Exonerated

by Dan Bongino

  Excuse me?

  How can the public have confidence in the investigations if Mueller and his report fail to delve into the underlying intelligence that was used to justify the entire probe? Remember that the very first sentence of Rod Rosenstein’s scope memo says Mueller had been appointed “to ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”22 Mueller is happy to share the evidence when it comes to Russian hacking and cyberinfluencing campaigns. When it comes to discovering the source of Christopher Steele’s raw intelligence? Total silence.

  The truth is, the FBI dropped the ball when it came to vetting intel. And Mueller refused to charge it with an error, despite spending 675 days trying to prove that relying on Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele’s research wasn’t a mistake. Then he compounded the error by never, at least according to what’s included in the report, vetting Steele or identifying the informants.

  But the biggest error, the biggest breach, the biggest failure of the Mueller report is that it ultimately failed to deliver on its mandate. It got convictions. It found ancillary wrongdoing and crimes by some Trump campaign associates. But it did not find collusion. And this is what really confounds me, because I know Robert Mueller has dedicated his life to public service—from his tour as a Marine platoon commander in Vietnam to his years with the DOJ and FBI. If his team did find obstruction evidence, shouldn’t Mueller have had the guts to file the charge he so clearly wanted to?

  Maybe, as I’ve just explained, it’s because he knew on some level he had to adapt the instructions of the scope memos that defined his mission in order to protect his other mission: rescuing the FBI and protecting the bureau from further embarrassment.

  I’m going to return to Mueller’s conclusion, which I mentioned a few pages back, so you can see what I’m talking about. Then we’ll get back to gaslighting. Here is the last page of the Mueller report. It is a master class in waffling, in speaking out of both sides of your mouth. In damning without indicting. In branding without owning. It’s the ultimate in casting aspersions. Here:

  IV. Conclusion

  Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.23

  This a staggering piece of legalese. It appears to pass the buck while also passing judgment. If the “report does not conclude that the President committed a crime,” then doesn’t it conclude that the president did not commit a crime? That would stand to reason, right? But no, Mueller, the crack logician, is splitting hairs. After 675 days of hectoring and analyzing, he couldn’t make a call. Instead he blamed the nonconclusion on DOJ policy—“the applicable legal standards” and the facts.

  I love that he cites “facts.” Generally, when facts prove a case, they usually result in a guilty verdict. When facts conflict or are inconclusive, they often result in an acquittal.

  What does a jury say when it decides to acquit a defendant?

  It says the defendant is—repeat after me, Robert Mueller—“not guilty”!

  There was no real trial by a jury here, obviously. But Mueller, in his private deliberations with his scheme team, weighed the evidence and realized that even if Attorney General Barr would allow the DOJ to press a case, it didn’t have enough hard evidence of intent to ensure a conviction. So Mueller punted.

  What a cop-out!

  One of the shrewd aspects of taking this position is that Mueller also says he has no opinion. And then he offers one in the last sentence, claiming the report does not exonerate Donald Trump.

  I was apoplectic when I read that last paragraph. I still am.

  There’s no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, at least not enough for Mueller to put his reputation on the line. There’s no evidence of collusion or working with Russia. And 675 days have dragged on with no subpoena or indictment of Trump. And now, in the entire 448-page document, there is no conclusive proof that Trump broke the law.

  And yet the special counsel insists that Trump is not exonerated?

  Did I wonder about Mueller’s guts? Now I have to wonder about his intellect. This conclusion shows he has a hell of a lot of nerve but not a lot of smarts. I get what Mueller is trying to do here. He wants to thread the needle and say, “I can’t prove Trump is guilty, but I’m not going to say he’s innocent, either.”

  In the end, Mueller does seem to offer up a verdict and a recommendation, suggesting that Congress impeach Trump if it believes the president engaged in “corrupt use of his authority”: “With respect to whether the president can be found to have obstructed justice by exercising his powers under Article II of the Constitution, we concluded that Congress has authority to prohibit a President’s corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice.”24

  By pointing out that the president has a “constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws”—no kidding!—Mueller implies that Trump hasn’t been doing that. Then he notes that Congress is mandated “to protect official proceedings, including those of courts and grand juries, from corrupt, obstructive acts regardless of their source.”25

  And that leads to him handing off the case to Capitol Hill on a platter: “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”26

  Let me translate that: “I’ve just laid out what I think Trump did, but Barr won’t let me pursue these charges. Since I am a professional who talks about rule of law, I’m not going to challenge Barr. Instead, I’m going to punt this over to Congress and, in plain sight, remind them that they can impeach the president.”

