The Inside Story of Why Mueller Failed (Andrew Weissmann)

[Nevilledog]

Last edited Mon Sep 21, 2020, 09:43 AM - Edit history (1)

Link to tweet

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/andrew-weissmann-mueller-book-where-law-ends/616395/

Andrew Weissmann was one of Robert Mueller’s top deputies in the special counsel’s investigation of the 2016 election, and he’s about to publish the first insider account, called Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation. The title comes from an adapted quote by the philosopher John Locke that’s inscribed on the façade of the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C.: “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.”

Weissmann offers a damning indictment of a “lawless” president and his knowing accomplices—Attorney General William Barr (portrayed as a cynical liar), congressional Republicans, criminal flunkies, Fox News. Donald Trump, he writes, is “like an animal, clawing at the world with no concept of right and wrong.” But in telling the story of the investigation and its fallout, Weissmann reserves his most painful words for the Special Counsel’s Office itself. Where Law Ends portrays a group of talented, dedicated professionals beset with internal divisions and led by a man whose code of integrity allowed their target to defy them and escape accountability.

“There’s no question I was frustrated at the time,” Weissmann told me in a recent interview. “There was more that could be done that we didn’t do.” He pointed out that the special counsel’s report never arrived at the clear legal conclusions expected from an internal Justice Department document. At the same time, it lacked the explanatory power of last month’s bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on the 2016 election. “Even with 1,000 pages, it was better,” Weissmann said of the Senate report. “It made judgments and calls, instead of saying, ‘You could say this and you could say that.’”

The Mueller inquiry was the greatest potential check on Trump’s abuse of power. The press gives the president fits, but almost half the country chooses not to believe the news. Congress will protect Trump as long as his party controls at least one chamber. Local prosecutors and civil plaintiffs are severely limited in pursuing justice against a sitting president. Public opinion is immovably split and powerless until the next election. Only the Special Counsel’s Office—burrowing into the criminal matter of Russian interference in the 2016 election, a possible conspiracy with the Trump campaign, and the president’s subsequent attempts to block an investigation—offered the prospect of accountability for Trump. Mueller couldn’t try the president in court, let alone send him to prison, but he could fully expose Trump’s wrongdoing for a future prosecutor, using the enforceable power of a grand jury subpoena. The whole constitutional superstructure of checks and balances rested on Mueller and his team. As their work dragged on through 2017 and 2018, with flurries of indictments and plea deals but otherwise in utter silence, many Americans invested the inquiry with the outsized expectation that it would somehow bring Trump down.

*snip*

[sfstaxprep]

1. And People Still Think Drumpf Won't Get Away With Everything

That he's going to be tried, and serve jail time, along with all his co-conspirators.

We should just feel lucky if he loses the election.

[Blue Owl]

2. K&R

[BainsBane]

3. This is the correct link

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/andrew-weissmann-mueller-book-where-law-ends/616395/

Yours goes to another article, in the NYTimes, not the Atlantic.

[Nevilledog]

13. TY so much.

That was the link to something else I posted....hadn't closed the tab.

Fixed it.

[radius777]

4. Mueller sucks. Here is the key passage:

And Mueller? He was incapable of navigating the world remade by Trump. He conducted himself with scrupulous integrity and allowed his team to be intimidated by people who had no scruples at all. His deep aversion to publicity silenced him when the public badly needed clarity about the special counsel’s dense, ambiguous, at times unreadable report. His sense of fairness surrendered the facts of presidential criminality to an administration that was at war with facts. He trusted his friend Barr to play it straight, not realizing that Barr had gone crooked. He left the job of holding the president accountable to a Congress that had shown itself to be Trump’s willing accomplice. He wanted, above all, to warn the American people about foreign subversion of our democracy, while the greater subversion gathered force here at home.

In our interview, I asked Weissmann if Mueller had let the American people down. “Absolutely, yep,” Weissmann said, before quickly adding: “I wouldn’t phrase it as just Mueller. I would say ‘the office.’ There are a lot of things we did well, and a lot of things we could have done better, to be diplomatic about it.”

[uponit7771]

8. +1, Mueller was the alarm bell that didn't go off loud enough.

[DeminPennswoods]

11. Rosenstein and Barr took advantage of Mueller's personal integrity

This is what Weissman is saying here.

[smirkymonkey]

12. I was given endless amounts of crap when I suggested this during the trial.

Everyone thought he was such a saint. He might not be a demon, but he was definitely not the hero everyone thought he was. He is and always was compromised.

[BigmanPigman]

5. Isn't Rosenstein the one responsible for doing this?

I read that he steered the investigation away from certain areas...like his money connections with Russia.

[uponit7771]

7. +1

[uponit7771]

6. Mueller was told by Rosenstein to NOT investigate parts of Trumps past, Mueller didn't tell congress

... and neither did Mueller's team.

Few of them have spoken out on why they stayed quiet about Rosensteins request and that in and of itself is a travesty.

[radius777]

9. And I don't buy the idea that Rosenstein/Mueller were just poor old establishmentarians

who were duped by the cunning Trump/Barr types.

They're conservative white guys who wanted the appearance of justice without rocking the boat too much, without risking their spot at the country club.

[uponit7771]

10. +1

[UTUSN]

14. K&R