a range of areas is not subtle, and it’s not hard to understand why Mueller himself wrote to Barr saying that the attorney general’s letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.”

Barr, when he was before the Senate yesterday, described the letter as “snitty.” Actually, it was generous. As Paul Rosenzweig summarized the situation on Lawfare, “the excerpts of the report contained in Barr’s original summary letter are at best a favorable spin on the report and at worst a rather transparent effort to mislead the public in advance of the report’s release.”

But selective quotation is actually only one of the means by which Barr is misstating Mueller’s findings. Here I want to focus on the substantive content of his mischaracterization of them—that is, not how he is doing it, but what Barr is doing.

As I read them, Barr’s public statements on the report reflect at least seven different layers of substantive misrepresentation, layers which build on one another into a dramatic rewriting of the president’s conduct—and of Mueller’s findings about the president’s conduct. It is worth unpacking and disentangling these misrepresentations, because each is mischievous on its own, but together they operate as a disinformation campaign being run by the senior leadership of the Justice Department.

The first element is Barr’s repeated conflation of that which Mueller has deemed to be not provable to the exacting standards of criminal law with that which is not true at all or for which there is no evidence. Mueller determined that the evidence “did not establish” Trump-campaign participation in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Mueller also makes clear that when his report describes that “the investigation did not establish particular facts,” this “does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.”

Yet Barr frequently talks as though Mueller found nothing of concern with respect to the underlying conduct on the part of the Trump campaign. “So that is the bottom line,” Barr said at his press conference. “After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the special counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes.”

Barr began his next sentence with, “After finding no underlying collusion with Russia …” Note his shift. In the first iteration, Barr is describing—accurately, if generously—that Mueller “did not find” something. By the second, however, he has pivoted to imply that Mueller found it didn’t happen. Barr vacillates in his public statements frequently from such careful, lawyerly descriptions of what Mueller did not find or establish to sweeping statements of vindication for Trump and his campaign.

In the text of the Mueller report, leads me to suspect that Mueller does not share Barr’s cavalier attitude toward the voluminous contacts between Russians and Trump-campaign figures and the positive enthusiasm for, and pursuit of, hacked emails on the part of the campaign. Had Mueller found no evidence of conspiracy, rather than insufficient evidence, he would have said so.

Barr’s second sleight of hand—also visible in the quotations above—is rendering the absence of a criminal-conspiracy charge as reflecting an active finding of “no collusion.” These two are very different matters. Conspiracy is a criminal charge. Collusion is a colloquial claim about history. Yet Barr, at his press conference, actually said that “there was in fact no collusion.” He used the phrase no collusion over and over. He even described it as the investigation’s “bottom line.”

In other words, Barr is not merely translating the absence of sufficient evidence for charges into a crime’s not taking place; he is translating the crime’s not taking place into an absence of misconduct in a more colloquial sense. He is also using the president’s specific talking point in doing so. This pair of mischaracterizations has the effect of transforming Trump into an innocent man falsely accused.

Barr amplifies this transformation with his third layer of misrepresentation: his adoption of Trump’s “spying” narrative, which states that there was something improper about the FBI’s scrutiny of campaign figures who had bizarre contacts with Russian-government officials or intermediaries. Barr has not specified precisely what he believes here, but yesterday’s Senate hearing was the second congressional hearing at which he implied darkly that the FBI leadership under James Comey had engaged in some kind of improper surveillance of the Trump campaign. In other words, not only is the president an innocent man falsely accused, but he’s now the victim of “spying on a political campaign”—as Barr put it a few weeks ago—by a biased cabal running the FBI.

To evaluate these allegations, we will have to await a forthcoming inspector general’s report on the matter. And Barr has promised some kind of review of his own as well. Suffice it for the present to say that I have seen no evidence to support these suggestions, which imply a kind of politically motivated “witch hunt” against Trump. Again, Barr is supporting political tweeting points of the president.

And here’s the fourth layer of misrepresentation. Barr has repeatedly insisted that our long-suffering president fully cooperated with the investigation, notwithstanding its illegitimate birth and the fact that there was nothing to any of the allegations it investigated. “The White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims,” he said at his press conference.

I suspect this would also come as a surprise to Mueller, who might point out that Trump tried to get witnesses not to cooperate—dangling pardons and seeming to threaten their families with investigation if they “flipped.” Mueller might point out that Trump tried to fire Mueller for conflicts that his own staff regarded as “silly” and “ridiculous.” Mueller might point out that Trump tried to rein in his jurisdiction, limiting him to the investigation of future electoral interference. Mueller might point out that Trump refused to sit for an interview and, even in written answers, refused to address questions concerning allegations of obstruction of justice. I say “might,” but Mueller actually did point all these things out in his report. Ignoring this reflects an astonishing conception of cooperation from the nation’s top prosecutor.

