Congress requires the unexpurgated report, Mr. Barr

The highly redacted version of Robert Mueller's vaunted report is slated for release Thursday, according to the Justice Department.

I want the whole damned report. So do a lot of others. Unfortunately, we're not entitled to it.

The problem is that William Barr, who as AG ultimately oversees bowdlerizing — excuse me, redacting sensitive material in the report, has declared that Congress isn't entitled to the redacted material, either.

I'm not buying that, Mr. Barr.

Barr has identified a few categories of evidence that he insists must be redacted from Mueller's final report:

• Evidence provided to the grand jury
• Sensitive intelligence
• Information concerning still-pending investigations
• Information that might hurt the reputations of people investigated but not indicted

Let's take these in order.

Ordinarily, if a grand jury doesn't vote to indict, that sends the message that those accused of wrongdoing were not guilty of that wrongdoing, in spite of whatever suggestive or inflammatory evidence was available. Sealing the evidence provided to that grand jury protects the accused from being found guilty in the court of public opinion.

However, Justice Department policy strongly discourages indicting a sitting president. Thus a grand jury hearing about possible malfeasance by the sitting president is participating in an exercise that almost certainly will not result in charges being filed, no matter what the evidence would warrant if the subject weren't the sitting president.

The Watergate grand jury recognized this conundrum. Guided, I assume, by its collective sense of morality, that grand jury asked the judge to release the evidence it saw to Congress, reasoning that since Congress was given the power of impeaching the president, Congress should weigh the evidence against him. That precedent was followed in subsequent cases like Ken Starr's investigation into Bill Clinton.

Why not release the Mueller grand jury evidence to Congress? Isn't that the natural destination for evidence of wrongdoing by a sitting president?

Somebody has to ask a judge to release grand jury testimony. In addition to Barr, who already has told Congress he will not ask, the Mueller grand jury itself could ask, just as the Watergate grand jury did. Why hasn't it? Did the Mueller grand jury decide the evidence it saw should not be released? Did it not know it had that power? Did the idea never even arise?

Now, as to sensitive intelligence, it's clear the public is not entitled to such information. Congress, however, routinely reviews such intelligence. The relevant committees have well-established procedures to safeguard it. They have to have all possible intelligence information in order to know how best to safeguard the country, after all.

Why is Barr refusing to provide the House Intelligence Committee with the relevant underlying evidence found by Mueller's investigators?

I'll give Barr a pass on material relevant to ongoing investigations. As far as I know, Congress doesn't routinely get such information.

The fourth category of redacted information, material that might affect the reputations of unindicted persons, seems fishy. After all, one person we know the Justice Department would be unlikely to indict is the president himself. To use the pretext that he wasn't indicted as an excuse to conceal damaging evidence about him is perverse. At the very least, Congress has to evaluate the evidence for itself to decide whether impeachment is warranted.

Even if you believe that people other than the sitting president ought to be protected from disclosure of damaging information, you come back to the problem that AG Barr is fatally compromised as a trustworthy overseer of the redaction effort. His pre-appointment memo dismissing the validity of the Special Counsel's investigation ought to have prompted him to recuse himself from oversight of the investigation, including its release. We simply cannot trust AG Barr to redact anything without suspecting the redactions will protect this president.

The public will have to wait for decades to see the unredacted report, I suspect. Congress, however, must see it now. It's why the public elects representatives — they have to have access to material the rest of us can't be trusted to see.

You have no fig leaf, AG Barr. You're stonewalling on behalf of the most corrupt president in modern history. You're complicit in his corruption and his criminality.

The admissions scam in novella form

Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic penned a splendid recounting of the college-admissions bribery scam — you know, the one that ensnared Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, among others — entitled, "They Had It Coming".

Flanagan informs the piece with her own experience as a teacher and guidance counselor at a tony Los Angeles prep school thirty years ago. She could see the Huffman/Loughlin scandal coming, not because she knew either of them but because she knew the type of parent they represent. That kind of parent existed back then, too.

We may yet find that the allegations are overblown or even unsupported. I doubt that, but anything's possible, especially when a case involves celebrities: both sides have a lot of incentive to distort reality.

Even so, the truths Flanagan finds resonate in these times. She tells an old-fashioned type of tale, the morality play, stylishly and well.

The stupidest robocall tactic

CNN's headline is "It's not just any call. It's from your number".

The article is about robocalls that use numbers of people in your phone's address book to get around our understandable refusal to answer if we don't recognize the originating number.

Using my friends' and family's numbers would indeed be a heinous step up from the often badly chosen fake numbers used by the useless parasites of the world today.

But your own number? That's a different story.

The article's writer picked up the call out of sheer curiosity. What was she expecting, that her phone was calling to see how she was? Of course it was a scammer.

