THE MUELLER REPORT—AS I SEE IT

During the highly divisive debate over the past two years to which the Department of Justice investigation into presidential abuse of power, obstruction of justice and conspiracy with a hostile foreign power has given rise, moderates on both sides have cautioned their more radical peers to stop trying to second-guess Special Counsel Robert Mueller and wait for his report. Wait, we have, but the release of the report this week holds out no promise of an end to the discussion. On the contrary, it opens up new questions on which defenders of the two juxtaposed positions regarding the latest US administration are bound to bitterly clash.

When then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Donald Trump in May of 2017 that prosecutor Robert Mueller was being appointed by the DOJ to look into allegations of obstruction and collusion, the president is reported to have said, “This is terrible. This is the end my presidency. I’m fucked!” The best one could surmise about such statements is that the president might have been unwarrantedly paranoid about the legal process within the US justice system—considering his unfamiliarity with the Constitution, Federal law or the truth. But it would appear, rather, that Trump was genuinely worried about how exposed he was to such an investigation because there really was a “there there” under these headings.

The 400-page Mueller report indeed confirms a “there there”, despite Attorney General William Barr’s best efforts to downplay it, to the chagrin of Republicans and Democrats alike. The Republicans, because it implies that the Mueller Report is not an end to a controversy, but just the beginning. The Democrats, because Special Counsel Mueller has effectively punted to them, and how they receive the ball and run with it is likely, one way or another, to affect their performance in the 2020 elections.

I received the report through a friend in New York while it was still hot off the press and have galloped through it since then. I’m a slow and careful reader, so I’m sure that I’ll have more to say on this investigation in the future. But my first look has led me to certain concrete preliminary conclusions that, for what they’re worth, I am sharing below. But one of the main ones is that no matter how carefully the investigation was carried out or how many truths it has uncovered, the GOP is bound, by and large, to continue to contend that it isn’t what you know but what you can prove (or that it’s all about the privileges the office of the president provides), while Democrats will argue that the report reveals exactly what they expected it to reveal and that if the president isn’t indicted it’s only because, under the law, he can’t be.

Here are a few other first impressions I’ve formed in scanning the redacted Mueller Report:

 - The US media, which the president and his base have gone out of their way to insult and try to discredit, have done their job admirably with regard to the misdeeds of the Trump administration and of the president himself. My main reason for arriving at this conclusion is that little if any of the special counsel’s report comes as a surprise to anyone who has been closely following the mainstream news. Papers like the The New York Times and The Washington Post have done a particularly good job of reporting over the past couple of years, as have magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and news sites such as Politico and The Daily Beast, among others.

 - The Mueller Report is not the end of anything, but the beginning. In one passage of the report the special counsel practically extends an invitation to Congress to investigate further and possibly impeach the president. According to legal experts making statements to the media the day after the report’s release, there appear to be more than a dozen potential prosecutions arising from the report. And Mueller has alerted other departments and agencies to them.

 - Since receiving the Mueller Report, Attorney General William Barr has sought to mislead the country about its contents. In his four-page preliminary summary of the report and in the press conference that he held on its release, he carefully trimmed his conclusions to leave out “the bad stuff” and to concentrate on vindication for the president. He even went as far as to give his own opinion with regard to the “obstruction and collusion” issues, with an eye toward prejudicing the GOP base in full favor of Trump and toward undermining the morale of Democrats and some Republicans who were hoping for conclusive evidence of both things. Barr’s ministrations on behalf of Trump were inconsistent, we now know, with the contents of the report.

In this sense, and combined with his unfounded allegations of deep-state “spying” on the 2016 Trump campaign, Barr is showing himself to be precisely what skeptics thought him to be when he took over from former AG Jeff Sessions: a Trump “hired gun”, a legal eagle with clear partiality and at the personal service of Donald Trump, not a true attorney general serving the interests of the people of the United States as a whole. Those who thought Barr was “a straight-shooter” or an impartial purveyor of balanced justice will be disappointed. But those of us who were aware of his past actions in government know that his specialty is obfuscation.

