Podcast presents the Mueller Report’s executive summaries

Once again, the Lawfare Blog is proving to be an excellent source of reporting and analysis, this time around focusing on the Mueller Report.

Although it’s only became public a couple of days ago, Lawfare has produced some meaty reporting.

If you’re into podcasts or audio books, Lawfare produced a podcast simply reading the executive summaries provided by Mueller’s team and included in the report. It provides a good way to get an overview of the report without editorializing pro or con.

The Lawfare Podcast Special Edition: The Mueller Report in Under an Hour.”

It also provides a link to the text of the executive summaries if you prefer to read, or want to read along.

At the same time, they produced another “special edition” podcast, “What to Make of the Mueller Report.”

In this Special Edition of the Lawfare Podcast, Bob Bauer, Susan Hennessey, Mary McCord, Paul Rosenzweig, Charlie Savage and Benjamin Wittes discuss what the report says about obstruction and collusion, Mueller’s legal theories and what this all means for the president and the presidency.

There’s also a thought-provoking assessment of the constitutional dimensions of the impeachment decision, “The Mueller Report Demands an Impeachment Inquiry.” It includes a detailed discussion of the October 2000 memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel which concluded a sitting president cannot be indicted, leaving impeachment proceedings as the remedy for presidential abuse of power.

The problem is that impeachment isn’t a purely political matter—though certainly it is political in part. It’s a constitutional expression of the separation of powers, of Congress’s ability to check a chief executive overrunning the bounds of his power. It’s also, under the OLC memo, the only release valve in the constitutional structure for the urgent and mounting pressure of an executive who may have committed serious wrongdoing. To say that the appropriate course is to simply wait for the next presidential election in 18 months, is to offer a judgment that—even in light of his conduct as described by Mueller—Trump is not truly unfit for the office. It is to say he is no different from, say, Vice President Mike Pence, who would take his place, or any other Republican for that matter. It is to say that what matters is winning elections, even if it risks further institutional harms.

In any case, Lawfare Blog has delivered some excellent weekend reading/listening.


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One thought on “Podcast presents the Mueller Report’s executive summaries

  1. Kate

    For all the money, time and effort—pushed by leaders who move the more critical concerns off the headlines with this ET for politicians—Report was predictably a yawn.

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