Posted on 05/06/2019 8:07:48 AM PDT by billorites
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s March “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election” contains a glaring omission: Not once in the 448-page tome does Mueller mention an investigation into whether Russia interfered with the U.S. presidential election by feeding dossier author Christopher Steele misinformation.
But Mueller also did not charge Steele with lying to the FBI, or refer a criminal case against Steele to federal prosecutors, as he did when the special counsel uncovered evidence of criminal misconduct unrelated to the 2016 election. Given Mueller’s conclusion that no one connected to the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to interfere with the election, one of those two scenarios must be true—either Russia fed Steele disinformation or Steele lied to the FBI about his Russian sources.
The Steele dossier, which consisted of a series of memorandum authored by the former MI6 spy, detailed intel purportedly provided by a variety of Vladimir Putin-connected sources. For instance, Steele identified Source A as “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure” who “confided that the Kremlin had been feeding Trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.”
Other supposed sources identified in the dossier included: Source B, identified as “a former top-level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin”; Source C, a “Senior Russian Financial Officer”; and Source G, “a Senior Kremlin Official.” Steele also described a smattering of unlettered sources as a FSB Cyber Operative; a former Senior Intelligence Officer; a Senior Government Figure; “well-placed and established Kremlin source 1”; “well-placed and established Kremlin source 2”; a Kremlin official involved in U.S. relations; a Senior Russian leadership figure; and a Kremlin insider with direct access to leadership.
Steele first provided a summary of the Kremlin-supplied “intel” on Trump to the FBI in June or July 2016, when he met with his reputed handler, Rome-based FBI agent Mike Gaeta. In September 2016, Gaeta provided the dossier to agents working on the Russia collusion investigation at the FBI headquarters in Washington D.C.
The following month, the U.S. Department of Justice included details from the dossier in an application submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court and obtained a court order to surveil former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. That FISA court order gave the Obama administration and career DOJ and FBI agents access to Page’s communications with Trump campaign officials prior to Page’s departure.
Leaks propelled the claimed collusion into the news. Steele shared details from the dossier with Michael Isikoff. Citing a “Western intelligence source,” Isikoff reported at Yahoo! News that “Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister,” and discussed the lifting of sanctions.
Government sources told Isikoff that Page’s activities in Russia had “been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election.” “After one of those briefings,” Isikoff wrote, “Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote FBI Director James Comey, citing reports of meetings between a Trump adviser (a reference to Page) and ‘high ranking sanctioned individuals’ in Moscow over the summer as evidence of ‘significant and disturbing ties’ between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin that needed to be investigated by the bureau.”
The DOJ later cited Isikoff’s article to support its FISA application to surveil Page. The application also detailed some of the impact this news story had on the Trump campaign: “Based on statements in the September 23, [Yahoo!] News Article, as well as in other recent articles published by identified news organizations, Trump’s campaign repeatedly has made public statements in an attempt to create the appearance of distance between Page and [Trump’s] campaign.”
Although Pence shot down the suggestion, responding, “nothing could be further from the truth,” the narrative dragged the Trump campaign up to election day—and a rabid portion of the populace continues to believe and peddle the Russian hoax. Yet Trump still solidly defeated Hillary Clinton.
But Trump’s victory does not negate the reality that, assuming Steele truthfully relayed to the FBI and the media the intel his Russian sources provided, Russia interfered in the election by feeding Steele false intel about Trump.
Yet in the special counsel report, Mueller identified only two principal ways Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election: “First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign and then released stolen documents.”
Surely, a plot by Kremlin-connected individuals to feed a known FBI source—Steele had helped the FBI uncover an international soccer bribery scandal—false claims that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia would qualify as a “principal way” in which Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The Russia social media campaign to disparage Hillary Clinton wasn’t a patch on the plot the Kremlin launched to destroy Trump: It resulted not only in bad press, but also an investigation into the Trump campaign and the use of court-approved surveillance exposing campaign communiques.
Even though Mueller was authorized, as he put it in the special counsel report, to investigate “the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” the report is silent of efforts to investigate Russia’s role in feeding Steele misinformation.
Little notice was made of Mueller’s apparent failure to investigate whether Russia interfered in the election by peddling phony intel to Steele that Steele relayed to the FBI, until Sen. Chuck Grassley raised the issue with Attorney General William Barr last week. During questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Grassley pitched the issue as follows:
The Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research against candidate Trump. Fusion GPS then hired Christopher Steele, former British intelligence officer, to compile what we all know as the Steele dossier, that reportedly used Russian government sources for information. The Steele dossier was central to the now-debunked collusion narrative.
Now here’s the irony: The Mueller report spent millions investigating and found no collusion between Trump campaign and Russia but the Democrats paid for a document created by a foreign national with reported foreign government sources. Not Trump, but the Democrats. That’s the definition of collusion. Despite the central status of the Steele dossier to the collusion narrative, the Mueller report failed to analyze whether the dossier was filled with disinformation to mislead U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI.
“My question,” Grassley continued: “Mueller spent over two years and 30 million dollars investigating Russia interference in the election. In order for a full accounting of Russia interference attempts, shouldn’t the special counsel have considered whether the Steele dossier was part of a Russian disinformation and interfere campaign?”
Barr responded that he had “not yet had anyone go through the full scope of [Mueller’s] investigation to determine whether he did address or look at all into those issues,” before adding, “one of the things I’m doing in my review is to try to assemble all the existing information out there about it, not only for the Hill investigations and the OIG, but also to see what the Special Counsel looked into. So I really couldn’t say what he looked into.”
