Everything Mueller

 

Everyone has an opinion about Robert Mueller’s testimony in Congress.  I wasn’t going to comment but the reaction was so very predictable and all the talking heads were saying somewhat similar things. So, here’s my take:

The Mueller Report, itself, was a legal piece of garbage. Mueller made legal history by changing the Rule of Law from “innocent until proven guilty” to “guilty until proven innocent.” The report was so poorly written, perhaps to obfuscate the truth. Further, it wasn’t even Robert Mueller’s report.  He didn’t even know what was in it (who is Fusion GPS?).

The most interesting thing about the Mueller Report, however, is not what’s in it, but what’s not in it.  Remember, it’s not what politicians say but what they don’t say that matters.  In the case of the Mueller Report, it’s who Mueller didn’t interview (and why).

Here’s just a few of the people who could have testified as to what actually happened, but were not interviewed by Mueller:

• Natalia Veselnitskaya – Veselnitskaya was the “Russian attorney” at the infamous Trump Tower meeting. She could have testified as to who in the Obama Justice Department granted her special entry into the U.S. on multiple occasions and why she met with Fusion GPS owner Glenn Simpson both before and after the Trump Tower meeting. Veselnitskaya has already given her account of the Trump Tower meeting to Senate investigators. The Mueller Report does not square with her account.

Comment: Mueller didn’t interview her because, if she had told the truth, she would    have had to testify that she was part of a Fusion GPS effort to entrap Donald Trump Jr.

• Joseph Misuf – Misuf was a central figure in the plot to entrap George Papadopoulos and he was a Russian agent according to the Mueller Report. In reality, Misuf was a Deep State double-spy working with American and British intelligence, with strong ties to Italian intelligence. The Italian government has since fired a number of top intelligence officials who worked with Misuf on the plot.

Comment:  Mueller never even charged Misuf for the crimes that the Mueller Report identified.  Why not?  Because if Misuf had ever been brought to trial, the whole Russian collusion storyline would have collapsed.

• Bill Binney – Binney is a NSA official. Binney has gone on record as saying that the DNC servers were not hacked from the outside (it was an inside job), therefore, obviously not by the Russians.  Obviously, if anyone knows what happened it’s the NSA.

Comment: The DNC servers were absolutely vital evidence in the case. Despite this, Mueller didn’t examine the DNC servers because he knew that if he did he would have had to conclude that it wasn’t the Russians who hacked the DNC servers.

•  Julian Assange – Assange, of course, is the head of Wikileaks who published the Hillary Clinton emails that were taken from the DNC server. Assange has said, on more than one occasion, that he did not get the Clinton emails from the Russians. Assange’s source for the emails is a critical part of the Russian collusion narrative yet Mueller did not interview him or Ellen Ratner, a journalist who did interview Assange.

Comment: Mueller already knew what Assange would have said so he didn’t try to interview him (or Ratner).

 

Here’s what the Mueller Report, Mueller’s testimony and the commentary of the talking heads didn’t focus on. The why of it all.  What was the real link between the hack of the DNC servers and the Russian collusion narrative?  Could it be that Russian collusion was simply a smokescreen to obscure the hacking of the Clinton emails by someone on the inside at the DNC, especially if that someone later died a mysterious death? The timeline is the untold story.

As for me, the best part of the Russian collusion narrative was all the spy stuff. There were spies from England, Italy, Australia and the Ukraine.  It was way better than any spy novel.  You just can’t make this stuff up. John Le Carre eat your heart out.

 

“I spent three hours with Julian Assange on Saturday at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Well, I did. One thing he did say was the leaks were not from, they were not from the Russians, they were an internal source from the Hillary Campaign.” 

     –  Ellen Ratner, journalist 

 

The Barr Effect

 

In politics, it’s usually what you’re never going to hear about that’s truly important. Governments have an incentive to not tell the public the whole truth.  However, sometimes you will hear the truth because governments are currying favor with one another. So, too, an event might provide a psychological reason for governments to disclose the truth when they would otherwise would not.  Such an event was the naming of Bill Barr as Attorney General.

When the dirty laundry is inevitably going to be aired publicly, governments and government officials try to get out in front of the disclosure.  With Bill Barr publicly saying that he is going to investigate the origins of the Russian collusion narrative, it’s become a mad scramble for people to come clean or to try and throw someone else under the proverbial bus. Here’s a few examples:

• Both James Comey and John Brennan are accusing each other of being the major culprit in having the Obama Administration embrace the phony Steele Dossier which eventually resulted in Robert Mueller being named Special Prosecutor of a Russia collusion investigation. Keep in mind, though, that the Steele dossier was funded by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton election campaign and was the work product of the British government. Meanwhile, Jame Baker who was then the FBI’s top lawyer said that he didn’t believe that the Steele dossier was legit even back then. Comment: Just a bunch of rats deserting a sinking ship.
• Both the Italian and Ukrainian governments have previously opened investigations into their governments’ role in the Steele dossier. Recently, the Italian Prime Minister fired six top officials of Italy’s various intel agencies because of their roles in the entrapment of former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos (which immediately preceded and led to the Russia collusion investigation).

