This is a true yet at the end, a balanced tour de force. Does Nate Silver accept unsolicited manuscripts? I'd like to see his blessing of your statistics, not that I see any to challenge, but I'm nowhere near your competence in using them. The thought crossed my mind some time ago Barr might be a plant. Do you know if he has a connection to James A. Baker? He's smart enough to engineer something like what you suggest and would have the motivation.
You make an old man hopeful.
Barr and Baker almost certainly crossed paths in the George HW Bush administration. Barr was appointed Assistant AG for the Office of Legal Counsel when Baker was Secretary of State and was later promoted to Deputy AG and finally AG when Baker was Chief of Staff at the White House.
Barr was also a spook at the CIA from 1973 to 1977. Barr's first political appointee job was in the Reagan administration.
As far as submitting analysis to fivethirtyeight, I appreciate the sentiment, but my analysis is probably not rigorous enough for them. Their work tends to be very data driven, though I suspect they would come to a similar conclusion if they went down that road.
No collusion? What the heck. I thought Trump would have been led away in shackles by now. And no obstruction? Hrmph. I guess no Crow for me this week. Let's see what the SDNY comes up with, but Mueller team was already stacked with Dems and Trump haters.
As always, I won't be reading and responses. I'll come back when Trump is impeached and eat all the crow. Or when Trump is reelected because Dems wont let Russia go.
How is the Mueller team stacked with Dems or Trump haters? The only ones saying that are Trump and Fox News, neither reliable sources. Mueller himself is a lifelong Republican and most of the members of his team are, as far as I can tell, apolitical. At least there is no public information about their political affiliations. This article has information on many of Mueller's key people:
Robert Mueller and His Prosecutors: Who They Are and What They’ve Done
What Mueller did do was put together a team with experts in organized crime, money laundering, and espionage. Any bias on the team is that most if not all are big rule of law proponents.
As I was saying …. Mueller has found on collusion and not confirmed anything about obstruction of justice. The cottage industry of Russia conspiracy theorists is over.
Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy but Stops Short of Exonerating President on Obstruction of Justice
My SO read the memo as soon as it came out and immediately concluded Rosenstein is a genius. Mueller's instructions were very clever. He was given broad powers to investigate Trump and the 2016 election, but was given a very narrow focus for his report. For his report he was told to focus on just collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign in the 2016 election. Being able to prove actual collusion (conspiracy against the United States in US law) between the Russian government and Trump to the sort of level Mueller would be willing to indict was small. Mueller is very conservative with indictments and only is willing to indict when he's 99% confident of a conviction.
However Mueller was free to follow any lead where it led him and then pass off that information to other prosecutors. We've only seen one prosecutor take on a lead from Mueller thus far because it was in Mueller's interest that it move forward: Michael Cohen. There is almost certainly more in the pipeline.
The legal community is coming down on the news media very hard for spinning this as over. We're at the end of the first act of the Ring Cycle (longest opera in history). The story is far from over, it's just started developing. What an experienced attorney looks for in any legal document is not just what it says, but what it specifically doesn't say. A good attorney knows how to write a document that tells truths they can't explicitly say directly. And Barr did that. To those trained to read between the lines (which my SO is good at, but I'm not), Barr said a lot that this isn't over.
We'll now see what comes out in the next year. If the evidence coming out from Congressional investigations and indictments from other jurisdictions than Mueller start coming out in the next year and it moves the fence sitters who were playing wait and see about what evidence came up about Trump's guilt to call for Trump's impeachment, then I could see a strategic impeachment come out of the House about a year from now. That would put all the Republicans running for re-election next year in a bind of having to choose between losing their primaries to someone from their right or lose the general election with the independents hating them for voting against removal.
