Lindsey Graham: Congress Could Get Mueller Report in April

Attorney General William Barr has told the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he's combing through special counsel Robert Mueller's report, removing classified and other information in hopes of releasing it to Congress in April.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he had dinner the previous evening with Barr, who said he is willing to testify before Graham's committee after he sends the report to Congress. Justice Department officials said Tuesday that more information could be released in "weeks, not months."
Democrats, meanwhile, frowned at the waiting game. Rep. Elijah Cummings, one of six committee chairmen who have demanded the full report by Tuesday, said much about the path forward depends on whether the report backs up Barr's conclusion that Mueller found no evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians to influence the 2016 elections. By Barr's account, Mueller made no finding on whether the president obstructed justice, a question now in Congress' hands.

"The president has now an opportunity for weeks, it sounds like, to do these victory laps," while Democrats wait on key decisions about investigating the administration, Cummings said.
Challenges lie ahead for both the Republicans and the Democrats who hope to deny Trump re-election next year. Both parties are readjusting their aims and strategies in the post-probe landscape, pivoting to health care and other issues that are more important for many voters, even with Mueller's full findings still unknown.
Graham said the attorney general is going through the report to take out grand jury material and classified information, neither of which can be publicly disclosed under the law.
Barr wants to make sure nothing is released that could compromise national security or intelligence sources and methods, Graham said. He said Barr also told him he wants to check with prosecutors who have cases associated with Mueller's Russia investigation. Mueller had referred cases to other federal courts as part of his probe.

Graham later told CNN he had spoken to President Donald Trump about the Mueller report, who said "just release it." Graham said Trump was unlikely to claim executive privilege on any of the material.
The attorney general released a four-page summary of Mueller's confidential report on Sunday that said the special counsel did not find that Trump's campaign "conspired or coordinated" with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election. It also said that Mueller reached no conclusion on whether Trump obstructed the federal investigation, instead setting out "evidence on both sides" of the question.
Emboldened by the end of the investigation, Trump on Tuesday strode into a high-spirited gathering of Senate Republicans, flanked by party leaders, saying the attorney general's summary of Mueller's report "could not have been better." GOP senators applauded his arrival, and he celebrated what he called his "clean bill of health." He showed an eagerness to move on, Republicans said, specifically to focus anew on repealing President Barack Obama's signature health care law.

At House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's own closed-door caucus meeting Tuesday, she urged rank-and-file Democrats to "be calm" and focus on the policy promises of health care, jobs and oversight of the administration that helped propel them to the House majority last fall.
"Let's just get the goods," Pelosi said.
Not that the Democrats are forgetting Russia and the 2016 presidential election. Many Democrats dismiss Barr's four-page summary as inadequate.
"I haven't seen the Mueller report. I've seen the Barr report. And I'm not going to base anything on the Barr report," said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.

Trump has said he "wouldn't mind" if the full report were released. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he's hesitant to agree to releasing information from Mueller that would "throw innocent people who've not been charged under the bus." He is blocking legislation approved unanimously by the House calling for the report's release.
The president seemed to have heeded advice from allies, including Graham, who encouraged him to use the political capital he's now gained to accomplish policy goals.
Pelosi's advice to Democrats to stick with the strategy that won them control of the House in 2018 was reinforced by Obama himself, who counseled freshman Democrats at a reception Monday night.
Obama advised the newly elected lawmakers to focus on constituents' hopes and concerns, while also identifying issues they feel so strongly about that they'd be willing to lose their House seats in fights over them, according to people at the private party.
The focus must go beyond Russia and collusion, Democratic leaders said.

