Jul 9, 2019
On the Mueller Report: An Outsider’s Take on a Quintessentially Insider Exercise
The ambivalence that lies at the heart of the American project — the work to achieve a democratic republic, and the efforts to undermine it — routinely manifests at the voting booth. We exclude some from citizenship entirely; others from voting rights. In many places, we administer tests intended to impede the exercise of our most sacred civic duty. If we succeed in casting a ballot, it registers in a system designed to dilute or amplify its significance based on where we live, and how many people, especially how many people of the same race or political affiliation, surround us.
Maybe because of the many egregious schemes concocted to favor those in power, we pay less attention to more innocuous patterns of trouble. Even when everything goes right, things can go very wrong. Voting in the United States is both a heavily regulated activity and, from the perspective of an individual voter, a poorly protected right. Consider the 19th century verb “cooping” — a word invented to describe the practice of gathering eligible voters, confining them to a room (or “coop”), providing copious amounts of alcohol for them to drink, and then, once they fell into a suitably drunken state, marching them from poll to poll to cast ballots for the same candidate over and over again. This fraud, one of several techniques deployed in the seedy world of 19th century partisan politics, was perpetrated against the white men best positioned to claim their political birthright during a time when those who were not white men could not. It’s not a vile betrayal of the American promise, though we have many of those; it’s just a wretched indifference to how we manage our voting.
In fact it is remarkable — and, at this point, unsustainable — that the United States boasts of its democracy while conducting somewhat chaotic elections guarded by ineffectual oversight. Our entire election machinery works more for political parties than it does for voters, a distinction that carries greater weight as the parties devolve into self-interested instruments that may, or may not, advocate for voters.
Considered in this light, the news that the Russian government meddled with the 2016 presidential election only underscores what has long been true: elections in the United States are vulnerable to interference and manipulation. Not every corruption of them derives from a foreign source, and Russia is not the only foreign power seeking to meddle in our elections. Still, any report that conveys the results of a two year investigation into Russian election tampering should be viewed as part of an effort to reclaim our democracy. For too long, for reasons big and small, management of our elections has lagged behind our democratic ambition; a straggler trailing an already disparate parade. The report of the Special Counsel’s office, tasked with reviewing Russian interference and led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, ought to renew our commitment to our most fundamental political practice.
But it does not quite do that.
Instead, the report of the Special Counsel’s office provides an establishment perspective that defines its scope, places its emphasis, and measures harm according to what powerful people might wish, rather than what ordinary Americans require.
There is much to be said for highlighting an elite perspective; certain political insiders took a real beating in the 2016 election. But because of its strangely delimited work, the Special Counsel’s office report raises a number of problematic questions, and leaves unfinished what ought to have been settled.
The Question of Russian Interference
The most curious and confounding choice made by the Special Counsel’s office is the decision to relegate the Russian attempts to hack both voting records and the software used to tally votes in several jurisdictions to venues other than itself — and, following that concession, the brief and perfunctory treatment those crimes receive in their report.
No example of Russian interference in the 2016 election could be more explicit or damaging than the attempt to disrupt its very mechanics. It would not be surprising if the Special Counsel’s office decided to focus on these exploits as their major preoccupation — after all, the most acute form of election interference is that which is inflicted on the election apparatus itself. I am not a legal scholar or expert in cyber-crimes; there may well be some explanation why the Special Counsel’s office ceded this pursuit to others. But the report offers us no real explanation. Added to that, even if the assignment of these investigations elsewhere makes perfect sense, the report does not accord much narrative significance to them, though many of us would regard as these crimes as the most serious infractions.
In the place of considering Russian attempts to harm American voters directly, the Special Counsel’s office examines closely only damage to political elites — namely, to Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Naturally, all American voters can feel aggrieved by Russia’s various plots against the Clinton campaign, but the Special Counsel’s choices, and especially his failure to explain them, does reinforce the unfortunate view that political parties and political candidates — not voters — are the first and most important clients of our election system.
