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Robert Mueller dies at 81
If you're like me and you barely paid attention to the Mueller Report while it was happening and don't remember anything, the article is a decent summary. I was under the impression that Russia did stuff, Trump didn't actively participate but didn't put up a protest either, and some of his team got busted for lying to investigators (Trump's lawyers were worried about him also getting involved in perjury but successfully managed to get him to "not recall" everything).
Anyways I still don't see what the big deal was, other than lying to investigators. They didn't do any hacking themselves or ask anyone to do it. Knowing about it in advance, or using it as part of campaign strategy, isn't a crime either.
Trump of course has a take on the event:
Rude, but I can't say I'd be any nicer to the guy who tried to put me in prison.
Yeah I feel like Trump going off on Rob Reiner after he was stabbed to death by his own son was considerably worse
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Could've gone with the Rickover classic:
Gives a fig leaf to the rudeness.
I can't find any reference to that anywhere; DuckDuckGo returns no results, the Wikiquote page for Admiral Hyman Rickover does not list such a quote either by or about him, and Wikipedia redirects 'Rickover' to the Admiral's page without any disambiguation page for others of the same name. Are you referring to the Admiral or someone else, and was the quote said by or about them?
"I hope the rest of your day is as pleasant as you are."
It's from what I believe is his final congressional testimony as admiral: Economics of Defense Policy, Hearing Before the Joint Economic Committee Congress of the United States Ninety-Seventh Congress Second Session Part 1 January 28, 1982. Page 55, PDF page 59:
Looks like I was off by two words, which may have been throwing off your search results. The Wikiquote page for the Kindly Old Gentleman is missing a great many of his best lines, IMO... such as the one where he compared cleaning up the patent lawyer profession to Hercules cleaning the Augean stables:
Then update it.
Whoever owns the page will just delete them again.
This page (Wikiquote, not Wikipedia) has been the subject of five edits (including the one that I just made in order to add the first quote mentioned above) in two years. I don't think anybody cares enough to camp on it.
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"Lying to investigators" is how the FBI, which to this day refuses to record interviews, frames people directly. You can't defend yourself, it's your word against the interviewer, who doesn't even write down notes as he goes, but writes it all down a few days after the interview, from "memory". They can literally write anything they want, and there is no recourse. Congratulations on your confession to 9/11.
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As far as I could ever tell, the Mueller report was, basically the actual coverup of the crimes. Mueller himself was a doddering figurehead who knew little about what was happening (selected because he was ostensibly a Republican, but his team was staffed with partisan Democrats), and clearly was at Joe Biden 2024 levels at the end. The report meticulously avoided investigating FBI wrongdoing, such as the dozens of leaks to partisan news organizations of half-truths, and the fabrication of evidence put into FISA applications, and instead focused on process crimes, often ones the investigation itself generated by doing things like not videotaping interviews, so agent memorializations could put interviewee's "statements" in the least favorable light when seeking indictments under $1001.
While some of the Trump conduct did seem at the time, obstructionist, with hindsight, we see it was perfectly justified. Trump's campaign advisors were illegally wiretapped. Comey himself attempted to blackmail Trump during the transition with the fake Steele Dossier (then leaked the fact that Trump was briefed on it so people could treat it like it was a serious FBI piece of work product). The Michael Flynn prosecution was an ongoing demonstration of the venality of the prosecutors, essentially bankrupting a man, and then the judge frustrating efforts to undue the ridiculous results.
All in all it was a big production to distract from what really happened which was a lot of illegal things at the FBI, wherein the Mueller report succeeded in its goals of hindering the Trump adminstration's agenda and running out the clock on those criminal and civil claims (and also fouling evidence by way of time).
I would rather not speak ill of the dead but I feel like Mueller fundamentally failed to grasp the situation he'd been presented with. He opposed prosecuting people for institutional failures on the grounds that he felt that such prosecutions would erode public trust in our institutions but what he didn't seem to grasp was that a failure to prosecute would erode trust even more.
See @faceh's rant about rewarding failure
Yeah, part of the theory of institutional rot is that eventually it settles in so deeply that
To actually address the rot would require exposing how utterly compromised the institution is, likely leading to its full collapse.
The members of the institution itself are aware of how compromised are but are dependent on its continued existence, and the honest ones are outnumbered by the apathetic/compromised ones, so everyone just goes along.
