Exonerated

by Dan Bongino

  What does this mean? It appears that the FBI was discussing placing a mole at the Trump team briefing and potentially having Pitcock help identify future recruits for its counterintelligence investigation.

  In other words, the FBI was looking to infiltrate the transition team.

  There is no evidence that Pitcock actually helped these guys out. But these texts sure make it seem like the FBI expected him to cooperate as the bureau spied on the incoming administration. Additionally, these texts again show the desperate, craven lengths to which the FBI was ready to go to try to nail Trump. So again, it’s no surprise that Mueller makes no mention of them in his report.

  The infamous June 9 Trump Tower meeting in Donald Trump Jr.’s office is also detailed in the Mueller report. This is the meeting in which Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya met Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner. It was set up by publicist Rob Goldstone, who pitched Trump Jr. that “the Crown prosecutor of Russia” (note: no such position exists) and Veselnitskaya, a connected Russian lawyer, had “very high level and sensitive information” that could damage the Clinton campaign.43 Trump Jr. responded that “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”44 The anti-Trump witch hunters have suggested this was collusive behavior, embracing damning revelations coming from a foreign government or source. But how is that any different than, say, receiving a dossier from a former British intelligence operative working on “opposition research” who claims to have former high-level Russian intelligence figures as “sources”?

  The Mueller report gives a thirteen-page play-by-play of the Trump Tower meeting. It also gives a thorough biography of Veselnitskaya. There are some redactions of the text in this section, but nowhere does it appear to mention that Veselnitskaya met with Glenn Simpson—the DNC and Clinton campaign operative who hired Christopher Steele to write the Trump-damaging dossier—for dinner both the night before and the night after the Trump Tower meeting. Why did they meet? Because Simpson and his company, Fusion GPS, were also working for Veselnitskaya. Simpson has claimed that he was unaware his Russian client had a meeting scheduled with the son of the Republican Party nominee for president. To me, this means that Veselnitskaya is a world-class poker player, that Simpson has severe memory issues, or that Simpson is lying.

  Remember, by June 9, Simpson had likely already engaged Steele—given that he told the Senate Judiciary Committee he hired Steele in “May or June”45—to gather intel on Team Trump. In the coming weeks, Steele would meet with Bruce Ohr and begin filing memos based on the dossier that alleges that Paul Manafort and Carter Page had secret meetings with Russian sources. The Trump Tower meeting appears, on the surface, to possibly corroborate those claims. It stands to reason that Simpson hoped and suspected that the FBI was, or would be, investigating whether Team Trump members were meeting with Russians—because that is the story Steele fed them. The Trump Tower June 9 meeting, then, could have been waved around as evidence. And that’s exactly how it was portrayed in the mainstream media. Once again, it provided the impression of possible wrongdoing.

  But if you want to talk about impressions, the connections between Simpson and Veselnitskaya and between Simpson and Steele seem much more damning. Veselnitskaya, a Russian with connections to Russian intelligence, met with the Trump team and then one month later, Steele filed reports about the Trump team’s meeting with the Russians. Isn’t that suspicious?

  Not, apparently, if you are the special counsel.

  There was one other Trump Tower meeting attendee with a strange set of connections that the Mueller report conveniently ignores: Rinat Akhmetshin, an alleged Russian-intelligence-connected lobbyist who was working with Veselnitskaya on behalf of Prevezon Holdings in an effort challenge the Magnitsky Act—the U.S. law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers—and trying to gain access to millions of dollars in Prevezon funds frozen by the U.S. government under the statute. While Akhmetshin’s alleged spy background seems to have been an ideal collusion conduit for Team Trump and the Russians, the initial impression appears to have been far from the actual truth. Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 14, 2017, he denied working in Russian counterintelligence and he shared his dislike of Trump—“I’m not a fan of the whole family”—and revealed that he had met Hillary Clinton in social settings and “knew some people who worked on her campaign.” He had plenty of other close connections to the candidate through his lawyer.46

  None of Akhmetshin’s Clinton connections or scorn for Trump are mentioned in the report’s rundown of the June 9 meeting. And that seems highly ironic: everyone made such a huge deal about Veselnitskaya having ties to Russia’s chief prosecutor and turning up at Trump Tower, but nobody gave a damn that a Clinton crony was sitting there too, listening to the team members discussing his acquaintance! The double standard is absurd.

  In the end, however, the Mueller report concludes that the Trump Tower meeting was much ado about nothing. All records relating to the meeting—including interviews, emails, and texts—show that no meaningful or damaging information about Hillary Clinton was exchanged. Mueller’s report also leaves out the myriad of connections between Konstantin Kilimnik and President Barack Obama’s State Department, where he served as a source of intelligence information. Who is Kilimnik, you ask? He’s the Paul Manafort associate whose frequent interactions with Manafort, and suspected Russian connections, are painted as nefarious in the Mueller report.

  Once again, what appeared to be a fire was only smoke.

  Speaking of illusions—or maybe I mean delusions—guess how many pages of the Mueller report contain the name Christopher Steele?

  Nine.

  Guess how many pages of the Mueller report evaluate the information that Christopher Steele provided to the FBI and in his well-publicized dossier?

