Has Mueller asked Putin yet if he is colluding?
Has Mueller asked Putin yet if he is colluding?
"Every country has the government it deserves."
Joseph de Maistre (1753 – 1821)
No. I'm saying a long running concern of mine is that the public and the intelligence community are operating on two different wavelengths.
For the public, anything and everything the intelligence community has with regards to Trump-Russia would be relevant in filling in the blanks. And there will be blanks. Big ones.
For the intelligence community, they're more concerned historically with parochialism (inter-agency rivalries) or more generally "big picture". They wouldn't want to burn a source close to Putin in order to inform the public, because they think that source would be useful to them in the future. We've seen pretty much exactly this with the 9/11 Comission report, followed by subsequent revelations.
For me, I think this is big enough for all-hands-on deck for the entire US government. The report will only exacerbate the "reality split" Trump has already brought about. The more the IC shows, the better it will be. The worst possible world is if in 2022, President Biden declassified the entire report, and it turns out that Trump should have been prosecuted for T reason when he got off with a bad news cycle, because the IC sat on something.
Hold up.
Something doesn't add up. The Mueller Grand Jury still has sealed documents/indictments that were never acted upon.
Right, which is why it would be pretty weird to see DoJ saying "no more indictments in the election interference investigation." As I said previously, this is likely just a status report on russian interference, and not interference as a whole. Besides, current DoJ policy says you can't indict trump while he's president. So anyone reading into it that this clears trump hasn't been paying attention.
Mueller's been farming out the indictments to standing DoJ divisions and Attorneys. It's been one of the ways he protected the investigation.
One of the earliest mischaracterizations that was made with the Special Counsel's Office was that it was, in effect, like Ken Starr's office, a mini-DoJ-for-Trump. In actually, the entire time Mueller operated it as an investigative group, that, with a couple of exceptions, when it got something, distributed it to parts of the DoJ that regularly handle that sort of thing.
Basically Mueller saw his job as investigative, not prosecutorial, by in large.
Which means those Sealed Indictments will still be acted on, by the DoJ itself.
Welp, so much for that.
Unfortunately the waiting isn't over even if we get to see the full report. We get to enjoy another 1-2 years of waiting for the other investigations to conclude.
For the first time I'll say it - @Skroe, don't get banned! Want to see everybody's reactions if/when info starts to release! =D Don't think the power of the Skroeban™ can add to anything else at this point! ;P
I am a lot less confident that Biden, or any democrat, will defeat Trump than I was a while back. If Biden, or any democrat, wins, well there IS no worst case scenario and I really won't care so much what happens to Trump, especially if the Senate is also taken over by the democrats. In this case I would be more interested in moving the US forward rather than revisiting the Trump nightmare.