Why wasn't Donald Trump harmed by the Mueller report in 2019?

[EJ24]

?

[Wrong about 2024 Ghost]

Barr, catering to Trump, successfully undercut the report's impact via selective, spread-out release and lying about its conclusions before anyone saw it. With Barr's active co-operation, the Trump administration effectively turned what ought to have been a single, damning document into a drawn-out procedural fight.

Mueller appears to have viewed his job as "provide sufficient grounds to allow Congress to impeach Trump", which he did (in the form of documenting Trump's obstruction of justice).  Congress then did not act on that evidence.

Media did not effectively communicate either the details of Russian interference, the findings of the report, nor Trump's deceptive attempts to minimize those findings. (American mass media preferences coverage of Trump as a terrible human being over coverage explaining how he would be/was a terrible President.)

Republican voters and politicians are not concerned with justice, corruption, and attacks on the rule of law. (That ought to have been obvious, but people - myself included - often underestimate the depths to which Republicans will readily descend.)

[Doomer]

-It took too long for the American attention span.
-The evidence wasn't damning enough, or at least not enough for voters to care about.

[EJ24]

-It took too long for the American attention span.
-The evidence wasn't damning enough, or at least not enough for voters to care about.

That does not bode well for the Jan. 6 stuff then.

I have always said they should have brought charges against Trunp and company within 2 weeks of Biden being in office. The longer this drags, the less the public cares.

[Badger]

He wasn't indicted even though Mueller specifically said that was not within his purview. It was still declared as a victory and exoneration by Fox News and everyone who was a Mindless partisan on the subject. The report itself is beyond damning and would have resulted in impeachment of any other president in American history.

[Sir Mohamed]

Not enough people cared. Those who did were in firm political camps anyway, so hardly changed anyone's mind.

[Doomer]

-It took too long for the American attention span.
-The evidence wasn't damning enough, or at least not enough for voters to care about.

That does not bode well for the Jan. 6 stuff then.

I have always said they should have brought charges against Trunp and company within 2 weeks of Biden being in office. The longer this drags, the less the public cares.

They did wait too long with the J6 stuff. And that's a huge deal. January 6 was an attempted coup. It doesn't matter if it was doomed from the start, it was the attempt itself that should be damning. Not even to mention the blatant attempts with the GA SoS phone call and others. He should be sitting in a jail cell right now, not running to reclaim the presidency.

This is a failure of every aspect of our government to hold him accountable, and since they failed he's free to retake the White House should the American people be dumb enough to allow him that (spoiler alert: they are).

[BG-NY (permanently retired)]

Because Mueller didn’t release SigInt showing the underlying claims…namely that people in Russia hacked the DNC and transmitted data to Wikileaks. Without that intelligence being released publicly, the report doesn’t have legs to stand on. The Trump Tower meeting allegations and the Stone-Corsi-Credico sideshow further discredited the ordeal as an unserious distraction among moderates and independents.

[Vosem]

The Mueller investigation was launched to investigate whether the Trump campaign had knowingly cooperated with the Russian government during the 2016 election. In 2015-2017, there were some fairly compelling reasons to think it had, and indeed the Russian government had put out feelers hoping that they would do so (at the Trump Jr.-Veselnitskaya meeting on June 9, 2016), and the Trump campaign didn't so much reject these as just fail to act on them due to incompetence. But ultimately the report showed that there hadn't been cooperation between Trump and the Russian government and the campaign was exonerated of the main charge.

I continue to wonder what an investigation of links between the Trump campaign and the Turkish government might've shown; the evidence for that seemed at least as compelling, at least one major campaign figure (Flynn) was actually jailed over links to Turkey, and Trump actually pursued unusually pro-Turkish policies in office. But for various reasons -- lesser salaciousness, Turkey being a sensitive NATO ally -- this stuff was never followed up on.

[OSR stands with Israel]

-It took too long for the American attention span.
-The evidence wasn't damning enough, or at least not enough for voters to care about.

That does not bode well for the Jan. 6 stuff then.

I have always said they should have brought charges against Trunp and company within 2 weeks of Biden being in office. The longer this drags, the less the public cares.

They did wait too long with the J6 stuff. And that's a huge deal. January 6 was an attempted coup. It doesn't matter if it was doomed from the start, it was the attempt itself that should be damning. Not even to mention the blatant attempts with the GA SoS phone call and others. He should be sitting in a jail cell right now, not running to reclaim the presidency.

This is a failure of every aspect of our government to hold him accountable, and since they failed he's free to retake the White House should the American people be dumb enough to allow him that (spoiler alert: they are).

The Democrats may very well want to run against Trump rather than other Republicans and if he was indicted and convicted, that would throw a huge wrench in that plan .

[Consuming is good, it's what we're made for]

A mix of all of these. I think it's no longer possible for a President of either party to be successfully impeached and removed from office no matter the circumstances. Checks and balances have become political and there is no longer an objective, shared definition of accountability. Most Republicans will tell you that Trump did nothing wrong vis a vis Russia/Ukraine, and even the ones who think he might have done something wrong don't necessarily believe he should've been removed from office for it. But I assume Democrats would do the exact same thing if the shoe was on the other foot.