Remarkably, the Special Counsel’s focus is even more narrow than the world of political elites — so much so that, without any additional explanation from him, we would have to call his report inaccurate. Director Mueller’s first volume, devoted to the subject of Russian interference, deals extensively with Russian efforts to manipulate the election via social media, as well as the separate campaign to obtain confidential material from political insiders via hacking, and then coordinate the release of that material so as to maximize its damage on the November election. The Russian entities executing these campaigns did not confine themselves to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — but, for some reason, the Special Counsel’s office does.
To be fair, the Russian social media campaign in favor of Independent Bernie Sanders does get mentioned; even more, the social media support lent to Black Lives Matter (and related entities) or altogether fabricated anti-immigrant groups set up by Russians operating under false identities comes in for occasional discussion. However, the Russian support directed in favor of Republican candidate Ted Cruz, disclosed by Twitter in its own analysis of election interference, goes unmentioned. Equally strange, the fact that Russians hacked (and released material on) more than just Democratic targets would be unknown to except a close reader of the report, who might notice the brief aside that the Russians attempted, and to some very small extent succeeded, to hack Republican Party targets (although surprisingly, I noticed only a news report cited as a source for this knowledge). The Special Counsel report declines to discuss other hacking targets, including notable ones, like Colin Powell, who had their personal communications posted on Wikileaks, replicating the tactics used against members of the Clinton campaign and outlets of the Democratic Party.
[Note/Correction: Marcy Wheeler tells me that Powell is in the Mueller report, in a redacted footnote.]
What explains the Special Counsel’s decision to concentrate on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (and her affiliates), even when it comes at the expense of a full picture of Russian interference? The simplest explanation would be that Director Mueller wishes us to concentrate on it as well, as he judged it (correctly) as by far the most significant dynamic, and he feared that a more comprehensive account would distract from the main storyline. Who can disagree with him? We might bristle at such condescension, but the truth is that, collectively, we have proven ourselves unable to handle breadth and nuance in a headline-dominated political culture that regularly counts both facts and logic as among its victims.
But another possible explanation raises a different set of distressing implications: that is, that Director Mueller chose to focus almost exclusively on the Russian help given to the Trump campaign and the damage done to Clinton’s so as to further marginalize our erratic president, banishing him to the very outskirts of legitimacy, and conversely to help to vindicate the reputation of his opponent, who could hardly be more entrenched in the country’s political establishment.
It’s important to place this narrative choice in context. One of the most revealing ways to assess the Trump presidency is to decide whether his campaign and administration represent a culmination of the political establishment, or a disruption of it (or, if you are like me, to consider it both ways). It’s been my observation that the political and media establishment, both of which did so much to fuel the rise of Donald Trump, now like to depict him as their antithesis — a convenient and self-authorizing belief that could never survive real scrutiny. Nevertheless, this conceit frames much of our political discourse. Along these same lines, it’s entirely possible that the report of the Special Counsel’s investigation adopts such a narrow focus so as to make it seem as though only one candidate was tainted by Russian influence, and only one other was targeted by their attacks.
If so, and even if it were not the case, then the particular focus of the Special Counsel report is even more strange than it appears. As the report and contemporaneous events make clear, the impetus behind the Special Counsel appointment was to resume an FBI investigation already underway after FBI Director James Comey was fired by President Trump (more on this below). Some bad faith questions regarding the appropriateness of the FBI investigation have been raised by people who point to the “Steele dossier” — a series of intelligence reports on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia compiled at the request of lawyers working for the Clinton campaign — as a potential point of origin for it. In my opinion, both the FBI and the Special Counsel’s office performed well in avoiding that problematic document. Still, difficulties remain. As I discuss here, it is a tricky proposition to turn a counterintelligence investigation into a criminal one, and particularly so when it concerns the sensitive subject of political speech. For example, as we have seen, accusations of “spying” on a campaign crop up.