Jussie Smollett Cartoons

Media mount counteroffensive against stinging criticism as probe ends

Forget the soul-searching. The media counterattack is underway.
With harsh criticism coming from the left as well as the right as Robert Mueller's probe ends, the leaders of major news organizations, along with assorted pundits, are defending their work and that of their colleagues.
And most of them aren't giving an inch.
Nope, they're basically saying we did everything right.
They're not reflecting on whether they banged the drum so loudly that it sounded like Donald Trump's presidency was headed toward collapse. They're not addressing whether they raised expectations for the probe to an absurd degree. They're not discussing whether reporting bled into commentary as more of its practitioners simultaneously joined the cable news parade.
The New York Times reached several of the news chiefs.
CNN President Jeff Zucker is "entirely comfortable" with the network's handling of the story:
"We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did. A sitting president's own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That's not enormous because the media says so. That's enormous because it's unprecedented."
Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron: "The special counsel investigation documented, as we reported, extensive Russian interference in the 2016 election and widespread deceit on the part of certain advisers to the president about Russian contacts and other matters. Our job is to bring facts to light. Others make determinations about prosecutable criminal offenses."
And Dean Baquet, the Times' executive editor: "We wrote a lot about Russia, and I have no regrets. It's not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality."
Joe Scarborough offered a high-decibel defense the coverage on his MSNBC show: "Don't knock reporters for The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the broadcast networks for doing their job right." He also took several shots at Fox opinion hosts.
Overall, I think there's something of a straw-man argument here.
Of course a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign, which yielded 37 indictments, and led to convictions of top former Trump associates, needed to be covered extensively and aggressively.
Of course the fact that Mueller declined to bring further charges doesn't mean that all the stories written about the allegations and Trump’s handling of them — not to mention his constant attacks on the special counsel — were wrong.
And of course politicians can behave unethically without explicitly violating the law.
So the issue isn't coverage vs. no coverage. It's proportionate coverage vs. Defcon 1 coverage, the drumbeat of here's-the-latest-outrage that could sink the president vs. here-are-the-latest-developments and new questions raised by our reporting.
While "journalists aren't investigators" in the law-enforcement sense, they routinely submit their investigative work for prizes, and promote it as "a New York Times/Washington Post/CNN investigation has found ..."
And that's without getting into the obliterated line between reporting, analysis and cable punditry in an era when most of the reporters covering the story have TV contracts. And that's without getting into commentary that portrayed the president as a potential traitor orchestrating a coverup that could lead to impeachment.
By the way, Fox News covered the hell out of this story too, though often in a skeptical vein and with more of a focus on possible wrongdoing within Mueller's office, the DOJ and the FBI, especially on the opinion side.
But what's striking to me is how the condemnations are coming from both conservatives and liberals.
Here's a piece in The Federalist:
"For the past two years, a large swath of the media engaged in a mass act of self-deception and partisan groupthink. Perhaps it was Watergate envy, or bitterness over Donald Trump's victory, or antagonism towards Republicans in general — or, most likely, a little bit of all the above. But now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has delivered his report on Russian collusion, it's clear that political journalists did the bidding of those who wanted to delegitimize and overturn Trump's election."
And here's one from Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi:
"Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media."
Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept told Fox that MSNBC "should have their top hosts on primetime, go before the cameras and hang their head in shame, and apologize for lying to people for three straight years ...
"There was a whole slew, not just me, of left-wing journalists with very high journalistic credentials far more than anyone on that network, like Matt Taibbi and Jeremy Scahill and many others, including myself who were banned from the network because they wanted their audience not to know that anybody was questioning or expressing skepticism about the lies and the scam they were selling because it was so profitable."
Alan Dershowitz, the liberal Harvard law professor, sounded a similar note on Fox, saying almost all the pundits "have just been dead wrong. It's time for them to fess up, it's time for CNN to issue an apology. CNN banned me from their air because I was being too fair. I was trying to assess what the essential issue was, and I wasn't being partisan. They didn't want that."
Of course, Dershowitz got more Fox invitations once he was regularly defending Trump.
The president isn't exactly moving on, tweeting yesterday that "the Mainstream Media is under fire and being scorned all over the World as being corrupt and FAKE." After pushing the "Russian Collusion Delusion," he said, "They truly are the Enemy of the People and the Real Opposition Party!" That’s the first time he's broadened the charge beyond just the "fake news," and in my view goes too far.
But when you have Ted Koppel saying Trump is right that "the establishment press is out to get him" — singling out the Times and Post — and former Times editor Jill Abramson saying its news coverage is "unmistakably anti-Trump," that ought to give people in the profession some pause.
For its leading members to say they have no regrets misses why much of the country is losing confidence in the media.