[Bismarck]

Because the democrats (looking at you Adam Schiff) oversold the extent of Trump’s wrongdoing. MSNBC was alleging that Trump was a foreign agent for Moscow. When the actual fact amounted to borderline cases of obstruction it seemed like nothing and really did exonerate Trump from most of what was being alleged by the left. 

[Vosem]

Because the democrats (looking at you Adam Schiff) oversold the extent of Trump’s wrongdoing. MSNBC was alleging that Trump was a foreign agent for Moscow. When the actual fact amounted to borderline cases of obstruction it seemed like nothing and really did exonerate Trump from most of what was being alleged by the left. 

Yeah, a large part of the reason that the scandal got as large as it did was because of the obstructionism, which happened because the Trump campaign itself was so disorganized as to apparently have been unsure whether it cooperated with the Russian government or not. Which is a powerful indictment of the mentality of its leading figures to be sure...but also bizarrely ended up helping them by pushing Democrats into a 2-year rabbit hole of what turned out to be nonsense conspiracy theories.

[Darthpi - Crush the Oligarchy]

William Barr went on TV and lied about the report's findings, and the media accepted his summary without questioning. When the actual report came out and contradicted him on many points, the idea that Trump did nothing wrong was already too well-established to push back against.

Barr should have been impeached.

[Doomer]

-It took too long for the American attention span.
-The evidence wasn't damning enough, or at least not enough for voters to care about.

That does not bode well for the Jan. 6 stuff then.

I have always said they should have brought charges against Trunp and company within 2 weeks of Biden being in office. The longer this drags, the less the public cares.

They did wait too long with the J6 stuff. And that's a huge deal. January 6 was an attempted coup. It doesn't matter if it was doomed from the start, it was the attempt itself that should be damning. Not even to mention the blatant attempts with the GA SoS phone call and others. He should be sitting in a jail cell right now, not running to reclaim the presidency.

This is a failure of every aspect of our government to hold him accountable, and since they failed he's free to retake the White House should the American people be dumb enough to allow him that (spoiler alert: they are).

The Democrats may very well want to run against Trump rather than other Republicans and if he was indicted and convicted, that would throw a huge wrench in that plan .

Speaking for myself, I don’t want to run against Trump again. He already tried to overthrow the government once and since then has publicly endorsed terminating the Constitution. Being on the national ticket for a major party again is too close for comfort. I don’t want him anywhere near the presidency ever again. I’d take losing the White House to a sane Republican whose policies I wholeheartedly disagree with so long as Trump isn’t the Republican nominee again.

[ProudModerate2]

Who said he was not "harmed" ?
Voted "Other"

[GeneralMacArthur]

There wasn't a way to elevator pitch the evidence to the American people.  There were dozens of cases where some guy on the Trump campaign made a phone call to a guy at a firm that was run by a Russian oligarch, or a Trump campaign guy's aide met at a restaurant with a Russian spy, or some leaked e-mail of Trump's son e-mailing his buddy with coded language about a Russian politician, or guys who had a Russian oligarch in their portfolio coming up to Trump's office, etc. so many things like this.

But individually none of them is enough to prosecute.  It's just the sheer volume, the sum total of all these events, that makes it blindingly obvious that Trump was intentionally coordinating his campaign with Russian intelligence, and made hirings/firings and took actions to directly further that strategy to his own benefit, and once in office made decisions to advance the interests of the Russians who helped him get elected.

The American people don't have time to read 500 pages of e-mails and phone calls and meeting records and such that prove, in aggregate, that Trump was coordinating with Russia.  They need some single, obvious, smoking-gun thing.  Which they also had, in Trump Jr.'s "I love it, especially later in the summer" e-mail, but by the time Mueller's report came out, the American people had already known about this for two years, and Fox News had had unlimited time to present dozens of different contradictory arguments about why it was no big deal.

Also, all this stuff was in text, which is the easiest thing to distort.  There was no recording of a phone call of Trump saying "yes, hack Hillary Clinton's e-mails."  There was no video of a Russian oligarch at a restaurant with Trump reviewing a list of policy requests together.  There was no photograph of Trump handing a thumb drive to a Russian spy dressed up like a member of the Stasi.  All it was was a bunch of e-mails at best, but much more frequently "this guy was a Russian spy, and he was on a team that Manafort's team contracted work with, at the behest of the Trump org" which is too easy to dismiss.

[Woody]

Also, all this stuff was in text, which is the easiest thing to distort.  There was no recording of a phone call of Trump saying "yes, hack Hillary Clinton's e-mails."  There was no video of a Russian oligarch at a restaurant with Trump reviewing a list of policy requests together.  There was no photograph of Trump handing a thumb drive to a Russian spy dressed up like a member of the Stasi.  All it was was a bunch of e-mails at best, but much more frequently "this guy was a Russian spy, and he was on a team that Manafort's team contracted work with, at the behest of the Trump org" which is too easy to dismiss.

Okay, so you're saying Trump never did any collusion then. Too bad that took you 5 years.

[Beet]

Mueller essentially concluded that the president can't be charged with a federal crime, even if he committed one. Since this guy was held up as a hero by Dems up until then, there was no one left to defend the rule of law.

[DaleCooper]

Other: Almost no one cares about corruption scandals enough to change their vote in American politics anymore.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Other:

I have never seen a politician escape controversy and the normal 'gotcha' traps of modern politics.

Teflon Trump just seemed to be impervious to the monthly, if not weekly, issues against him.