Surely the best way to dispel doubts regarding the nature and legitimacy of Special Counsel’s investigation would be to take a comprehensive view of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Remarkably, after deftly sidestepping the Steele dossier, large portions of the Special Counsel’s report on Russian interference — with its nearly exclusive focus on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton or her surrogates — reads like another installment of it.
The Question of Obstruction
Volume II, devoted to possible obstruction of justice charges, also features some surprising limitations, though in most respects it strikes me as the superior of the two. For some reason, the Special Counsel’s office either only considered or chose to only discuss possible obstruction of justice charges against Donald Trump, and then only in regard to obstruction he may have committed to spare himself (as opposed to someone close to him) of legal scrutiny.
But their own account raises a suggestion of charges against others. At one point, the Special Counsel addresses this prospect directly: “the evidence we obtained,” he writes, “would not support potential obstruction charges against the President’s aides and associates beyond those already filed.”
This declaration comes at the end of a paragraph that recites possible episodes of obstruction (vol. 2, 158), but left off this list is an instance of the President’s personal counsel calling Michael Flynn’s lawyer to leave a voicemail which suggested that Flynn’s loyalty to the president would be rewarded. When Mueller relates this story earlier in his report, he entertains obstruction charges against Trump, noting that “[b]ecause of privilege issues,” meaning that which exists between Donald Trump and his lawyer, “we could not determine whether the President was personally involved in or knew about the specific message his counsel delivered to Flynn’s counsel.”
But his counsel definitely knew about it, as he was the one who said it. Though I am the furthest thing from an expert in the intricacies of attorney-client privilege, it does not seem that the doctrine stretches so far as to furnish a hall pass for criminal activity. If that voicemail was worth considering as a possible obstruction charge against Donald Trump, then it seems equally worth doing so for his lawyer. There might be some valid reason not to file charges, but it ought to at least be discussed in the report.
More bizarre is the omission of Steve Bannon’s potential involvement in the Seychelles meeting from the second volume of Mueller’s work. Bannon, Trump’s former principal on the National Security Council, exchanged text messages with Erik Prince, an influential Trump supporter, during the crucial transition period, a time when Bannon served on Trump’s official transition team. As the first volume tells us, cooperating witness George Nader believed that Bannon knew about a secret meeting in the Seychelles between Erik Prince and a Russian oligarch close to Putin, and Prince himself acknowledged that “it was fair for Nader to think that Prince would pass information on to the Transition Team.” Yet Bannon denied knowing about it. At this point, it is worth quoting the Mueller report at length:
The conflicting accounts provided by Bannon and Prince could not be independently clarified by reviewing their communications, because neither one was able to produce any of the messages they exchanged in the time period surrounding the Seychelles meeting. Prince’s phone contained no text messages prior to March 2017, though provider records indicate that he and Bannon exchanged dozens of messages.[] Prince denied deleting any messages but claimed he did not know why there were no messages on his device before March 2017. Bannon told the Office that, during both the months before and after the Seychelles meeting, he regularly used his personal Blackberry and personal email for work-related communications (including those with Prince), and he took no steps to preserve these work communications.
And that is all the Special Counsel has to say about that.
Meanwhile, in the world of normal people raising natural questions, several seem pertinent. First, there is a record preservation requirement that applies to people who serve on the presidential transition team later appointed to the executive branch (as Bannon was). Though not straightforward, its application in this instance does not seem to have been considered by the Special Counsel. Second and independent of that consideration, it’s possible to view Prince’s record deletion as an obstruction of justice. It’s also possible to view Nader’s testimony as sufficient to charge Steven Bannon with lying to federal agents, and, along the same lines, any forensic evidence retrieved from Prince’s provider as sufficient to charge him with the same. Finally, if the discussions in the Seychelles meeting violated the Logan Act, it’s possible to view Bannon’s refusal to volunteer records as an obstruction of investigation of that crime, or possible complicity in it. Most of all, it just frankly boggles the mind that the Special Counsel’s Office showed no interest in expiring the trail of evidence, including pressing charges in order to obtain more, so as to present us with a more authoritative reckoning of this troubling encounter. Despite some very clear suggestion of evidence tampering and obstruction, the Special Counsel leaves it out of Volume II.