Fifth, it is on the collective back of these prior misrepresentations that Barr rests his particularly generous interpretation of intent in considering questions of obstruction. It is hard to read Mueller’s account of Trump's conduct as reflecting chiefly noncorrupt motives. But if you first adopt the fiction that the investigative subject is an innocent man falsely accused and being pursued by politically motivated FBI agents engaged in improper “spying,” and that he is nonetheless endeavoring in good faith to cooperate with his prosecutors, that does change the lens through which you look at his conduct. One might then indeed tend toward forgiving interpretations of the occasional eruption of anger.

One might then find, as Barr did in Mueller’s report, “substantial evidence … that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks.” And one might then find that evidence of such “non-corrupt motives weighs heavily against any allegation that the President had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.” The trouble is that if you don’t first adopt these conceits, the weight of the evidence Mueller cites on intent really doesn’t push in that direction. It pushes in exactly the opposite direction.

Barr adopts, sixth, a related mode of obfuscation with respect to obstruction, which is to disaggregate all the episodes Mueller considers and view them in isolation from one another. Mueller specifically urged that the pattern of behavior was important. “Although the events we investigated involved discrete acts,” he wrote, “it is important to view the President’s pattern of conduct as a whole. That pattern sheds light on the nature of the President’s acts and the inferences that can be drawn about his intent.”

Indeed, it is very hard to look at Trump’s behavior toward the investigation over two years and not see malign intent. But isolate any specific fact pattern among the 10 Mueller describes, and you can diminish it. Look at any one in isolation, and—particularly if you have Barr’s hard-line views of presidential power—you might see a facially legitimate exercise of that power for which there is a plausible noncorrupt motive to which Mueller has indeed scrupulously nodded. If you miss the forest for the trees, you will miss the deforestation as well.

Finally, Barr conflates Mueller’s decision not to evaluate presidential obstruction with a decision on his part that the evidence is insufficient to find that Trump committed crimes. This is a very important misdirection on Barr’s part, because it allows him to imply not merely that he does not believe that the president committed crimes, but that Mueller does not, either.

Both at the press conference and in yesterday’s hearing, the attorney general insisted that Mueller had told him that it was not merely the Justice Department’s legal opinion stating that the president could not be indicted that prevented him from concluding that Trump had obstructed justice.

“He made it clear that he had not made the determination that there was a crime” but for the opinion, Barr said at the press conference. The implication is that the issue was not just one of legal authority, but that the evidence wasn’t there either.

I don’t know what Mueller told Barr privately, but the report does not support this claim. Mueller lists four “considerations that guided our obstruction-of-justice investigation.” The first of them states that the Justice Department “has issued an opinion finding that ‘the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions’ in violation of ‘the constitutional separation of powers.’” Because Mueller is an officer of the Justice Department, “this Office accepted [the department’s] legal conclusion for purposes of exercising prosecutorial jurisdiction.”

The use of the word jurisdiction here is not casual. It means that Mueller believes he lacks the authority to indict the president. Because of that, he goes on to explain, he did not evaluate the evidence to render a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The report offers no support for the notion that Mueller stayed his hand on obstruction out of concern for the strength of the evidence.

The effects of these layers of mischaracterization are to rewrite the Mueller report and to recast the presidential conduct described in it. The direction of the recasting just happens to dovetail with the president’s talking points, and just happens to transmute him from a scofflaw with power into a victim of the “deep state.”

The mystery is why Barr is doing this. In an op-ed yesterday in The New York Times, Comey offered one hypothesis, writing that “amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them” and that “proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing. I think that’s at least part of what we’ve seen with Bill Barr and Rod Rosenstein. Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from.”

This may be right. It may be the case that Barr knows that he’s spinning, and that he’s doing it—having had his soul eaten by Trump “in small bites,” in Comey’s poetic formulation—to preserve his position in the mad king’s court.

But we should also consider what is perhaps a scarier hypothesis: What if Barr actually believes it all? That is, what if he has sufficiently become a creature of the factual ecosystem of Trump’s support that he truly believes that the real problem here was not a president who accepted (noncriminally, of course) assistance from a hostile foreign power during his campaign, lied serially about it, and tried repeatedly to frustrate investigation of his conduct? What if Barr actually believes that closing a criminal case on these matters is the end of the historical conversation, as well as the end of the criminal conversation? What if he is actually untroubled by the substance of what Mueller reported and, like Rudy Giuliani, believes it’s okay for presidential candidates to take “dirt” from foreign governments on their rivals and okay for presidents to call up investigations of those rivals? What if he really believes that the true problem here was the investigators?

In some ways, the only thing scarier than an attorney general who would knowingly and cynically deliver the layers of misinformation Barr has been dishing is one who would do so because he’s all in on a collective delusion.

