As of Sunday (nor in the rest of the week) “Trump has made no major address to mourn those gunned down last week as they worshiped at mosques in New Zealand. He has not condemned the professed white-supremacist motives of the accused killer.” Instead on Sunday he gave what many consider a manic performance on Twitter, in which he wrote more lies and disparagement of John McCain, attacked a rerun of Saturday Night Live, blasted Fox News for suspending Jenean Pirro for anti-Muslim comments, and retweeted conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation.
Reporters tried to figure out what inspired the uptick in tweets: “appeared to be driven more by idle hands and an empty weekend schedule.”
Trump continued to attack the memory of John McCain throughout the week.
The fact that the New Zealand shooter was a Trump fan had acting chief of staff Mulvaney on a Sunday news show saying that Trump is not a white nationalist, and by the logic that links him to Trump, the shooter’s rantings about ecoterrorism links him to Pelosi and House democrats.
Leonhardt writes: “It isn’t very complicated: The man with the world’s largest bully pulpit keeps encouraging violence and white nationalism. Lo and behold, white-nationalist violence is on the rise. You have to work pretty hard to persuade yourself that’s just a big coincidence.”
The New York Times published an investigative report on Deutsche Bank:
- “officials have quietly argued to regulators, lawmakers and journalists that Mr. Trump was not a priority for the bank or its senior leaders and that the lending was the work of a single, obscure division. But interviews with more than 20 current and former Deutsche Bank executives and board members, most of them with direct knowledge of the Trump relationship, contradict the bank’s narrative.”
- “The bankers determined he was overvaluing some of his real estate assets by as much as 70 percent, according to two former executives.”
- “Next month, Deutsche Bank is likely to start handing over extensive internal documents and communications about Mr. Trump to the congressional committees”
Elijah Cummings says that he has evidence Jared and Ivanka may be violating the Presidential Records Act by using encrypted communications Whats App to communicate official White House business.
Despite the end of the Mueller investigation, Trump’s legal problems–about a dozen separate investigations that we know about–will carry on in other jurisdictions, most of them in the Southern District of New York.
Russia Investigation:
On Tuesday, a curious clue from Mueller’s office. The Washington Post has been given a March 21 deadline for the unsealing of documents in the Manafort case. Mueller’s team requested an eleven day extension until April 1 due to “a press of other work.” Unclear what that means, but there is speculation that by April 1 some work, either about Manafort or some other case, will be concluded.
By Thursday there was more intense speculation the Mueller was about to make a move this week. A reporter even snapped a picture of him driving to his office. Wheeler says any guessing is a lot of hot air. She posits these five possibilities, from a conspiracy indictment to a report that says no crime was committed.
On Friday, just after 5:30 news broke that Mueller had submitted his report to Barr. Barr then sent a letter to the House and Senate. Main takeaways:
All of Mueller’s investigative actions were approved by the Assistant Attorney General or the Attorney General, meaning everything he wanted to do he was allowed to do.
There will be no more indictments by Mueller’s office.
Barr will notify the Congress about “principle conclusions” this weekend.
Barr and his team worked on preparing the report through Saturday. The Democratic leadership have made their first moves in the unfolding chess match over the Muller report. Pelosi is insisting they receive the “full report and underlying findings will be sufficient so that Democrat-led House committees can conduct their own scrutiny of Mr. Trump.” Top House and Senate Democrats are “demanding that all documents, communication and evidence amassed by Mr. Mueller and his team be preserved because Congress might request access to it.” And Pelosi is sugesting that the Democrat members of the Gang of Eight will refuse to particiapte in a classified briefing on the report, saying that “any briefing be unclassified to allow lawmakers to discuss the full investigative findings publicly.”
Ben Wittes, and others, make a point that backs up the call for releasing the report to the public: “It becomes the central vehicle for the redeployment of the criminal probe for all of the other democratic purposes we have invested in that probe. At least as regards the president himself, one cannot then read much into the end of the investigation without reference to the text of the report. The report is the investigation and the investigation is the report.”
Personal Log: I saw the news just a minute after the Washington Post tweeted their article. I was in our neighborhood park with Viola, just checking in with the news while she played on the slide. The first several hours, before we knew any details, were a reckoning. The fantasy of Mueller hauling Trump and his family away in chains was popped immediately as the news that there would be no new Mueller indictments.
By end of day Saturday, with DOJ saying there would be no communication today, the speculation continued, with a sense of muted excitement from people on Team Trump, and a sense of muted acceptance and general glumness from people who expected Mueller to offer some sort of knock out blow. Trump himself has not Tweeted or made any announcement from Mar-a-Lago, which has inspired speculation of its own.
Writers who take the Mueller investigation seriously on the merits–not as political theater–weighed in throughout the day. Wheeler explains that part of the reason we got here, with the stakes so high for the Mueller report, is this: “Partly as a result, partly because he’s a narcissist who wanted to deny that he had illicit help to win, and partly because he’s a compulsive liar, Trump and his aides all lied about what they’ve now sworn to be true. Over and over again. And that raised the stakes of the Russian investigation, which in turn further polarized the country.”
“Both sides, however, would do well to take this report — whatever it says — as the final word on this part of the Russian attack in 2016, and set about protecting the country from the next attack it will launch.”
Wittes emphasizes how important it is to know why the Mueller investigation ended: was it because he found no wrong doing, or because the wrongdoing he found could not be prosecuted for any host of prosecutorial reasons he outlines in the post. He describes how Mueller’s mandate was limited, that “it was so wrong to make the Mueller investigation the end all and be all of accountability for L’Affaire Russe in the first place. … Because a criminal investigation is not designed to answer [all] these questions comprehensively, its end cannot put them to rest.” He then pivots to why the Mueller report is so important: “What a criminal investigation can do, and what it may have done here, is to provide a text that offers a factual record which might be redeployed for purposes of answering non-criminal questions in addition to the criminal ones for which that record was created.”
Frum makes this point Friday as well, which he has been saying since 2017: “Mueller’s full report will surely inform and enlighten Americans about many details of what exactly happened in 2016. But the lack of further indictments by Mueller underscores that the job of protecting the country against the Russia-compromised Trump presidency belongs to Congress. It always did.”
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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.9%