  Zero.

  This is a truly fascinating omission. The man who provided the primary “evidence” used to obtain the FISA warrant and drive the entire Mueller investigation is barely mentioned in the investigation’s final report. This is Steele’s biggest cameo in the entire 448-page document:

  Several days later, BuzzFeed published unverified allegations compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the campaign about candidate Trump’s Russia connections under the headline “These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia.’’47

  Pretty much every other mention of Steele in the report is made in passing with a brief mention of the dossier. There is no exhumation, no analysis, and no detail about the credibility of Steele’s FBI reports or his dossier.

  There is also no mention of Glenn Simpson or Simpson’s firm Fusion GPS in the special counsel’s write-up. The man who I believe did more than anyone else to drive the Trump-Russia collusion story forward, the man who knew Manafort was dirty, the man who knew there was a script to follow and then directed it from the shadows—hiring Steele, unleashing him on the world, talking to DOJ officials and his journalist pals—does not substantively exist in the entire special counsel narrative.

  Think about that for a while.

  Once your outrage subsides, ask yourself what this absence means. Why has Glenn Simpson been airbrushed out of these events? Why is Christopher Steele nothing more than a passing figure?

  Because digging into Simpson and Steele’s work, as I have shown here, would mean digging into a series of politicized lies. And that would expose the FBI management cabal running the Trump investigation, the organization Mueller devoted so much of his life to, as a politically motivated group of swamp rats abusing their power. It would also expose the U.S. intelligence leaders under the Obama administration as politicized incompetents.

  And that was not Mueller and Rosenstein’s game. The special counsel was on a rescue mission. And the report was and is part and parcel of that mission.

  Thirty-five million dollars, 675 days, and 448 pages later, America still do
esn’t know whether Christopher Steele was fed misinformation by Russian intelligence.

  Thirty-five million dollars, 675 days, and 448 pages later, America still doesn’t know for certain the real reason the FBI relied so heavily on a discredited Christopher Steele’s information to advance the biggest hoax in American history.

  Thirty-five million dollars, 675 days, and 448 pages later, America still doesn’t know if what Simpson’s wife implied on Facebook is true—that he directed Steele in compiling the dossier.

  Thirty-five million dollars, 675 days, and 448 pages later, America has no idea whether the Steele dossier was the creation of Vladimir Putin’s counterintelligence division. All we know is that the raw information in the dossier that was fed to the FBI was almost all completely wrong and politically toxic.

  SINS OF OMISSION, PART TWO

  So much has been left out of the Mueller report that it is exhausting to document. But let me add a few more inconvenient truths that the legal sages knowingly skirted around. They are important because they reveal the full extent of the Mueller team’s efforts to foist a biased report on the public.

  The investigators devote a lengthy section of their wrap-up to Michael Cohen’s testimony to Congress. As the world now knows, Cohen, who was also convicted of tax fraud, making false statements to a bank, and campaign finance violations, pled guilty to lying to Congress on November 29, 2018, saying he “made these statements to be consistent with” Trump’s “political messaging and out of loyalty to Trump.”48

  When Cohen made those false statements, according to the Mueller report, he “understood Congress’s interest in him to be focused on the allegations in the Steele reporting concerning a meeting Cohen allegedly had with Russian officials in Prague during the campaign.”49

  We know that Steele’s truly alarming allegation about Prague—his claim that Trump sent Cohen to pay off Russian hackers—was false because Cohen had never traveled to Prague. But the report just ignores the Steele dossier’s fabricated claim of Trump collusion as if it were some tiny detail, mentioning the Czech Republic capital twice on a single page and essentially breezing over yet another false report from Steele.50 But this isn’t some trifling charge; it is a huge and frightening allegation that merges fact—the Russians were using hackers and cyberwarfare to influence the election—with the damaging fiction that Trump was colluding and funding the operation. Again, the Mueller team’s report makes a conscious effort to steer clear of the poisonous “information” that led to the entire investigation.

  One last thing on the Cohen section: I want to stress how the authors take pains to prosecute Trump in print.

  Before going over Cohen’s version of events in slow-mo, the Mueller report confirms that investigators found no evidence that Trump directly influenced or tried to influence Cohen’s congressional fibs.

  With regard to Cohen’s false statements to Congress, while there is evidence, described below, that the President knew Cohen provided false testimony to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow project, the evidence available to us does not establish that the President directed or aided Cohen’s false testimony.51

  Despite this conclusion, the report then delivers a forensic analysis of Cohen and Trump’s interactions and possible motivations. Even though the authors have just noted that nothing proves that Trump directed Cohen’s testimony, they go on to imply the exact opposite:

  …there is evidence that could support the inference that the President intended to discourage Cohen from cooperating with the government because Cohen’s information would shed adverse light on the President’s campaign-period conduct and statements.52

  This is one of the many times the authors convey wrongdoing on Trump’s part without convicting or even accusing him of anything. It is another example of calculated character assassination.

