Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Robert Mueller Told William Barr His Memo to Congress on Collusion, Obstruction Lacked Context: Reason Roundup

 
 
Reason
 
Robert Mueller Told William Barr His Memo to Congress on Collusion, Obstruction Lacked Context: Reason Roundup
Dissatisfied with media coverage of the results of his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian...
 
 
Dissatisfied with media coverage of the results of his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, Special Counsel Robert Mueller wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr in late March expressing frustration that Barr's four-page memo to Congress summarizing Mueller's findings "did not fully capture [their] context, nature, and substance."
That's according to The Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the letter on Tuesday. The Post did not publish the letter in full, which means we are relying here on their interpretation of a letter that supposedly complains about Barr's interpretation of Mueller's report. From The Post:
The letter and a subsequent phone call between the two men reveal the degree to which the longtime colleagues and friends disagreed as they handled the legally and politically fraught task of investigating the president. Democrats in Congress are likely to scrutinize Mueller's complaints to Barr as they contemplate the prospect of opening impeachment proceedings and mull how hard to press for Mueller himself to testify publicly.
At the time Mueller's letter was sent to Barr on March 27, Barr had days prior announced that Mueller did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In his memo to Congress, Barr also said that Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but that Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge.
Days after Barr's announcement, Mueller wrote the previously undisclosed private letter to the Justice Department, laying out his concerns in stark terms that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.
"The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office's work and conclusions," Mueller wrote. "There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations."
According to The Post, the two men talked on the phone after Barr received the letter, and this conversation was friendlier in nature.
Barr is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Barr previously testified that he didn't know whether Mueller supported his conclusions.

FREE MINDS

"Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color," reads a recent student-created petition calling for the firing of the legendary art critic whose views on gender and sex have occasionally offended the modern progressive left. "UArts: you are disrespecting your students and putting them in danger. Do better."
This is hardly the first time Paglia has endured such calls. When her first book, Sexual Personae, was published in 1990, faculty members at Connecticut College compared it to Mein Kampf. At the time, it was intellectually curious students who defended the book.
Now the situation is largely reversed, notes The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf.

FREE MARKETS

The situation in Venezuela may be reaching a climax: Embattled dictator Nicolas Maduro had plans to flee the country but was convinced by Russian forces to stay, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed on Tuesday. Maduro disputes this. According to NPR:
U.S. officials have been characterizing the situation in Venezuela as nearing its endgame, and opposition leader Juan Guaidó called for the "final phase" of the uprising Tuesday in his attempt to remove Maduro from power. But Venezuela's military handily stamped out pockets of resistance, and despite word from American officials that key Maduro allies are abandoning him, the country's defense minister proclaimed his continuing loyalty. More than 50 countries support Guaidó's claim to power.

QUICK HITS

  • Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has appeared on video for the first time since 2014. The self-proclaimed caliph acknowledged ISIS's loss of territory in Iraq and Syria but promised "there will be more to come after this battle."
  • Japan has a new emperor.
  • Plymouth State University must pay $350,000 to an adjunct professor it fired for testifying in defense of a woman facing sexual assault charges.
  • Jacob Wohl's brilliant political strategy, in his own words: "make shit up."
  • Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) accused of violating the separation of church and state with "He is Risen" Easter post.
  • The trailer for the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog movie is the stuff of nightmares.
 
 
 
 
advertisement
 
 
Learn more about RevenueStripe...
 
 
 
 
Most Popular Stories from Reason‌.com
 

Cancel Culture Comes for Counterculture Comics

Chicago Impounds Innocent People's Cars and Soaks Them in Fines. Now It's Getting Sued

Colorado's New 'Red Flag' Law Illustrates the Pitfalls of Disarming People Based on Their Future Behavior

The Immorality of Student Loan Forgiveness and Free College

Polls Say Biden, Bernie Could Beat Trump. Should You Believe Them?
 
 
 
15173360067167
 

Robby Soave is an associate editor at Reason. He enjoys writing about culture, politics, education policy, criminal justice reform, television, and video games.
 