By far the most surprising aspect of Volume II is the determination by Director Mueller that current Department of Justice guidance, which instructs federal prosecutors against filing a criminal charge against a sitting president, amounted to a prohibition against making any criminal determination at all. This decision relates to one of the central enigmas of the second volume — namely, that the firing of FBI Director Jim Comey, which prompted consideration of a Special Counsel appointment in the first place, is not itself an act that the Special Counsel felt obliged to resolve in any formal sense.
Does Mueller bear that burden? Is he required to identify some “innocent” motivation behind the firing of Comey? Everyone acknowledges that Comey’s removal resides within the President’s power. Nearly everyone acknowledges that such would not matter, if the removal was undertaken with criminal or corrupt intent; it would still count as a potential obstruction of justice. Given the gravity of the situation, it’s possible to argue that Mueller’s official remit, or perhaps his duty to history, required the application of some unusual standard, like affirming a plausible alternative explanation. Does one even exist?
Nothing credible suggests that Trump fired Comey out of some belated indignation over how the FBI Director led the Clinton email server inquiry, though it is critical to note that Trump always intended to invoke that behavior as part of his official rationale. Based on my reading of the report, my assessment is that Trump was outraged over Comey’s willingness to tell him that he was not a subject in the Russia investigation in private, while refusing to provide those same assurances in public. I also think the report invites us to draw this conclusion.
Two possibilities exist to explain the discrepancy in Comey’s remarks. One is that, by sustaining a false impression that Trump was under scrutiny, Comey sought political leverage over President Trump. Although it’s a startling theory, it can’t be ruled out; in fact, maybe I’ve know too much about the history of the FBI, but I favor it over the alternative. A second thesis is that Comey may have been trying to provide ample room for his investigators to develop whatever evidence they’d like, however they thought best. This does not quite explain why Comey might tell the president one thing in private and refuse to say it in public, but he might have judged it premature to rule out Trump as an eventual target, yet felt compelled to disclose to the president his actual investigatory status in real time. If so, then his removal counts as a potential act of obstruction, and may very well have been undertaken by Trump to protect someone other than himself from law enforcement, so as to better insulate himself politically (or, for some undiscovered incident, legally).
Here it is imperative to note that Director Mueller could not countenance a formal resolution of the Comey incident without implicating a close colleague — or, if you will, a fellow insider. If, on the one hand, Mueller concluded that Comey had indeed supplied Trump with a reason for his removal, it would disgrace him as a conniver who failed to heed the lessons of his previous political interventions. If, on the other hand, Mueller decided that Comey’s firing was obstruction, it would entail a finding that, by providing a memorandum that was initially relied upon as a public rationale for the dismissal, the Acting and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein participated in a cover-up. This latter reading is powerfully resisted by the Special Counsel’s Office; it is one of their few decisive interventions on the matter. But it is nevertheless obvious from the narrative compiled by them that Rosenstein knew he was equipping the president with a pretext for firing Comey(or, to quote the report, that “[Rosenstein’s] own reasons for replacing Comey were ‘not [the President’s] reasons’” [2, 68]).
Though it puzzled observers, Mueller’s rejection of any formal determination in the obstruction section — which would necessitate a finding on the Comey incident most of all — can be interpreted as a refusal to malign a friend.