It is hard to imagine situations where a high-profile, wealthy, esteemed institution that becomes aware of its own declining functionality is able to course-correct from purely internal pressures, rather than some exogenous force arriving to impose changes.
Ironically (or not?) Elon showed that there are 'nondestructive' ways out. His handling of the twitter takeover maintained continuity but he fixed things by a quick purge of staff, then bringing in some motivated replacements to reorient and take control and 'right the ship' then a lot of rapid,
This didn't work nearly so well with DOGE... but I think the idea has legs.
I do now believe the the filtering/skin in the game mechanism has to be harsh and trigger as early as possible. Harsh as in the outcomes should start with death and scale down from there. "Early" as in people should be getting filtered before they are in position to do extreme damage.
And there should probably be some redundancy as well since the first thing any infiltrator will do if they sneak through a filter is... disable or modify the filter itself.
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I don't think there would be much direct collusion between the Trump campaign (at least, not multiple high level staffers) to begin with just because there's not too much need for it. It's simple to just stay working in parallel with the same goal in mind than risk communicating too much. That being said, I take it by default that there was Russian influence in the 2016 election, but I also assume there was foreign influence of basically any kind. Point to any modern middle income or above country and they're most likely engaged in a bunch of spycraft, cyber warfare, bot networks, etc. The US does it to other countries too!
The Mueller report is mostly meaningful to me in just how much obstruction there was from the Trump 1 admin. That's the suspicious part to me, trying to hide Russian operations suggests there might have been something deeper that was left undiscovered. Similar to how the continued attempts to slow walk and hide the Epstein files continues to suggest something deeper. I'm a big fan of privacy from government and don't buy the "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument for mass surveillance, but that's on individual rights and personal privacy. It is in fact suspicious when done with the government itself.
But realistically it doesn't even change anything. We already know that Trump is extremely friendly towards Putin and Russia! We don't need any proof of campaign coordination to know how much they get along, he's pretty blatant in this!
Speaking of Trump's reaction btw, incredible how much material This You is getting from it. also boy there is an old Kirk tweet for everything at this point.
The problem with this entire take is that Trump actually has colluded with a foreign power and he was extremely open about it, creating an undeniable trail of evidence accompanied by corrupt outcomes which simply do not exist for Russia and Putin. The Russian connection relies on incredibly dodgy IP address connections and other bullshit, along with one of 2016 Candidate Trump's policies (get the US out of foreign wars) coinciding with one of Putin's priorities (end the Ukraine war, which was rendered substantially harder by US assistance). There's mysterious backchannels, blackmail material with sources exactly as strong as someone on 4chan saying they made it up (not joking) etc - and to top it all off, there's no real evidence that Trump acted in a corrupt fashion and helped out Russia.
But if we switch focus for a second and look at Israeli compromise, there are mountains of evidence - we can see Trump talking about how Miriam Adelson purchased his foreign policy decisions for money, we can see the pipeline from donations to pardons, we can see foreign policy decisions completely outsourced to Israel no matter how much the US suffers. This is what corruption actually looks like, and it isn't hidden at all - there IS direct collusion, there IS evidence of quid pro quo, there IS evidence of bribery. What's the point of talking about the anemic and insubstantial accusations of pro-Russian collusion when Trump openly confesses in public to being purchased by Israeli money?
Why did Israel decide that Trump should make a separate peace with the Houthis?
My apologies for being ambiguous - I did not mean that Israel were in charge of all foreign policy decisions, but that certain decisions were made by them with zero regard for America's interests.
Ah, I see. Thank you for clarifying!
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I got the impression that the Trump "obstruction" was very similar to a "resisting arrest" charge by cops accompanied with no other crimes.
Basically go hard on accusing someone of a crime, when they protest their innocence as just about anyone will do, slam them with your body or investigation powers and now the cop has a guaranteed crime even if the original accusation was bogus.
He was friendly far below the "friendliness" that the Obama and Biden administrations had with Ukraine. Which amounted to million dollar bribes to Biden's son.
I very much felt like the Democrats were expecting their own level of corruption to be uncovered by the investigation, but instead it was a bunch of nothing. Like the jealous partner that insists you are totally cheating when it's then that has been unfaithful.