  Another major player in Russiagate, WikiLeaks, also goes under the microscope in the report. As has been widely documented, the controversial site published a huge trove of documents from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee that were, the report concludes, stolen by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. And early in the report, investigators state that Trump and the campaign “showed interest in WikiLeaks’s releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton.”53 Republican Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, however, got to the heart of the bogus collusion narrative during a TV interview on April 18, 2019, while discussing the Mueller report:

  No evidence is cited, however, showing WikiLeaks knew the GRU was behind the hacks. Or that the Trump team knew the Russians were behind the hack. WikiLeaks detested Hillary Clinton. Trump was facing Hillary Clinton in the presidential race.

  Just because two ships are both sailing in the same direction, it doesn’t mean they’ve agreed with one another to chart the same course. So here you got a circumstance where obviously Donald Trump Jr. wanted bad information about Hillary Clinton to be in the public sphere. Russia wanted the same thing. But there was no agreement for them to coordinate or collude or conspire to make that happen. That’s why we’re unable to charge Donald Trump Jr.

  If there was a meeting of the minds, if there was evidence to support those claims, then I think you would have seen a criminal indictment. But obviously, the people who wrote this report are no fans of the president. You had Andrew Weissmann, who was a Hillary Clinton booster. You had Jeannie Rhee, who represented the Clinton Foundation against FOIA requests.

  So this was a group of people who had an ax to grind. And though they couldn’t bring charges because they didn’t want to be—they couldn’t sustain them, they still wrote that stuff.54

  Gaetz got that 100 percent right. At the end of the day, despite certain commonalities, there is no evidence that WikiLeaks knew the source of the documents was the GRU or that Putin’s people were stirring the pot. And there is no evidence that Trump’s team knew the Russians had provided the documents to WikiLeaks.

  Conspiracy requires knowing the intent of others. While the writers of the report located communications from WikiLeaks personnel that make it clear that the organization wanted to cause Clinton harm, there is no direct line showing that WikiLeaks or the Trump campaign knew that Russia was behind the document dump.

  So what the report omits here is that the actions of three separate organizations were conflated by Christopher Steele and his dossier “sources” into one sinister, nonexistent conspiracy. And the FBI and the special counsel spent countless hours and cash running down this conflation and then refused to state the obvious: that distinct events and organizations had been accused of working together without any proof that they were. That conclusion is conveniently missing from the Mueller report.

  As I stated earlier, Russiagate and the resulting Mueller report owe their existence to a number of events: Glenn Simpson’s 2007 article and the subsequent plug-and-play anti-Trump operation; the politicized cesspool of the Obama administration; the firing of James Comey; and the fact that Trump was turning the status quo on its head. But perhaps no single event allowed Russiagate to spiral out of control more than Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from any and all investigations involving Russia and the Trump campaign.

  His punting the responsibility to Rod Rosenstein resulted in the appointment of Mueller and the sliced-and-diced 448-page document that omits key exculpatory evidence for Trump.

  The report’s authors delve into the actions that led to Sessions’s recusal—although they harness it to recount how the announcement of the special counsel led a despondent Trump to rant at his attorney general about how an investigation might cripple his administration. Still, Sessions comes out of the report looking like a wronged man, not so much by the president but by the media and investigators who could have cleared the air of collusion fears.

  With respect to Sessions’ statements that he did “not recall any
discussions with the Russian Ambassador…regarding the political campaign” and he had not been in contact with any Russian official “about the 2016 election,” the evidence concerning the nature of Sessions’ interactions with Kislyak makes it plausible that Sessions did not recall discussing the campaign with Kislyak at the time of his statements. Similarly, while Sessions stated in his January 2017 oral testimony that he “did not have communications with Russians,” he did so in response to a question that had linked such communications to an alleged “continuing exchange of information” between the Trump Campaign and Russian government intermediaries. Sessions later explained to the Senate and to the Office that he understood the question as narrowly calling for disclosure of interactions with Russians that involved the exchange of campaign information, as distinguished from more routine contacts with Russian nationals. Given the context in which the question was asked, that understanding is plausible.55

  And yet no mention is made of the firestorm of weaponized leaks and charges that forced Sessions to adopt his hands-off approach. The Never Trump outcry created a high-profile scandal where none should have ever existed. The Mueller report often supplies context when it wants to damn Trump or a campaign member. But in addressing the sequence of events behind the tarring and feathering of Jeff Sessions, very little context is applied beyond the reality of whether or not he lied about his contacts with Russians. The report concludes it is “plausible” he did not. It doesn’t mention a damn thing about all those who accused Sessions of lying, or why they wanted to taint him with the idea that he was hiding something about his relationship with Russia. Why is all that missing? Because examining the motives behind damaging Sessions would draw a direct line from a politicized anti-Trump movement to the creation of the special counsel’s investigation, the efforts to investigate obstruction charges and, ultimately, the report itself.

  No wonder Mueller didn’t provide context!

  I could go on identifying the gaslighting, the rewriting, the hypocritical and selective use of evidence and facts, and the lack of context in page after page of the special counsel’s report. But the ultimate takeaway is that what Attorney General William Barr wrote in his four-page overview of the report was 100 percent true. Despite their relentless cataloging of selective events, miscast intents, and blurry optics, the investigators “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”56 And “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”57