Indeed, it was Barr (along with other colleagues), who was one of those called in as a “cleaner” during investigation of the Iran-Contra affair under the administration of George H.W. Bush. Those investigations were being handled by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. Walsh, like Mueller, was a Republican who had earned a well-deserved reputation for professionalism. The job for which Barr and his associates were brought in was the effective short-circuiting of that probe into “conspiracy among the highest-ranking Reagan administration officials,” which included by then President Bush. And they did their job well, conjuring up ways to suppress evidence, and thus shield top officials like Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger—co-defendant along with six others in the investigation— and, indeed, Presidents Reagan and Bush. Bush would eventually issue highly controversial pardons to the seven defendants, thus effectively halting Walsh’s probe and the legal jeopardy to which he and Reagan were exposed in its tracks.

- The Mueller report could not establish that the Trump electoral campaign directly colluded with the Russian government to subvert the 2016 presidential elections so as to swing them in favor of Trump. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. The report indicates that the Russians repeatedly reached out to the Trump campaign and that campaign officials including Trump’s son, Don Jr., did indeed show interest in the Russian overtures. This in itself is at least ethically questionable behavior, since a more politically savvy and democratically honest team would have immediately made the candidate aware of what was going on and urged him to go to the FBI to let the agency know that Russian intelligence was seeking to influence the outcome of the election. The report indicated that Don Jr. wasn’t charged for his role in seeking Russian contacts because his testimony demonstrated that he truly wasn’t aware that what he was seeking to do might be a felony. In other words, we can infer from this that Trump’s son was deemed too stupid and ignorant to be charged.

Furthermore, despite the president’s insistence that he was “joking” when, during a campaign rally, he said, referring to the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private Internet server while she was secretary of state, “Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find 30,000 emails that are missing,” the report indicates that it wasn’t more than five hours until Russian agents were at work seeking to hack their way into the computers of Hillary Clinton and, eventually, the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

 - There was indeed, according to the report, Russian intervention in the 2016 elections. It led to the Mueller team’s indictment of a dozen Russian military intelligence agents. Collusion or no, this is a topic of grave concern to the country’s security, and one that is getting way too little attention, mainly because if the president admits that Russian intervention in US domestic affairs is a major problem that requires immediate action, it will be a tacit admission that his performance in the popular vote, which he lost by nearly three million votes, may have been even worse than at first believed.

 - The Mueller Report does not say, as the president and AG Barr have sought to convince the public, that there was no obstruction and/or attempted obstruction of justice on the part of Trump. It merely says that Department of Justice guidelines dictate that no sitting president can be indicted. If not, independent legal experts indicate, there are at least eleven examples of attempted obstruction with which Trump could be charged. And former federal prosecutor and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told CNN that under federal law, attempted obstruction is the same as obstruction because it indicates a willingness to subvert and influence the outcome of legal proceedings.

 - Which brings me to a bottom-line conclusion of the report: namely, that, thanks to the adults in the room among Trump’s team and the GOP, the system worked to keep the president somewhat more in check than he otherwise would have been, particularly as regards obstruction of justice. What can be inferred from Mueller’s report is that collusion was avoided and obstruction contained because a number of Trump team members disobeyed Trump’s orders. In other words, they saved Trump from himself, and in the process, preserved the rule of law. The highest-profile case of this was seen in testimony by former White House Counsel Don McGahn whose lengthy presentation before investigators provided major insight into a paranoid and dysfunctional administration in which he consistently stood up to the president to keep him from breaking the law or getting others to do so.

The importance of McGahn’s testimony before the Mueller investigation team is clear from the fact that the president is now railing against the former White House counsel, saying that McGahn painted a distorted picture of the Trump administration. It is more likely, however, because McGahn was right on the money that he is now a target of the president’s rage.  As an unnamed White House source told The Washington Post, “If anything, Don (McGahn) saved this presidency from the president. If Don had actually gone through with what the president wanted, you would have had a constitutional crisis. The president’s ego is hurt, but he’s still here.”