Essay- Russian interference: Mueller opened more questions about 2016 election

Why did Trump have such a strong bond with Putin? Did Trump have a personal reason, not some foreign policy reason, to favor Russia? Why did Trump push Flynn to be favorable to Russia?

 
"...the version of the report released is only the start of wide-ranging and intensive House investigations." - Charles Tiefer

By Charles Tiefer published in The Conversation 

Professor of law, University of Baltimore

The release on April 18 of a redacted version of the Mueller report came after two years of allegations, speculation and insinuation – but not a lot of official information about what really happened between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Nor had there been much light shed on whether the president tried to obstruct the investigation into his campaign.

The report prepared by special counsel Robert Mueller and issued by the Justice Department provided greater detail about those questions. And it offered more information about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The Trump administration will want to argue that the release of the Mueller report is the end of investigating the Russia scandal.

On the contrary, the version of the report released is only the start of wide-ranging and intensive House investigations.

I served as special deputy chief counsel of the House Iran-contra investigation of the Reagan administration. We did months of hearings on the type of material that is either incomplete or redacted, as today’s Congress will find, in the Mueller report.

Here are some of the ways the House will likely follow up with more investigation.

Bring in witnesses to testify

The House will call some of the witnesses mentioned in the report for their full story, not just their cameo appearance in this incomplete report.
 the version of the report released is only the start of wide-ranging and intensive House investigations.

But, until we get a House public hearing with Flynn as a witness, we will not know the full story.

Why did Trump have such a strong bond with Putin? Did Trump have a personal reason, not some foreign policy reason, to favor Russia? Why did Trump push Flynn to be favorable to Russia?

The report does not say.

With Flynn, as with many others, the report is the start, not the finish, of getting the full story.

2. Intelligence committee investigation

Attorney General Barr has announced that a “less redacted” version is, or will be, prepared for a few congressional figures. Presumably he means that the classified parts of the report that describe secret intelligence, which have been redacted, will be shown to the congressional leadership.

But, the leadership cannot itself undertake an investigation.

This is the kind of material that normally goes to the entire House Intelligence Committee. That committee can follow up with demands for documents and closed hearings. And that committee has the trusted expertise to determine that the conclusions of their inquiry can be made public, either via open hearings or by report to the House and the public.

The committee could determine what is actually known by investigators about how Russia viewed Trump and what Russia may have done that secured Trump’s favor.

3. Release grand jury information

Furthermore, the report redacts not just classified information, but grand jury information as well. And Barr may well have omitted, rather than redacted, invaluable grand jury evidence, especially documents.

These could be released by the attorney general to Congress with a court order under what is called Federal Criminal Rule 6(e).

Barr refused at congressional hearings to seek such an order. But, under sufficient pressure from Congress – against the background of a public that wants the full report and the full story – he could reconsider.

In the Watergate scandal, the prosecutors got exactly such a court order so they could make invaluable evidence available to the House Judiciary Committee.

4. Limit what’s limited by ‘HOM’- Harm to Ongoing Matter
There is a great deal of key material redacted in the report with Barr’s label, “HOM” or “Harm to Ongoing Matter.” That means the redacted material likely relates to an ongoing investigation by law enforcement.

This appears to have been done with a very broad brush. Under pressure from the House, backed by the public, this could be treated by Barr with a fine scalpel instead.

For example, one of the most promising avenues to investigate is the potential overlap between Russia’s attempts to help Trump, WikiLeaks’ dissemination of material embarrassing to Hillary Clinton, and Trump’s requests for help in making material damaging to Clinton public. Who can forget Trump shouting, “I love WikiLeaks”?

Yet, Barr’s broad-brush redactions wipe out a whole section on WikiLeaks. Presumably Barr is saying, by this redaction, that the case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an ongoing matter.

As the recent arrest of Assange makes clear, there is currently an investigation into his actions by the U.S., which has charged him with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. That means that WikiLeaks’ interaction with the Trump campaign is not the heart of that judicial matter. Rather, the heart is about Assange working with hackers who stole the damaging material.

So the House should be allowed to pursue the part – WikiLeaks and its interactions with the Trump campaign – which is central to the House’s concerns but peripheral to prosecutors of Assange.

5. Documents, documents, documents

Finally, this is just Mueller’s report. 

Behind it is much more that would be of vital interest to congressional investigators and the public.

This 400-plus page report is not the underlying information alluded to in the report, like copies of emails or other documents, that provides broader information about so many matters.

The House has every reason to seek and to receive the underlying information.

These various examples are just the beginning of what the House can seek to find as it takes off from the incomplete and redacted Mueller report.

When I was an attorney for the House Iran-contra Committee, we received far more encouragement and cooperation from independent counsel Lawrence Walsh than is promised by Barr. And we went on to dig up striking material during months of hearings.

I believe the House will now pick up where the Department of Justice has left off.

"Russia, if you're listening!" And indeed they were.