It's shaping up to be another No Good, Very Bad Day for Donald Trump, American president. The centerpiece of it all is a pair of reports Wednesday night, first in the New York Times and soon after in the Washington Post, that members of Robert Mueller's team feel Attorney General William Barr mischaracterized their findings. Specifically, they were dismayed when Barr drew up his own four-page summary that scarcely quoted from the actual report, since they had specifically written summaries of their own that could be released to the public almost immediately with minimal redactions, as the Post tells us:

“There was immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work instead,” according one U.S. official briefed on the matter. ... Summaries were prepared for different sections of the report, with a view that they could made public, the official said. The report was prepared “so that the front matter from each section could have been released immediately — or very quickly,” the official said. “It was done in a way that minimum redactions, if any, would have been necessary, and the work would have spoken for itself.”

So Barr had some ready-made summaries he could have released, but he chose instead to write his own. And his just so happened to place everything in a softer light, particularly on the question of obstruction of justice.

In his letter, Barr said that the special counsel did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. And he said that Mueller did not reach a conclusion “one way or the other” as to whether Trump’s conduct in office constituted obstruction of justice.

Absent that, Barr told lawmakers that he concluded the evidence was not sufficient to prove that the president obstructed justice. But members of Mueller’s team have complained to close associates that the evidence they gathered on obstruction was alarming and significant. “It was much more acute than Barr suggested,” said one.

It was amazing to watch the reaction to The Barr Letter. Here was an attorney general who got the job after he wrote a 19-page memo cross-examining the Mueller probe, particularly on the question of obstruction of justice, releasing a four-page summary of a two-year investigation that dismissed obstruction along the same lines he had before he'd seen any of the non-public evidence. Barr was also involved in sweeping a previous Republican presidential scandal under the rug, as he was George H.W. Bush's attorney general when that president opted to pardon everybody involved in Iran-Contra before they could start testifying about how deep that scandal went into the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Barr is pictured undoubtedly assuring Ben Carson it’s all above-board. Cheriss May Getty Images

Predictably, the president and his media apparatchiks went postal. They not only declared victory—NO COLLUSION! COMPLETE EXONERATION!—but started demanding an investigation into how the investigation got started. (This is "the Oranges of the Investigation" talk we were subjected to earlier in the week.) Almost as predictably, much of the mainstream media cowered in fear, accepting their lashing from the right-wingers and even unleashing full-page headlines on the front page of major newspapers—like, say, the New York Times—that characterized The Barr Letter as The Mueller Report itself, and the findings as No Collusion.

Even that last part isn't really what The Barr Letter said: It relayed that Mueller's team had found insufficient evidence to charge anyone in Trump's campaign with conspiring in the Russian government's influence campaign—a very specific charge that does not get into the possible business connections and various shady contacts between the two parties during the election. There exists a gray area between "indicting a sitting president" and "the president did zero things wrong" that Trump and his allies and a cowed media erased. That particularly goes for a kleptocracy like Russia, where the lines between the government and the oligarchs and the mob are exceptionally blurred, and someone like Trump, who, in his business career, took up residence on the border of the underworld.

Consider this Presidential Tweet from shortly before Trump was inaugurated:

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Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017

Wouldn't you like to see the actual Mueller Report to see if the president was telling the truth here? I mean, we already know he was pursuing a deal for a Trump Tower Moscow throughout his campaign to become President of the United States, in which capacity he could ease relations between the two countries by, say, rolling back sanctions on Vladimir Putin and his oligarch cronies. He lied, shamelessly and repeatedly, to the American people that he had no business there at all.

At the root, this is a story about corruption and white-collar crime, not—as NeverRussia Leftists are fond of saying—a way to re-litigate the 2016 election or make excuses for why Hillary Clinton lost. (That happens to be a line pushed by the president himself.) It's not about the election result, it's about whether Trump's crooked dealings in New York were actually Transatlantic, and whether that might affect his ability to make decisions in the interests of the American public.

None of this has convinced some folks in The Establishment Media to get out of the fetal position.

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Risk for Dems here is that the public narrative has already been formed and they look like sore losers in keeping the story going. https://t.co/W2HVGIRcWM — Katty Kay (@KattyKay_) April 4, 2019

What? First of all, this is once again one of the propaganda strategies perpetrated by the president, but which some in the free press have apparently eaten up. His pet attorney general released the mangled findings precisely to try to calcify public opinion in a way that would allow Trump and his allies to paint all further dissent as Sore Loser! re-litigation.

Second, this is not an NBA Playoff game, it's a question of whether the U.S. president is corrupt. It's not about the polls, although the polls do not show some dramatic swing in public opinion towards Trump, so this take is both cowardly and stupid. As historian Julian Zelizer put it, this is turning into the 2000 election. Why, assuming you have a working memory and the ability to recognize patterns, would you believe anything this president or his administration says about anything? The president says 22 false things a day in public now.

