August 4, 2020

Poll : Most Americans don't trust Trump on coronavirus. Republicans don't trust CDC or Fauci.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/poll-americans-don-t-trust-trump-coronavirus-republicans-don-t-n1235680

WASHINGTON — Fewer than a third of Americans say they trust what President Donald Trump has said about the coronavirus pandemic, new polling shows, while a majority of the public trusts the messaging from the country's leading health experts. According to the NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Tracking Poll, 58 percent of Americans say they don't trust what Trump has said about the pandemic, while 31 percent say they do trust his comments.

But a majority of American adults say they trust statements from Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fifty-one percent of adults say they trust Fauci's statements, and 55 percent say they trust the CDC. Twenty-nine percent say they don't trust Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and 32 percent say the same of the CDC. And 49 percent say they trust what their states' governors have said, with 37 percent saying they don't.



The new poll shows a serious political divide driving public opinion.

Majorities of Republicans trust what the president has said, but they don't trust what Fauci has said or what has come out of the CDC. Just 32 percent of those who identify as Republicans or lean Republican say they trust what Fauci has said. Thirty-eight percent say they trust the statements from the CDC. Majorities of Republicans and Republican leaners say they don't trust Fauci or the CDC, 53 percent and 52 percent respectively.

As for Trump, 69 percent of Republican and Republican leaners say they trust his comments, while 29 percent don't. Forty-nine percent of Republicans and Republican leaners say they don't trust their governors' comments, while 41 percent say they do. Democrats, by comparison, overwhelmingly trust the CDC and Fauci's comments but don't feel the same about Trump. Seventy-eight percent of those who identify as Democrats or lean Democratic say they trust what Fauci has said, and 76 percent say they trust the CDC's messages. Only 9 percent of Democrats or Democratic leaners say they don't trust Fauci, and 16 percent say they don't trust the CDC.

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August 4, 2020

Up to 2,000 UK jobs to go at Pizza Express and Dixons Carphone

Restaurant chain could shed up to 1,100 staff as retailer cuts 800 managers

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/04/pizza-express-close-restaurants-jobs-staff-coronavirus



Another 2,000 high street workers face losing their jobs after Pizza Express said it was to close 15% of its UK restaurants and Dixons Carphone said it was getting rid of 800 managers in its stores.

They are the latest big high-street names to announce job cuts in the wake of the economic upheaval created by the coronavirus pandemic. The jobs blow adds to the 2,600 redundancies announced on Monday at the retail and gym chain DW Sports and tour operator Hays Travel.

Later this month, Pizza Express will launch a company voluntary arrangement (CVA) – an insolvency process allowing it to exit stores and cut rents – that could result in the closure of up to 70 of its 449 UK restaurants.

“Our business has a long history of success, but the UK-wide lockdown has hit the hospitality industry particularly hard,” said Zoe Bowley, who runs Pizza Express in the UK and Ireland. “As a result, it is with a heavy heart that we expect to permanently close a proportion of our restaurants, losing valued team members in the process.”

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August 4, 2020

Jake Paul Won't Give Up Partying Despite Backlash For Throwing Ragers During Pandemic

Another YouTuber claimed he knew of people testing positive for COVID-19 after attending “influencer parties” over the last few weeks.

https://nowthisnews.com/news/jake-paul-wont-give-up-partying-despite-backlash-for-throwing-ragers



Jake Paul said in a recent interview that he’s “not the type of person who's gonna sit around and not live” his life after facing backlash for hosting parties during the ongoing pandemic. His comments come after several Los Angeles-based influencers apologized for attending a widely criticized party, while other accounts reported that unnamed influencers tested positive after attending parties. In an interview with Insider published July 31, the controversial YouTuber didn’t mention any regret for hosting multiple parties in his Calabasas home during the COVID-19 crisis. In mid-July, several videos surfaced of one of his parties and showed crowds of people in his mansion and backyard, not wearing masks or social distancing. Despite the rise in cases in California — particularly in LA County — Insider reported that Paul would not confirm whether he’d stop hosting parties.
https://twitter.com/BillFOXLA/status/1283238582195384322
“I don't know what to think of it, to be honest. I don't think anyone really does," Paul told Insider. "No one has answers, our leadership is failing us, and everyone kind of just doesn't know what to do. But I personally am not the type of person who's gonna sit around and not live my life.” Shortly after videos of Paul’s party circulated, Calabasas Mayor Alicia Weintraub told FOX11 news that she was “outraged.” According to Insider, Paul said he spoke with the mayor on July 31, saying “everything is cool.” Though Weintraub told Insider that she only spoke to a representative of Paul’s since the party. Weintraub told FOX11 last month that she would be working with the local sheriff’s department to make sure that any future large gatherings “will not be tolerated.”