 
GET REASON MAGAZINE
 
Reason is the magazine of "free minds and free markets," offering a refreshing alternative to the left-wing and right-wing echo chambers for independent-minded readers who love liberty.
Subscribe today to save 65% off the cover price.
 
 
Reason on Facebook Reason on Twitter Reason on YouTube Reason on Google+ Reason Podcast
 
Reason Foundation
5737 Mesmer Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90230
 

CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS HYPOCRITE

Welcome to Bennie Thompson's world of hate.

 
The Congressional Black Caucus is a repository for dozens of hate-filled, emotionally immature Democrats with no capacity for self-reflection. With pained and pious expressions etched permanently on their faces, these professional grievance mongers routinely parade under the banner of “racial justice” as they condemn conservatives for their alleged bigotry and insensitivity. Consider, for example, Bennie Thompson, who represents Mississippi's 2nd Congressional District and serves as Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. In a recent interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Thompson voiced his utter contempt for Donald Trump, blasting the president for his “simplistic attack” against Rep. Ilhan Omar's reference to 9/11 as an event where “some people did something.” “I have a grandson,” said Thompson. “I almost have to send him out [of] the room when the president comes on TV, because I don't know what's going to come out of his mouth.”
One wonders how Mr. Thompson's grandson would feel if he could hear what came out of grandpa's own mouth in a 2014 interview in which he spoke about a then-recent controversy involving white Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy, who, in a dispute over grazing fees, had recently engaged in an armed standoff against federal agents. According to Thompson, Bundy had received enthusiastic support from “a lot of those right-wing Republicans” – but only “until he talked [positively] about slavery” – at which point the Republicans “fagged up” and withdrew their backing.

Why was Bennie Thompson permitted to use an anti-gay slur like this in a public forum, without the slightest political repercussion?

That 2014 interview, incidentally, was a very long, friendly discussion moderated by someone calling himself “The Son of Man,” an individual who proudly affirms that he first “accepted the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad” in 1973. That same Elijah Muhammad spent 41 years as the leader of the Nation Of Islam, an organization infamous for its seething hatred of whites and Jews. And yet, there was Bennie Thompson, exchanging pleasantries with a proud disciple of that same racist anti-Semite.  

How does Thompson feel about Elijah Muhammad's innumerable, passionate calls for black separatism, or about Muhammad's repeated references to white people as “blue-eyed devils”? For that matter, how does the congressman feel about The Son of Man's own call for the formation of “a new black nation,” or about his steadfast belief in the traditional Nation Of Islam teaching that white people are subhuman deceivers who were created some 60 centuries ago by a black renegade scientist named Yakub?
Has any of that rhetoric ever offended Thompson's oh-so-delicate sensibilities? Obviously not, because he was quite happy to let The Son of Man know, in no uncertain terms, how much he “appreciate[d] the opportunity” to appear on his “absolutely important” program. The Son of Man, in turn, characterized Thompson as his “brother,” assuring the congressman that “we're going to invite you to come on [the program] whenever you have something that you feel you need to share; we will always open these doorways to you … [and] stop whatever we doing and listen to you.”

It is also curious that Thompson has been unwilling to say anything critical about yet another Jew-hating racist, Louis Farrakhan, who currently heads the Nation Of Islam. In February 2018, for example, the Daily Callercontacted Thompson and a number of his fellow Congressional Black Caucus members to ask if they would publicly denounce Mr. Farrakhan and his consistently incendiary rhetoric. Along with 19 of his fellow Caucus members, Thompson not only declined to criticize Farrakhan, but he refused even to comment about the latter's voluminous, venom-laced trash talk. You may recall that Farrakhan has referred to Jews as “bloodsuckers”; to the Jewish faith as a “gutter religion”; to Adolf Hitler as “a very great man”; and to white people as “potential humans” who are the “skunks of the planet.” Mr. Thompson's refusal to condemn such filth is rather interesting, is it not? What would his grandson think about that?