  How does that ensure respect for the integrity of the process that Mueller stated was the whole purpose of his probe? As the second-to-last sentence of the initial scope memo says: “If the Special Counsel believes it is necessary and appropriate, the Special Counsel is authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation of these matters.”27 It doesn’t say that “the Special Counsel is authorized to pass the buck to Congress and let Congress politicize the matter for another two years”! But that is what Mueller has done. I believe he knew that facing off against Barr would end badly and that a trial, much less a conviction at a trial, would be impossible, so he decided to prolong the distrust and the crippling narrative by pointedly advising Congress to do the same. What a guy.

  SINS OF OMISSION, PART ONE

  The Mueller report also contains numerous sloppy, contradictory, and cloudy sections, and it frequently confounds logic. But zoom in on some of the most egregious and alarming issues and you’ll see that the report is more disturbing for what it doesn’t say than for what it says.

  Let’s take the mysterious case of Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor with ties to Western intelligence officials who tried to inject a collusion storyline into the campaign by telling George Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton. “‘Emails of Clinton,’ he says. ‘They have thousands of emails,’’’ is how Papadopoulos remembers the claim.28

  There is no available evidence proving Mifsud was, or is, a Russian spy. But the Mueller report describes him as having “Russian contacts.” Then it lists his connections to Russians with ties to Russian cyberintelligence.29

&nbs
p; But nowhere does it note that Mifsud also has deep political connections to liberal Italian politicians; that he posed for photos with British politician Boris Johnson, who served as England’s foreign minister; that he was frequently seen in the European Parliament; or that he was hanging out with Italian Socialist and Democratic Party leader Gianni Pittella. Mifsud has posed with so many Western politicians and diplomats that the BBC once called him the “selfie king of the diplomatic circuit.”30

  The report also fails to note that Mifsud’s own lawyer has published a book in which he says that Mifsud has far more ties to Western intelligence and politicians than to Eastern European ones, basically disavowing the notion that he was working for the Russians.31 Finally, at no point does anyone raise what seems like an obvious question: did Papadopoulos, who was spun left and right by at least four operatives, all asking him leading questions about Russia, simply misremember his exchange with Mifsud? Or did others mischaracterize what Papadopoulos had said? Is this, in other words, a giant transcontinental game of telephone in which the evidence evolved over time, as the principal subjects and investigators batted whispered allegations about “dirt” and “emails” back and forth?

  As Andrew McCarthy astutely points out in The National Review, Australian high commissioner Alexander Downer, the primary source who flagged Papadopoulos to the FBI, propelled the probe forward with what he thought he had heard:

  Mueller carefully describes not what Papadopoulos said to Downer, but what Downer understood Papadopoulos had “suggested,” namely 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.”32

  Casting even more doubt on the whole “sky is falling” Russia-Clinton alleged email crisis are two other notable issues. First, Maltese mystery man Mifsud was interviewed by the FBI in February 2017, and he denied mentioning or knowing about the Clinton emails.33 Second, if he had known about the emails, he would have been wrong—since Russian agents allegedly hacked the DNC emails, not Clinton’s or her campaign’s. So, again, shouldn’t the special counsel have at least entertained the possibility that Papadopoulos may have had a faulty memory?

  Given all this—plus the fact that Mifsud utterly failed to provide Papadopoulos with any significant Kremlin contacts to set up a possible meeting with candidate Trump—there is plenty of conflicting evidence here. But in his report, Mueller opts to withhold any evidence that might upend the narrative the FBI had bought—or possibly helped create—three years before and continued to feed to the American public.

  In the end, however, the report is forced to nearly exonerate Papadopoulos: “No documentary evidence, and nothing in the email accounts or other communications facilities reviewed by the Office, shows that Papadopoulos shared this information with the Campaign.”34

  But that didn’t stop the FBI and special counsel from going crazy trying to prove otherwise: that Mifsud was a Russian agent and Papadopoulos was some kind of colluding traitor. For shame.

  One last thing about the report’s obvious and curious omissions regarding Papadopoulos: nowhere in the report is there a single mention of Stefan Halper or his “research assistant” Azra Turk, the operatives sent at Papadopoulos by the FBI and who exchanged emails with him. It is, as writer Paul Sperry notes, “Another example of how Mueller’s probe was really designed to protect the FBI/DOJ.”35

  Speaking of Halper, there is no mention of him at all in the Mueller report. This is a truly shocking omission. A lifelong operative, Halper himself was so entrenched in spycraft and networking that he was beyond a liability. Never mind that Papadopoulos almost instantly made him for a spy; it is starting to look as if Halper may have had more connections to Russian espionage masters than anyone in this whole fiasco.

  As Sara Carter reported in August 2018, while Halper was running the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar at the University of Cambridge, he “invited senior Russian intelligence officials to co-teach his course on several occasions and, according to news reports, also accepted money to finance the course from a top Russian oligarch with ties to Putin.”