If so, then it further illuminates the insider mentality that characterizes, and occasionally mars, the Special Counsel’s investigation. Nothing is more illustrative in this regard than the casual attitude adopted toward Rod Rosenstein. Though involved in what is potentially an astonishing act of obstruction at the center of the Special Counsel’s work, Rosenstein supervised Mueller’s investigation. In fact, Rosenstein is interviewed formally by the Special Counsel’s Office (footnote “439: Rosenstein 5/23/17 302”). Again, acknowledging my own lack of legal expertise, from the crude outside perspective of an ordinary person, this bears the marks of a conflict of interest. Equally dismaying is the fact that Rosenstein’s interview appears to be the first one conducted after Mueller was cleared by the Department of Justice’s ethics officials to serve (“On May 23, 2017, the Department of Justice announced that ethics officials had determined that the Special Counsel’s prior law firm position did not bar his service…”) It doesn’t take a career in criminal justice to know that the person you interview first is not the one you are really investigating; to the contrary, it’s his narrative that you will set store by, and use to evaluate the testimony of others. Mueller never really subjected Rosenstein to scrutiny, and he was never really going to.
Finding incestuous relations unproblematic might suit the Special Counsel’s Office, but for me, it robs Mueller’s work of its due, eliciting suspicion of a process that needs trust in order to be accepted in full or in part. Taken one step further, many of the inadequacies of the Special Counsel’s report can be summarized as a failure to question assumptions or fully explain decisions. In aggregate, they amount to an insider’s arrogance; an immersion in a political establishment poorly conditioned to perceive its own wrongdoing and shortcomings, let alone rectify them. It did not help that media coverage of the Mueller investigation, which tacked between uncritical adulation and outright harassment, featured little reason for introspection in either case.
Lacking proper incentives, that so many of Mueller’s decisions make sense must be applauded. As much as aspects of the Special Counsel’s work raise concerns, his investigation also clarified several things, offered a better predicate for pursuing several more, and set welcome precedents.
First among those is the brisk pace of his investigation. Truly one person who should feel utterly rebuked by the Special Counsel’s Office is former Independent Counsel Ken Starr. Director Mueller completed a dramatically more important, complex, and substantive investigation than Starr’s inquiry examining President Bill Clinton, and he did so in less than half the time. This accomplishment should not go without praise, especially in light of the criticism above — namely, the report seems too focused at times; its questions and interpretations too narrowly constructed.
Clearly the suggestion of Russian electoral interference placed the legitimacy of the election in doubt, a fact that probably weighed heavily on Mueller. And so it should. During his investigation, observers drew comparisons to the length of other Special Counsel investigations in order to rebut a suggestion that Mueller should bring his inquiry to a quick close. Without wanting to insult anyone, I found this to be a fitting example of a phenomenon I call “data dumb”: invoking data without either the skill or the desire to parse it. Nobody cares that it took four years for a Special Counsel to investigate Clinton’s HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros; they don’t even remember that he was investigated, and they might not even remember him. That’s a far less exigent undertaking than reviewing the legitimacy of a presidential election, the outcome of which must be validated, or thrown in doubt, at the earliest possible moment.
Mueller’s attentiveness to expediting his efforts helps to explain his somewhat controversial decision not to pursue obtaining oral testimony from the president. I don’t see that he had much choice. Even if he decided to litigate the question by referring it to another office — as he did, for example, in the most serious instances of Russian electoral intrusions— a lengthy court battle would dominate the news coverage in the same way as the Mueller probe itself. Weighing that prospect against the evidence the Special Counsel’s already amassed, Mueller probably concluded that the result did not warrant the expenditure.
And that leads to another of Mueller’s accomplishments: his report is a lucid model of exposition. Even the volume dedicated to obstruction — loaded with threshold tests; plunging the uninitiated among us into the occasional law school seminar detailing the appropriate stages of legal analysis — pauses to offer insights like, “The President has no more right than other citizens to impede official proceedings by corruptly influencing witness testimony.” Mueller wants to make sure we get it. And, on the obstruction charges that Special Counsel seems to find most persuasive — namely, the various attempts to interfere with his own investigation — we definitely do get it. After reading this report, an unprejudiced reader cannot conclude anything other than the President of the United States obstructed justice.
