The Shrine

For the initial post here, I'll post only the link to the pure report itself, so as to avoid introducing prejudice into any facet of the discussion:

https://media.npr.org/assets/news/2019/ ... report.pdf

While I'm only forty or so pages in, and those hardly fully read for detail - all I can say so far is the same as I have been saying:

If these are the optics of victory, the country is just in terrible shape.

The report describes alleged rampant Russian hacking of the U.S. political process at a scale heretofore unknown in America. Genuine collusion between Russian security services and Wikileaks, at minimum. Lots and lots of obfuscation, multiple attempts by the Administration to derail the probe, and unprosecuted process crimes including perjury, including at least one incident by White House Press Secretary Sanders (who has not yet been charged with any crime).

If the report is credible - and that's a big if - one thing is absolutely clear:

Whether or not Donald Trump was aware of it and aided it or not (and the report doesn't exactly exonerate Trump there, a lot more digging is necessary to see what he did and did not know and when), Russia's espionage and security services went absolutely balls-out in one of the larger recorded propaganda campaigns in human history in a successful attempt to elect this man.

The two big questions I see are:

1. Is the Mueller report credible?
2. If so, why did Russia practice electioneering at an astonishing scale to elect Donald Trump?

So far, one of the standouts is a giant, essentially entirely-redacted section called "Trump Campaign And The Dissemination of Hacked Materials".

It basically looks like several pages of this:



The redactions in this section primarily seem to be related to the notion that revealing this information would harm several government cases involving deputy Trump campaign manager Rick Gates as a witness, a close associate of Paul Manafort's, who has like Manafort pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States - as well as the subpoena against Jerome Corsi, which relates to the Gates cases. Gates has of course already and in tandem pled guilty along with Manafort to multiple counts of running a large money-laundering operation to conceal the profits of their Ukranian political lobbying work:

Gates, who struck a plea deal with Federal prosecutors that included agreeing to testify against Manafort, became the government's star witness during Manafort's trial. Manafort was convicted of 8 counts of tax and bank fraud.[32] During the trial, Gates testified that he and Manafort carried out an elaborate offshore tax-evasion and bank fraud scheme using offshore shell companies and bank accounts in Cyprus, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and the United Kingdom to funnel millions of dollars from their political consulting work in Ukraine.[33]

Still, the idea that somehow an entire section on Trump campaign staff possibly aiding in the release of Russian hacked materials to the U.S. public has to be redacted is a little too convenient for me to accept purely on good faith.

I will continue to call for the release of materials related to this section, and to call to ask why it was redacted - because if Barr is helping Trump actively conceal damaging details in this investigation, these giant pages of blacked-out redactions are likely to be where it is occurring.

...the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts."

Grim.

So we're definitely in collusion-but-"not collusion" territory; Putin expected to get a pliable and Russia-friendly President, whereas Trump wanted to see Hillary brought down.