Can we believe the things we're told in Our Town?

THURSDAY, MAY 6, 2021

Locking up Barr again: Can we believe the things we're told by the major news orgs in Our Town?

Today, consider a major case. Consider the case of Bill Barr.

On Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow devoted her first sixteen minutes to this favorite (defunct) punching bag. At this point, Barr no longer matters. But it's still good business, here in Our Town, to dream about locking him up, preferably while mugging and clowning and all-in-all yukking it up.

Maddow may have embellished a time or three as she entertained us with this evergreen product. This morning, a news report in the Washington Post includes this puzzling passage:

HSU (5/6/21): Both judges blasted Barr’s four-page letter to Congress in March 2019 that said the special counsel did not draw a conclusion as to whether Trump obstructed the investigation and that Barr’s own opinion was that the evidence was insufficient to bring such a charge.

In reality, Mueller’s report laid out evidence of obstruction but said the special counsel could not fairly make a charging decision, given department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

Writing in March 2020, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton called Barr’s public statements “misleading” and said he had “grave concerns about the objectivity of the process” that led up to the public release of the Mueller report.

The reporter here is Spencer Hsu. Forget his claim about what those two judges did. 

(The more recent ruling, by Judge Jackson, involves the judge's assessment of a document which hasn't yet been released to the public. It amused us, and yet it didn't amuse us, when Maddow seemed to assume that the judge's assessments had to be accurate. Judges can be biased too, and judges can make errors.)

Can you believe the things you're told? For today, let's consider Hsu's account of Barr's initial four-page letter. Let's compare it to Hsu's account of what the Mueller Report really said.

Hsu is certainly right on one point:

In his four-page letter, Barr did say that Mueller didn't draw a conclusion as to whether Trump obstructed justice. Barr may have done that because that seems to be what the Mueller Report clearly said at several different junctures.

The Mueller Report considered possible obstruction of justice in "Volume II" of the two-part report. At the start of Volume II, the report says this:

MUELLER REPORT (page 2): [I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. The evidence we obtained about the President's actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred.  Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

Plainly, that passage says that the Mueller team was not "exonerating" Trump on the question of obstruction. Barr specifically quoted that language in his four-page letter. (You can see Barr's text below).

That said, the passage also says that the Mueller team didn't conclude that Trump committed an act of obstruction. Which part of "this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime" doesn't Our Town understand? 

We've read Barr's four-page letter a good numbers of times over the years. We've never quite been able to see what was supposed to be wrong with it.

By way of contrast, Barr staged a ridiculous press conference when he finally released the redacted Mueller Report roughly three weeks later. That press conference resembled a Trump PR event, but the original letter correctly stated that Mueller didn't state a judgment about whether Trump had committed an act of obstruction.

How about it? Should Barr have said that the Muller Report "did not draw a conclusion as to whether Trump obstructed the investigation?" 

Rather clearly, Hsu seems to imply that something was wrong with Barr's statement to that effect—but as we've shown you, that's what the Mueller Report seemed to say on page 2 of the relevant Volume. Indeed, just a few pages later, it seemed to say it again:

MUELLER REPORT (page 8): Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President's conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President's actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

As you can see, that's the same thing they said six pages earlier. At the very end of Volume II, they decided to say it again:

MUELLER REPORT (page 182): Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President's conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President's actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

As you can see, that was a verbatim restatement of the passage from page 8.

We've never really understood what was supposed to be wrong with Barr's original four-page letter. His later press event struck us as a ludicrous PR event, but his letter seems to present a reasonable overview, including the verbatim quote about Trump not being exonerated.

That said, the journalism in Our Town now runs on Storyline. Journalistic statements don't have to be accurate. They simply have to reflect prevailing script and Storyline.

Last night, Don Lemon gave it a try! Two night earlier, he had tried to explain the basic facts about the way this country was founded. Here's what Lemon said last night, almost surely reading text prepared by staff:

LEMON (5/5/21): Remember, Bill Barr released a misleading four-page summary of the Mueller report and hosted a spin session to get out in front of that report.

On obstruction, Barr's initial summary claimed that Mueller's report sets out evidence on both sides of the question of obstruction. But the Mueller Report specifically said it did not exonerate the president, and Mueller testified to Congress that he didn't.

You'll remember, at the time, Mueller called Barr out, writing a letter to him just after the summary. It was released saying it did not fully capture the context, nature and substance of the investigation and its conclusions. Mueller also made clear that if Trump did not commit a crime, we would know. 

 Did we mention that this was CNN? That account made almost no sense at all.

According to the CNN star, Barr released a misleading four-page summary of the Mueller Report. "But the Mueller Report specifically said it did not exonerate the president."

Did the Mueller Report specifically say that? Yes, it specifically did! But then again, so did Barr's "misleading" letter. Here's the relevant text:

BARR LETTER (3/24/19): The report's second part addresses a number of actions by the President—most of which have been the subject of public reporting–that the Special Counsel investigated as potentially raising obstruction-of-justice concerns. After making a “thorough factual investigation” into these matters, the Special Counsel considered whether to evaluate the conduct under Department standards governing prosecution and declination decisions but ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion—one way or the other—as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction. Instead, for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as “difficult issues” of law and fact concerning whether the President's actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction. The Special Counsel states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

In his letter, Barr specifically quoted the passage in which the Mueller Report specifically said that it hadn't exonerated Trump. Compare that to Lemon's delivery of product.

Lemon's presentation made no sense, but why would anyone expect different? This is the way the "journalistic" game is now widely played in Our Town. 

The Crazy has plainly come to rule the towns in which The Others live. But banality often rules ours.

When it comes to the reporting and discussion of news, Our Town is in a deep corporate decline. It's been that way for a very long time—and as is true in other towns, Our Town just keeps getting worse.

According to anthropologists: According to major anthropologists, your lizard wants you to  believe every negative claim about Barr. These scholars keep saying that this is the way our human brains are wired.

According to these credentialed experts, sometimes such claims about Barr can be wrong. We find this extremely hard to believe, but that's what these experts keep saying.