Maybe it's that whole William Barr thing. Thanks to the Washington Post, we learned Tuesday night that Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent the attorney general a letter on March 27 suggesting the "summary" memo Barr had released three days prior "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office's work and conclusions" and that "there is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation." That's the memo Trump and his allies paraded around for days and weeks after as a sign there was NO COLLUSION! NO OBSTRUCTION!

When asked while testifying before Congress on April 20 whether Mueller backed his take on the obstruction charges, Barr said, "I don’t know whether Mueller supported my conclusion." Considering he'd received Mueller's letter three weeks earlier, it appears Barr may have lied under oath. This is known among Legal Beavers as "perjury."

So maybe Donald Trump, American president, just wants to talk about something else. Or maybe he really is as scared as he appears to be of Joe Biden, the new Democratic frontrunner based on the very early polls. The president seems particularly concerned at the prospect Biden could recapture some of the white-working-class union votes that Trump siphoned off the Obama coalition in 2016 after Biden snagged the endorsement of the International Association of Fire Fighters endorsement this week.

Anyway, something caused the president to share more than 50 tweets in 20 minutes this fine Wednesday morning. The vast majority were retweets of people who replied to Dan Bongino, a member of the endless parade of pro-Trump grifters now wandering the landscape in search of a dollar. Bongino tried to cancel out Biden's IAFF endorsement by tweeting that none of the firefighters he knows is supporting Biden. Trump shared this approvingly.

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I’ve done more for Firefighters than this dues sucking union will ever do, and I get paid ZERO! https://t.co/Tw0qwTiUD6 — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 1, 2019

Thanks, Mr. President, for this stirring meditation on public service. This prompted a retweet spree, spanning dozens of tweets from random accounts, in which the President of the United States shared the message of anyone who claimed to be a firefighter—or even just know a firefighter—who supports Trump or is otherwise displeased with the union's decision. A common theme was that union leaders do not represent the interests of the rank-and-file members, with the subtext that Trump does. The way you can tell they were all real is that one of them, after earning a Presidential Retweet, apparently changed their display name.

The president got got. Twitter

It appears the president has retracted his retweet.

Then it was time for some TOTAL EXONERATION! tweets.

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“The Democrats can’t come to grips with the fact that there was No Collusion, there was No Conspiracy, there was No Obstruction. What we should be focused on is what’s been going on in our government, at the highest levels of the FBI....” Senator Josh Hawley — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 1, 2019

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NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION. Besides, how can you have Obstruction when not only was there No Collusion (by Trump), but the bad actions were done by the “other” side? The greatest con-job in the history of American Politics! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 1, 2019

The ham-handed way Trump and his allies are going about trying to redirect the probe on his political opponents is a sad barometer of where we're at when you consider that millions of people will buy it.

Also, the special counsel found insufficient evidence to charge the president and his associates with conspiring with the Russian government in its influence operation. The report does not evaluate "collusion," because it's not a crime, though it does detail 127 contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russians during the campaign. That includes Trump's campaign manager sharing confidential campaign polling data on the key battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota with an associate linked to Russian intelligence and Putin crony Oleg Deripaska. This is normal and you shouldn't ask any questions about it. Shut up!

On the other hand, there are mountains of evidence backing the idea Trump abused his power to interfere in the investigation and obstruct justice, to the point that The Fox News Judge came down unequivocally on the side that the president broke the law.



And then there was this.

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Why didn’t President Obama do something about Russia in September (before November Election) when told by the FBI? He did NOTHING, and had no intention of doing anything! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 1, 2019

As many have pointed out already, the Obama administration did not act publicly because Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell threatened to trash intel officials as partisan if they did. Slate has the background:

When Sen. Mitch McConnell was told by then–CIA Director John Brennan before the 2016 election that Vladimir Putin and Russia were attempting to interfere with the goal of assisting Donald Trump, McConnell’s response took him aback, according to Greg Miller, a Washington Post reporter who has just released a book about Putin, Trump, and the election. The majority leader said he wouldn’t sign on to any condemnation of Russia’s actions and that if the administration went public with the intelligence, McConnell would in turn call out Brennan as a partisan intervening on behalf of Hillary Clinton, Miller colorfully revealed in a CNN interview Tuesday.

Here was another casually insane lie from the president, which we've all just come to accept by now. (It's also a reminder that McConnell has done more to destroy American democracy than Trump has.) But what we really should not accept is that this is how the world's most powerful man spends his mornings: rattling off the fact-free musings of his Fox News-addled brain, retweeting anyone who says they're a Firefighter For Trump, and otherwise attending to the affairs of state in the era of American decay.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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