The easiest fake call to spot is the one that purports to come from your own number.

Now, the geniuses who pursue this line of moneymaking haven't all figured this out: at least one of them has tried it on me. The attempt was amusing, I'll admit. Yet even the dimmest bulb will eventually realize what a stupid tactic it is.

In the long run, better gear up for your "friends" and "family" to be threatening you with jail for unpaid taxes that can conveniently be paid off with prepaid debit cards.

Barr is covering for Trump

Attorney General William Barr has been sitting on Robert Mueller's report for a week. He supposedly is busy redacting "four categories of information":

grand jury information, information related to intelligence sources and methods, information pertinent to ongoing investigations and anything that could harm the "reputational interests" of "peripheral third parties."

As Rachel Maddow noted, Robert Mueller's team filed dozens if not hundreds of indictments and other legal briefs to federal courts, all or nearly all of which contain heavy redactions. Mueller and his team knew their report would be of intense interest to the public. It's inconceivable, then, that they would not have prepared a redacted version of the final report.

Barr, therefore, need not spend time redacting at least the second or third categories of information. As for the first, grand jury information, prior investigations into Watergate, Whitewater and other alleged presidential misconduct all provided grand jury information to Congress; a prosecutor need only seek permission from a judge. Barr, however, has not indicated he is seeking such permission. Why not?

As to the fourth category, "reputational interests", where is that defined in the law? What gives Barr the legal right to redact on that ill-defined but presumably highly subjective basis?

Don Trumpone and his cronies get themselves into trouble by lying to and withholding information from both law enforcement and the public. At least one of those cronies, Paul Manafort, has tried to lie to the courts, too. The consequences have been unpleasnat for him.

Barr may have had a sterling reputation going into his confirmation hearings, but that reputation is shot now as he dances as fast as he can to avoid providing every word of Mueller's report to anyone but Rod Rosenstein and himself.

The public may not be entitled to see sensitive intelligence discussed in Mueller's report. but Congress, and especially the intelligence conmmittees, are entitled — under the law.

As for the rest, I don't know whether we, the public, are entitled to see testimony given to the grand jury. I'm certain we aren't entitled to see information pertaining to ongoing investigations.

But "reputational interests"?

If Mueller didn't charge a person, it's because he didn't have evidence that that person committed a crime. But that person might have behaved in a way that makes the rest of us queasy. He might, for instance, have shown a painful inclination to trust Vladimir Putin over fellow Americans. That's just one possibility, of course. In any case, if that person occupies a position of trust in our government, do we, the public, not have a right to know such a thing?

Even if there's an argument to be made that the public should not see such information — and to be clear, I don't imagine there is such an argument — there is absolutely no way to justify withholding such information from Congress.

Congress is not limited to investigating crimes. Congress may investigate anything that its members deem necessary. Given that members of Congress take an oath to defend the Constitution, it's their sworn duty to investigate anything that may threaten the nation. They not only have the right, they have the positive responsibility to see if Mueller's team uncovered any non-criminal but still threatening activities. "Reputational interests" are irrelevant to "national (security) interests".

If Barr redacts as much information as he's suggesting he will from what he provides to Congress, I would argue he is obstructing Congress from fulfilling its Constitutional responsibilities.

Every second Barr delays getting the full report to Congress, along with its underlying materials, lends weight to the suspicion that he is protecting Don Trumpone by eating up time Congress requires to digest the Mueller report and its implications.

Barr may be comfortable with Don Trumpone but the rest of us aren't. Everything Barr has done so far makes us less and less comfortable with him, too.

Despite Barr's intervention, we still aren't done

My last entry was written before William Barr summarized Robert Mueller's report for Congressional leaders.

Since then, of course, Barr's later top-line finding — that Don Trumpone didn't conspire with the Russian government to throw the 2016 election — has dominated the news. Trump supporters celebrate it and demand that the rest of us move on.

Hold on a sec.

First, we have not seen Mueller's report. We have only heard Barr's summary of it.

Second, according to Barr, Mueller didn't feel he could come to a conclusion on whether Don Trumpone obstructed justice. Nevertheless, Barr's letter to Congressional leaders declared,

The Special Counsel's decision to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.

Why did Barr believe he had to decide?

A little history sets the question in its proper context. By the time of Watergate, the Justice Department had already established its policy that a sitting president could not be indicted. That meant that the results of the grand jury investigation into the scandal could not result in an indictment even if the facts warranted. Yet it would have been perverse if the grand jury findings had simply disappeared into a file cabinet. So with the permission of a judge (grand jury proceedings are normally not made public), the findings were shared with Congress. The reasoning was, if the findings warranted action, only Congress could take it.

If Mueller didn't feel he could definitively state whether or not Don Trumpone obstructed justice, it might well have been because he felt bound by the aforementioned Justice Department policy. That, in turn, would mean only Congress could decide what to do with Mueller's findings.

