Mueller was sold as an investigation of Russian interference. Yet he *never* investigated Clinton campaign's secret dossier

The thing I can't get over is how Mueller Special Counsel was sold to public as an investigation of Russian interference. Yet he *never* investigated Clinton campaign's secret dossier and how it may have been exploited by Russia trying to plant disinformation. https://t.co/jKMlENndP4

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) April 16, 2020

Insinuendo: Why the Mueller Report Doth Repeat So Much

The first thing to note about the Mueller report is just how contentious it is. It isn’t a set of findings so much as an assertion of what the findings might have been if only there had been more evidence. It is like a closing argument in a criminal case already dismissed for lack of evidence but in which the prosecutor is determined to redeem what he can of his case. Mueller turns to a variety of strategies: hectoring repetition; the use of extraneous detail to add heft to flimsy assertion; and a resort to insinuation and innuendo to prejudice the reader against those who have escaped the dock.

Papadopoulos Again and Again

Ever since the debunking of Trump-Russia dirt paid for by the Democrats and compiled by the opposition firm Fusion GPS, government officials and conspiracists have insisted that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with launching the investigation. The story is that the FBI flew into action after learning that Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos had made an alarming statement to an Australian diplomat in a London bar, telling him about Russian intentions to interfere with the U.S. election.

From the first page of his report, the special counsel is eager to establish the narrative that that Papadopoulos, not Steele, sparked the initial investigation. Mueller writes that in May 2016 “Papadopoulos had suggested to a representative of [a] foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.”

But it’s not enough to say it once. Come page 6, Mueller writes, “Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton.”

Mueller repeats this claim nearly word for word again on pages 81, 89, and 93.

At least page 192 offers a hint of variation: The FBI “approached Papadopoulos for an interview” because of “his suggestion to a foreign government representative that Russia had indicated that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton.”

Such relentless repetition might be dismissed as lazy cut-and-paste writing. But repetition is an ancient and effective tool of rhetoric. The Greeks called it epimone; the Romans, commoratio. It can be used subtly and powerfully, as in “Brutus is an honorable man," or it can be employed in a clumsy effort to pound home a weak claim, as in “Papadopoulos suggested…that the Trump Campaign…”

What makes the claim weak?

The problem starts with “Papadopoulos suggested.” What exactly did he say? “Suggested” implies he expressed himself indirectly. The report’s use of that squishy verb all six times it refers to the conversation is an admission that Papadopoulos did not directly make the explosive claim that allegedly spurred the FBI into action.

The next part of the sentence is not only vague, but misleading – “Papadopoulos suggested … that the Trump campaign had received indications.”

This implies that information allegedly given to Papadopoulos – an adviser to the campaign – was shared with the entire campaign. This is especially misleading because the report later says it found no evidence that Papadopoulos told anyone else on the campaign about the emails.

And then there’s the descriptor “received indications,” which is even more amorphous than “suggested.” An “indication” could be anything from a light flashing Morse code to one of the grifters in “The Sting” putting a finger to the side of his nose. If Papadopoulos was told something, why not simply write he “was told”? The downside of the simple construction, from a prosecutor’s point of view, is that it lacks the implication that something furtive and sneaky is going on. “Receiving indications” by contrast, sounds suitably shady.

Where did those indications come from? The “Russian government,” according to the special counsel’s report. Finally, a precise and concrete claim. Unfortunately, it is also false. The source of his information was Joseph Mifsud, whom the special counsel describes as a “London-based professor who had connections to Russia and traveled to Moscow in April 2016.” There is a difference between someone with unspecified “connections to Russia” and the “Russian government.”

The Mueller report makes another incorrect claim when it states the Russian government offered to “assist the [Trump] Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton.”

There is no evidence that Papadopoulos said anything about a plan to “assist” Trump through “anonymous” action to the man in the London bar – whom the report oddly refers to as a “representative of a foreign government” when everyone knows he is Alexander Downer. As Downer told The Australian newspaper in April 2018, Papadopoulos “mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the election, which may be damaging.”

Put these corrections all together and the special counsel’s oft-repeated statement – “Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton” – should actually read “Papadopoulos said to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that a professor who had traveled to Russia had told him Russia had damaging information about Hillary Clinton and might release it before the election.” This latter version isn’t just a far more accurate representation of what Papadopoulos said; it is also far less suggestive of any wrongdoing. But of course, if there’s less suggestion of wrongdoing there’s also less justification for the FBI to have taken the extreme step of investigating a presidential campaign.