Russia is an enemy nation that hates the US, the west, and democracy. They have been our opposition for decades and decades.
Ukraine while definitely not perfect is an ally of the west, a democracy, and have not been our enemy for decades and decades.
Can you not tell a difference here?
Ukraine has totally been USA enemy in the decades before 1989. Ukraine is exactly as Russia by any conceivable metric just scaled down a bit. Third - Ukraine is too weak to be an ally. Potential client state is a better description no matter what Churchill of the 21st century thinks.
Ukraine should not be defended against conquest because they're a worthy country or ally but because it contains lots of valuable farmland and other resources and millions of potential janissaries Russia could use to conquer Europe.
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Ukraine could not have been the enemy of USA before 1989 because there was no such thing as a diplomatically and geopolitically separate state of Ukraine. USSR was the enemy of USA. The territory of the modern day Ukraine was territory, it could not have been the enemy of anyone. It's land. Maybe you could argue that the politicians of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine remained enemies of USA after they became independent, if you could actually trace the same politicians and the same attitudes.
By that logic Russia too couldn't have been enemy for decades and decades.
That logic would apply to Russia if Russia did not inherit the vast majority of USSR's momentum, position and ambition.
Enemy country changes name, slightly shrinks, wants same things = effectively same enemy.
New country spawns from fringes of enemy country, has fraction of its power, different concerns = not the same enemy.
I could see a situation where I'm enemies with the ROC then retain enmity with Taiwan despite them being fringe and tiny compared to the previous entity
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Russia not great, Putin definitely not great, but we're all friends now (or at least back then) because it's no longer the USSR, the Cold War is over, and we have no reason to be flinging nukes at each other anymore, right?
The reset was an Obama initiative in 2009. There have been swings in the "friends/not friends" arc between the West and Russia over those "decades and decades" of being an enemy.
Hunter Biden was a different matter, but I think yes, he got paid to basically be Dad's Boy and be the introduction between Ukrainian (and Chinese, let's not forget that either) interests and the White House due precisely and solely to Joe's position. Without Joe being in power or near to it, Hunter is not getting paid spit.
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The "not perfect" is doing a lot of lifting in that statement.
Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine Russia seemed no worse than any of America's Gulf state "allies". Ukraine would probably get dumped in the same general category but much less bad within that category.
America has been friendly and "allies" with plenty of shit tier governments around the world.
I've been putting "allies" in quotes because an ally that you aren't willing to let have nuclear weapons is more accurately a protectorate territory.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union there has not been an ideological reason for Russia and America to hate each other.
Back in 2016 Trump had no reason to do saber rattling crap with Russia. He was instead picking a trade war fight with China. And you'd probably want Russia on your side if you start a trade war fight with China, since Russia can negate the main leverage over China: Fuel.
The general point is that back in pre 2016 taking bribes from Ukraine would not have been ok simply because "they aren't Russia". I would consider Great Britain to be one of America's best allies, and I don't think Hunter Biden's relationship with them would have been ok.
Meanwhile the lukewarm stance of Trump 1 administration of "we are not going to label you as enemies" was treated as being equivalent to treason.
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The 1980's called. They want their foreign policy back.
Sorry, Cat, but table stakes for this conversation is the kind of scathing, molten ranting at Obama and Hilary Clinton that'll get you fired, bankrupted and jailed when Democrats retake control and implement Project 2029.
Sans the ante up, this is just TDS from the peanut gallery.
Has any of "Russia hates the US, the west, and democracy" changed, or are you trying to say that foreign policy going forward should be against those traditional American beliefs and against ourselves?
Because it certainly doesn't seem like they've changed much. While the UK, Germany and Ukraine have taken the top three of Russian enemies, the US still has a significant amount of hate towards it from the Russian people and the only reason they don't hate us more is because Donald Trump is very friendly to the country that threaten our allies, threatens to nuke Elon Musk and is currently providing Iran with intelligence to hit American targets. And we all know their elections are about as fair as North Korea, just great campaigning by Putin and fortune that all his critics end up insane or falling out of windows or dying to rare dart frog poisons.
Should 2020's American foreign policy be cheering this on?
Didn't realize they were the current president and were cozying up to Putin right now.
There's not really way to ask this without sounding condescending, but are you old enough to remember the Obama administration?
