Charles Lipson: Mueller's Sinking Reputation

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Republicans add three more serious charges against Mueller. First, his team was packed with partisan Democrats, many closely affiliated with Hillary Clinton and strongly biased against Trump. Second, the report itself was shoddy and unfair, they say. It relied heavily on news articles, omitted exculpatory evidence, failed to investigate the infamous "Steele dossier," and never asked why, if Russians were trying to penetrate the Trump campaign, the candidate himself was not told by the FBI. Another serious charge -- deliberate distortion of evidence --comes from president's former attorney, John Dowd. He has shown the Mueller report edited one of his phone calls to change its meaning. Dowd is apoplectic, calling the report a "fraud." Others will join him if additional distortions, misrepresentations, and omissions are found.

Third, Mueller should have known at least a year ago, and perhaps earlier, that Trump and his senior aides never cooperated with the Russians. He had a duty, Republicans say, to disclose that in a timely way to the American public. He failed in that duty, leaving an unnecessary cloud over Trump and impeding his presidency. Why? And why didn’t Rod Rosenstein, who was supervising the investigation for the Department of Justice, step in and resolve these issues?

Of course, Republicans think the real subversion of justice was committed by the Obama administration’s DoJ, FBI, and intelligence agencies, both in their investigations of Trump and in whitewashing the email case against Hillary Clinton. Attorney General William Barr is already looking into those charges, as are DoJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorneys John Durham and John Huber. The chief judge of the secret intelligence courts, Rosemary Collyer, has already delivered a report to DoJ saying that the court was not given full, truthful information in warrant applications.

These investigations could burgeon into a catastrophic scandal, involving not only leaking, lying, and illicit spying but possibly collusion by U.S. government agencies to affect the outcome of an election. We don’t know that yet, and we don’t know the role the Obama White House played, but we need to know.

How do these issues affect Mueller’s reputation? First, his entire investigation was based on two fragile pillars, which Mueller never questioned. If they collapse, Mueller is buried in the rubble. The first pillar is the FBI’s dubious "origin story." The bureau states, and Mueller explicitly accepts, that its Trump investigation began in late-July 2016 after a low-level campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, spoke about Russia to an Australian diplomat in a London bar. Apparently, Papadopoulos also made exculpatory comments, which were not included (as legally required) in a subsequent search-warrant application.

But there is mounting evidence that Papadopoulos was not the first target and July 2016 was not the real starting date. Counter-intelligence investigations of Trump and his associates apparently began earlier and were never disclosed. Neither was widespread illegal spying on Americans by intelligence agencies and their private contractors. Still more surveillance was outsourced to friendly foreign intelligence agencies, which relayed their findings to Washington. Mueller never mentioned these problems -- and possible crimes.

This last bit is the most important, I think: If the DOJ, FBI, and CIA have to repeatedly lie about when and why this investigation started, that's proof that even they know that what they did was illegal from the start.

They want to claim the investigation only began when Papadopolous mentioned the rumor that Russia had Hillary's emails. But of course that's a lie, and already proven to be one; Josef Misfud, acting as a US agent, mentioned this rumor to Papadopolous, and then Alexander Downer, also acting as a US agent, catfished the rumor out of him and then reported it to his buddies in US intelligence.

But that means, of course, that Papadopolous was already the target of a spying/entrapment effort -- and that means the investigation began before the DOJ, CIA, and FBI will admit it did.

Why?

Well, here's one simple theory: They started the investigation based on the unverified, and often provably false, claims contained in a "dossier" based on Kremlin sources paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC. I would wager real money that never before in the history of the US has an investigation into a rival presidential campaign ever been predicated on such a vaporous foundation, and the DOJ, FBI, and CIA know damn well that this was unprecedented and very much Third World in practice, and so they're pretending the investigation began after they got some extraordinarily weak "confirmation" of the "dossier's" claims.

But, in fact, they began the investigation -- the spying, the framing, the inviting-Russians-to-a-dinner-which-Michael-Flynn-was-attending-to-claim-"Michael-Flynn-was-seen-dining-with-Russians" -- before the "confirmation." They began the investigation to get confirmation.

They began hiring spies and calling upon foreign intelligence services to infiltrate/frame the Trump investigation so then they'd have the pretext to investigate.

But that means, again, that investigation preceded "confirmation," and did not follow it, as they continue lying that it did.

At some point, this will become obvious, and the people pushing this lie are going to be exposed to perjury and jail time.

But they won't be charged and won't go to jail -- establishing beyond doubt that we live in a country in which government officials put citizens in jails for crimes that they themselves may blatantly commit and know they have full immunity for any prosecution for those crimes.

So long as those officials are acting in accordance with the Deep State's preferred liberal/Democrat politics, of course.

posted by Ace of Spades at 12:15 PM

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