A Fair, Honest and True Assessment of the Mueller Report

Kellyanne Conway appeared ecstatic. Bouncing down the driveway after appearing on Fox News Thursday afternoon, she told us the president was in a great mood. She then proceeded to entertain apologies from the press for suggesting the president had been involved in collusion with the Russians. No one took her up on that offer.

Then she told us we shouldn’t lie any more about the president. I told her point blank she shouldn’t lie to us. She ignored me. She claimed, two and a half hours after the Mueller report had been released to the public, that she’d already read the entire thing. When I said, “Oh, a speed reader, eh?” she frowned. But make no mistake: Conway was in her element.

It was the happiest reporters had seen her in months. She smiled, danced and made fun of reporters as she defended Trump after an early morning news conference by Attorney General William Barr in which Barr excused Trump’s seemingly bad behavior in the past because Trump was unwarrantedly raked through the coals. “No collusion.”

And the president, we were also told, was in a fantastic mood. Like many other statements by Trump and members of the administration, it was a lie. Trump had already made one public appearance Thursday, and while he said he was in a great mood as he appeared before a group of Wounded Warriors —“No collusion” he reminded us—his actions indicated otherwise. He was muted. He stood to the side at one point during the ceremony under a larger-than-life-sized portrait of George Washington. Our first president and our 45th stood together, at least symbolically, and Trump never looked smaller. Looking grim, and his small dark eyes surrounded by their unnaturally orange shell of skin, he appeared oddly out of place next to one of the founding fathers. It was hard to miss the contrast.

Trump left the ceremony with barely a nod and headed back to the Oval Office where he was scheduled to engage in whatever executive time he wanted until he left the building for Mar-a-Lago later in the afternoon. “He’s not all that happy,” one of his staffers told me. “He’s finding out what’s really in the Mueller report.”

The 448-page redacted report (find it here) was hardly the exoneration Barr made it out to be, which prompted many Democrats and even some Republicans to privately and publicly demand Barr’s ouster. “He’s not the personal attorney for the president,” one told me. “He’s supposed to be independent.” “Trump found his Roy Cohn,” another said evenly.

The long-awaited report did not exonerate the president as Trump claimed. In fact, it said just the opposite. “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” Mueller wrote.

There will be a lot of armchair quarterbacking on this report for days, weeks, months and even years to come. The Kellyanne Revue will give way to a cold, sober reality quicker than anyone in the administration wants to admit. However, the president already seems to know: when he said he was “fucked” with the appointment of a special prosecutor after he fired FBI Director James Comey, this is one time he didn’t lie.

By Thursday afternoon, as a larger-than-usual crowd of reporters and photographers wedged themselves into a small area outside of the Oval Office on the South Lawn to catch the presidential departure, the gloom was apparent. With the First Lady in tow, Trump quickly walked to Marine One and left. We were left taking pictures, and all the struggle to get into a position to ask him a question was for naught. I asked him if he were innocent of collusion, did that make him an unwitting Russian pawn? He didn’t answer that. He didn’t answer anything else.

“You know damned well if that S.O.B. was in a good mood he would have stayed and gloated and taken our questions,” more than one reporter opined. The writing was on the wall even from what little was released by the attorney general. The Russians interfered in our election in 2016. They did it to help Donald Trump. Mueller’s report is replete with chapter and verse of this interference. It’s staggering how often the Russians interfered, how thorough their interference was and how effective it turned out to be. The Russians staged rallies in Trump’s name and put out fictitious ads and social media posts which attracted millions. Trump even retweeted a Florida rally posting sponsored by a Russian hacker pretending to be a conservative American. Kellyanne’s joy probably came from the fact she’s barely mentioned in the report, and therefore whatever happens to Trump, she still has the ability to get away clean. In the swamp, Kellyanne is that alligator that always survives.