Because if you want to talk about not getting that Russia is THE ENEMY, then the conversation has to begin with Mitt Romney calling Russia our biggest foe, and Obama's turn-it-around re-election zinger specifically making fun of him for it.
Helpfully, I already linked the video.
Part of that was driven by the Russian Reset, a showy, futile, embarrassingly stupid effort at rapprochement made by the Obama administration towards Russia (much like their efforts towards Iran). Team Obama thought it was cringe and old-fashioned to still be mad at Russia just for being a genocidal communist tyranny. And Hilary let them personally enrich her to the tune of tens of millions donated to the Clinton Foundation and generous speaking fees to Bill, while she signed off on the things like the Russian purchase of a major uranium company.
In 2014 the idea that "Russia hates the US, the west, and democracy" was considered laughable neocon boomer anti-communist retard shit.
The reason Democrats hate Russia with the fire of a thousand suns is because they needed a scapegoat for Hilary losing in 2016, even if the efforts to blame Russia were idiotic and laughable. Putin obviously wanted Hilary to win, because he'd already bought her and knew how to fold her like a cheap table. Meanwhile, Trump occasionally says nice things, and also threatened to bomb Moscow if Putin invades Ukraine.
It's about consistency. Do you actually think the Russians are the villains of the era? Then please, show your homework essay on how insane and evil it was that Trump's predecessor and rivals were so cozy with Putin.
I do remember it but way too young to really pay much attention to or understand politics much. Regardless I don't find it a strong argument to point at how the Dems fuck up here. Yeah, maybe they are soft on Russia. That's not a good reason to be soft on Russia too, they are our enemy. They're a freedom hating west despising dictatorship.
"Other people kiss up to America's enemies so we should as well' just means more kissing up to our enemies!
That was not the American consensus position 14 years ago. It became a bit sketchy after Russian invaded Crimea in 2013, but no one wanted to go too hard on that because it was embarrassing to Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton, who were not just "soft" on Russia, but far softer than Trump has been.
"Trump kisses up to Putin" is actually just a retarded, self-serving lie, perpetrated by bad actors who were driven insane by TDS. He says nice things sometimes when he wants something from people, just like he does to Kim Jong Un and Zohran Mamdani, and other times he says mean things. And in the real world, Putin consistently launches invasions when verbally harsh, limp Democrats are in power, and sits in his lane when Trump is.
Again, as someone who does know the history here, it's hard to take your position as anything other than an isolated demand for standards, fueled by ignorance.
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The Mueller report explicitly concluded it "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities," despite the Trump Tower meeting, WikiLeaks interest, etc. There was no smoking gun of active collusion, even after the most exhaustive investigation since Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance. There is a boring explanation to Trump 1.0's aggressive actions (like trying to have Mueller fired via McGahn); rather than an attempt to hide some deeper conspiracy, it was understandable frustration and defensiveness in response to what they (Trump and MAGA) view as an overreaching, politically motivated investigation that ultimately found no criminal coordination despite two years of scrutiny.
I'm apparently the only "Epstein skeptic" here, I discussed it in an earlier CW thread. Regardless, there could be a deceptively simple explanation here as well: there is simply no exit strategy here. The "files" are a raw doc dump of anything tangentially related to Epstein. Analogously, any tangential mention of Trump (and other individuals) that's not quite incriminating but still supremely humiliating can and will be used to impugn him as a child rapist. But Trump himself lit the fuse with the "pedo cabal" hysteria, and he probably did not expect it to blow up under his own arse.
"No smoking gun" doesn't mean something didn't happen, it could of course be hidden successfully. Controlling parents not finding the birth control their daughter put in her sock drawer doesn't mean she's not out having sex.
The act of a coverup suggests that something might have happened. Tons of encrypted messages, deleted communications and other roadblocks to knowing the truth makes the picture murky in both ways. It's harder to show guilt, but it's also harder to suggest innocence. From a legal perspective where they have to prove guilt, that works well. From a casual perspective where we can ask "what's with all the deleted messages?", it doesn't work as well.
There was an easy exit strategy! They could have just released the files as they promised to do multiple times before and during the election season. The only reason why Epstein is even a fiasco for them now is because they completely pivoted so hard from "we're gonna reveal this coverup" to "nothing to see here, ignore everything we said before".