As Robert Mueller’s report states, there was no collusion with Russia. However, there appears to have been collusion with respect to Britain, Italy, the Ukraine and possibly Australia as well. Politics does make strange bedfellows so don’t count on ever hearing the real story. When you go down this rabbit hole, it leads to places you’d never expect.

 

Epilogue

Of course, then there’s the collusion between Joe Biden and China, Bill Clinton and Russia, Diane Feinstein and John Kerry with Iran. Seems like everybody is colluding with someone.

 

Saying Goodbye To Mueller

 

Not much to say about the Mueller report as there wasn’t much there worth reporting about. However, the reaction to the wind-up of the two-year long investigation requires a short take, although you’ve probably already had your fill by now.  Anyway…

The Mueller Report says that their investigation does not exonerate the president on the obstruction question. This line is causing angst all over Capitol Hill for all the wrong reasons.  The problem is that a prosecutor, which is what Mueller was, does not determine guilt or innocence.  A prosecutor’s only function is to determine whether or not there is enough evidence that makes it probable that a crime was committed, and, if so, to refer that case for criminal prosecution.

So, according to Mueller, there wasn’t enough evidence to refer an obstruction case against Trump for possible prosecution. Full stop. However, some people feel that Mueller needs to definitely say that Trump is innocent and if he fails to do so, then there are grounds for possible future investigation.  I am certainly not qualified to say whether there are grounds to prosecute Trump for obstruction of justice.  The only thing that we do know is that Mueller did not have sufficient evidence to refer the obstruction case for prosecution.

Here’s what we do know, though.  According to Mueller, there was no collusion between Trump and Russia.  The reason is that the only evidence that Mueller had in that regard was a bogus dossier bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.  It was a dossier that the FBI relied upon in getting illegal FISA wiretap warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.  That we know for sure because of testimony given by DOJ and FBI personnel before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committee.

So, the only possible meddling by Russia in the 2016 presidential election would have had to have been on behalf of Hillary Clinton.  Further, it has now been made public that the Ukraine has opened up an investigation about meddling between its own government on behalf of Hillary Clinton. How could the media have gotten it so wrong?

Caitlin Johnstone, a liberal political commentator, put it this way, “It has been obvious from the very beginning that the Maddow Muppets were being sold a lie…The insane, maniacal McCarthyite feeding frenzy that these people were plunged into by nonstop mass media propaganda drowned out the important voices who tried to argue that public energy was being sucked into Russia hysteria…Every politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed this moronic load of bull spunk has officially discredited themselves for life.”

Why is she so upset? Because the Democrats shot themselves in the foot by looking far worse than how they describe Trump. Far worse. They intentionally created the hysteria and then tried to blame it on Trump. Only it backfired. Spectacularly. Maybe, Pelosi et al. were secretly working for Trump to get him reelected.  If so, they may have just succeeded.

 

 

 

The Kavanaugh-Barr Effect

William Barr is currently being questioned before the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of the confirmation process of his becoming the new Attorney General.  The Democrats on the committee, like Kamala Harris, are all playing nice nice with him. That’s due to the aftereffect of the Judge Kavanaugh SCOTUS confirmation hearing, or more simply the Kavanaugh effect.  Therefore, expect that Barr’s confirmation is already a foregone conclusion.

Now, earthquakes have aftershocks but the Barr confirmation hearing has resulted in what I call a pre-shock. A big pre-shock is what happened today when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller blinked.  By that, I mean that the Special Counsel did something totally out of character – he refuted a report from BuzzFeed that Trump instructed his personal attorney (Michael Cohen) to lie to Congress.

Here’s the backstory behind the BuzzFeed article:

• BuzzFeed stands by their story which came from an admittedly unverified intelligence dossier.
• One of the two BuzzFeed reporters who published the story hasn’t even seen the evidence that the BuzzFeed story is supposedly based on.
• The other BuzzFeed reporter has been criticized in the past for claiming sources that he didn’t really have.
• It was BuzzFeed that also released the now totally discredited “Steele Dossier,” the Russian collusion narrative.

So, why did Mueller make such a rare public statement when he never comments on ongoing investigations? Why, indeed? It’s what I call the Barr-effect.  His soon-to-be new boss is none other than William Barr.  Yes, that William Barr.  How would you explain to your new boss that you allowed a fake news narrative to remain publically unchallenged where it could be used as fodder for the impeachment of the President?

And that’s what I refer to as the Kavannaugh-Barr effect. It’s Beltway politics at its finest.

 

“In politics… never retreat, never retract… never admit a mistake.” –  Napoleon Bonaparte

         P.S. Or when you do retract, you bury it on the back page.