If he's innocent, shouldn't the president order the Mueller Report to be made public?

If he's innocent, shouldn't the president order the Mueller Report to be made public?

by digby




Rush Limbaugh had an interesting theory about the Mueller report today:

Mueller’s gonna have to say something to somebody, but his point was that we’re not gonna see it. It goes to the Justice Department and Congress, and it’s up to whoever to make it public, and it may not ever be made public, he thought, because Mueller’s got nothing. And the Mueller whatever it is — the investigation report, whatever — is much more valuable unreleased.

If there’s nothing in it, why report that? If you’re this bunch of people running this coup, if you are this bunch of people trying to get Donald Trump’s numbers down to 30% or lower, and you finish the investigation and you haven’t found any evidence for your original premise of collusion, why would you announce that? You’re not gonna announce that! You’re gonna say, “Well, it’s ambiguous or it’s something,” and there won’t be a report and you’ll have the media clamoring for it — and what will we get?

We’ll get leaks from this report nobody has seen, and it will be the continuing death by a thousand cuts. It will be one lie after another amplified by others, and it will just be continuing this looped process that we’re in. Or there might be a report. In case there is a report, everybody under the sun has been warning us that expectations — has been warning the left that expectations — are not gonna be met. The latest is Clapper. Listen to him again. This is this morning on CNN. He was asked, “When you hear McCabe say that it’s possible that Trump is a ‘Russian asset,’ what is your reaction?”

Listen to his reference to the report that Mueller has coming out in this bite.

CLAPPER: I would — and have — added the caveat “whether witting or unwitting.” And, uh, I think that’s an important distinction. You consider Putin’s background as a trained, experienced KGB agent and how he would approach somebody that he is trying to co-opt or influence or gain leverage over. In that sense, in that context is, uh, what I think of when, uh, I mean potential unwitting asset. I think that the hope, uhhh, is that the Mueller investigation will clear the air on this issue once and for all. I’m really not sure it will and the investigation, when completed, could turn out to be quite anti-climactic and not draw a conclusion with that.

RUSH: Now, he’s just the latest. He’s about the tenth person in the past eight weeks or so who has alluded to the fact that the Mueller report’s gonna let a lot of people down. I want to warn you: That could be a well-coordinated, gigantic sandbag. You know, you learn these people, you witness ’em the way they do things one time, and you never forget it. I’ve cited this example before. During the taped deposition that Bill Clinton gave in the Paula Jones case, it was videotaped, and it was to be played for the public later.

A day or two before this deposition was to be made public, Clinton allies flooded the media with stories of how the president just lost it when the question of the cigar came up, and they were very worried about how this was gonna look. “The president, apparently, just lost it!” So we all are primed, and when they are going to play the videotaped deposition, we are all tuned in — and guess what?

Clinton did not lose it. His eyes just got big for a split second and then he rolled on. He was totally unfazed. We had been totally set up, and I want to warn everybody that we may be being set up again. These people have been lying from the beginning. McCabe is out there. You think McCabe doesn’t know what Mueller’s got? I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you. You think McCabe does not know? I guarantee you he does know!

These guys all know they’re all in on it. These are conspirators in this whole hoax, and if McCabe is out there saying, “I think Trump is still a Russian asset,” then I’m not gonna be surprised if Mueller says that. Why would these people do all of this, and then in the two years prior to the 2020 election release a report that’s basically blah, blah, “Eh, nothing to see here”?

You got Clapper here talking about “unwitting.” So I’ll tell you what I think now — and I’d be very happy to be wrong about this. I think this report is gonna name Trump, and I think this report is going to position Trump as a dupe. It’s exactly what Clapper has said here, that Trump is so stupid and so unqualified and so unprepared for this job that we should never, ever elect another president like this. This man has been unwittingly duped by not just Putin.

I'd guess he's setting up the idea for the Trump cultists that if the Mueller Report is kept secret they shouldn't assume that the congress is going to close up shop and let the whole thing go? (Because the idea Trump is a cretinous moron (which is obvious) might be even worse than being an actual foreign agent.)

Whatever Rush's reasoning it's really an argument for releasing the report to the public.

In fact, if Robert Mueller finds nothing worth prosecuting beyond what we've already seen and he finds no evidence of wrongdoing by the president and his henchmen, shouldn't Trump want it made public? After all, I'm pretty sure he has the power to do that.

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