The mainstream media is criticizing a pair of tweets President Trump sent out this morning.
Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue. Watch out for people that take so-called “notes,” when the notes never existed until needed. Because I never….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 19, 2019
…agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the “Report” about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad). This was an Illegally Started Hoax that never should have happened, a…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 19, 2019
In the first tweet, he writes “Watch out for people that take so-called “notes,” when the notes never existed until needed.” Trump is referring to former White House counsel Don McGahn. He was in the habit of taking notes during meetings with Trump, who found the practice annoying.
The Mueller Report quotes Trump as saying to McGahn, “Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.”
The friction actually started between Trump and McGahn in June 2017 when, according to the report, Trump directed him to “inform the Acting Attorney General that Mueller should be removed as special counsel. McGahn threatened to resign and Trump backed down. Trump later ordered McGahn to deny that he had tried to fire Mueller. McGahn refused.” Trump accepted that.
Can anyone really blame President Trump for wanting to fire Mueller? He knew he had not colluded with Russia and that this was a bogus investigation which was hurting both his presidency and the country. Mueller had also interviewed with and been rejected by Trump for his old job as FBI Director the day before he was appointed to the special counsel. As a Washington insider, he never should have been considered for the special counsel. He was as conflicted a candidate as he could possibly be.
This incident is listed in the report and in every media outlet’s list of the top takeaways from the report as an area of potential obstruction of justice.
What is even more interesting are the items which were excluded from the report. The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel wrote an excellent analysis on the entire report which can be read here.
Strassel writes:
Note as well what isn’t in the report. It makes only passing, bland references to the genesis of so many of the accusations Mr. Mueller probed: the infamous dossier produced by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. How do you exonerate Mr. Page without delving into the scandalous Moscow deeds of which he was falsely accused? How do you narrate an entire section on the July 2016 Trump Tower meeting without noting that Ms. Veselnitskaya was working alongside Fusion? How do you detail every aspect of the Papadopoulos accusations while avoiding any detail of the curious and suspect ways that those accusations came back to the FBI via Australia’s Alexander Downer?
The report instead mostly reads as a lengthy defense of the FBI—of its shaky claims about how its investigation began, of its far-fetched theories, of its procedures, even of its leadership. One of the more telling sections concerns Mr. Comey’s firing. Mr. Mueller’s team finds it generally beyond the realm of possibility that the FBI director was canned for incompetence or insubordination. It treats everything the FBI or Mr. Comey did as legitimate, even as it treats everything the president did as suspect.
In the end, it was a political document written by a team of two dozen highly partisan Democrats. It was never going to be an objective report.
As just as Mueller intended, it has unleashed a new round of investigations.
I, for one, think Trump is entitled to a little venting.
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