Paul isn’t the only influencer to be called out for hosting parties during the pandemic. Well-known online personalities including James Charles, Nikita Dragun, and Tana Mongeau were criticized for attending a party at LA’s “Hype House” in late July. The party was thrown for Tik Tok star and YouTuber Larray’s birthday. Hype House member and popular Tik Tok star Tony Lopez said in an Instagram Story on July 31 that he had a fever and sore throat. Lopez also attended Larray’s birthday party. After a wave of backlash flooded the internet, Larray, Charles, and Mongeau have since apologized for being “careless” and attending parties. YouTuber and influencer Elijah Daniel claimed on Twitter last week that “a lot of influencers have been confirmed” to test positive for COVID-19 after attending “influencer parties.”
https://twitter.com/defnoodles/status/1289309527171428353
https://twitter.com/elijahdaniel/status/1289065119054352385
He added that those people “aren’t warning people they came in contact with” after testing positive. Daniel himself announced on Friday that he has been living with COVID-19 and contracted the virus “again” a few weeks earlier. While the influencer parties in LA continue to rage on, so has the spread of the virus. The state of California has continued to report high numbers of daily new cases. On August 1, more than 9,000 new cases were reported, bringing the total to more than 509,000 cases. LA County is currently leading the U.S. in total cases out of any county, according to Johns Hopkins.
https://twitter.com/elijahdaniel/status/1288052744129929217

August 4, 2020

Georgia's largest school district saw 260 COVID-19 cases only a day after resuming work

260 Employees Of Georgia School District Tested Positive For COVID-19 Or Were Exposed
Teachers returned to work in-person on Wednesday and by Thursday, 260 employees were “excluded from work” due to a positive case or possible exposure.

https://nowthisnews.com/news/260-employees-of-georgia-schools-exposed-or-test-positive-for-covid-19



More than 260 employees in Georgia’s largest school district have either tested positive for or been exposed to COVID-19 after beginning in-person planning for the upcoming school year. Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) spokesperson Sloan Roach told NowThis on Monday that teachers returned to work last Wednesday; by Thursday, 260 teachers were “excluded from work due to a positive case or contact with a case.” Roach also said the district learned through contact tracing that a “majority” of those reported cases are a result of “community spread.”

The Atlanta-area district operates 141 schools and serves more than 180,000 students. The district’s Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks announced last month that it will begin the school year virtually on August 12. Gwinnett County has had a recent spike in COVID-19 in the last few weeks, reaching nearly 18,000 cases as of Monday. Georgia has reported more than 195,000 cases in total. “Given the number of COVID cases in Gwinnett, it would be expected to see positives among our employees based on the community spread in our county,” Roach told NowThis.

Parents of students at GCPS staged a protest in late July after the district announced it would be completely online for the start of the school year. Protesters demanded that the district reopen schools fully. The discussion of reopening schools in the fall has been a contentious issue among communities and leaders including President Trump, who has threatened to withhold federal funding from schools that do not resume in-person learning. Last week, the president said during a briefing that “keeping [students] out of school and keeping work closed is causing death.” He also said, “If you look at what’s going on: the younger, the better. Amazing — the immune system.”

Meanwhile, a study recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Friday revealed that a Georgia camp experienced a major coronavirus outbreak this summer. In June, 260 campers and staff members tested positive for COVID-19 at an overnight camp in Georgia. Nearly 600 people in total attended the camp. Of the 344 people who were tested, 76% had positive results. The CDC study found that 51% of those who tested positive were between 6 and 10 years old. About 44% were between 11 and 17, and 33% were 18 to 21 years old.

