Under Rug Swept
By 
Good piece by Marcy Wheeler about Bill Barr’s service to Donald Trump in his capacity as a professional Republican cover-up artist:
When Attorney General William P. Barr released a four-page memo two weeks ago opining that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense,” we already knew enough to be sure that Barr was spinning the contents of the report his memo claimed to summarize, as multiple reports now say he did.
That’s because there was already public evidence at the time that undermined Barr’s conclusions. Barr’s letter may have been accurate, technically speaking. But based on what it omitted about two key associates of President Trump — his longtime adviser Roger Stone and his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort — it was obvious that the attorney general had left whole areas of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings out of the summary. That Mueller’s team thinks Barr made the investigation’s findings look less damaging to Trump should not come as a surprise.
Barr’s summary clears Trump of obstruction of justice because Mueller didn’t have enough proof to charge a narrowly drawn crime: conspiracy or coordination with the Russian government. That wouldn’t include coordination with WikiLeaks. Indeed, because of First Amendment protections, coordinating with WikiLeaks would probably not be a crime.
It might, however, look a lot worse for Trump than Barr’s flat declaration that no one “in the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia.”
Even without Mueller’s report, we know from Stone’s indictment for lying to Congress and Trump’s former longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen’s sworn congressional testimony that the special counsel’s investigation found evidence that Stone sought to optimize the WikiLeaks release of the emails Russia stole from Democrats.
In July 2016, for example, Cohen testified, Stone called Trump and told him that within days, a massive dump of emails would damage Hillary Clinton, to which Trump replied with something along the lines of, “Wouldn’t that be great?” Shortly thereafter, someone on the campaign “was directed” (Stone’s indictment doesn’t say by whom — but we don’t know whether Mueller’s report does) to find out what other stolen documents would be coming. On July 25, 2016, records show, Stone asked author and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi not only to find out what was coming but also asked him to “get the pending WikiLeaks emails” themselves. By Aug. 2, 2016, Corsi’s emails with Stone reflect mutual understanding that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta would be targeted. And when WikiLeaks dropped Podesta’s emails on Oct. 7, 2016, just after the release of a video showing Trump making demeaning comments about women, someone close to a high-ranking Trump campaign official credited Stone for the timing, which minimized the impact of the video, texting him: “well done.”
The Taibbi/Greenwald thesis that if there is not a provable criminal conspiracy with the Russian state that therefore there’s no scandal and indeed that there was never even anything worth investigating is an epic feat of goalpost-shifting.