Moreover, like so many of his fellow legislators in the Congressional Black Caucus, Thompson views conservative blacks as race-traitors and sell-outs. Thus did he smear Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 2014 as an “Uncle Tom” and “a lackey for Antonin Scalia.”
Perhaps Bennie Thompson should be less concerned about what his grandson might hear coming out of Donald Trump's mouth, and more worried that the young man might be exposed to the sewage that comes out of the mouths of grandpa and the people he admires.
* * *


VIDEO: THE FASCIST LEFT'S TAKEOVER OF EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE, PART II

Teaching to transgress.

 
In this second part of this 3-Part Series, we see the entire Evergreen campus being dominated by self-assigned “anti-racism” surveillance mobsters. Any attempts to restore rational discussion is rebuffed against the backdrop of escalating rage, labeling, anti-white abuse, and intimidation. Don't miss it! [See Part I: HERE].


GETTING DOWN WITH THE DEMOCRATS

California Democrat boss Eric Bauman “forcibly performed oral sex” on male staffer, lawsuit alleges.

 
Democrat staffer William Floyd charges that former California Democrat Party boss Eric Bauman, 59, “forcibly performed oral sex on him several times.” Floyd, 28, is suing the 59-year-old Bauman over sexual harassment, assault, battery, negligence and civil rights violations.
Bauman forced Floyd to submit to oral sex two other times, the April 24 lawsuit suit contends, and Bauman once told Floyd “if you cross me, I will break you.” It wasn’t the first brush with such allegations for the New York-born Bauman. Though not a household name across the nation, the accused sexual abuser is a major player in the Democrat Party.
According to a 2004 bio, Bauman is a “Registered Nurse with graduate education in Health Care Administration,” and founder of the firm Consultants in Nursing Services Administration.
Bauman became a member of the California Democratic State Central Committee and the California Democratic Party Executive Board and “held leadership positions in both of President Clinton’s campaigns and Vice President Al Gore's campaign. Bauman backed SB 562, a “single-payer” bill he said would make California a “healthcare sanctuary” state.
In 2017, the Democrats’ California vice chairman Eric Bauman and chairman John Burton both endorsed Keith Ellison to head the Democratic National Committee. According to a report by Karen Ocamb in the Desert Sun,part of the USA Today chain, “Ellison relied heavily on Bauman to reach out to Democrats nationwide and confirm that the DNC candidate was not anti-Semitic, as some alleged.”
When Bauman was contending for chairmanship of the California Democrat Party, rumors began emerging that he had engaged in inappropriate behavior with 14- and 16-year-old boys. As the Los Angeles Blade reported, Bauman “blew it off” as an “old saw” used against gay or lesbian candidates. “The accusations of pedophilia come out,” Bauman told the Blade, “the accusations that we’re promiscuous; the accusations that we have drug problems.”
During the campaign, a video titled “The Eric I know” appeared on YouTube with Michael Andraychak proclaiming “Eric Bauman is my husband.” According to Andraychak, the two met while working as nurses and after 20 years decided to get married. The key to Bauman’s life of service, Andraychak explained, was being raised by a single lesbian mother, a nurse known for helping people.
Rumors aside, Bauman became the California Democrats party chair in 2017, and last August he called for a boycott of In-N-Out Burger, founded by a Christian family, that donated $25,000 to Republicans for the November 2018 election. “Et tu In-N-Out? Tens of thousands of dollars donated to the California Republican Party,” Bauman tweeted. “It’s time to #BoycottInNOut — let Trump and his cronies support these creeps…perhaps animal style!”  The burger boycott didn’t fly, and by November the Democrats were starting to target Bauman his own self.
As CALmatters reported, Bauman was the subject of allegations that he “harassed staff members and party activists with numerous lewd comments and incidents of inappropriate physical contact.” And this conduct “persisted even as the public gaze focused so heavily in the last year on rooting out sexual harassment.”
Bauman confessed to a drinking problem and said he would seek treatment. As he conceded in a statement, “I have made the realization that in order for those to whom I may have caused pain and who need to heal, for my own health, and in the best interest of the Party that I love and to which I have dedicated myself for more than 25 years, it is in everyone’s best interest for me to resign my position as chair of the California Democratic Party.”
William Floyd was not mentioned in stories on Bauman’s resignation, but Spencer Dayton, 21, a delegate from Lodi, told the Sacramento Bee that “he was twice groped at Democratic events by Bauman, who did not appear to be drunk either time.” When Bauman shook his hand, Dayton explained, Bauman pulled him in close and grabbed his penis, and it was “very, very quick but very intentional.”
In similar style, at a Party executive board meeting, Bauman put an arm over Dayton’s shoulder then, “he reached down and grabbed my butt.” Dayton told the Bee he felt like he was being “propositioned to trade sex for Bauman’s help.” By all indications, reporters did not seek out Michael Andraychak for his thoughts on the alleged proposition.
After William Floyd’s lawsuit, Michael Andraychak did not go on record about the allegations that his powerful Democrat husband forced oral sex on young male staffers. Bauman denied the allegations through his attorney and neither party indicated whether any consensual oral sex took place before the Democrat allegedly forced himself on Floyd.
CALmatters called Bauman “the latest casualty of the #MeToo movement” but he may be the Democrats’ first case of forcible same-sex abuse. Presidential candidate Joe “scratch ‘n sniff” Biden likes to put the squeeze on the ladies. Minnesota Democrat Al Franken, a former comic, liked to make a grab for women’s pectoral regions. Likewise, John Conyers and Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax are both ladies’ men.
Democrat power broker Harvey Weinstein, not exactly a Brad Pitt type, demanded sex from countless women in exchange for help on the career side. Weinstein’s rape trial has been postponed until September.


