We all know that great swathes of the web are simply garbage – absurd listicles, the detritus of content farms living a zombie existence, abandoned social networks, virtually everything on Twitter. It all has some fascinating value in the future just as scientists and historians learn things from the actual physical garbage of the past. But one of the amazing things about the Internet is that in addition to all the garbage and trash the web contains almost limitless different niches of treasures. One of the ones I’m continually bowled over by is the digitization of archival material in the world’s great archives and research libraries. Take the British Museum or the British Library or the Library of Congress or countless other repositories around the world. Sure, they all have websites, which tell you some information about their holdings. But one of the great projects (multitudes of programs) over the last thirty years is the digitization and digital publication of a great swathe of the historical riches of global civilization.
Neither here nor there in the big scheme of things. But I thought some of you might find this interesting. On Friday I encouraged TPM Readers to reach out to their members of Congress to find out their current position on the release of the Mueller Report. Here’s the post. Here’s the DIY running tally I was doing through the early afternoon. I’ve suspended that effort for the moment the Second Barr Letter has changed the state of play significantly. I explain where I think we are here. But as part of that effort I used a new part of our system to send a note (an email) to all 29,265 TPM members to let you know what we were doing because I thought time was of the essence and it was a particularly important moment.
When I was away my main goal was to relax and bury myself in books. In particular I returned to a long time interest: the origins of the business of movable type printing and its transformative effect not only on the way people consumed information and also the way they formed their collective identity – an amorphous thing that is highly tied to communities of people both consuming the same information and being collectively aware that they are exposed to or consuming the same information. I have long been interested in this period – the late 15th and early 16th centuries – because a cluster of epochally consequential events happen over no more than two or three generations. The significance of some are more clear than others. But over time they will interweave into and catalyze each other, magnifying the significance of each by their interactions.
Consider some key examples. (In some cases I use approximate dates when the precise event is murky, amorphous or incremental.)
Simple point on the day’s events. The only legitimate way this concludes is for Congress or some subsection of Congress to get the complete and un-redacted Mueller Report. Full stop. Precedent is on the side of this approach. The Congress also have various models to accommodate. It can be released only to the committees of jurisdiction. It can be released only to the Gang of Eight, though that strikes me as far too restrictive. It can of course be released to the entire Congress, which seems most reasonable. What redactions are included in the publicly released Mueller Report is something reasonable people can disagree over. But as long as the substance of the redactions remain secret from the Congress the whole thing is illegitimate. If the redactions of the public version are reasonable we need members of the opposition party to confirm that that is the case. We need leadership of both chambers to confirm that. This is shaping up to give Bill Barr broad latitude to hide all the details that President Trump wants kept secret.
Attorney General Bill Barr’s latest letter to Congress about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report has several pieces of news about the next steps of the report’s partial release.
We’re still trying to make sense of this letter. It’s ambiguous on a few key points. But there’s one highly relevant thing that seems clear. Attorney General Barr plans to give the extensively redacted version of the Report to Congress too. So Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi et al., will only get to see a version of the report that has been extensively redacted under four broad categories.
Here’s the letter where Barr lays out his timeline.
[This post will be updated and re-timestamped through the day.]
Our situation now seems pretty clear. The administration plan is this: Release the Barr Letter and use it as a cudgel to claim bogus exoneration and threaten revenge against the President’s perceived enemies while Bill Barr tries to run down the clock until January 2021.
Okay, we’re starting to put together the beginnings of a tally, which you can see below. Letters after a Reps name are the initials of the TPM Readers who spoke to their offices. Gist so far is that pretty few are changing their position explicitly. But the key is that most GOP Reps are still saying they support releasing the report but then getting squishy about when. This of course can mean in six months or two years. So these are clearly trying to give room for Barr to pursue his run out the clock until January 2021.
Now that the long awaited Mueller Report conclusions have been released, most Democrats and others
have gone back to the pre-Witch Hunt phase of their lives before Collusion Delusion took over. Others are pretending that their former hero, Bob Mueller, no longer exists!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2019
As a faulty chyron flashed on screen a few minutes past 6:00 a.m. ET Sunday, Fox News’ Pete Hegseth reported the real news: that Trump “announced yesterday, and the State Department confirmed, that we will be cutting aid payments to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.”
A Fox News spokesperson pointed TPM to an on-air correction from Fox News’ Ed Henry a few hours after the error: “Now we want to clarify and correct something that happened earlier in the show,” Henry said. “We had an inaccurate graphic onscreen while taking about this very story. We just want to be clear, the funding is being cut off to the three Central American countries. We apologize for the error – it never should’ve happened.”)
H/t Brian Stelter
President Trump announced on Twitter Friday that he would close the border “or large sections” of it next week if Mexico doesn’t figure out a way to “immediately stop ALL illegal immigration.”
Fate was not on Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ side Thursday as she tried to flee reporters asking about the Special Olympics budget cuts, only to be stymied by a sluggish elevator.
Watch the whole cringeworthy two-plus minutes here:
Watch CNN’s @ryanobles try to ask Betsy DeVos about proposed federal cuts to the Special Olympics. pic.twitter.com/69yzJsq5Hy
— Daniel Lewis (@Daniel_Lewis3) March 28, 2019
White House adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, just days after special counsel Robert Mueller wrapped up his investigation into the Trump campaign and Russian interference, according to a photo of Kushner departing the closed door hearing posted by BuzzFeed’s Jason Leopold.
During David Bernhardt’s confirmation hearing to lead the Interior Department, an unexpected sight emerged over his right shoulder. A young woman donned a “swamp creature” mask and has proceeded to wear it throughout the hearing so far.
Woman puts on "swamp creature" mask during Interior Department secretary nominee's confirmation hearing pic.twitter.com/pLH1gjnMMT
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) March 28, 2019
President Trump joined his White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and others calling for the resignation of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee and who has doubled down on claims that he’s seen evidence of collusion, despite the apparent conclusions of the special counsel report.
Monica Lewinsky on Wednesday retweeted a post by law professor Orin Kerr, who mused about what might have happened if the infamous Starr Report had been handled the same way special counsel Robert Mueller’s report has been treated by the Trump administration.
Former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos told Reuters on Tuesday that his lawyers applied for a pardon from President Trump and, after serving his 14-day jail sentence, he’s mulling withdrawing his guilty plea for lying to the FBI.
The tweet stands in stark contrast to the Trump administration’s actions in court on Monday.