Even if that's not the reason Mueller did not issue a finding on obstruction of justice, the fact remains that he didn't. So, again, why did Barr? Why did Barr feel the need to do so? And again, if Mueller couldn't decide, how could Barr after spending only forty-eight hours with the data Mueller spent twenty-two months gathering and pondering?

As far as I can tell, Barr improperly substituted his own judgment for that of Mueller and Congress.

The only way for the rest of us to know whether Barr behaved improperly is for him to release Mueller's entire report. The version for public consumption likely will have to be redacted in part, but an unredacted version must be made available to appropriate members of Congress.

And yes, we still have our homework to do. We have to read Mueller's final report for ourselves.

Mueller's done: we aren't

Robert Mueller has wrapped up his work as special counsel.

We don't know what he found under his remit to investigate "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump".

Presumably we'll find out what's in the report soon. However, we have gotten entirely too hung up on Mr. Mueller's investigation.

I'm not discounting his work. It has resulted in indictments, guilty pleas and in the case of Paul Manafort, a conviction by a jury. It has produced a mountain of evidence of malfeasance by Trump associates. It has turned up evidence of criminal behavior outside the special counsel's remit, evidence that has been or is being pursued by other U.S. attorneys' offices. That's a lot of bang for the buck. (And this is just what we know publicly.)

However, the significance of his final report has been overstated. It doesn't mark the end of our work as a nation. It's just a milestone.

What's next?

Attorney General Bill Barr must release the report — unedited by the White House. (Redactions by Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller are okay.)

The public must digest the report.

Congress, in addition to digesting the report, must continue its own investigations into suspected Trump administration misconduct. Congressional investigations have a wider scope than Mr. Mueller's and may well turn up information he did not.

What if Mr. Mueller's report doesn't include any evidence of criminal behavior on Trump's part?

It doesn't change much. We already know the doughy Don is not fit to hold office. The question is whether enough of the public can be awakened from its delusive faith in him to acknowledge that.

We have been choking on the stench from what most of us suspect is Trump administration corruption ever since he took office. Multiple Cabinet secretaries have been forced to resign because of ethical violations. Trump himself has refused to release his tax returns or to divest from his financial holdings while in office, as his predecessors since Nixon did. He overruled the recommendation of experts to secure a high security clearance for his son-in-law (and who knows who else). He bragged of firing James Comey to end the investigation into his campaign's links to the Russian government. He revealed sensitive, classified intelligence, garnered by a close U.S. ally, to Russia.

Not all these actions are criminal. Nevertheless, they are not acceptable for any officeholder, including the president. And impeachment does not require criminal conduct. Congress determines what constitutes impeachable behavior.

In addition to using the presidency to enrich himself, which is incontrovertible (and, in case you've forgotten, illegal), we are left to wonder: is he also compromised by a foreign nation, compelled to do its bidding under threat of blackmail? Might he also be hiding what he knows or suspects are criminal acts he and/or his staffers committed?

Wholesale corruption, coercion by a foreign power (or by a domestic one, for that matter), obstruction of justice — any of these should be grounds for impeachment.

Unless, that is, you're okay with a president squirreling away millions of dollars in what are effectively bribes laundered through his business, or being under Moscow's thumb, or letting his friends get away with murder (metaphorically or, heaven forbid, literally).

What we already know of Trump's own actions, as well as those of his staffers and associates both during his campaign and while in office, stinks to high heaven. More indefensible behavior may come to light: Congress, U.S. attorneys, federal agencies including the I.R.S., states, and cities are pursuing civil and criminal investigations above and beyond Mr. Mueller's.

Mr. Mueller's report doesn't mark the end of anything except his job as special counsel. The real work is just starting — and it's up to the rest of us.

We have to decide whether we'll continue to suffer Trump's corrosive and un-American corruption of our democracy.

Yeah — the fate of our nation is on us. Not Mr. Mueller. Us.

Going after dead people

Out of nowhere, the toddler-in-chief recently whined that he hadn't been thanked for supposedly approving a state funeral for the late John McCain.

It's not clear that the honors our domestic Dear Leader approved constitute a "state funeral", at least as Wikipedia describes one. However, set that aside and assume that McCain's services in D.C. did constitute a state funeral. Suppose, too, that the McCain family didn't drop a little thank-you note through the White House mail slot.

So what?

Shouldn't a president have better things to do? (I was going to ask "Doesn't" rather than "Shouldn't", but clearly this president really doesn't.)

Oh, and Donnie? You're doing a bang-up job of showing how big and brave you are by going after a dead man. That's so presidential, Donnie. That'll get you the respect you crave.

Once again, you've shown yourself to be thoroughly useless.