THE MEDIA CHEERS GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP OF THE INTERNET

What the media’s response to Sri Lanka’s social media shutdown says about its real agenda.

 
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism
After Muslim terrorists murdered hundreds of Christians, the Sri Lankan government responded, as it had during clashes between Muslims and Buddhists last year, by shutting down social media.
The Sri Lankan government’s justification for the shutdown was that "false news reports" were being spread through social media. This excuse closely echoed the argument that the media in the United States had been making in its push for censoring Facebook after Trump’s victory to fight “fake news”.
If anyone thought that the media would react critically to a foreign government that ranks near the bottom in press freedom silencing social media, including citizen journalists, they were very wrong.
"Sri Lanka Shut Down Social Media. My First Thought Was ‘Good.’" the headline of a New York Times op-ed blared. “Sri Lanka social media shutdown reveals Facebook's Achilles' heel,” the Washington Post echoed. The theme of both major media pieces was that social media was dangerous and that government shutdowns of free expression might be necessary to keep people safe from “extremism”.
"Good, because it could save lives. Good, because the companies that run these platforms seem incapable of controlling the powerful global tools they have built. Good, because the toxic digital waste of misinformation that floods these platforms has overwhelmed what was once so very good about them," Kara Swisher of Recoderanted in her Times op-ed defending Sri Lankan government censorship.
Swisher’s Recode site also published its own post, “Sri Lanka blocks social media: shutdown shows Facebook can’t be trusted”. An actual journalist would have argued that a government shutdown of free expression shows that the government can’t be trusted. It wasn’t Facebook that failed in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government had received warnings about an incoming attack and had failed to act.
The shutdown of social media prevented the spread of information damaging to the government.
No lives were being saved by shutting down social media. Any Muslim terror plotters already had their orders. And would have been able to bypass the ban using VPN. Christians are a tiny minority and were not about to take to the streets. The shutdown prevented Sri Lankans in their own country and abroad from quickly getting in touch with their loved ones. And limited public criticism of the government.
The Sri Lankan defense ministry already announced why it was blocking social media. And it isn’t to save lives. “Currently, the security sections are conducting investigations in a broad manner on these incidents and the government has taken steps to temporarily block all the social media avenues until the investigations are concluded,” its statement reads.
The military is blocking people from expressing their opinions until it finalizes its story and presents it officially to the public. And this is what our own media supports and wants to see in America.
The issue isn’t whether Facebook can be trusted. It’s whether the media trusts the people.
“Social media has blown the lids off controls that have kept society in check. These platforms give voice to everyone, but some of those voices are false or, worse, malevolent,” Swisher writes.
Giving voice to everyone is the essence of free speech. And that’s what the media opposes.
The media has tried to spin internet censorship, in this country or in Sri Lanka, as an urgent response to a crisis. The Sri Lankan government, Cat Zakrzewski at the Washington Post claimed, "made a unilateral decision: The risks from rampant misinformation and fake news on these platforms were greater than the communications benefits these channels could bring during a crisis."
The risks from “misinformation” and “fake news” are political. Censorship is a political solution.
Democracy does indeed die in darkness. And the darkness is the flow of black ink spilling from The Post.
There are occasional times when censorship can save lives, and those almost always involve revealing military secrets and law enforcement plans, behavior that our own media happily engages in.
