Barr's word games, exposed!
Here's the single quoted passage about collusion and conspiracy contained in Barr's non-summary of the Mueller report.
"As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
First thing to notice is that if you just take this as plain English, this quoted sentence fragment does not say definitively that Trump "did not conspire with the Russians." It does not even say there is no evidence that Trump conspired with the Russian.
It just says that the investigation "did not establish that Trump did so."
Second thing to notice is that the quoted bit is not a stand alone sentence in the original, as is indicated by the bracketed capitalization of '[T]he' ... that's what you do when you take a fragment of an original and quote it as if it were an entire, free standing sentence, when it is not written or stated as such in the original. Usually you do this when the part you leave out is immaterial to the point you want to pull out of the original. But I suspect that this is were Barr does he most deft slight-of-hand!
Suppose, for example, that the full sentence in the original reads something more like:
'While the investigation did establish that there were numerous suspicious contacts between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and while these were thoroughly investigated by this office, and while these matters remain both a cause of concern and the subject ongoing counterintelligence operations, the investigation did not establish..."
That would not constitute anything close to "an exoneration" of Trump, now would it?
And Barr knows it. And the press and the Republicans and certain leftist democrats who want to pooh-pooh the whole Russian thing out some sort of perverse sense of sympathy for the Russian point of view, should know it too.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Roasts Trump like a pig on a spit. Then barr would have to release the report to counter it.