Mueller’s accessible report empowers ordinary people like myself to develop a critique — perhaps an unwanted and unimportant consequence, but one that deserves special mention here, since much of the foregoing criticizes him for implicit elite bias. It also allows us to discern for ourselves the nature of Russian interference in the 2016 election, a valuable exercise in light of the proliferation of self-serving narratives.
The Project of Democratic Reclamation: What Happened, and What Should We Do About It?
My personal take on that story adopts the same outside perspective deployed in the analysis of Mueller’s report, with the same corresponding advantages and drawbacks. Outsiders often refuse to defer to considering a question on conventional grounds; we insist on our own context. For example: foreign interference is not our most significant form of electoral disruption; Russia is not the only foreign government corrupting our electoral process; and Russian meddling was directed in favor or against more than just Trump and Clinton. Observations like these provide leverage for critique — and I am convinced that each has a role in reclaiming our democracy — but they can also appear or encourage others to draw false equivalence, or dismiss as trivial and commonplace things that ought to be judged as serious and on their own terms.
Bearing that in mind, I do not agree with those who argue that Russian interference swayed the outcome of the election, but the Special Counsel’s characterization of those efforts as “sweeping and systematic” strikes me as fair, especially when considered together.
In terms of election results, the social media campaign strikes me as having amounted to very little. On this subject, the Special Counsel’s office relies upon “view” numbers to indicate the circulation of Russian-sponsored messages. Statistics such as these demonstrate reach but not influence. What can be the measurable effect of a stream of illicit messages, designed to depress or excite the vote, on top of a torrent of similar messages, all of them licitly-sourced, and featuring the same themes, directed against the same people? A Russian point of origin does not endow any given intervention with special persuasive power. The Trump campaign knew they wanted to depress the African-American vote, for example; they waged a social media campaign along those lines. “We have three major voter suppression operations underway,” a Trump campaign official disclosed to Bloomberg in the run-up to the election, evidently unbothered to use the word “suppression” to describe voter depression efforts. In all, Brad Parscale was much better equipped — in resources and in skill — than his covert fellow travelers firing off Facebook rants half a world away. Because the Russian Internet Research Agency amplified tactics already underway by the Trump campaign, it is difficult to assign any decisive electoral impact to their efforts.
So why did the Russians bother with it? The rallies organized by Russia via unwitting proxies in the United States pose this question in pointed fashion. Why risk the exposure of fake identities just to stage yet another public event in a swing state during election season? Though not significant in the election results, Russia’s social media campaign ought to be viewed as political infrastructure-building. Anticipating a Trump loss, Russian agents claimed territory in the Trump movement that would be well-credentialed in the eyes of American supporters, yet responsive to their own interests. For instance, the contact list developed to stage a rally before the election might be activated (in a swing state) immediately following it, to organize a gathering to contest the legitimacy of a Clinton election win, during a time when support for Trump would dissipate and public events would be scarce. Russian-directed social media activity, much of it gilding the lily during the campaign, could become an essential catalyst, a radicalizing or chaos agent, for some other project once the election is done. In that light, the activities of the Internet Research Agency take on a new level of menace, and an ongoing urgency.
The “hack and release” operation directed by official organs of the Russian state showed greater intent to sway election results and must be considered the more serious of the two campaigns. While Putin prefers to run his business on kind of a franchise model — indicating ambition, but uninvolved in its (fraught) implementation — it is hard for me to believe that Russian agents hacked an array of powerful US state actors without some sort of permission. Unlike the social media campaign, largely derivative of similar operations Russia has conducted elsewhere, the “hack and release” was a deliberate and direct attack on the US political establishment, and it is one to which I assume Putin lent his personal support.
