Mueller Spent $732,000 on Outside "Contractors," But Won't Say Who. You Could Almost Say That Mueller is Hiding This Information From Congress.

Paul Sperry at RCI:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent more than $732,000 on outside contractors, including private investigators and researchers, records show, but his office refuses to say who they were. While it's not unusual for special government offices to outsource for services such as computer support, Mueller also hired contractors to compile "investigative reports" and other "information."

The arrangement has led congressional investigators, government watchdog groups and others to speculate that the private investigators and researchers who worked for the special counsel's office might have included Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS, the private research firm that hired Steele to produce the Russia collusion dossier for the Clinton campaign.

They suspect the dossier creators may have been involved in Mueller's operation -- and even had a hand in his final report -- because the special counsel sent his team to London to meet with Steele within a few months of taking over the Russia collusion investigation in 2017. Also, Mueller's lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, had shared information he received from Fusion with the media.

Raising additional suspicions, Mueller's report recycles the general allegations leveled in the dossier. And taking a page from earlier surveillance-warrant applications in the Russia investigation, it cites as supporting evidence several articles -- including one by Yahoo! News -- that used Steele and Fusion as sources.

Mueller even kept alive one of the dossier's most obscene accusations -- that Moscow had "compromising tapes" of Trump with Russian hookers -- by slipping into a footnote an October 2016 text Trump lawyer Michael Cohen received from a "Russian businessman," who cryptically intimated, "Stopped flow of tapes from Russia." Lawyers for the businessman, Giorgi Rtskhiladze (who is actually a Georgian-American), are demanding a retraction of the footnote, arguing Mueller omitted the part of his text where he said he did not believe the rumor about the tapes, for which no evidence has ever surfaced.

..

U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the report should be renamed "The Mueller Dossier," because he says it contains a lot of similar innuendo. Even though Mueller failed to corroborate key allegations leveled in the dossier, Nunes said his report twists key facts to put a collusion gloss on events. He also asserted that it selectively quotes from Trump campaign emails and omits exculpatory information in ways that cast the campaign's activities in the most sinister light.

For example, the Mueller report says that Carter Page met with Russian officials he knew to be Russia officials.

Court records say the opposite.

Mueller also left out of his report a detail RealClearInvestigations has previously reported: that Page was a cooperating witness in the case in question, helping the FBI eventually put a Russian agent behind bars in 2016. Nor did Mueller see fit to include in his report another exculpatory detail revealed in agent Gregory Mohaghan's complaint and reported earlier by RCI -- namely, that the Russians privately referred to Page as "an idiot" who was unworthy of recruitment.

Excluding such details is curious, given that the Mueller report quotes from the same FBI complaint and cites it in its footnotes.

Here's another example, from Devon Nunes. The Mueller report noted that Josef Misfud -- whose contacts with George Papadopolous were pretended to be suspicious -- had Russian connections. They cited news reports for this claim.

Yet the report fails to quote those same news reports which said that Josef Misfud had Western intelligence connections, and taught at Link University, where the FBI itself taught classes, and which itself was connected to Western intelligence services.

Curious, this cherry-picking, eh?

Or did they just stop reading after the headline? Will that be their claim?

Careful, boys: lying to Congress is a crime.

Back to Sperry:

Special counsel spokesman Peter Carr declined comment when asked specifically if Mueller's team hired or collaborated with Fusion GPS or any of its subcontractors. Mueller took over the FBI's Russia probe in May 2017, whereupon he hired many of the agents who handled Steele and pored over his dossier.

Here's another curious omission: Why does the Mueller report fail to mention Steele or his dossier at all?

[N]either Steele nor his dossier is mentioned by name anywhere in the first half of the report dealing with collusion, though their allegations are hashed out.

It's almost as if they're protecting a source and colleague from negative publicity.

Simpson did not return calls and emails seeking comment.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, John Solomon reports more on the report on Steele and his ludicrous allegations filed by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on October 11, 2016.

Her observations were recorded exactly 10 days before the FBI used Steele and his infamous dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign's contacts with Russia in search of a now debunked collusion theory.

It is important to note that the FBI swore on Oct. 21, 2016, to the FISA judges that Steele's "reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings" and the FBI has determined him to be "reliable" and was "unaware of any derogatory information pertaining" to their informant, who simultaneously worked for Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign to find Russian dirt on Trump.

That's a pretty remarkable declaration in Footnote 5 on Page 15 of the FISA application, since Kavalec apparently needed just a single encounter with Steele at State to find one of his key claims about Trump-Russia collusion was blatantly false.

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She quoted Steele as saying, "Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami," according to a copy of her summary memo obtained under open records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United. Kavalec bluntly debunked that assertion in a bracketed comment: "It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami."

And yet the FBI represented Steele as completely reliable and claimed, in a filing to the court they were swearing to be accurate in all particulars, that they had no reason to doubt the veracity of his claims.

Is the FBI claiming they didn't know of her report?

Kavalec, two days later and well before the FISA warrant was issued, forwarded her typed summary to other government officials. The State Department has redacted the names and agencies of everyone she alerted.

But it is almost certain the FBI knew of Steele's contact with State and his partisan motive. That's because former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland says she instructed her staff to send the information they got from Steele to the bureau immediately and to cease contact with the informer because "this is about U.S. politics, and not the work of -- not the business of the State Department, and certainly not the business of a career employee who is subject to the hosta Act."

In other words, this is not bona-fide "intelligence," this is a partisan operation that government employees are forbidden by law from indulging in, because the hosta Act forbids partisan activities in the guise of government work.

And the FBI lied.

And a lot of people have been prosecuted in this case for lying, or allegedly lying.

Open an investigation in McCabe, Yates, Comey, and Lynch.

Let's see how many process crimes we can convict them of.

Who. You Could Almost Say That Mueller is Hiding This Information From Congress.&bodytext=Paul Sperry at RCI: Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent more than $732,000 on outside contractors, including private investigators and researchers, records show, but his office refuses to say who they were. While it's not unusual for special government offices to...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace of Spades at 06:42 PM

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