Trump holds a meeting with senior military leaders. Bill O'Leary Getty Images

No, none of this episode has been particularly encouraging going into the 2020 campaign cycle. The mainstreamers have proven themselves just as spinnable as they were in 2016, when Hillary Clinton's Email Protocol—an issue now put in stark relief by the fact that Jared Kushner and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are trading emojis on Whatsapp—took on the same weight as all the examples of Donald Trump's clearly disqualifying behavior combined. People get so terrified of being accused of Liberal Bias by right-wingers who will never grant them the title of Objective Journalist they desperately seek that they never stop to ask basic questions, like: if the full Mueller Report COMPLETELY EXONERATES! the president, why after Barr's letter did he quickly transition to fighting the release of the full report? Surely Trump wants the world to see how exonerated he is?

The same logic might apply to The Tax Returns, another issue on which the president suffered a blow this week. Trump steadfastly refused to release them during the campaign, as every major-party presidential candidate since Watergate has done, and continued his refusal through the transition and the first two years of his presidency. This was successfully accomplished through an ever-expanding portfolio of lies and false promises to do so "when he's no longer under audit," an excuse that never made sense—you can release returns that are under audit, and there was no way that the many previous years of returns were still under audit—but which the media seemed to largely accept in perpetuity.

Now that Democrats have moved to subpoena six years of Trump's returns, he is rolling out the same old defense.

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Informed of House Ways & Means request for his tax returns, @POTUS says he's still under audit. "I'm always under audit it seems," He said until he's no longer under audit, he's "not inclined" to release his returns. Though the Congressional request was to the IRS - not to him. pic.twitter.com/Ga3xsQIpxn — Mark Knoller (@markknoller) April 3, 2019

Look! He is literally telling you that he's declared himself Permanently Under Audit, and thus can never release the returns. As if this scam were not incredibly obvious already, he is now just giving away the game. The question we should ask, as we might with the Mueller Report, is why the president is so desperate to keep his tax returns hidden when, as he'd surely tell you, there's nothing to see there. It's almost like he's fucking lying.

And finally, it wouldn't be a No Good, Very Bad Presidential Week without some added headaches from the Son-in-Law-in-Chief. Remember when we learned, thanks to a White House whistleblower, that Jared Kushner was just one of at least 25 people who received security clearances over the objections of career intelligence officials? Those officials had raised red flags about his fitness to have access to classified information, because he had points of weakness with which people who wanted that information could seek to compromise him, but the president ordered he get one anyway.

We've got further developments.

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A whistleblower told House investigators that Senior White House Official 1 - now identified as Jared Kushner - was flagged "after the background investigation revealed significant disqualifying factors, including foreign influence," conflicts of interest, "and personal conduct." https://t.co/ohA238LLW9 — Rep. Don Beyer (@RepDonBeyer) April 4, 2019

Jesus Christ. The guy Whatsapping with the Saudi prince and doing God-knows-what-else outside of diplomatic and national security protocol may have an issue with "foreign influence" that makes him unfit to see the massive volume of top secret intel to which he's got access. But it's probably a coincidence that we're shoveling nuclear technology towards Saudi Arabia now.

Kushner is honored at a celebration for the First Step Act. Cheriss May Getty Images

Alright, one more thing. It really wouldn't be a Trump Infrastructure Week without a scene from The Great American Heist. An op-ed in The Washington Post relates the plot of what's goin' down at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

When President Trump first nominated Barry Myers, then the CEO of AccuWeather and a fierce critic of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, to head the very agency he had spent decades attacking, many who care about government ethics sounded the alarm. The announcement seemed extreme, even by the loose ethical standards of the Trump administration — which is partly why his first nomination stalled in the Senate in 2018. On Wednesday, the Senate GOP leadership plans to ram through Myers’s renomination without a hearing despite his failure to address any of the major ethics issues that were raised the first time he went through this process. If anything, Myers’s financial activity since his first nomination expired only heightens concerns about his ethics.

And what's the ethics issue?

When his nomination was first announced, we were concerned about whether Myers could be relied on to oversee an agency that can directly affect his family’s business. AccuWeather uses NOAA’s free weather data to make its own predictions, which it then sells to the public. AccuWeather has also argued that NOAA should reduce the amount of weather information it releases directly to the public — that is, much of the data generated by NOAA with our tax dollars would be available exclusively to private companies like AccuWeather that could then sell us forecasts based on that data. Myers himself has advocated that NOAA do less for America so AccuWeather can increase its profits.

So the guy who sells you otherwise free weather information gathered by a government agency with your tax dollars has been tapped to lead that agency, which he thinks should stop offering that information free to the public and only disseminate it through private companies, like his, who can profit off it.

This is crony capitalism on steroids. It's the kind of ethics violation that could mire a previous administration in scandal for years, but which seems to be so commonplace in this one that nobody has the bandwidth to keep up with all of it. (Did you hear the news this morning that the acting Interior Secretary, a lobbyist who had so many conflicts of interest when he took office he carried around a card listing all of them to keep track, continued lobbying after he promised he would stop?) No, this will all just float on by as Mitch McConnell rams this guy through the Senate.

The Great American Heist currently in progress shows why we need to see the full Mueller Report. Pretty much every organization the president has ever run is under investigation by state or federal authorities, because every indication is that the president does not run an honest shop. He already relentlessly profits off of the presidency through his hotels and businesses, from which he did not actually divest. That includes payments from foreign governments that have business before the United States. We must know whether the tentacles of his murky empire go further even than all of that. We must see it for ourselves, with as little input as possible from William Barr.

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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