Read the whole thing.

Robert Mueller Did Not Merely Reject the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theories. He Obliterated Them.

The two-pronged conspiracy theory that has dominated U.S. political discourse for almost three years – that (1) Trump, his family and his campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, and (2) Trump is beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin — was not merely rejected today by the final report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It was obliterated: in an undeniable and definitive manner.

Read the whole thing.

Mueller report: Collusion by the news media, not Donald Trump, but don't expect apologies

The mountain has labored and brought forth a mouse. After two years of hype, special counsel Robert Mueller has reported to Attorney General William Barr that there was no “collusion,” as Donald Trump would put it, between Trump or the Trump presidential campaign and the Russians regarding the 2016 election.

There will be no new indictments from Mueller beyond the few already issued, none of which charges a U.S. person with anything related to collusion. This is a big disappointment to the people in politics and the press who were openly hoping to see Trump, and his family, kicked out of the White House and thrown into jail.

And there were a lot of those people, as Grabien editor Tom Elliott noted last week:

►In December 2017, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski said the Trump team might be going to jail "for the rest of their lives."

►Last December, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Delaware Sen. Chris Coons — as he often does — whether he thought Trump might be facing jail time. Coons said yes, "the issues outlined against both Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, I think, continue to sharpen the ways in which it is clear that the Mueller investigation has produced a whole series of actions not previously exposed to the public."

Special counsel Robert Mueller attends church across from the White House on March 24, 2019.

►Also in December, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Trump could be the first president "to face the real prospect of jail time."

►In April 2017, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said the evidence he had already seen suggested "people will probably go to jail."

Actually, it was always a crock, dreamed up immediately after Hillary Clinton’s election-night defeat by her staff to explain away failure. As reported in the campaign book "Shattered," by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Clinton refused to take responsibility for her defeat, and the day after her concession, top officials gathered “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up.… Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."

Though this was a matter of record — the book was hardly obscure — the news media chose to run with the Russia story, which quickly morphed from “hacking” to the more nebulous “collusion,” quite credulously. They did so because they wanted it to be true, because they hoped it would hurt Trump, whom the press almost universally despises, and because it was good for ratings and clicks.

The irony, of course, is that while purporting to worry about Russian interference in American politics, by advancing this story the press was actually doing the work of President Vladimir Putin, sowing division and confusion through the American polity.

As former Clinton pollster Mark Penn tweeted, we wasted two years, at least $30 million and a lot of institutional credibility at the FBI and Department of Justice over “a false story of Russia collusion based on oppo research that was always unsubstantiated and preposterous.”

Liberal journalist Matt Taibbi was even harsher, calling the Russia-collusion story WMD times a million. Taibbi noted that the news media's credibility is a major victim:

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As (New York Times' Peter) Baker notes, a full 50.3 percent of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”

Well, that’s because it was. Leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald administered a Twitter beat-down to some of his colleagues in the news media, saying: “If you constantly went on TV or wrote things to mislead millions into believing Mueller was coming to arrest Trump, Jr., Jared and a whole slew of others for conspiring with the Russians, just admit it. Save yourselves the embarrassment of all this whitewashing & pretending.”

We might someday need a press we can trust. But I hope not, because we certainly don’t have one.

So what’s next? Well, there may not have been Russian collusion, but there certainly was collusion between FBI agents and journalists, with agents leaking information and journalists paying them off with “tickets to sporting events, golfing outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events," according to the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice.

And the connections between the Justice Department and the political opposition-research firm Fusion GPS (where the wife of senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr was paid to dig up dirt on Trump) were particularly egregious.

Roger Simon of of PJ Media writes that there is a lot of corruption yet to be investigated and prosecuted, on the part of Trump’s accusers: “It was a conspiracy and, worse yet, a conspiracy ignited and carried out from within the FBI and the Department of Justice. Nothing could be more dangerous to a democratic society than that. How high this conspiracy went is still somewhat unclear. I say ‘somewhat’ because the likelihood of it having reached into the White House of the previous administration is great. It's hard to imagine how it could have happened otherwise.”

Will we see any accountability for the many ethical — and probably legal — breaches involving Trump’s bureaucratic opposition? Stay tuned. But the “Russian collusion” narrative has now imploded.