SINKING DEEPER INTO A POLICY MADE IN HELL

US Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has become the latest casualty in the presidential version of The Apprentice reality show that President Donald J. Trump once hosted on national television. The catch line for that show was, “You’re fired!” And Trump is now hosting it from the White House, although it only reaches TV through third party news sources and is a drama that is being staged in the only relative privacy of the presidential cabinet. It is clear from news sources and Nielsen’s own comments that she didn’t quit last weekend, but was forced out of office by the president, whom she described as “increasingly unhinged” regarding immigration policy. And the shake-up at Homeland Security has continued since Nielsen quit under pressure last Sunday.

Kirstjen Nielsen

As the story is being pieced together from off-the-record statements by concerned inside government sources to the mainstream media, we are learning that Nielsen’s departure was only the first major symptom of a sweeping purge that the president is carrying out in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and related agencies. The symbolic beheadings continued this week with the dismissal of Secret Service Director Randolph Alles, who, according to the White House “will be leaving shortly.”

The story has implications that are complex and far-reaching, but that can be summarized in a few questions that those working in the Homeland Security Department of Donald Trump must ask themselves if they hope to keep their jobs: Am I willing to shut down the border wherever and whenever the president tells me to? Am I willing to snatch children from their mother’s arms and cage them? Am I willing to send those children off to parts unknown without a clue of how to get them back to their families? Am I willing to break the law in order to do the president’s bidding? Nielsen appears to have been willing to do some but not all of these things. In the main, she wasn’t willing to break the law to close the border, or to ignore judicial decisions regarding immigration cases, and her refusal to do so was sufficient for the president to fire her.

Despite Nielsen’s having garnered a dark reputation as a Trump enforcer—who has overseen mass detention of asylum-seekers, separation of would-be immigrant families at the border, the tear-gassing of migrants including mothers and children on the frontier between Mexico and the US, the scattering of immigrant children separated from their parents to other parts of the country, the deaths of several children in detention from apparent neglect and the “misplacement” of hundreds of children in government or foster care—the president is understood to have sought Nielsen’s resignation because she was “too soft” on immigration.

Mother and child detained at the border

Following this latest departure, Trump’s cabinet now includes four acting department heads. With a turnover rate of around 66 percent, Trump has hosted the largest number of top-slot cabinet departures in recent memory: 14 only three months into his third year. His closest competitor for cabinet departures was Bill Clinton, with 12 for his entire first term. Obama oversaw the departures of nine of his cabinet members in his first four years. The lowest turnover by far was in the cabinet of George W. Bush with only four departures during his first four years in office.  

Nielsen was one of the better-prepared of Trump’s staff members, having graduated from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and from University of Virginia Law. Apparently with an eye to diplomacy, she also majored in Japanese Studies at Nazan University in Nagoya, Japan.  But her career early on turned to national security when she served under George W. Bush on the White House Homeland Security Council as Director for Prevention, Preparedness and Response.

After leaving the Bush administration in 2008, Nielsen didn’t continue in government but turned instead to private contracting. She made herself known as the founder and president of Sunesis Consulting. But she was listed as the firm's only employee, and her personal cellphone number served as the company switchboard. Despite this skeletal profile, during the Obama administration she won a federal contract for an initial sum of 450,000 dollars to “provide policy and legislation, technical writing, and organizational development” for use by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

She also later served as a senior member of the Resilience Task Force under the Center for Cyber & Homeland Security Committee at Georgetown University, and was a member of the Global Risks Report Advisory Board at the World Economic Forum.

Nielsen’s rise to Director of Homeland Security came in a roundabout manner. She was General John Kelly’s chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security when he headed that agency. But she later accompanied Kelly to the White House when Donald Trump appointed the general to the post of Chief of Staff. There, Nielsen became Kelly’s principal deputy. Following Kelly’s move to the White House, the Homeland Security post was held by Acting Secretary Elaine Duke. But in October of 2017, Trump named Nielsen to replace Duke, and she was Senate-confirmed in December of that year, officially becoming Secretary of Homeland Security.

Surrounded

In the year and a half that she headed up the Homeland Security Department, Nielsen presided over some of the most morally and legally questionable as well as cruel policies of the Trump era to date. Surely the most controversial of these has been “family separation”, in which the United States government has ordered the separation of the families of undocumented immigrants, including asylum-seekers, at ports of entry on the US-Mexican border. This policy of separation has included the removal of immigrant children, quite often to parts unknown.

