Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/03/house-judiciary-votes-to-autho.html
“It should be up to a judge — not the President or his political appointee — to decide whether or not it is appropriate for the committee to review the complete record.” — House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler
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Nice! I expect that more than a few Republicans are quietly panicking right now. Probably not the Orange One, he’s too stupid for it, but the more aware ones.
If anyone was still unsure of why Democrats getting control of the House was such a big deal, well, this is part of the why. 
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He may be stupid, but he reacts pre-emptively to any potential danger as a life-long con artist would.
(he said it about immigration courts yesterday, but an independent judiciary – as Nadler’s statement today implies – is one of Il Douche’s greatest enemies in general.)
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Boy, I sure hope a bunch of Democrats count their chickens before they hatch and make all kinds of public assumptions about what the report will say instead of doing the smart thing and underplaying it so the eventual revelations of financial and ethical wrongdoing don’t get downed out in a Republican victory dance. Fingers crossed!
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One way or another the public needs to see that report in as unredacted a form as possible. Since Dolt-45’s tax returns aren’t referenced in the report as far as we know I doubt that it will contain any smoking guns as far as he and his company are concerned. Nadler and other Dem leaders demanding this so far have been smart enough not to claim otherwise.
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I fully agree, and as a Chuck Rosenberg said, a prosecutor doesn’t take 300 pages to say everything is fine. I just think some prominent Democrats have handled the report issue extremely poorly and given Trump & the GOP an easier path to claim “vindication.”
If the Democrats had maintained a united message for the last 18 months that they believed actual “collusion” between Trump and Russia was extremely unlikely but the reality of Russian interference in the election demanded that Americans know the full truth of what Putin did & why he did it, they’d be in a much better place than they are today.
I happen to think that the report likely contains the kinds of misdeeds that would get any other President impeached five times over, but we can’t pretend the old political rules still apply when they clearly don’t.
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I look forward to Attorney General Barr either complying with the subpoena or being held in solitary like Chelsea Manning is right now.
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Which ones in particular? It’s always useful to identify the goofballs who need to “stop helping”.
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I agree with everything you said, except that I think it doesn’t really matter what’s in the report. Every single person in the US will either have their beliefs confirmed by the report, or else they’ll believe the report is wrong. Witness the beginning of this thread, where people are convinced that Trump is toast as soon the full report is released.
If Barr lied when he said the report exonerated Trump, I have a feeling Mueller and/or his team would have piped up already, somehow.
Also, I don’t think it’s possible for Barr to release an unredacted version while the grand jury is still sitting.
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you know how after a hurricane or mass shooting, whatever the initial report is “sticks” no matter how incorrect it was at first, no amount of updates ever corrects perspective?
congress is about to go on break (like they are ever not on break) so the initial momentum that the moronic press/news reported the “barr report” as if it was the final word, has now stuck and the right is running with it hard as if it’s truth
facts no longer matter anymore, idiots are always going to believe what they want and even if the president of the united states was a proven serial-sexual-abuser, slept with porn-stars while married and just had a child, obese and lies about it, hell lies every time he is on camera about everything, not enough people care
stop saying just “president”, stop saying just “trump”
it’s the President of the United States is a crook and liar, proven 100 times and known before he was elected out of 17 other candidates
half the country is the problem, he’s exactly the piece of garbage that was advertised and elected because of that
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I guess it’s true…
like some evil mothers say…
“life is but to die.”
All that there is to living is anticipation.
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Releasing the report will be like holding a frayed MAGA banner in the wind to let lawyers to start grabbing random threads, pulling them and seeing where they lead.
It’s going to be messy.
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I may be putting myself on an island on this, but I think Schiff misplayed it pretty badly. I think he, like 99% of Congress, is incapable of turning down camera time and overplayed what he thought the report was going to say, rather than underplay it so it would seem worse if/when we see the whole thing.
If you accuse somebody* of murder, and it turns out that they probably only committed arson and tax fraud, you set yourself up to have to backpedal when you didn’t have to be in that position.
*when that someone is a pathological liar incapable of shame, who uses these traits as a superpower for his supporters that love him because of, not despite, those traits
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I expect Barr’s summary to be generally correct, and while the report will have incidents that are questionable nothing has enough hard evidence of legal collusion to make a case.
I also think that the White House is holding off on releasing the report to keep it in the news and divert attention away from their day to day activities. I think the White House is playing the media. If Barr had been lying outright I would have expected Mueller to speak up by now.
I think anybody who expects the report to contain some white hot scandal are going to be disappointed. It’s going to be a bunch of the same low level corruption we’ve come to expect from this administration.
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I’d disagree. Schiff has done a really good job with this so far. If he seems like his outrage dial is sometimes turned up to 11, it’s because the GOP is scared of him and has put a target on his back.
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I’d say more technically correct, in a lawyerly, Scalia kind of way. This isn’t Barr’s first rodeo in this regard.
I agree in general, but strongly suspect that it will provide us with the chance to see Donnie Jr. getting thrown under the bus by his dad. Also, if it takes out even a few of the low-level scumbags and helps out the state-level investigations (as Mueller intended) then releasing it will be worthwhile.
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Let’s say for a second Barr lied. Trump is super-duper guilty of collusion to rig the election.
- He won’t be impeached. Impeachment proceedings will run out the clock, and he just won’t get reelected.
- He won’t lose any supporters, because they are sort of fine with any means necessary to get their guy in office. Based on readings thousands of comments on Breitbart the only way his supporters turn on him is if: A. He makes a move to ban or regulate guns or B. Gets caught banging a dude.
- Even if state level charges after he is out of office come into play… He won’t ever see a day in jail. Come on. He’s got hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal, and is 72. He will run out the clock in the courts, and probably die before those cases are concluded.
Basically, all we can hope for now is that his memory in the history books is destroyed.
Because the world is not fair, and some people never see justice for their misdeeds.
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