Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-five. Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 7:13 PM, for 12h 25m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 76.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred sixty-sixth day.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire kills 146 garment workers in Greenwich Village.
Recommended for reading in full:
Neal K. Katyal – who drafted the special counsel regulations under which Robert Mueller was appointed – writes of The Many Problems With the Barr Letter:
But the critical part of the letter is that it now creates a whole new mess. After laying out the scope of the investigation and noting that Mr. Mueller’s report does not offer any legal recommendations, Mr. Barr declares that it therefore “leaves it to the attorney general to decide whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.” He then concludes the president did not obstruct justice when he fired the F.B.I. director, James Comey.
Such a conclusion would be momentous in any event. But to do so within 48 hours of receiving the report (which pointedly did not reach that conclusion) should be deeply concerning to every American.
….
His letter says Mr. Mueller set “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.” Yet we don’t know what those “difficult issues” were, because Mr. Barr doesn’t say, or why Mr. Mueller, after deciding not to charge on conspiracy, let Mr. Barr make the decision on obstruction.
….
On the law, Mr. Barr’s letter also obliquely suggests that he consulted with the Office of Legal Counsel, the elite Justice Department office that interprets federal statutes. This raises the serious question of whether Mr. Barr’s decision on Sunday was based on the bizarre legal views that he set out in an unsolicited 19-page memo last year.
That memo made the argument that the obstruction of justice statute does not apply to the president because the text of the statute doesn’t specifically mention the president. Of course, the murder statute doesn’t mention the president either, but no one thinks the president can’t commit murder. Indeed, the Office of Legal Counsel had previously concluded that such an argument to interpret another criminal statute, the bribery law, was wrong.
Mikhaila Fogel, Quinta Jurecic, Susan Hennessey, Matthew Kahn, and Benjamin Wittes consider What to Make of Bill Barr’s Letter:
In other respects, however, Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report is ominous for the president. While Mueller did not find that Trump obstructed his investigation, he also made a point of not reaching the opposite conclusion: that Trump didn’t obstruct the investigation. Indeed, he appears to have created a substantial record of the president’s troubling interactions with law enforcement for adjudication in noncriminal proceedings—which is to say in congressional hearings that are surely the next step.