  Course syllabi reveal that one man who shared the course load with Halper in 2012 and 2015 is former director of Russian intelligence Chief Vyacheslav Trubnikov. Carter also notes that the British press also reported, “Halper received funds for the Cambridge seminar from Russian billionaire Andrey Cheglakov, who has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

  None of this is mentioned in the gaslighting document of the century.

  The Mueller report doesn’t care if Halper has direct contacts to Russian intelligence. It should have cared, and I’m about to tell you why, but get ready for a mind-boggling detour that casts even more shadows on Christopher Steele and James Comey. Not that we need actually need any more evidence against them at this point.

  Let’s go back to October 11, 2016, when Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec met with Christopher Steele and listened to a breathless version of his fiction-filled intel. She took notes and wrote up a memo on the exchange. In it, she noted that Steele had told her that the “institution” employing him was “keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8.” This is a stunning admission. It makes clear that the DNC and the Clinton campaign wanted Steele’s unvetted allegations to help influence the presidential race.36

  At one point in the summary, Kavalec describes what Steele’s “sources” had told him:

  There is technical/human operation run out of Moscow targeting the election. There is a significant Russian network in the U.S. run by the Russian Embassy that draws on emigres to do hacking and recruiting…. Payments are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami.”37

  Kavalec then inserts her own editorial comment in the write-up: “It is important to note that there is no Russian Consulate in Miami.” In other words, she had quickly realized that at least one detail in Steele’s “intel” was completely off the mark—a point that should have raised flags for anyone vetting Steele’s raw intelligence.38

  How did the FBI miss this stuff? How did Mueller miss it—or did he just choose to omit it from his report?

  There’s at least one more highly damning revelation in Kavalec’s write-up. Her handwritten notes taken while Steele was talking were also saved. The notes are scattershot, but one page makes references to “sources” and “sourcing,” and there is a hard-to-read name in her notes.39 A law enforcement contact of mine studied the document and deciphered the enigmatic scrawl. His conclusion?

  Trubnikov—the Russian spymaster who worked with Halper.

  My contact wasn’t alone, either: reporter Chuck Ross decoded the scribble with the same result.40

  This suggests that Steele, at some point, mentioned the former director of Russian intelligence to Kavalec. Was he Steele’s source? Why else would the name surface? And if that’s the case, well, then Steele was using information from a known Russian espionage leader and feeding it to the FBI. This is the real Russia-collusion story: it seems more and more likely that Steele’s information was Russian misinformation.

  And this again leads us back to Halper, the operative who turns up in so many places in this story. Was he driving sources to Steele? Was he fabricating tales as he appeared to do regarding Michael Flynn and a so-called Russian honeytrap, and as he definitely did while trying to con George Papadopoulos? Aren’t any of this man’s dubious dealings worth exposing? How could the FBI work with someone so potentially compromised, someone who, according to Papadopoulos, was a completely charmless bully?

  That Steele and Halper both seem to have connections to Trubnikov should have cast further doubt on the dossier’s allegations. That it didn’t, and that the Mueller report mentions none of this, just makes the gaslighting even more apparent.

  Not surprisingly, the names of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, th
e disgraced FBI agent and lawyer, are also missing from the Mueller report. So is the name Josh Pitcock.

  On June 29, 2017, the New York Times reported that Pitcock would leave his job as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff. It now appears that his departure may have been initiated by the discovery of texts between Strzok and Page that indicate Pitcock was being targeted by the FBI. An April 25, 2019, a letter by Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson to William Barr lays out the issue:

  In text messages exchanged between former FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and former FBI Attorney Lisa Page, the two discussed the possibility of developing “potential relationships” at a November 2016 FBI briefing for presidential transition team staff.41

  In their exchange, the devious duo discuss which “CI guy”—which presumably means “counterintelligence guy”—should attend a transition team briefing with William Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. Here’s the end of the exchange. Keep in mind that, while the identity of Charlie is unknown, Katie is likely Katherine Seaman, the wife of Josh Pitcock, who worked as an FBI counterintelligence analyst; Joe is likely FBI agent Joe Pientka; Andy is likely FBI bigwig McCabe; and Bill is probably FBI deputy counterintelligence director Bill Priestap:

  Strzok: Talking with Bill. Do we want Joe to go with Evanina instead of Charlie for a variety of reasons?

  Page: Hmm. Not sure. Would it be unusual to have [sic] show up again? Maybe another agent from the team?

  Strzok: Or, he’s “the CI guy.” Same.might [sic] make sense. He can assess if there are [sic] any news [sic] Qs, or different demeanor. If Katie’s husband is there, he can see if there are people we can develop for potential relationships

  Page: Should I ask Andy about it? Or Bill want to [sic] reach out for andy [sic]?

  Strzok: I told him I’m sure we could ask you to make the swap if we thought it was smart. It’s not until Mon so Bill can always discuss with him tomorrow.42