The report also clearly shows Trump had one tactic before the press and public and another when it came to courts and legal responsibility. His campaign and his White House communications staff became a tool of propaganda, pumping out lies and shilling for Trump at his whim. It’s the situational ethics of a shyster. Sell whatever you can publicly, and when called on the carpet before a court of law, you tell the truth as best you can to avoid a bunco rap. Mueller’s massive report shows Trump had no problem trying to deceive the American people, but knew enough to play it as straight as he could considering his lack of ethics when he faced the law. He sweats every move. He tried to manipulate every move. His former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was so tortured he carried around a resignation letter, according to the Mueller report, for weeks. All because Sessions wouldn’t un-recuse himself from the Russian investigation and shut it down. Who knew Sessions had ethics? Compared to Barr, he looks like Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Meanwhile, there’s the hapless, hopeless and meaningless Sarah Sanders—long known among the press corps as a bad fertilizer salesman. She got outed by Mueller’s investigators when she admitted making up stories about FBI agents disliking Comey. She dismissed her extensive lies as a “slip of the tongue.” There are a large number of pages in the report dedicated to exposing lies and questionable behavior from Michael Cohen, Sanders, Carter Page, Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopolous, Hope Hicks, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and others. Trump wants you to believe he hired the best and the brightest, but the Mueller report makes them all look like the Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

Still, Mueller couldn’t pin the slippery eel down. Part of it was because Trump never sat down for an interview with Mueller, and part of it has to do with how the laws are applied. The Donald is coy, cunning and vicious. His years around mobsters have taught him to speak around a subject, indicating what he wants done, but also providing him with legal and plausible deniability for any action taken in his name. The Mueller report also shows that if Trump didn’t meet with Putin and cut a deal, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Luckily, the group surrounding Trump wasn’t able to pull it off or, in several cases, refused to do what Donald wanted—especially when Trump tried to shut down Mueller’s investigation.

“The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests. Comey did not end the investigation of Flynn, which ultimately resulted in Flynn’s prosecution and conviction for lying to the FBI. (Don) McGahn did not tell the Acting Attorney General that the Special Counsel must be removed, but was instead prepared to resign over the president’s order. Lewandowski and Dearborn did not deliver the president’s message to Sessions that he should confine the Russia investigation to future election meddling only. And McGahn refused to recede from his recollections about events surrounding the President’s direction to have the Special Counsel removed, despite the President’s multiple demands “that he do so,” Mueller wrote.

The report also shows every time Trump shouted “fake news,” he was the one faking it. The Mueller report uses articles from the *Washington Post, The New York Times,*Daily Beast, statements from Trump subordinates, excerpts of Trump’s statements caught on the South Lawn, in his news conferences and from his minions in the now defunct press briefings as well as the president’s personal tweets to assist in building his case. In every instance, Mueller verified what Trump later called out as a falsehood.

Trump’s actions, and those by the chief propagandist Sarah Sanders, have led to threats of violence against reporters—some of whom have to have body guards—but Trump doesn’t care one bit about that. You cannot miss the parallels to a mob family, whether it’s Donald talking about people “flipping” on him or how Cohen got phone calls from Trump friends and associates reminding him how “The Boss loves you.”

Robert Costello, a friend of Rudy Giuliani’s, told Cohen in an email that he had a conversation with Giuliani and “the conversation was ‘very, very positive. You are ‘loved’ . . . they are in our corner . . . sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places.’” The irony that Giuliani once prosecuted mobsters is only too sweet. Mueller does address the obstruction of justice issue squarely and soundly, reminding everyone that in U.S. v. Greer “obstruction of a criminal investigation is punishable even if the prosecution is ultimately unsuccessful or even if the investigation ultimately reveals no underlying crime.”

Mueller also lays low most of Trump’s defenses: “Our investigation found multiple acts by the president that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” Mueller wrote. Some referred to the lengthy report, particularly the second volume that addresses the possibility of obstruction of justice, as a “blueprint” for impeaching Donald Trump.

Sure enough, Friday afternoon, shortly after Trump got off the golf course with his friend Rush Limbaugh, Elizabeth Warren proclaimed that impeachment proceedings should begin immediately against Donald Trump. So far, the call is getting mixed reviews. So, where the Mueller report ultimately leads us is yet to be determined. But if you sit down and read the report with a clear head, it is a shocking indictment of a corrupt, incompetent and bungling bunch of second-rate criminals who’ve twisted the guiding principles of the Republic into an opportunity to fleece the American public while Kellyanne Conway is left dancing in the streets.