The Washington Post Editorial Board has accurately described Nielsen’s performance at the DHS as “attempting to placate a president for whom no anti-immigrant measure is beyond the pale.” While some media outlets have sought to turn Nielsen into a sort of unsung hero for her refusal to go as far as the president asked her to go in implementing his authoritarian advances, the Post also precisely described her time at the DHS as “a season of gratuitous, inept and ultimately futile cruelty,” adding that, “in the process, she bent the truth, sought to evade accountability and did incalculable damage to the prestige of the United States. It is a miserable record.”

And new evidence is pointing to the probability that many thousands more migrant families have been broken up than originally thought, with the process of family separation having begun in the first year of the president’s term and only becoming public knowledge last year when the situation reached crisis proportions. Worse still, Nielsen was so anxious to placate her boss that neither she nor her staff deigned to ask themselves how they would track the members of the families that they were ripping apart so that they might be reunited in the future. There was a feeble attempt to scrap this policy after it became a full-blown scandal in the national and international news media, but the president is doubling down on it once more and it is now clear that this heinous and inhuman practice has his enormous signature all over it.  

The heart-rending result of this is that hundreds of children snatched from the arms of their parents and caged, before being fostered out to parts unknown, are now missing and the government has no idea where to find them. Clearly, this US administration has no foresight, nor does it seem concerned at all about the burden of posterity.

We’ve come to understand that Donald Trump is hardly an intellectual. This is why, since taking office, he has consistently relied on shadowy, Rasputin-like characters to do his thinking for him. To a man, they are extreme nationalists who view the presidency more as an authoritarian game-changer than as an integral part of a complex system of division of powers and of checks and balances. The most prominent figures in this camp have been far-right ideologue Steve Bannon and, more lately, Stephen Miller. The 33-year-old Miller, who had a political kinship to Bannon when Bannon had the president’s ear, came to the government through former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but “outlived” Sessions to become Trump’s senior adviser.

Stephen Miller

Miller is seen as having a major influence on Trump’s courting of the National Rifle Association, his false claims regarding “massive voter fraud” that he perceived as taking the popular vote from him in 2016, his view of the judiciary as “too powerful” and as an enemy of the presidency, and, first and foremost, his extreme anti-immigration policy. Indeed, Miller was instrumental in the administration’s defeat of the Immigration Reform Bill that would have gone a long way toward solving the immigration situation in the US.

As a footnote, it is worthwhile wondering how a man like Miller developed his rabid aversion to immigrants. The fact is that he descends from a family of asylum-seekers who immigrated to the US. His mother’s family arrived in the United States in the early 1900s from Belarus, from where they fled in the face of the anti-Jewish pogroms perpetrated by czarist Russia. Furthermore, as a Jew, it would be hard for him not to know that today’s Western asylum laws originated after World War II, as a result of the holocaust. His fundamentalist anti-immigration stance and his full support for and promotion of such cruel policies are, then, all the more baffling.    

The fact is that the border crisis is being manufactured by the Trump administration in general and by Stephen Miller in particular. The solution isn’t throwing human rights considerations out the window and acting like some of the worst dictatorial regimes in living memory, where state-promoted abductions, disappearances and separation of families have also been used as inhuman policy tools, but by putting aside futile political divisions and agreeing on a compromise to repair what is, basically, a dysfunctional immigration system.

Perhaps a history lesson would be in order, for the sake of providing perspective. This policy bears a striking resemblance to the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans and Japanese residents during World War II. That humanitarian fiasco left a moral stain on the Roosevelt administration—and so too on the United States—that no amount of good that FDR might have done for the country could erase.

Again, however, this administration seems uninterested in either the past or the future, but merely in a present that it is deeply invested in turning chaotic. If we can’t get the full story now, when the Trump administration is consistently stone-walling on not just this, but practically every issue of the day, we’ll surely get it in the future when books are written, studies done, and films made about the lawlessness and cruelty of this administration, whose chief executive is notoriously divorced from humanitarianism, the Constitution and the rule of law.