Trump Opposes Further Disaster Aid for Battered Puerto Rico

President Donald Trump is taking a hard line against further disaster aid for hurricane-devastated Puerto Rico, telling GOP allies that the U.S. island territory has gotten too much rebuilding money compared with Southern states.

Trump's opposition to additional Puerto Rico funding sets up a showdown with House Democrats, who insist that a $13 billion to $14 billion disaster aid package that's a top priority for southern Republicans won't advance without Puerto Rico aid.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio says Trump told Republicans at a luncheon Tuesday that aid for Puerto Rico "is way out of proportion to what Texas and Florida and others have gotten."
The disaster aid package cleared a procedural hurdle by a 90-10 vote and is expected to pass the Senate, setting up talks with the Democratic-controlled House.

George Conway: Trump Is Guilty of Being Unfit for Office

George Conway, the husband of counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, argued in a new opinion piece that President Donald Trump is unfit for office.
Reacting to the news that special counsel Robert Mueller cleared Trump of conspiring with the Russians to win the 2016 presidential election, Conway penned an article for The Washington Post and said if Mueller was charged with investigating whether Trump was fit to serve, he would be guilty.

"If the charge were unfitness for office, the verdict would already be in: guilty beyond a reasonable doubt," he wrote.
Regarding Mueller's conclusion of no collusion, Conway said he wants to see Mueller's full report to explore what he sees are "links" between the Trump campaign and Russia.

"As matters turned out, and quite surprisingly, we now know from public sources that there were links aplenty," Conway wrote. "So who knows what we might learn on these subjects from Mueller's still-unreleased report?"
Mueller also looked at whether Trump obstructed justice during the multiple investigations that examined whether his campaign had improper ties to the Russians. Mueller, a former director of the FBI, could not reach a conclusion on that, a point Democrats have pounced on.

Conway was no different.
"If his report doesn't exonerate the president, there must be something pretty damning in it about him, even if it might not suffice to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt," Conway wrote. "And in saying that the report 'catalogu[ed] the president's actions, many of which took place in public view,' [Attorney General William] Barr's letter makes clear that the report also catalogues actions taken privately that shed light on possible obstruction, actions that the American people and Congress yet know nothing about."

Barr released a brief summary of Mueller's findings Sunday. He has pledged to release a more detailed report in the coming weeks.

Barr: Next Mueller Report Out in Weeks, Not Months

Attorney General William Barr plans to issue in a matter of weeks a public version of the special counsel's report that found President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign team did not conspire with Russia, as Trump prepared to use the findings against his political opponents.
Democrats attempted to change the subject to healthcare after the report from Robert Mueller appeared to shatter their case that Trump was an illegitimately elected president.
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 48 percent of Americans still believed Trump worked with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, down 6 points since conclusions from the Mueller report came out on Sunday.
The poll found Trump's job approval rating had ticked up 4 points to 43 percent following release of the findings. There was a thirst for more information, as 57 percent of Americans said they wanted to see the entire report.

Barr released his own summary of the report's central findings on Sunday but said he needed more time to review the report to determine how much of it could be made public.
A Justice Department official said on Tuesday that Barr's plan was to release a public version in "weeks, not months." Congressional Democrats have demanded Barr turn over the report to them by April 2, which would only leave a week for the Justice Department to complete its review.
The Justice official said there was no plan to share an advance copy of the report with the White House.
Some portions of Mueller's confidential report contain materials that arose during secret grand jury proceedings. Federal rules generally prohibit the government from releasing that information to the public.
The report also contains information about ongoing criminal investigations that Mueller referred to other U.S. attorneys' offices.

