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Notes -
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.
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
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