Later during the four-hour hearing, Sen. John Cornyn asked the attorney general, “how do we know that the Steele dossier is not evidence of a Russian disinformation campaign? Knowing what we know now that the allegations are unverified? Can we state with confidence that the Steele dossier was not part of the Russian disinformation campaign?” Barr responded: “No, I can’t state that with confidence, and that is one of the areas that I’m reviewing. I’m concerned about it, and I don’t think it is entirely speculative.”
If Barr is concerned about it, why wasn’t Mueller? Any competent prosecutor would have investigated whether Russia peddled false intel to Steele.
Or did Mueller investigate this question? It’s possible, maybe even likely, given this acknowledgement in the special counsel report: “From its inception, the Office recognized that its investigation could identify foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information relevant to the FBI’s broader national security mission.” “During the Special Counsel investigation,” Mueller then explained, the FBI had embedded personnel “whose purpose was to review the results of the investigation and to send-in writing-summaries of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to FBIHQ and FBI Field Offices.”
Not all of the intelligence and counterintelligence information derived from the special counsel investigation was included in the report.
Here’s the clincher: Not all of the intelligence and counterintelligence information derived from the special counsel investigation was included in the report. Rather, as Mueller explained, the report contains only the “information necessary to account for the Special Counsel’s prosecution and declination decisions and to describe the investigation’s main factual results.”
This assertion is laughable given the special counsel’s report unnecessarily opined on whether Trump obstructed justice, but then failed to reach a “prosecution or declination decision,” as required by regulation. The more likely answer? Political expedience. After all, evidence that Russia interfered in the election by feeding the false collusion narrative to Steele would vindicate Trump, who has been screaming “Witch hunt” from day one.
Of course, there is another possibility: Steele could have invented his Russian sources and the “intel” they supposedly provided him. If so, Steele should have been charged with lying to the FBI. Yet Steele remains a free man, showing either Mueller is incompetent or a political hack.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Cleveland served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and current adjunct instructor at the college of business at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
I vote both.
Mueller Was Either Incompetent Or A Political Hack to take the Fake Investigation in the first place
Political whatever, the whole report was geared to be anti-Trump and he failed to provide a comprehensive analysis.
It’s a slow train, but you can hear it coming down the track.
I consider him a political hack. Once he got the information that there was no collusion, he should of closed the case, but he did not. By not closing the case proved he is a political hack.
Political hack...deep stater....
Mueller’s number 1 objective was to protect the reputation of the FBI and his friends there. His number 2 objective was to thwart Trump’s plans to drain the swamp and generally to make Trump’s life miserable. His number 3 objective was to stoke the conflict with Russia.
Mueller is quite competent and very politically clever. He is indeed a partisan operator without any genuine interest in justice or truth, but he will abandon the interests of Democrats whenever his venal self-interest dictates otherwise.
It’s not a binary choice. Robert “Anthrax” Mueller is both.
The mueller report was conclusive on no wrong doing of our president but other than that it was a patrician political piece of crap.
Wasn’t the actual impetus (stated mission) of the investigation was to see if the Trump campaign conspired with Russia? It basically excluded all other forms of Russian interference except any potential Trump campaign associates.
It’s not really Mueller’s fault that the special council was created specifically to get Trump.
It was never about finding any other types of Russian interference in our elections, nor was it broad enough (and probably couldn’t have been) to investigation the overall integrity of our election systems, either foreign or domestic (can’t evne open that can of worms with our current media)
The whole point of the special investigation was to continue the attacks and conspiracies on the Trump campaign that started in 2015, and nothing more.
Basically, we are lucky Mueller was smart enough to realize that the whole worm could turn, and he didn’t want to be caught as a partisan player.
Both
Did Rosenweasel ever release, to anyone, his letter which defined the scope, or limits of Mueller’s investigation? It seemed people were frequently asking for it but never getting access to it.
Do people still believe that British intelligence didn't notice that one of their former member (if he was former) was being employed by one US Presidential Candidate to develop an smear document on another US Presidential candidate using sources connected to the Russian government? In the surveillance state of Britain they totally missed this?
No way. I firmly believe that they knew about it, they likely sanctioned it and probably Steele did it with their help. Basically Hillary hired British spies to work with Russia to undermine our presidential election. That's what happened. And that's why in my view any "special relationship" we shared is dead.
IIRC, the Rosenweasel scope letter was included in the Mreport...
The funny thing to watch your freepers is how the press is going to do a complete 180
For the last two years on this completely false bull crap report referred nonstop treason treason treason he’s going to jail it’s all over for trouble he colluded. Etcetera
Now we got the nothing burger Mueller report , all 448 pages of it , and it’s turning back around and now we’re going to investigate all of the federal crimes and Felonies they were committed in coming up with this investigation
Watch the press turn around and completely cover it all up cover for all the criminals and say it’s all nothing MoveOn MoveOn MoveOn
bbb
“ . . . Including(i) Any link and/or coordination between the Russian government; and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and
(ii) any matters that arose or may arise from the investigation; and
(iii) any other matter within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).”
There was no charge to look at anyone working for the FBI, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, or anywhere else, probably deliberately so, and Mueller interpreted his charge narrowly to only include investigating Trump’s campaign, but then extended it into his transition and his administration.
Thanks for the reply. And, yes, I'd bet my last dollar that it was deliberate. Trump needs to start releasing documents and Barr and others need to go all hands on deck investigating the investigators, and investigating all the players involved in initiating and carrying out the election meddling and attempted coup.
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