The Problem of Establishing the Problem

In which @mtaibbi, they guy telling everyone who'll listen that journalists fucked up in reporting the Russian story, admits he still doesn't know whether Russia did the hack. https://t.co/W7RSZGzYDv pic.twitter.com/ixENHr8isK

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) April 1, 2019

The problem is stated pretty baldly here:

But what is also true is that he has a masterly ability to get people deranged and focused on the wrong things. I think they suckered us into the collusion/Mueller storyline. It was in Trump’s interest to keep the circus going, especially if he had reason to expect he’d be exonerated. I see no reason to doubt Mueller professionalism or diligence. So, perhaps we need to think about all the things Trump did to keep us focused on collusion as a very skillful manipulation.

What is the problem?  Well, it's multifold.  1)  I don't think Trump is all that clever, or even cunning.  He has a kind of low animal cunning, at best.  If he "kept the circus going" its because he thinks chaos is his squid ink, and as long as things are at 6's and 7's, he can avoid accountability.  It's not a strategy, it's just a practice.  He's not a secret chess grandmaster, but we keep attributing that to him because he won the American presidency.

a)  for example, Andrew O'Hehir trotted out the "analysis" that, if you cut out California (next it will be Texas, I guess), Trump won the popular vote.  California may be the most solidly Democratic state in the Union at the moment, and is certainly the most populous, but somehow that many people in one place voting in pretty much one direction (there are only 2 directions at the Presidential level of politics) means their votes can be excluded for purposes of making a (somewhat) point.  But O'Hehir is not therefor entirely wrong:  Trump's popular vote is a bit larger than the plain vote count accounts for, and that does mean Trump had as much, if not more, support than Clinton.  Or, conversely, it means Clinton had even less support than her popular vote victory seems to indicate.

Half-empty; or half-full?

So did Trump win, or did Clinton lose?  Did Clinton campaign so poorly, make such a poor presentation as a candidate, that Trump won by default, not by his own efforts?  The difference determines how the next election is analyzed, even how it can be anticipated.

b)  Did Trump "keep the circus going"?  Then why did it close so far out of town?  The moment Barr's letter dropped, Trump didn't just do a victory dance, he declared himself King and Absolute Ruler as as well Determiner of Scheduling For FoxNews (no, not his tweet, his comments at the rally after Barr's letter).  He's ceaselessly berated the Democrats for daring not to show all fealty to Dear Leader, and stepped all over the "victory" the Barr letter brought (more on that in a moment) to be point even White House staff are quoted as sarcastically saying it was done because there'd been enough good news already.  Trump has announced he's cutting off financial aid to three countries, a decision (it is finally being reported) that Congress may have to agree to before it becomes effective (he's not the monarch he thinks he is), and his declaration of intent to close the Mexican border is causing Administration staff to consider ways to make him think it has happened without incurring the disaster of actually doing it.

If Trump was interested in "keeping the circus going," creating a whole new circus of chaos and pandemonium is an odd way to do it.

There's another point made in that letter to Josh Marshall:

Anyway, at this point, we should expect a major bump in his approval ratings, and though we’re far out from 2020, I’d say he’s gone from being a slight favorite to win reelection to a strong favorite. We’ll see, I guess. But our side invested a lot of energy into the collusion story line, and we rolled snake eyes.

Because the people are sheeple, right?  The age-old cynicism of the intertoobs that we can't have nice things because the mass of Americans lead lives of quiet desperation, and are as stupid as Trump, to boot.  Except that didn't happen, either:

The story on polling post-Mueller report isn't that Trump job approval has moved up or down, it's that it hasn't really moved at all.

— amy walter (@amyewalter) March 31, 2019

Did we "roll snake eyes"?  Only if the Barr letter is wholly accurate; and it seems most people don't really think so.  Or at least, they don't really care about it.  It could be their opinions of Trump are shaped by what they see of him, not by what FoxNews says he says, or what Rachel Maddow says he's actually doing, or what endless commentators and pundits say endlessly about what's "really" going on.  After all, Trump can't stay out of the public eye for more than 10 minutes at a time.  He was silent until the Barr letter was released, and then he was unfettered and released a horde of tweets like the villain releasing his evil swarms upon the land.  He went to a rally universally regarded as the rantings of a deranged man, and again his popularity numbers didn't waver.  Jennifer Rubin has written that the next successful Presidential candidate may need only promise to read a book once in a while, and never get on Twitter; and she probably has a good point.  All of Trump's bombast and all of Trump's "social media" presence and all of Kellyanne Conway's efforts on TeeVee, and Trump can't get his approval rating to budge from where it's been for almost 3 years now.

And Josh is right:

There is an obvious and creeping realization now that what is in that report is probably pretty bad for the President. Clearly it stopped short of any criminal charges – a major victory for the President in itself. But what’s in there? Most of the people who’ve delved deepest into this story have been clear from the start that the real wrongdoing quite likely wouldn’t fit into criminal charges. If the report had all come out at first the headline might still be no charges, at least the final headline. Now whatever is in that report will have to be navigated against the standard of total exoneration the President’s defenders have embraced.

First, criminal charges are not the only standard by which we hold public figures accountable.  Is a politician who promises the moon and then produces nothing guilty of criminal fraud?  Was GHWBush a criminal when he said "Read my lips!  No!  New! Taxes!," and then raised taxes?  He certainly blamed that promise and the "breaking" of it for his one-term as President (his criminality he covered by pardoning all and sundry in Iran-Contra after he lost re-election).  Is it essential to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump conspired with Russian agents to win election?  Or is it of greater concern to learn the President of the United States is probably a Russian asset, or at the very least a "useful idiot"?

Something lost in all this discussion of the report and criminal standards of evidence and proof, is the counter-intelligence investigation Mueller oversaw, one the FBI reportedly briefed the "Gang of 8" on last week.  True, such matters require a high degree of confidentiality and involve many a "state secret," but the question of whether or not the POTUS is beholden to the government of a foreign power is a question that needs to be publicly aired.  I'm more concerned that we aren't talking about it at all, than I am about what Mueller's report says about obstruction of justice or conspiracy.  Maybe we can't indict a sitting President; but we certainly need to know if the President is essentially, or even arguably, the agent of a foreign power.

Barr’s angle is clearly to conceal and delay the release as much as humanly possible. But keeping this report a secret will not be sustainable. The flurry of redactions Barr has in mind won’t be sustainable. It will all come out.

If it does, I think it will involve a lot more than whether or not the President is an unindicted co-conspirator.