Mueller noted that while the report does not conclude Trump committed a crime, “it also does not exonerate him.”

[Full disclosure: I am an angry old white man, a veteran with a college degree. Not a Democrat, not a Republican. Officially, I am NPA “No Political Affiliation.” I live in a deep red county. The government sends me a monthly check and provides my health insurance. What you call, Socialism. So, I’d really really like to see the government perform competently. Do what it is supposed to do. Send me my check. Cover my ass.]

If you can imagine Trump as a runner, bear with me, you can easily imagine him covered in fluorescent Lycra, slapping high fives over the Verrazano Bridge, then having his limo speed him to Central Park, where he would ease out of the crowd after all the Africans had gone by before sprinting across the finish line covered in sweat – artfully applied by Kellyanne Conway on the ride over – as the first USA finisher. Maybe set a national record.

My first thought was Lance Armstrong. Sad. Did you watch Lance ride a bike? Genius. Did he really need PEDs? Performance Enhancing Drugs.

Trump is arguably the greatest con man in history. Maybe there’s no argument. Give the man his due. Did he really need Putin’s help?

My second thought was Rick Reilly’s new book, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.

“To say ‘Donald Trump cheats’ is like saying ‘Michael Phelps swims,” Reilly stated in emphasizing the depth and level of the president’s habits, according to the New York Post.

“He cheats at the highest level. He cheats when people are watching and he cheats when they aren’t,” Reilly writes in his book. “He cheats whether you like it or not. He cheats because that’s how he plays golf.”

“If you’re playing golf with him, he’s going to cheat.”

The book also addresses Trump’s golf handicap score of 2.8, which would indicate the president is a more skilled golfer than eighteen-time major title champion, Jack Nicklaus who has a score of 3.4, according to the Golf Handicap and Information Network.

“If Trump is a 2.8,” writes Reilly, “Queen Elizabeth is a pole vaulter.”

“Golf is like bicycle shorts, it reveals a lot about a man.”

Cheating, after all, is just a different form of lying. Like tax evasion.

We live in a world where politics is now reported as sport. We have teams. And each team has its mascots and team colors and fight songs. Slogans and shit. Let’s just say Trump didn’t take a limo to the Park. Let’s just say he won by seventy thousand votes across three states giving him an Electoral College victory while losing the popular (democratic) vote. Three million more people – 3,000,000 more American voters – wanted the other candidate. Trump, he is claiming an American Record and I am saying, he was paced by Putin.

He was paced by Putin, he was paced by Putin, he was paced by Putin. And that must lead to disqualification. It is time to protect ourselves the next time The Donald toes the starting line. No PEDs, Donnie. No Vlad.

No Collusion = Useful Idiot. It’s math.

And if you don’t like what I have to say, it was just “a slip of the tongue,” or maybe it was “a joke.”

But, whatever, it was said “in the heat of the moment.”

The Hustlers and Swindlers of the Mueller Report

By Masha Gessen for The New Yorker

There was a lull on social media among Russia watchers after the redacted Mueller report dropped, on Thursday. “Everyone is reading,” a friend of mine wrote. “It’s like a well-written detective novel.”

I disagree. A masterfully constructed novel might spin different strands in order to tie them up neatly at the end, leaving the reader with the sense that the world has come into focus: motives are clear and mechanisms of malfeasance have been exposed. The Mueller report exposes the mechanisms and the motives, to be sure, but doesn’t tie anything together in the end. Rather than the story of a single crime masterminded by a single actor or entity, this is the story of many hustles, most of them unsuccessful. You’d be hard-pressed to find collusion among these hustlers—each of them has his own game.

One of the first hustlers comes into the report on page 54. He is Jerome Corsi, whom the report identifies as an “author who holds a doctorate in political science.” He is also a conspiracy theorist, a Swift Boater, and a birther. In his interviews with investigators, Corsi claimed to have alerted the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, to the impending publication, by the Washington Post, of the “Access Hollywood” tape, on which Donald Trump boasted of forcibly kissing women and grabbing women by the genitals. Corsi appears to have claimed credit for insuring that Assange released the first trove of e-mails stolen from the Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, within an hour of the publication of the tape. The special counsel could not find anyone who could corroborate Corsi’s claims. It appears that Corsi might have lied (though Corsi has denied this). Corsi’s hustle is like most of the other hustles in this story: he is inflating his own importance.

