30 members shy of 30,000 total.

I’ve wondered about this a bunch myself. Barr’s bad faith was telegraphed far in advance. Why’d Mueller and his lawyers allow themselves to get snookered? Initials of TPM Reader withheld …

I have known and worked with Mueller and many of the folks over the course of the last quarter century.

[REDACTED: Discussion of TPM Reader’s professional working relationships at DOJ with various top lawyers involved in the larger Russia probe and Special Counsel investigation.]

They’re all great and careful lawyers. I don’t disagree with the bottom line that given DoJ policy and the Special Counsel regs, they could lay out evidence of Trump’s crime but not accuse him or formally recommend impeachment.

That said, I’m surprised they didn’t anticipate the kind of bad faith snookering we’re now seeing from Barr. They had every reason to know, based on his history and the public record of how he became AG, that he wouldn’t serve as an honest gatekeeper for their report. And they had a perfectly plausible opportunity to preempt his manipulation.

Have you been wondering why Robert Mueller was able to investigate President Trump for obstruction of justice, but not accuse him of any crime? TPM’s Josh Kovensky has you covered.

We just recorded a new episode of the podcast with Mike Isikoff and Dan Klaidman of Yahoo News and the Skullduggery podcast. (Should drop late this afternoon or early evening.) We mainly talked about the Russia probe, looking back to the second half of 2016, what was known then, how reporting on the dossier looks in retrospect. But we also talked about the recent faux-controversy with Rashida Tlaib because it was based on comments she made on their podcast. And we got some interesting backstory on how it unfolded and how and why it exploded as a story.

The best way to understand Bill Barr’s activities is that it is his current job to seed an ever-expanding catalog of pro-Trump conspiracies with the imprimatur of the Department of Justice. I don’t know how many civil servants Barr will purge, how selectively he’ll use declassified intelligence to damage political enemies or how much he’ll try to imprison the President’s political opponents. He clearly wants to do all these things and I’m certain he is actively working to do one and two. But to the extent he finds himself limited on those fronts, he accomplishes a lot just by this on-going lying on which there is little way for people to call him out.

Happy Friday, May 31. President Donald Trump dropped a trade bomb on Mexico Thursday, promising tariffs until Mexico somehow stops immigrants from crossing the U.S. border illegally. Here’s more on that and the other stories we’re covering.

From the moment it was first reported, I suspected the Trump administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the Census was about boosting the GOP’s electoral advantage.

However, I did not expect I’d see a smoking gun that was the administration’s true motive. And I definitely didn’t believe I’d see one with as much smoke as what was revealed on Thursday morning by the the groups who sued the administration over adding the question.

Trump’s claim about Robert Mueller interviewing for and trying to get the FBI job again is preposterous on its face. But it actually comes up in the Mueller Report itself, from Steve Bannon’s interview …

President Trump says so many ridiculous things. But this one stood out to me this morning. He appears now to believe that to impeach him, the House would need not only to find a “crime”. They’d also have to find a “misdemeanor”. Remember “high crimes and misdemeanors”. Video after the jump.

In the drama yesterday, as Netanyahu struggled in vain to cobble together a government, there was a legitimately hilarious moment I want to share with you. As noted yesterday, in the final hours, Netanyahu was offering crazy deals to all sorts of people – most notably Labor MKs – if only he could get one more seat (for a total of 61 out of 120) for his government AND who would support legislation to make him immune from prosecution. The appeals to Labor MKs were the crucial sign that he was willing to bargain away virtually anything to get that last seat and immunity.

So while all this is happening, Hadash MK Ayman Odeh goes up to the speaker’s rostrum in the Knesset to epically troll Netanyahu.