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August 3, 2020

A Hospital Forgot to Bill Her Coronavirus Test. It Cost Her $1,980.

Send us your medical bills. We’ll use them to investigate hospital and doctor billing practices.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/upshot/nj-coronavirus-medical-bill.html


Debbie Krebs felt sick in March and went for a coronavirus test. She tested negative, but then the test was omitted from her medical bill, resulting in a major price difference.

When Debbie Krebs got the bill for a March emergency room visit, she immediately noticed something was missing: her coronavirus test. Ms. Krebs, a lawyer who focuses on insurance issues, had gone to the Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, N.J., with lung pain and a cough. A doctor ran tests and scans to rule out other diseases before swabbing her nose. A week later, the medical laboratory called, telling her it was negative.

Ms. Krebs had a clear memory of the experience, particularly the doctor saying the coronavirus test would make her feel as if she had to sneeze. She wondered whether the doctor could have lied about performing the test, or if her swab could have gone missing. (But if so, why had the laboratory called her with results?)

The absence of the coronavirus test made a big price difference. Congress, Ms. Krebs had heard, barred insurers from charging patients for visits meant to diagnosis coronavirus. Without the test, Ms. Krebs didn’t qualify for that protection and owed $1,980. She called the hospital to explain the situation but immediately ran into roadblocks. “When I called the hospital, they said, ‘You did not get a coronavirus test,’” she said. “I told them I absolutely did.”

Across the country, Americans like Ms. Krebs are receiving surprise bills for care connected with coronavirus. Tests can cost between $199 and $6,408 at the same location. A coming wave of treatment bills could be hundreds of multiples higher, especially for those who receive intensive care or have symptoms that linger for months. Services that patients expect to be covered often aren’t.

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August 3, 2020

Why Do Liberals Unfriend People Over Politics? Because Conservatives Are Soulless Monsters

You may not be a neo-Nazi, belong to the KKK, or join white power marches but if you still vote Republican, you've consciously chosen to stand with the absolute worst people in America. Why the fuck would any liberal want to associate with you?

https://thedailybanter.com/2018/05/04/liberals-unfriend-because-conservatives-are-monsters/



Every now and then, a new article (or a repost of an old one) makes the rounds on social media discussing how liberals are more likely to unfriend people over politics both online and in the real world. Usually the context of the post is to show how "intolerant" the left is but what is actually driving this trend? The first layer is the dry analysis that shows that conservatives tend to already self select, meaning their circle of friends tend to sound just like them:

And that conservative echochamber isn't limited to conservatives' online interactions: It's a reflection of the lack of ideological diversity in their real life relationships. Two-thirds of consistent conservatives told Pew that most of their close friends share their views on government and politics, compared to just over half, or 52 percent, of consistent liberals. For mostly conservatives, 42 percent of their close friends have the same views, while just 26 percent of mostly liberals respondents who said the same.

In other words, white Republican voters seek out other white Republican voters because that's who they're comfortable with. But the deeper layer is that while conservatives bitch and moan about liberals, only the most brainwashed believe that Obama was working with ISIS and the Mexican drug cartels to set up FEMA concentration camps in abandoned Walmarts. They whine about being persecuted but they know, deep down (and usually not even that deep) that they aren't losing their rights, just their white privilege and while that's terrifying, it's hardly life threatening. On the other hand, liberals look at what conservatives say they want and are absolutely horrified. We're not talking about what they say in public and in front of news cameras; that's playacting so the media can pretend the GOP is a normal party and that conservatism is healthy and chock full of moderates.

No, we're talking about what conservatives say when they think no one is paying attention or when they forget to hide what they really are. When they drop the facade, what's revealed is not a functional human being but a soulless monster fueled by hate. If this strikes you as crazed hyperbole, you are either painfully ignorant or Chris Cillizza. But I repeat myself. The left has been saying for decades that the right was devolving into a cesspool of incoherent rage. Long before Trump came down that escalator, it was screamingly obvious that the path the GOP was on led direct to white nationalism and the fascism that comes it with it. We were told to shut the fuck up by a lazy press pushing a "both sides are always equal" narrative. But when you really listen to what they are saying and really look at what they are doing, what are the core conservative policies?

