Thread by @HoarseWisperer

News broke today and much of its potential significance seems to have been missed...

The news: Two days after the redacted Mueller report dropped, White House Counsel Emmit Flood wrote an angry letter to Atty Gen William Barr complaining about it.

1/
cnn.com/2019/05/02/pol…

Flood opens by basically complaining that Mueller was supposed to either charge Trump or shut up.

"What prosecutors are supposed to do is complete an investigation and then either ask the grand jury to return an indictment or decline to charge the case."

2/

That's basically the complaint Dem's leveled against Jim Comey for choosing to narrate the FBI's decision not to charge Hillary Clinton over her private email server.

So, first, ummm, karma...

Sucks when guidelines you were happy to see violated in 2016 boomerang back on ya.

WH Counsel Flood goes on to generally repeat the same opening theme...

MUELLER DIDN'T FOLLOW THE PLAN! HE WAS SUPPOSED TO REACH 'A DECISION' AND KEEP QUIET IF THERE WERE NO CHARGES!

You're seeing where I'm going with this, right?

White House attorneys were angry that things hadn't gone down as they thought they were supposed to...

They had been banking on Mueller operating within a set of "rules"... and they thought they knew what he would do *because of those rules*.

It seems to me, Flood is hinting at something that has gone from a suspicion to a theory to a belief for me.

Barr landed in Feb. with a plan to shut Mueller down and clear Trump.

That plan centered on forcing Mueller to operate based on "DOJ Guidelines" - AKA William Barr's.

By forcing Mueller to operate within a set of guidelines that all but prevented indicting a sitting president, Barr wasn't technically "shutting down" the investigation but he was predestining Mueller's ultimate answer: no indictment.

...and Barr and the White House banked on Mueller being a good soldier who followed precedent and protocol from there.

Mueller is such a straight shooter, they fully expected him to play by the rules even after they cooked the rule book.

They expected a quiet declination.

They expected Mueller to deliver exactly what Flood laid out in his angry Yelp review:

Mueller wasn't supposed to say anything bad if he declined to charge Trump - and he wasn't supposed to charge Trump, soooo... What's with the long report?!

Flood then goes on to basically say "We only gave up all this information because we thought Mueller wasn't going to let it get out...".

"We gave Mueller info we expected him to keep to himself..."

Think about that for a minute.

They were providing evidence to investigators conducting an investigation. Were charges to be brought, the evidence would nearly assured of being subject to disclosure.

The inference is that they expected Trump and others to go uncharged.

That's both surprising and not.

It's not surprising Trump believed he was going to get off. It's reasonable for the client to expect to beat the investigation.

It strikes me as surprising counsel would agree to provide information that would be damaging if disclosed without a rather concrete agreement.

Flood appears to be suggesting Mueller violated only what the White House believed to be "an understanding". Lawyers don't rely on those much.

Trump has some weak counsel, so I suppose there may have been some bungling.

Worth noting that those disclosures came pre-Barr though.

Regardless, with the genie now out of the bottle, Flood spends much of the rest of the letter trying to jam it back in.

Basically asserts that the White House can claw back executive privilege now automagically by virtue of some rather tenuous-sounding theories of privilege.

And Flood tries to rationalize why Trump can now legally instruct staff to obstruct Congress on the basis of the unprivileged privilege automagically returned to the genie's bottle...

Translation: we messed up by letting people talk, so, no more talking because *reasons*

The importance of the letter (to me) is not in what it says but in what it appears to hint at...

Trump's people coughed up too much. Trump's attorneys let them let too much out of the bag...

Barr then came in with a plan to clean up the entire mess:

1) Force Mueller's hand by limiting the conclusion he could reach to no indictment
2) Count on Mueller to stick to protocol and say little or nothing about all that evidence he collected but couldn't/didn't indict from

But Mueller spit the bit.

Barr mistakenly assumed Mueller would be forced to choose from only the two binary options: indict or don't.

Mueller foiled the whole plot by carving out a third way.

By crafting a 400+ page report w/o a charging reco OR a declination, Mueller took the entire doc. outside the protocol Barr was planning to use as the basis for suppressing all the evidence.

Barr wouldn't let him indict. A declination would've allowed Barr to bury everything.

Instead, Mueller operated within the law but outside polite-but-not-binding guidelines and protocols.

Barr's entire plan was predicated on Mueller staying within them though... and he assuredly promised Trump this would all go according to plan.

If this admittedly quite speculative set of inferences and suspicions is true, Trump would quite naturally be mad as hell that all of the info he was sure would stay buried is now public.

And while the real culprit was his and his counsels' choices, he'd still blame Barr.

Flood's letter reads as a bit like a complaint to a co-conspirator about how badly the bank robbery went down after being promised the alarms would be deactivated.

Keep an ear open for Trump comments about Barr... and about the Mueller report contents seeing the light of day.

Since Trump still needs Barr to bury all of this and it is an unfolding situation, a narcissist like Trump would be less rageful than usual. Barr can still redeem himself.

If the above is close to true though, Trump will not be able to keep from grumbling about Barr though...

Standard disclosure. This is all highly speculative. I have no inside sources. I might be entirely wrong. Don't bet your mortgage on this or anything else I mull over.

I'm sure legal experts will dissect Flood's letter and its arguments. Those takes you can count on, at least.

Note: Flood is Trump’s personal counsel - not White House Counsel.