Its outsider methodology deserves special attention. Where US intelligence services might obtain and then leak information for use in prominent newspapers — consider the release of the “Panama Papers,” so damaging to Russian off-shore banking, as a possible example — the Russians apparently used a middleman to pass hacked data to Wikileaks, generating excitement over a trove of raw material that could disclose any number of things. The Russian approach boosted press coverage dramatically, as each outlet felt obliged to take their own pass at the information. Judged on the basis of maximizing impact, the Russian tactics strike me as superior to their more sedate establishment rival.
But only as long as the credibility of the secondary outlet lasts, or the information disclosed proves incisive. In the case of Wikileaks on the Podesta emails, it was a short run with minimal, if any, gains. Wikileaks was already a tarnished vehicle and, as it turns out, John Podesta really doesn’t put very much that is scandalous down in emails (and he may not have anything scandalous to say at all). Though the Russians came with formidable intent, they left with a risotto recipe. In the end, what the Russians gain in impact by following their unorthodox path, they lose in the ability to control the narrative.
In contrast, when it comes to CIA channels to The Washington Post — to take just one possible example — we must admit that the US intelligence establishment is playing a long-game, with more discrete objectives. Some of that work seems evident in the Mueller report itself, as it cites press reports that rely on leaked intelligence at face value, then considers legal punishment against Trump when he responds. I would wager that these news items all came from leaks “authorized” by any given agency, but in the fair play calculus of so many Americans, the difference between one sort of behavior versus the other may seem like nothing more than legal niceties, designed to impart protection to the powerful while punishing anyone with the audacity to retaliate. I’d wager that the country’s political establishment might be surprised to find that ordinary Americans are not always so willing to view carefully constructed internal memoranda or tightly knit institutional cultures as the ultimate arbiter of what is right and wrong; or who is surrendered to judgment, and who is spared.
And this gets to the heart of the dilemma that Donald Trump provokes: does a complacent establishment retain the capacity to be self-critical, and do we have a political culture that will reward rather than penalize the effort? Clearly there is no perfect suit of armor. As before and like always, we are called to defend our democracy in spite of its defects. In this place and in this time, doing so demands that we ask whether Robert Mueller has run an investigation that brings us closer to conducting our elections in a manner that befits our ennobling ideals, and whether we have received his report bearing that purpose foremost in mind. We may not agree on the particulars — some might find the “hack and release” operation more consequential than I do, for example — but the real fight will be won or lost based on whether we choose an enduring or an expedient framework to assess the Special Counsel’s findings. This ought to be — and to some limited extent, is — a report on our shoddy electoral system, with a particular focus on Russia; secondarily, it is a report that furnishes several accounts of obstruction of justice committed by President Trump, any one of which marks a deviation from constitutional government. Everything else can and should be considered with explicit reference to these structuring truths.
The details or where we weigh in on the particulars is less important. But by the very same token, it is a mistake to surrender to conspiracist thinking on Russia; it prevents us from seeing all that we should, and doing all that we must.
For me, the sum total of Russian efforts (including the hacking of voter rolls and election software) amounts to a plan to place the legitimacy of an anticipated Hillary Clinton victory in doubt. Turns out, history had a different idea. The only thought more sobering than reckoning Russian interference as decisive in the election is supposing it was superfluous. In reality, we showed plenty of contempt for our democratic republic all on our own. The rampant influence of money and corporate actors in our elections; the inconvenience of voting and insecurity of our voting apparatus; the schemes concocted to minimize the voice and the power of citizens; all these would shock the jaded conscience of a 19th century political boss.
Likewise, the only suggestion more damning to Donald Trump than he obstructed legal proceedings because he needed to, is that he did so because he wanted to. What greater contempt of our democracy can be shown, than when someone discards its recognized safeguards, not of some perceived necessity, but as a matter of simple preference? Accordingly, on the basis of the Mueller report and in order to confront in commensurate fashion the dangers that threaten us, the American people need federal legislation to bring voting up to a national standard of accessibility and security; and we need Congress to launch impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump for obstruction of justice.