Hate for the poor - We watched Ron Paul literally say that people without insurance should be left to die if they can't afford the bill for catastrophic illness. The audience of Republicans wildly applauded this. Conservatives despise the poor unless they are one of them. They support cutting food stamps, school lunches, Medicaid, etc. under the moral pretense that the poor are lazy and should be punished. A lot of it is racism but a lot of it is also simply a hatred of the idea of helping those in need.

Hate for immigrants - ............

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August 3, 2020

Tom Cotton calls slavery 'necessary evil' in attack on New York Times' 1619 Project

a week old, but I could not find this on DU

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/26/tom-cotton-slavery-necessary-evil-1619-project-new-york-times

The Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton has called the enslavement of millions of African people “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”.

Cotton, widely seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2024, made the comment in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published on Sunday.

He was speaking in support of legislation he introduced on Thursday that aims to prohibit use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project, an initiative from the New York Times that reframes US history around August 1619 and the arrival of slave ships on American shores for the first time.

Cotton’s Saving American History Act of 2020 and “would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts”, according to a statement from the senator’s office.


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August 2, 2020

video which appeared to show a military dog demonstration using a "Colin Kaepernick stand-in"

The US Navy is investigating a video which appeared to show a military dog demonstration using a "Colin Kaepernick stand-in" at the National Navy SEAL Museum in Florida last year

https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/1290067061406801920
https://twitter.com/BillyCorben/status/1289979415879798784

August 1, 2020

Trump Is Rigging The Postal Service To Get Himself Re-Elected

And now with Trump proposing to delay the election itself, the stakes are higher than ever before.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trump-is-rigging-the-postal-service



WASHINGTON, DC -- When and if the votes are counted and we have a new president, Donald Trump and his fascist co-conspirators have to be held accountable for the unprecedented and entirely despotic actions they’ve taken since and even before the 2016 election. And now, with Trump proposing to delay the election, the stakes are higher than ever before. As I’ve said repeatedly: the only way we can prevent another Trump is to forcefully slam the door behind this administration -- the “door” in this metaphor being a series of legislative reforms, constitutional amendments, and, yes, prosecutions of everyone who participated in the subversion of our democratic republic in the name of propping up our first presidential dictator. One of the top shelf items on the list isn’t being discussed a lot, but it should be. You may have heard that Trump and his Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, are busily crippling the U.S. Postal Service. Why? Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, second quarter 2020 revenues for the USPS grew by more than $300 million from the second quarter of the previous year, totalling $17.8 billion. Likewise, 2019 revenues for the entire year were up more than half-a-billion dollars over 2018. It turns out, e-commerce from corporations like Amazon has significantly helped the USPS, with operative profits growing every year since 2012. Are people mailing fewer letters these days? Sure. Is it seriously damaging the USPS? Not really.

The major issue plaguing the USPS right now is a good problem to have: and that’s meeting its pension obligations to its retired workers. Solutions, however, include debt forgiveness from Congress and a $25 billion modernization grant. Given Congress’s spending on bailouts and tax cuts, $25 billion to help the USPS isn’t that much of a burden in the grand scheme. However, Trump, responding to the proposal, said, “The Postal Service is a joke.” Back in March, a bipartisan bill to infuse the Postal Service with $13 billion was killed by Trump. So, why then, did DeJoy decide to cut overtime for USPS workers, effectively slowing down mail delivery in the middle of a pandemic in which people rely more on at-home deliveries than ever before? And he did it at a time when the USPS’s profits are growing. It’s all about Trump, of course. First, Trump hates Jeff Bezos, mainly because he’s jealous of Bezos’s ridiculously ginormous wealth. Plus, the Mad King is pissed that The Washington Post, owned by Bezos, is mean to him -- you know, by printing the truth about what Trump is up to. The head of the American Postal Workers Union, Mark Dimondstein, recently observed, “These changes are happening because there’s a White House agenda to privatize and sell off the public Postal Service.” But since the USPS is still quite popular, they’re afraid to do it in one big move. Instead, they’re rigging the game by holding back deliveries and pissing people off. Then, when the time is right, boom. It’ll be fully privatized. Put another way: slowing down service actually hurts profits, and that’s the point. Starve the beast. If people are pissed off about slower-than-usual service, they’re more likely to use non-USPS solutions like FedEx and others. The USPS suffers and the suffering turns to irreparable damage until it’s sold off for parts.