If President Trump told the New York Times or the Washington Post that they couldn’t print leaked plans for destroying Iran’s nuclear program, they, and the rest of the media would wrap their thousand-dollar suits and power suits in the First Amendment and cry that they are being censored by a tyrant. But they cheer a government shutdown of social media as an urgent response to the crisis of free speech.
"A few years ago we'd view the blocking of social media sites after an attack as outrageous censorship; now we think of it as essential duty of care, to protect ourselves from threat," Ivan Sigal, the executive director of Global Voices, tweeted.
Who are ‘we’ and ‘ourselves’?
Who needs to undertake this “essential duty of care” to protect “ourselves” from the threat of speech?
Global Voices got its start as an alliance of bloggers fighting for free speech. These days, Sigal sits on a board of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Despite their misleading names, Soros organizations have been leading the fight against freedom of speech in this country and around the world.
Why do George Soros and his associates believe that freedom of speech is a threat to them? The threat is a world where everyone, not just the media and Soros groups, can have a voice and reach people.
The tech activists cheering internet censorship were some of the loudest voices calling for net neutrality. Without net neutrality, they howled, the internet would no longer be free. But their idea of a free internet is a place that’s free for billion-dollar platforms to sell, but not for individuals to speak. It’s a world where Netflix can push its garbage original content at the expense of all internet users, but those users had better watch what they say or the plug on their speech will be pulled.
Was that anyone’s vision of a free internet? Did its pioneers envision the world wide web as a space where you can watch Fuller House or where people from around the world can share and debate ideas?
The internet can be little more than a content delivery system. An echo chamber in which Google and its rivals use AI to push content meant to manipulate you into buying, thinking and voting their way. Or it can be the public marketplace of ideas that is open to all voices, the good and the bad, as was intended.
Sri Lanka social media support and the media’s enthusiastic support for it are warning signs on the road. Their vision is of an internet controlled from the top down by oligarchies and governments.
A world where, as the Washington Post likes to say, democracy truly does die in darkness.
Anti-speech activists have made Facebook into the public enemy of their campaign. But their problem with Facebook and other social media platforms, as Swisher put it in the New York Times, is that they “give voice to everyone”. The real villain of the media isn’t Mark Zuckerberg. It’s you. Facebook is being attacked for insufficiently censoring speech. The dot com is collateral damage in a censorship campaign.
Social media is another term for speech. The anti-speech campaigners don’t like to use the word. They talk about “fake news”, “misinformation”, “extremism”, “threats” and “harmful content”. Censorship likewise undergoes an Orwellian renaming to “filtering”, “managing”, “reining in” and a dozen others.
But underneath all the euphemisms, there are only two words. Censorship and speech.
What might Sri Lankans have posted if they hadn’t been censored. We’ll never know. Neither will they. If the enemies of free speech win this war, no one will ever know what the rest of our country has to say.
The cheers for the actions of the Sri Lankan government by media activists, who couldn’t find Sri Lanka on a map and couldn’t name its government, is a trial balloon for censorship in the United States. The false claims that Russian bots and fake accounts on Facebook had altered the election with ‘fake news’ were used to pressure social media platforms into censoring and deplatforming political opponents.
But they aren’t going to stop there.
Now we know that their ideal vision is a world in which the government can just block social media and erase the voices of millions of people with a command, some keys and the flick of a switch.

Contact Form

Name

Email *

Message *