The Department of Justice released special counsel Robert Mueller's long awaited report earlier this morning.
The report — which only included "limited" redactions, according to Attorney General William Barr — detailed his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
Mueller was unable to conclude that “no criminal conduct occurred.” The investigation was also unable to clear President Trump on obstruction. The report states that the evidence obtained “about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred.”
Why obstruction by Trump failed: Efforts by Trump to obstruct justice failed because others refused to "carry out orders," the report said.
Trump tried to remove Mueller: Trump called former White House lawyer Don McGahn at home and directed him to call the acting attorney general and say Mueller "had conflicts of interest and must be removed." McGahn refused.
What the Trump campaign knew: The special counsel’s investigation into possible collusion found that members of the Trump campaign knew they would benefit from Russia’s illegal actions to influence the election, but didn’t take criminal steps to help, the report said.
Why Mueller didn’t subpoena Trump: The special counsel believed it had the authority to subpoena President Trump — but decided against doing so because it would delay the investigation, according to the report. Prosecutors also believed they already had a substantial amount of evidence.
Sarah Sanders misled the media about the firing of the FBI director: The White House press secretary conceded in an interview with Mueller she made statements to the media that were not based in fact.
Trump dropped F-bomb after Mueller got the job: In May 2017, shortly after Trump learned from his then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had appointed Mueller, Trump “slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm f***ed.’”
Mueller said Trump's public acts can be considered obstruction: The special counsel wrote about how the President’s public comments can be considered as obstruction efforts because of his power.
Congress has the right to investigate: Mueller’s report laid out the case for why Congress is able to investigate and take action against Trump on obstruction of justice.
Trump asked campaign aides to find Clinton’s emails: After Trump publicly asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails at a July 2016 press conference, he privately and repeatedly “asked individuals affiliated with his campaign to find the deleted Clinton emails,” the report said.
Mueller considered different possible collusion crimes: The special counsel looked at potential crimes outside of conspiracy as he investigated collusion —including crimes under campaign finance law and regarding individuals potentially acting as illegal foreign agents for the Russian government.
Mueller investigated rumored compromising tapes of Trump in Moscow: The special counsel examined whether Trump learned during the presidential campaign of the rumored existence of compromising tapes made of him years earlier when he visited Moscow.
Let’s crowdsource annotation of the Mueller report. Here’s an annotatable, searchable version of the PDF. Just log in with @hypothes_is to weigh in. https://t.co/Hivzh796Mx Thank you @TheViewFromLL2 for that!
For people interested in following the collaborative reading and open annotation of the #MuellerReport, here's a link to the "crowd layers" dashboard which summarizes and visualizes the growing annotation activity: https://t.co/Fx6h3X358t enjoy!
Thursday on the NewsHour, Attorney General William Barr releases a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on possible cooperation between Russian government operatives and members of President Trump’s 2016 campaign. Plus: Legal and political analysis of the Mueller report, as well as how the report is being received abroad.
Yesterday I was contemplating calendar heatmaps which are probably best known from the user interface of GitHub which relatively shows how active someone is on the website. I’ve discovered that JetPack for WordPress provides a similar functionality on the back end (in blue instead of green), but sadly doesn’t make it available for display on the front end of websites. I’ve filed a feature request to see if it’s something they’d work on in the future, so if having something like this seems useful to you, please click through and give the post a +1.
A screen capture of what my posting “velocity” looks like on the back end of my website. The darkest squares indicate 30+ posts in a day while the next darkest indicate between 15-30 posts. My “streak” is far longer than this chart indicates. I obviously post a LOT.
Circular Widthmaps
Today I saw a note that led me to the Internet Archive which I know has recently had a redesign. I’m not sure if the functionality I saw was part of this redesign, but it’s pretty awesome. I’m not sure quite what to call this sort of circular bar chart given what it does, but circular widthmap seems vaguely appropriate. Here’s a link to the archive.org page for my website that shows this cool UI, screencaptures of which also appear below: http://web.archive.org/web/sitemap/https://www.boffosocko.com/
Instead of using color gradations to indicate a relative number of posts, the UI is measuring things via width in ever increasing concentric circles. The innermost circle indicates the root domain and successive levels out add additional paths from my site. Because I’m using dated archive paths, there’s a level of circle by year (2019, 2018, 2017, etc.) then another level outside that by months (April 2019, March 2019, etc.), and finally the outermost circle which indicates individual posts. As a result, the width of a particular year or month indicates relatively how active that time frame was on my website (or at least how active Archive.org thinks it was based on its robot crawler.)
Of course the segments on the circles also measure things like categories and tags on my site as well along with the date based archives. Thus I can gauge how often I use particular categories for example.
I’ll also note that in the 2018 portion of the circle for July 11th, I had a post that slashdotted my website when it took off on Hacker News. That individual day is represented as really wide on that circular ring because it has an additional concentric circle outside of it that represents the hundreds of comment URL fragments for that post. So one must keep in mind that things in some of the internal rings aren’t as relative because they may be heavily affected by portions of content further out on the ring.
My website posting activity (and a little more) from 2018 and before according to the Internet Archive.My website posting activity (and a little more) from April 2019 and before according to the Internet Archive.
How awesome would it be if this were embed-able and usable on my own website?
Attorney General William Barr explained before the release of the special counsel report that the law and regulations kept him from including everything that Robert Mueller uncovered, as well as how.
Directed by Daniel Attias. With Jason Priestley, Shannen Doherty, Jennie Garth, Ian Ziering. Brandon becomes jealous of Andrea's new boyfriend, Jay, who invites her to Houston with him for a Republican convention, while she tries to get Cameron, to join on her day care group outings. Dylan's father, Jack, asks to put in a good word for him at his parole hearing, and Kelly keeps Dylan some company while mending her broken heart over leaving Jake Hanson (see Melrose Place). Meanwhile, ...
I’m glad that the PressEd Conference’s main schedule page has links and embedded versions of all of yesterday’s talks on each of the individual session pages.
The best part of reading through them on the day after is being able to read and react to all the additional conversations and sub-threads. There’s also more time to catch what I missed and read and reflect on some of the more dense links to other sources. I hope I can manage to digest it all before PressEDConf20 is upon us.
It was a huge amount of effort and work by our wonderful hosts and all the presenters. Congratulations all around!
The easiest magic in the box. Just by adding 6 characters to your WordPress web address, you get a link to goes to a random post on your site. Spin the wheel....
After the release of Mueller’s report this week, the panelists discussed what the report reveals, the questions it raises, and the impact it may have on the Trump presidency.
Directed by David Frankel. With Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Adrian Grenier, Emily Blunt. A smart but sensible new graduate lands a job as an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the demanding editor-in-chief of a high fashion magazine.