The third and most obvious reason, to me at least, has to do with the election. Every decision made by the administration has to be viewed through the prism of re-election, so it could be deliberate move by Trump and DeJoy to sabotage the mail and, with it, the absentee voting process -- taking a giant cartoon-sized wooden hammer to the entire operation in order to help Trump win re-election. If this is part of DeJoy’s equation, and we have no reason to believe it’s not given the Trump administration’s track record, the president is using his authority to directly disenfranchise American voters by blocking their ability to cast ballots on time. I mean, we only need to see that DeJoy gave Trump $1.2 million in donations for his campaign to know where the Postmaster General’s loyalties are. By the way, prior to running the USPS, DeJoy was tasked with raising money for the ill-fated Republican National Convention this year. He’s also donated millions to the broader GOP. In other words, DeJoy has invested a mountain of cash to re-elect Trump and he’s clearly not about to let something like efficient mail delivery stand in his way. And if they can privatize the entire shmear, too, well that’s a bonus. Strangely, knowing how 34 states, including DC, offer absentee voting without an excuse, Trump is shotgun-blasting the service in a way that’ll also thwart his own fanboys from casting ballots as well. Then again, the lower the voter turnout, the better Republicans tend to do, even if their own people are hindered.

The consequences for the rest of us are grim. What happens to people who use the service for prescription deliveries or paychecks? And knowing the loyalties of the Postmaster, how can we possibly be confident that our ballots will get to where they’re going, and with a reasonable delivery time? We can’t. Trump is spreading his disgusting taint everywhere, meddling in areas that were never mandated by his illegitimate electoral victory. There was no “silent majority” outcry to murder the USPS. Nah, this is another masturbatory Trump revenge project: screwing Bazos and rigging the election, with a little far-right privatization orthodoxy as a side dish. The only way to overcome DeJoy and Trump’s illegal and punishable malfeasance here is to get your absentee ballot and to mail it right away as soon as ballots are made available -- as soon as early voting begins. The sooner ballots are in the hands of your county boards of elections, the sooner they’ll be counted and Donald Trump will, himself, be screwed. We’re not powerless here. Trump can’t stop you from voting unless you wait until the last minute. Don’t. The mail is crippled by Trump’s cheating, but we don’t have to be caught in his trap. Not this time.

August 1, 2020

The Real Purpose of Trump's Threat to Delay the Vote

The real purpose of the threat by our Twittiot-in-Chief to delay the election is to lay the groundwork for massive challenges of mail-in ballots.

https://www.gregpalast.com/the-secret-purpose-of-trumps-threat-to-delay-the-vote/



Officially, 1,913,369 ballots were challenged and thrown away in 2016—that’s how Trump stole the last election and how he will steal 2020…they will question your mail-in ballot signature, the color of your ink—and if you put an “X” instead of filling in the little bubble—they’ll junk your ballot. Yes, Donald, “The 2020 election will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT election in history” — because your crew is defrauding voters out of their ballots. Whose ballots gets challenged? According to the US Civil Rights Commission which investigated in Florida, the chance of your ballot being challenged and uncounted is 900% higher if you’re Black than if you’re white.