Next, on page 61, comes Henry Oknyansky, a.k.a. Harry Greenberg, a Russian-born Florida businessman, and Alexei Rasin, identified as a Ukrainian involved in Florida real estate. The two met with the Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone in May, 2016, and offered to sell damaging information on Hillary Clinton, which Rasin claimed to have obtained while working for Clinton. Stone rejected the offer. Mueller found no evidence that Rasin was ever connected to Clinton, and the special counsel was unable to locate Rasin himself.

Page 67 marks the arrival of big-time hustlers: the father and son Aras and Emin Agalarov and their sometime associates Irakly Kaveladze and Robert Goldstone. Aras Agalarov is a Moscow real-estate mogul. Kaveladze is his deputy and representative in the United States. Goldstone is a British music producer who served as a go-between for Agalarov’s contacts with Trump. Agalarov wanted to build a Trump-branded tower in Moscow. The Trump Organization explored the option but, by September, 2014, appears to have lost interest in the Agalarovs, only to take up negotiations the following year with two other potential partners in Moscow. In this battle of hustlers, Felix Sater, a Soviet-born New York lawyer and convicted felon, emerges. He imagines bigger and better than the rest of them. In a now famous November, 2015, e-mail to the Trump attorney Michael Cohen, Sater promised the world: a ribbon-cutting ceremony from Trump Tower Moscow that would feature Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin onstage together—and this, he claimed, would win Trump the Republican Presidential nomination. (“And possibly beats Hillary and our boy is in,” he added hopefully.) Sater proceeded to string Cohen along with promises of arranging a meeting with Putin.

Frustrated, Cohen decided to reach out to the Russian President himself, by writing to a publicly available e-mail address for Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. His first message didn’t go through because he misspelled the address, but eventually he made contact with Peskov’s assistant. Sater jumped back in, trying to take control of the communication. Claiming to be coördinating with Peskov and promising a meeting with Putin, Sater arranged for Cohen to travel to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, in June, 2016. Cohen went so far as to get his travel arrangements and credentials, but then concluded that Sater was misrepresenting his connections and was not acting on Peskov’s behalf after all. Cohen didn’t go to Russia. At the St. Petersburg forum, Putin, in an onstage interview with Fareed Zakaria, made fun of the American media’s obsession with his imagined regard for candidate Trump. “I said that he is colorful,” Putin said. “Well, he is colorful.”

The next pair of hustlers are George Papadopoulos, who was hired as a foreign-policy adviser by the Trump campaign, which was rushing to cobble together a team, and Joseph Mifsud, who called himself a professor and worked at a London institution that called itself an academy. Mifsud and Papadopoulos meet on page 82, in March, 2016. Mifsud boasted of his connections in Russia and elsewhere; Papadopoulos, according to the report, “thought that such connections could increase his importance as a policy advisor to the Trump Campaign.” Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to a Russian woman he may have misrepresented as Putin’s niece. After the meeting, Papadopoulos sent an e-mail to the campaign in which he misrepresented Mifsud, whom he had met just days earlier, as his good friend, and lied that he had also met the Russian Ambassador to London, who, he lied some more, also acts as Russia’s deputy foreign minister. Over the next several months, Papadopoulos worked frantically to arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin using contacts, including Mifsud, who couldn’t possibly have the access necessary to broker such a meeting. Higher-level campaign officials dismissed his efforts. Papadopoulos was fired from the campaign, in October, 2016, after he gave an interview to the Russian news agency Interfax in which he criticized sanctions against Russia. Somewhere along the way, Papadopoulos appears to have heard that Russia had “dirt” on or e-mails from Hillary Clinton, but the investigation found no evidence that he shared this information with anyone on the campaign.

Then there was Carter Page, the founder of a failing consultancy and investment-management firm focussed on Russia. He had been hustled by a Russian intelligence officer named Victor Podobnyy, introduced on page 96. The report quotes Podobnyy, who met Page in 2013, boasting to an associate that he is feeding Page “empty promises.” Podobnyy was identified as an intelligence agent by the U.S. government in 2015; Page was interviewed by the F.B.I. about his contacts with him before he started volunteering for the Trump campaign, in January, 2016. In a now-familiar double hustle, Page misrepresented himself to the campaign, claiming that he had high-level Russian contacts, and exaggerated his own position in the campaign to his Russian contacts. In July, 2016, he travelled to Russia without the campaign’s authorization, spoke out against sanctions, and met with high-level government officials. When his activities began generating publicity in the U.S., he was fired from the campaign. After the election, he applied for a position on the transition team; on his application, he once again exaggerated his experience, the standing of his foreign contacts, and his role in the Trump campaign. He never heard back from the transition team, but he continued to hustle the Russian side for at least another couple of months.

