If one intends to review this post, but has not yet read Part I (which is immediately below), I would start there 😉
While the depth and breadth of the Russians’ efforts to interfere with the 2016 election weren’t known by our intelligence services prior to the election, the early sections of Volume I of the Mueller Report nonetheless seem to me to cast a pall over a figure the Report mentions only in passing: then-President Barack Obama. It is undisputed that the Obama Administration was alerted to a notable level of malign Russian activity some months before the election, and engaged in internal debates about a strategy as to how best to respond. Mr. Obama said after the election that he had told Russian President Vladimir Putin in September, 2016, “to cut it out” or face “serious consequences,” and the Obama Administration publicly indicated in October, 2016, that it was “confident” that the Russian government was behind the theft and dissemination of Democratic officials’ emails. These actions received little attention from our people and had no effect on the Russians. Mr. Obama also said after the election – about the time he was then placing sanctions on the Russians for their behavior – that he was concerned that his Administration’s placing too much emphasis on the Russians’ actions prior to balloting would have appeared to be interfering with the election: “We were playing this thing straight – we weren’t trying to advantage one side or another. Imagine if we had done the opposite. It would have become one more political scrum.”
President Trump has recently criticized Mr. Obama for his relative reticence about the Russian interference prior to the election. Although Mr. Trump’s comments are transparently self-serving, I do believe that Mr. Obama should indeed have done more than he did to create greater awareness of the Russian threat and aggression. As President, he was sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Free, fair, and accurate suffrage forms the foundation of our constitutional system. Putting aside claims of active collusion or criminal conspiracy existing between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government, Messrs. Putin and Trump have both publicly acknowledged that they had a coincidence of interest in the election’s outcome. Neither is a strategist; both, brilliant opportunists. Any objective observer would recognize that it would have been Mr. Trump that initiated the “political scrum” that Mr. Obama decided it was best to avoid by failing to speak out more forcefully about the Russians’ behavior in the fall of 2016. For all of our former President’s charisma, intelligence, and good intentions, Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump each out-maneuvered him. The Republicans are so focused on defending Mr. Trump’s legitimacy and the Democrats so committed to protecting Mr. Obama’s legacy that neither have really expressed what I will venture: that given the intelligence he had at hand, President Obama should have damned the political consequences, and used his bully pulpit to place a spotlight on the Russians’ attack on our system. In the last great test of his presidency … he didn’t do his job.
A brief comment about Volume II of the Mueller Report, of which I have read – and only intend to read – its Introduction and Executive Summary. As all who care are aware, Mr. Mueller and his team, after outlining a litany of questionable activities by President Trump relating to the Russia investigation, elected not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgement as to whether Mr. Trump had criminally obstructed justice. Below is a link to a short Statement joined by hundreds of former federal prosecutors, asserting that Mr. Trump’s conduct “… would, in the case of any other person not covered by the [Department of Justice’s] Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.” Given their respective situations, Mr. Mueller’s and these prosecutors’ assessments seem complementary.
https://medium.com/@dojalumni/statement-by-former-federal-prosecutors-8ab7691c2aa1
McCoy's Noise 