That’s if you get your ballot at all. According to an MIT study, one in ten voters who request a mail in ballot don’t get one at all, or get it too late to count. We saw the test run in Georgia in March where the GOP state government delayed the ballot send-out, meaning thousands of African-Americans never received their ballot. Even the husband of the Executive Director of the ACLU of Georgia got his ballot the day after the election. (But yes, he was guilty of attempted VWB—Voting While Black.) Don’t cry; don’t whine: you can, you must, steal back your vote: that is, protect it. We can expose the steal and reverse it. That’s why I wrote, How Trump Stole 2020—it’s not a prediction, it’s a warning. I'm watching CNN right now and they’re telling me that Trump doesn't have the authority to delay the election. They are missing the f**king point.



Trump doesn't have to delay the vote. In America, elections aren't stolen like they're stolen in some right-wing fever dream of a movie. There's no military junta marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, no back alley assassinations like in an episode of House of Cards, no Russians needed. They're stolen in the back rooms of power by men in Brooks Brother suits, they're stolen using Excel spreadsheets, they're stolen by votes simply not being counted. It's really hard to make a true-to-life film version of how America gets stolen. Mind you, we tried. In The Best Democracy Money Can Buy we tried to warn America what was coming. Sadly, it seems that we were too late.

Now three months away from the next Presidential election, Donald Trump is sending out missives to his base: He’s whipping up his army of Boogaloo bozos in Hawaiian shirts into a frenzy over fraudulent mail-in votes. No, we won’t get a million bogus ballots from Bolivia, but the facts don’t matter. So what’s the point? The point is not to intimidate voters; no one’s scared of these Trumpito pinheads. Rather, the point is to place “poll watchers” who will challenge every single mail-in vote. This is what they did in Michigan (See Michigan Michigass) to prevent the counting of 75,355 ballots in Detroit—and that gave Trump a “victory margin” of 10,000 to take Michigan and the White House. Michigan 2016 will be USA 2020 unless we take back our ballots.



related


Trump's call to "delay" the election is a distraction — but it's also a serious threat

Remember, Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell are delighted to stomp on the rule of law to keep Republicans in power

https://www.salon.com/2020/07/30/trumps-call-to-delay-the-election-is-a-distraction--but-its-also-a-serious-threat/

The first thing to understand about Donald Trump's threat to delay the November election — should we call it a public fantasy? — is that it's a distraction, like so many things our president says and does. Around 8:30 Eastern time on Thursday morning, news came down that the U.S. economy saw its worst contraction since the advent of modern economic recordkeeping after World War II, with GDP falling at an annual rate of nearly 33% in the second quarter, 9.5% below where it was the previous quarter. This is a plunge exponentially larger than the fallout from the crash of 2008, and probably the largest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

At 8:46 a.m., Trump let loose with this Twitter turd: "With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???" As a distraction, the gambit worked. Immediately, the shift in headlines and cable news focus went from the country's record-setting economic devastation toward this idiotic but deeply troubling question of whether Trump can really get away with delaying the election until such time as he thinks he can win it (which may be never). The second thing to understand about Trump's threat is that it's nonetheless deadly serious. No matter how many reassuring articles come out about how there's no mechanism available to Trump to delay the election, the public should not be complacent about this.

Rule of law, for the people who surround Donald Trump and prop him up, is something to be broken, not respected. Trump is a profoundly stupid man, but he does have a flight of much smarter people around him to do his bidding, especially when it comes to securing power for themselves and shutting down the ability of the American people to vote the bastards out. We should not underestimate what people like Attorney General Bill Barr and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could come up with, if they decide that Trump's harebrained notion of using the pandemic as cover to "reschedule" (read: cancel) the election is the only path to keeping Republicans in power in 2021.

Barr, after all, has spent his time in charge of the Justice Department focused on remaking the institution as one focused on covering up Trump's crimes, instead of dedicated to fighting crime. He started by using his powers to falsely frame the findings of Robert Mueller's report on Russian election interference, claiming that Mueller found "no collusion." That was an outright lie. Mueller found extensive collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian conspiracy, much of it right out in public, even if it fell short of what Mueller felt could be charged as criminal conspiracy. But Barr successfully pushed out the "no collusion" narrative, and the impact of the entire Russia investigation's dwindled to almost nothing, despite Trump's demonstrable guilt in the cover-up.

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