One of the most covered events of the campaign appears on page 110: a June, 2016, Trump Tower meeting, in New York. The hustler this time was Natalia Veselnitskaya, a small-time lawyer who was representing a Russian businessman battling American sanctions because of his role in the death of the Russian accountant Sergei Magnitsky. Veselnitskaya claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. So convincing was her bid for attention that old acquaintances, including the Agalarovs, Kaveladze, and Goldstone, joined her effort, in the apparent hope of hustling their way back to Trump. The Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr., attended the meeting. Veselnitskaya also brought Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet-born American lobbyist. Veselnitskaya had nothing to offer—she apparently had no dirt whatsoever, and she and Goldstone exaggerated her contacts with high-level officials in the Russian government (as did much of the American media, after the fact of the meeting became public). Kushner was angry that he had wasted his time. Goldstone later apologized to Trump, Jr., and complained to the younger Agalarov that his reputation was “basically destroyed by this dumb meeting which your father insisted on.”

Manafort, the second-biggest hustler in this story, comes in on page 129. According to the report, he instructed his deputy, Rick Gates, to release campaign information to Manafort’s former employee Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the F.B.I. considers to have ties to Russian intelligence. Kilimnik had come to him with a proposed peace-brokering arrangement between Russia and Ukraine. A telling detail is that he claimed that former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was then living in Russia, would secure Russian support for the proposal. Manafort, who had worked for Yanukovych, was in a position to know that he was being hustled: Yanukovych did not have the kind of access to the Kremlin that would support such a claim. But Manafort had a hustle of his own: he told Gates that the arrangement would be “good for business” and, the report says, “potentially a way to be made whole for work he previously completed in the Ukraine.” Manafort was, it seems, trying to share internal campaign information in lieu of making debt payments to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

The report explains that Mueller’s team “applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of ‘collusion.’ ” Mueller decided not to charge any Trump-campaign officials with conspiracy due to a failure to “establish any agreement among Campaign officials—or between such officials and Russia-linked individuals—to interfere with or obstruct a lawful function of a government agency during the campaign or transition period.” The key word here is “agreement.” Of course there was none. Every character in this story was hustling every other character. Everyone was exaggerating his importance and selling more than he had. Conspiracy assumes a common purpose, but these people didn’t have one—not even, it seems, the hustle ultimately perpetrated on the American people by the election of Donald Trump.

• Masha Gessen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of ten books, including, most recently, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.

The Mueller report is the opposite of exoneration

By Editorial Board Washington Post

The president tried to manipulate the justice system, according to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The Editorial Board argues that Congress must not let this go.

THE REPORT of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is not what the American public had been led to expect. As Attorney General William P. Barr said last month, the special counsel found little evidence of a coordinated plot between Russia and the Trump campaign to swing the 2016 election. But Mr. Mueller told a very different story about whether President Trump obstructed justice than the one Mr. Barr gave the country in his summary of the special counsel’s report. In fact, Mr. Mueller compiled a damning account of Mr. Trump’s lies, behind-the-scenes manipulations and attempts at coercion while Justice Department officials were properly investigating Russia’s election-year activities and Mr. Trump’s own possible obstruction.

Mr. Mueller made clear that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential race in “sweeping and systematic fashion,” which Mr. Trump has denied; that the interference was designed to help Mr. Trump; and that the Trump campaign was happy to accept the help, which is morally repulsive.

Related: [Read the full, redacted Mueller report]

Even so, Mr. Mueller’s account of the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia contains no evidence of substantial cooperation. Contacts between figures on the fringe of Mr. Trump’s circle, such as sometime foreign policy advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, with equally sketchy Russian characters may have revealed Moscow’s interest in helping the Trump campaign, but they apparently led nowhere.

The infamous June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between a Russian delegation and Trump campaign officials, including Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, was, as Mr. Kushner put it, a “waste of time.” It is telling that the Trump team took the meeting because the Russians were promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, but the Russians’ real agenda was to lobby against the Magnitsky Act, a law mandating sanctions for human rights crimes.

