Thoughts on the Mueller report

You may be aware that the special investigator has finished his work and presented his report to the attorney general, you may also be aware that the AG has released a summary saying that the president is not being accused of collusion in it.

Some things to keep in mind:

Mueller was never going to make an outright claim accusing the president of a specific crime without the hardest evidence possible, I am talking multiple on record witnesses as well as tapes and supporting documentation. The report being the smoking gun that brings down the administration was always a pipe dream.

This doesn't mean the president committed no crimes! It only means that the investigator decided there wasn't enough evidence for him to make an accusation at that time, seeing as the impeachment of a president is a political matter more than a criminal one, as we saw when Bill Clinton was impeached in the 90s, this makes sense based on his character.

William Barr is not a trustworthy source when it comes to letting him interpret evidence for us. The Attorney General is firmly in the presidents pocket and was not going to release a summary that harmed his boss, to my mind, the fact that he released a summary at all rather than making the whole report public suggests that there is at the very least some embarrassing information in there let the partisan mouthpieces make the snap judgments and wait for the full report.

We may never see the full report, the House voted unanimously to have it released, but the Senate is a very different beast these days and I do not know if they will vote to compel it to be public, or even if they do how hard the administration will fight that release, I suspect in the end it they can't stop it, but they can draw things out.

That might end up being a good thing, if the release of the report gets dragged out for, let's say, sixteen months, that means it goes public in the month or two leading up to the election and would therefore be fresh at the time it would make the greatest impact. That all said I would still prefer it sooner rather than later because...

It probably won't matter anyway during the election, or, sadly, at all. Maybe a couple more cronies get indicted, hell maybe Kushner gets slapped with charges, but that is probably as close the the family as charges will come and it was always unlikely that more would result from it.

This absolutely doesn't exonerate the president of anything, the report doesn't declare him innocent or say the investigation was a waste of time, none of that, all it says(that we know of) is that it isn't recommending for or against charges being brought. It is stating facts and letting someone else decide what to do with them.

That caveat above is important, because if we never see the full report, or we see a redacted version, we can't know for sure what was recommended by it, it is possible, if unlikely in my opinion, that the AG's summary is completely fabricated, not just spun, and the report may well recommend charges be brought, I rather suspect that Mueller would go on record if lies were spoken in his name, but we can't know for sure.

We still need a proper candidate in 2020, even if the report was a damning as we hoped and impeachment proceedings began immediately, we'd still need a good candidate because that shit takes forever and is unlikely to take down Mike Pence at the same time. Even if it did that the GOP wouldn't exactly sit the election out and that party is pretty much dominated by fascists now, any candidate they put up would be barely more tolerable than what we have now from a policy standpoint.

Nothing has been able to sink Trump so far, his base has proven to be remarkably, insanely, devoted and we can count on a baseline of 35-40% of the vote going for him literally no matter what he does, that means the progressive candidate has to be one that inspires turnout, and voter suppression tactics still have to be overcome, the challenge is not insurmountable by any means, but it ain't nothing either.