Who cares about "exit strategy" when they never even had to make it into such a topic to begin with if they just did what they said! It is perfectly reasonable to wonder why they pivoted so hard, and that reason is pretty likely related to either people in the admin itself or a powerful third party who they wish to protect. The strategy is to not enter the burning building to begin with if you don't have a plan to get out.
Dude what?
Russell's Teapot for reference.
In looking at your string of comments in this thread, I'm starting to think you have a particularly nasty case of TDS or are doing a kind of slow-boil trolling that will eventually
blossomreveal itself for what it actually is.You're more than free to be an anti-Trumper here. Hell, I'm one. But claims like this one;
Are the kind of equivocating nonsense that lead TheMotte to split from Reddit in the first place (and also, like, censorship and stuff). If you think that the Trump-Russia collusion story is valid, that's fine as well and I'd encourage you to highlight some evidence you find impressive or just do some good ole schizoposting. But, again, a lot of your argumentation is the kind of bad faith and literal Motte and Bailey style sophistry that is frowned upon around here regardless of your subjective beliefs.
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Again, there was two years of digging through everything they could get their hands on. Yes, the deleted messages and encrypted apps leave some gaps, but the team still pieced together a pretty clear picture that didn't show campaign level conspiracy or coordination with Russia. It's more like the parent searched the whole house, questioned friends, checked call logs, and even found some flirty texts, but nothing that actually proved the daughter was sneaking out for secret hookups.
The actual contents of the files are ancillary to the volatility of an international public primed for outrage.
American elites are a pedo cabal, the Epstein files is the grand unifying conspiracy that explains the world, and old Jeff was a Mossad linked predaphile blackmail kingpin puppeteering America towards Greater Israel. Any mention of sexual activity on Little Saint James island is evidence of minor sexual abuse. Absence of details means the real tapes have been scrubbed a long time ago. Exoneration means elite capture, silence is cover-up, and deviant Jews are overseeing the network.
That is the popular narrative. And it is epistemically bulletproof.
Best case scenario is we revisit this fiasco with a little more lucidity once it's ancient history.
Not the first, not the last ladder climber to yank his own rug just to make his rival trip. Recent events should be the most glaring exhibition of a consistent blind spot in Trump’s capacity for modeling downstream second and third order consequences.
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What those who don't remember politics before Trump miss is that the people hyping-up the Mueller investigation still thought we were in the Watergate era of political scandals. Their mindset was that they just needed a fancy report in PDF format formally accusing Trump of firing Comey to cover up the Russia investigation, and then Trump would be finished.
The Supreme Court has since ruled that this is constitutionally protected conduct, but no one back in 2017 would have considered such a ruling to be possible.
I really feel like the popular narrative of Watergate was completely detached from reality to begin with. Nixon did things that were wrong, sure, but I'm pretty sure basically every modern president does things at least that bad. You would have to be profoundly naive about that for the accusations made of Nixon to stand out as a unique stain on the presidency. It was basically a hit job by someone or something, and insofar as Nixon was driven by paranoia, he was right to be; he just screwed up the implementation.
I feel like this is just an argument for applying a similar level of scrutiny and accountability to everybody else. Or better yet, an even harsher standard than that precedent. I rather like the idea of my leaders being too afraid of the consequences to attempt any ratfucking.
Oh, to be clear, 100% agreed.
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I mean, Mark Felt did turn out to be Deep Throat. And wasn't E. Howard Hunt one of those involved in spying on Goldwater for LBJ?
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The big deal was that the MSM said it was treason and you’re a traitor for thinking otherwise.
I have zero opinion on Mueller himself and usually abide by thinking less people should die.
Russian collusion was one of the seminal - possibly the top - things that killed media trust for millions of people. The damage will never be undone (in our lifetime).
I suppose now that he’s following in lockstep of the neoconservative warhawks he’s therefore ‘atoned’ and has been rehabilitated as a Russian prop. Or are we still going with that narrative and calling Trump’s bombing of Iran a new military incursion by Putin?
Never. The objective of Russiagate has always been to attack Trump, his legitimacy as POTUS 45, and erode public confidence in his administration. I don't know if an Iran war was always inevitable independent of Trump, but Trump has most certainly accelerated the timeline.
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