At the very least I would have wanted Mueller to say that he would be willing to honestly testify in any way that would help congress do their job best.
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Mueller obviously thinks Trump needs to be impeached for obstruction of justice. Alternatively, Trump would need to be indicted after January 20, 2021.
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He did not say he would not honestly testifyā¦he said he had done his job and would not be talking about anything that was not in the reportā¦have you read that report? Hundreds of pages. That is a lot of testimony right there. This man has been attacked by Trump and his crew for 2 years. I donāt think piling on will make any difference.
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Except itās not exactly the start now is it?
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What Iām noticing, both in his comments and the discussion, here and elsewhere, is that the thirst for impeachmentājustified as it is, no questionāis taking a back seat to the very, very important issue he highlighted but that no one wants to pay attention to: ELECTION SECURITY.
Like I said, impeachment is important, and while I appreciate Joshās take on it, Iām increasingly convinced that it needs to happen, and soon, lest it look like no one did anything when faced with a criminal presidency. But the insecurity of our elections, from social media to actual ballots, is how we got this criminal president, at the will of an adversarial foreign government.
Itās one thing to put out the fire thatās burning the house down. Itās another to build the new house with the same faulty wiring that caused the fire in the first place. Both need to be addressed. Ignoring easily hackable voting machines, allowing Facebook to continue to ignore willful disinformation on its website while giving third parties access to unprecedented personal data, and pretending that this piece of the puzzle will just magically go away is, among other things, a great way to ensure that the criminal presidency gets a second term.
Somehow we need to find a way to address two major issues at once.
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As itās clear that the only way to get an unredacted version of the report will be to steal it, Mueller needed to be much more specific. He needed to plainly state that the Donald is guilty of impeachable offenses, but that it is likely this will never happen due to a treasonous GOP.
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I think that Muellerās statement today has solidified enough of this country to demand impeachment.
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The facts as we already know them already demand impeachment. It would be nice to have a cherry on top, but we lost our cherry a long time ago.
And here we are, years later and Trump is still trying to collude with our enemies, the Senate majority leader got bought off by a Russian oligarch, and the Republicans have started making a list of Americans to attack.
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And this is a specific example of a more general phenomenon: Some people are so evil, or stupid, or irresponsible that it can be dangerous to entangle yourself with them in any way.
Of course, one should be aware of this before agreeing to be, say, a Special Counsel.
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I could understand your post if you had a head cold and were seriously medicated, but Tierney, what Mueller did was tell Congress to do their constitutional duty.
Shame on you. I expected better out of you.
The burden is now on Nancy Pelosi. If she does not act soon, if not now, she will be as guilty for letting this criminal president go free, leaving him in a position to continue to destroy this country, its constitution, and to threaten this flat earth.
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I donāt understand TPMās take at all. HE SAID - if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that. That is really significant and itās new that he is being so explicit! Only in this bizarro world where facts donāt seem to matter would such a statement from such an official - that there is no confidence that the PRESIDENT DIDN"T COMMIT A CRIME (!) - be characterized as a ho-hum, no big deal event. In fact, all of TPMs coverage of this is really infuriating me. Itās what weāre seeing from the GOP - why are you doing it, too?
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The bitterness I see here and elsewhere toward Mueller seems to be born of this persistent and completely nonsensical, if also understandable, assumption that Heās Our Guy, St George against the Trump behemoth. But he is not and never was that. He was a straight arrow, doing an impeccably professional job within the constraints of the law, as compared with the political hack-job travesty of, for example, the Starr Report. It was not his job to torpedo Trump. Heck, it didnāt even start out as an investigation of Trumpāonly Trump kept throwing himself bodily in front of it to the point where he made himself the focus at least in the public eye, a pretty good job of diversion from the original investigation, which was to look into what Russia was doing. Kinda interesting that.
But the point is, with Trumpās main strategy being to cast the whole thing as a political witch hunt, a strategy they are continuing to press forward with show trials to take place next January if Sara Hypocrisy Sanders is to be believed, the best thing we were entitled to expect was exactly the kind of investigation he carried out. The political context absolutely demanded rigorous adhesion to the letter of the law, all the more so since the rule of law is what is most essentially at at stake.
"And second, the opinion says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrongdoing.ā
I read this as saying he has loaded the gun and put it in Congressās hands, but they are the ones who have to muster the fortitude to aim it and pull the trigger. Whereas it seems like a lot of people are disappointed that he didnāt do that part for them too.
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Totally agree with this. I am bewildered by TPMs take on this.
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No longer St. Bob.
Still a bad analogy.
Mueller was LEGALLY precluded from issuing an indictment or even recommending one. You want him to break the law? More than anything else, that would allow the Orange Mango skate.
I think Iāve deciphered it . . .
If you wanted Al Pacino, you should have hired Al Pacino.
Congress, do your goddamned job.
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Yes, except I would say he put a loaded gun on the table. What matters now is whoās the first to pick it up.
Yes!! Election security and preventing further attacks similar to the ones performed by the Russians in the 2016 election should be a non-partisan issue. We need to be able to trust that our elections are legitimate. If Congress focuses on this, it will be clear which leaders believe in the Constitution and which put Party before Country.
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āCherry on topā? We have squat. Again, short of Mueller being explicit, he needed to reveal corroborated information that made the path to impeachment undeniable. Heās done nothing in that way.
Again, we need the unredacted report, especially if Mueller is disinclined to testify before Congress.