Barr has not yet revealed a precise date for when the final public version might be ready.
The Justice Department has not commented on the Democrats' request that it be released to Congress by next week.
Trump and his top aides attacked unidentified political opponents for starting the campaign investigation, calling the actions treasonous and worth probing.
"I think what happened was a disgrace," Trump told reporters on a visit to the U.S. Capitol, where he had lunch with Republican senators.
Republicans also were out for retribution, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell saying he supported a push for an inquiry into potential missteps by law enforcement officials in their probe of Trump.
Senator Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democratic minority in the Senate, leaped on a court filing from the Justice Department that said the entire Obamacare healthcare law - the signature legislative accomplishment of Democratic President Barack Obama - should be struck down in the courts.

The law provides healthcare coverage for an estimated 20 million people, and Trump and his Republican allies, who see it as government overreach, have failed to replace it despite vows to do so.
"It is a stark reminder of the difference between our two parties: Democrats are fighting to expand and improve healthcare coverage and lower costs while Republicans are trying to take it all away and raise costs," Schumer said on the Senate floor.
Republicans said during their lunch with Trump they discussed ways to improve the healthcare system.
TRUMP CAMPAIGN FUNDRAISING
Trump's re-election campaign launched fundraising drives in the aftermath of the Mueller report. "Democrats allowed this WITCH HUNT to go on for 2 YEARS. It’s time to show them we’re tired of their PARTISAN investigations," said one fundraising appeal.

Trump suggested he had been the victim of a smear campaign launched by senior officials in the Obama administration.
"It went very high up, and it started fairly low, but with instructions from the high-up," Trump told reporters, without offering details. "This should never happen to a president again."
Trump advisers were predicting he would go on the offensive at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Thursday night, his first major appearance since the Mueller investigation concluded.
"We reserve the right to remind the American people that the Democrats have tried for two years, by lying to the American people, to overturn the election results of 2016," a senior Trump campaign official said. "And they don’t get to just turn the page and say: 'Never mind."

Obamacare Cartoons

Trump administration backs total overturn of Obamacare, will support states challenging the law

The Trump administration on Monday told a federal appeals court that the whole Affordable Care Act must be abolished, setting for a clash between President Trump and 2020 Democratic candidates embracing “Medicare for All” system.
Justice Department attorneys filed a letter with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans asking to effectively strike down the ACA in its entirety, agreeing with the landmark ruling made by a federal judge in Texas last year.
"The Department of Justice has determined that the district court’s judgment should be affirmed. Because the United States is not urging that any portion of the district court’s judgment be reversed, the government intends to file a brief on the appellees’ schedule," the filing read.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled last year that Obamacare is no longer constitutional because the tax reform – as enacted by Republicans –eliminated the health care law’s penalty for not having health insurance.
The administration initially insisted that only certain parts of the law should be invalidated, including protections for people with pre-existing conditions. But the latest filing moved on from the earlier position and embraces the total overturn of the law.
The filing noted that the government will file a brief in support of the Texas-led coalition of states that are trying to overturn the health care law, given that “the United States is not urging that any portion of the district court’s judgment be reversed,” the Washington Post reported.
“The Department of Justice has determined that the district court’s comprehensive opinion came to the correct conclusion and will support it on appeal,” Kerri Kupec, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, told the newspaper.
A victory for the government would mean that millions of people could potentially lose their health care and causing particular disruption within the industry as no replacement system would be put in place.
Over 11 million reportedly signed up for Obamacare coverage this year, it was announced this week. That’s just slightly less than compared to 2018. At the same time, however, the number of new customers fell by more than 500,000, a worrying sign for the backers of the system.
The move to support efforts to strike down the ACA will undoubtedly pit Trump and Democratic presidential candidates, such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris, who are increasingly embracing abolishing private insurers and support the creation of a single-payer system.
At the same time, the latest effort to completely invalidate the law may prove Congressional Democrats right, who warned during the midterm election last year that Republicans are trying to repeal the law, including the protections for people with pre-existing conditions, while Republicans denied such plans.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.