Nor did the investigation find evidence that Mr. Trump approved, or even knew about, questionable pre-inauguration contacts between soon-to-be national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador, during which Mr. Flynn urged moderation by the Kremlin in responding to sanctions imposed by the Obama administration. Mr. Mueller did indeed compile evidence that Mr. Trump attempted to derail prosecution of Mr. Flynn for lying about his conduct, and that he tried to suppress evidence about the Trump Tower meeting; but underlying wrongdoing by Mr. Trump was not the motivation for these attempts.

Related: [George Conway: Trump is a cancer on the presidency. Congress should remove him]

The report does establish collaboration between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, on the one hand, and between WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence on the other. Russia’s military intelligence agency supplied WikiLeaks with stolen Democratic Party documents and emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta; the Trump campaign, in turn, heavily promoted the material and allegedly sought to learn from WikiLeaks when more would be released.

Some of the most substantial of Mr. Barr’s redactions appear to cover activity undertaken by Trump associate Roger Stone in acting as an unofficial liaison between the campaign and WikiLeaks, which was covered in a separate indictment of Mr. Stone in January. But the unredacted portions of the report do not clearly show that WikiLeaks knew it was being used by Russian intelligence, nor that the Trump campaign coordinated directly with the Russians about the leaks.

Yet Mr. Mueller argues that the absence of clear evidence of illegal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign does not mean that the president must be innocent of obstructing justice. In his summary of the special counsel’s findings last month, Mr. Barr said Mr. Mueller declined to make a call on the president’s behavior, then explained that there was too little evidence to conclude Mr. Trump committed a crime. Mr. Barr’s account has now been shown to be highly misleading.

No matter his findings, we now learn, the special counsel was never going to declare Mr. Trump guilty. Mr. Mueller’s report stated that, from the very start, “we determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes.” That is because Justice Department guidelines bar prosecuting a sitting president, Mr. Mueller explained, and it would be unfair to charge someone who had no chance to win exoneration in court.

But Mr. Mueller did everything short of leveling an accusation. “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” the report read. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.”

Mr. Mueller described many disturbing incidents, mapping out how each could constitute obstruction of justice. Some were previously known but are bolstered in the report by sworn testimony and new detail; others are newly disclosed. When Mr. Trump pressured then-FBI Director James B. Comey to go easy on Mr. Flynn, he knew the FBI was involved, he knew he was not supposed to meet alone with the FBI director, he sent advisers out of the room in a manner suggesting he understood the request was improper, and it is clear he thought wrapping up the controversy surrounding Mr. Flynn would end “the whole Russia thing.”

The 448-page report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III submitted to Congress April 18 detailed 10 “episodes” of potential obstruction of justice against President Trump. Congressional Democrats must decide what, if anything, to do with Mueller’s evidence. (Taylor Turner/The Washington Post)

When Mr. Trump twice told then-White House counsel Donald McGahn to fire Mr. Mueller — “Mueller has to go”; “you gotta do this” — he knew he was under investigation, he knew there was no rational basis for removing the special counsel, and he had been told he should not be discussing the matter with Mr. McGahn. He later sought to have Mr. McGahn deny that Mr. Trump had ever told him to fire Mr. Mueller. The story is similar when Mr. Trump tried to get then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to end the investigation into Mr. Trump and his campaign, an act “intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President’s and his campaign’s conduct,” Mr. Mueller found.

Related: [E.J. Dionne: Mueller’s report is the beginning, not the end]

How could there be obstruction of justice even if there was little evidence to support the underlying suspicion of Trump campaign coordination with Russia? First, Mr. Mueller argued, “Obstruction of justice can be motivated by a desire to protect non-criminal personal interests, to protect against investigations where underlying criminal liability falls into a gray area, or to avoid personal embarrassment. The injury to the integrity of the justice system is the same regardless of whether a person committed an underlying wrong.”

More specifically, “The President had a motive to put the FBI’s Russia investigation behind him,” Mr. Mueller wrote. “A thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns.”

Second, once he knew he was under scrutiny for possibly interfering with a legitimate law enforcement inquiry, Mr. Trump had further motive to derail the probe. At that point, Mr. Trump engaged in “public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate.” Mr. Mueller noted that “the President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

From here, the House Judiciary Committee must hear directly from Mr. Mueller. Lawmakers should insist on reading the entire report, including substantial sections that have been redacted from public view. Then they may face a difficult balancing act between the many valid reasons to regard impeachment as a last resort, and their responsibility to ensure that no one is above the law.