The Mueller Report

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The Mueller Report Apr 18, 2019 17:14:54 GMT

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Post by Admin on Apr 18, 2019 17:14:54 GMT

Mueller's office says it weighed charging Trump with obstruction, but didn't in part because "we recognized that a federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would place burdens on the President's capacity to govern and potentially preempt constitutional process for addressing presidential misconduct."

Special counsel Robert Mueller's lengthy report made public Thursday reviewed President Donald Trump's attempts to muddy the investigation, including efforts to tamper with witnesses, but decided not to charge the president with obstruction because there was no underlying crime and many of the attempts were carried out in plain view.

But Mueller said the decision not to charge Trump was a difficult one, and that it was not clear he was innocent of obstructing justice. If the special counsel's office had been certain that Trump did not commit crimes, Mueller said, it would have said so in the report.

Trump, the 448-page report reveals, was panicked when he first found out about Mueller's appointment, saying: "Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked," citing testimony from then Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff.

"How could you let this happen, Jeff?" Trump continued, telling Sessions something to the effect of, "You were supposed to protect me. ... This is the worst thing that ever happened to me."

Special counsel Robert Mueller's report on his investigation into Russian election interference was released publicly Thursday, with some redactions: www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/read-text-full-mueller-report-n994551

Last Edit: Apr 19, 2019 5:25:17 GMT by Admin

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The Mueller Report Apr 19, 2019 17:30:14 GMT

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Post by Admin on Apr 19, 2019 17:30:14 GMT

Julian Assange not only knew that a murdered Democratic National Committee staffer wasn’t his source for thousands of hacked party emails, he was in active contact with his real sources in Russia’s GRU months after Seth Rich’s death. At the same time he was publicly working to shift blame onto the slain staffer “to obscure the source of the materials he was releasing,” Special Counsel Robert Mueller asserts in his final report on Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.

“After the U.S. intelligence community publicly announced its assessment that Russia was behind the hacking operation, Assange continued to deny that the Clinton materials released by WikiLeaks had come from Russian hacking,” the report reads. “According to media reports, Assange told a U.S. congressman that the DNC hack was an ‘inside job,’ and purported to have ‘physical proof’ that Russians did not give materials to Assange.”

Thursday’s long-anticipated release adds new details about Assange’s interactions with the officers in Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate. Still, it leaves one question unanswered: Why was Assange so determined to exonerate the Russian intelligence agents who gave him the material?

As laid out by Mueller, Assange’s involvement in Russia’s election interference began with a June 14, 2016 direct message to WikiLeaks’ Twitter account from “DC Leaks,” one of the false fronts created by the Russians to launder their hacked material.

“You announced your organization was preparing to publish more Hillary's emails,” the message read, according to Mueller’s report. “We are ready to support you. We have some sensitive information too, in particular, her financial documents. Let's do it together. What do you think about publishing our info at the same moment? Thank you.”

A week later, WikiLeaks reached out to a second GRU persona, Guccifer 2.0, and pitched WikiLeaks as the best outlet for the hacked material. On July 14, 2016, GRU officers used a Guccifer 2.0 email address to send WikiLeaks an encrypted one-gigabyte file named “wk dnc link I .txt.gpg.” Assange confirmed receipt, and on July 22 he published 20,000 DNC emails stolen during the GRU’s breach.

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The Mueller Report Apr 19, 2019 17:53:32 GMT

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Post by Admin on Apr 19, 2019 17:53:32 GMT

Donald Trump lies all the time, and his administration officials often end up lying on this behalf.

We know this. We’ve known this since the day after his inauguration, when then-press secretary Sean Spicer gave an angry press conference insisting that Trump had record crowds to watch him get sworn in.

But it’s striking that the Mueller report — in which Spicer and his successor, Sarah Sanders, are peripheral figures at best — still manages to incidentally document at least seven instances of Trump’s press secretaries lying, four of them in the 24 hours after Trump summarily fired FBI Director James Comey on May 9, 2017.

These aren’t all the times that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report proves that Trump administration officials were lying, or even all the times it shows Sanders and Spicer were lying. It is limited to the cases in which the lie is noted in the report, as well as the truth it ended up obscuring.

If the Mueller report is a testimony to just how big the difference is between “unequivocally a crime” and “an okay thing to do” — and arguably it is — having your press people lie routinely and without apparent regret about important things is a pretty representative motif. No one would argue that what Spicer or Sanders are documented doing here is criminally chargeable, but it’s still bad for democracy.

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The Mueller Report Apr 21, 2019 3:56:42 GMT

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Post by Admin on Apr 21, 2019 3:56:42 GMT

Special counsel Robert Mueller's report offers further evidence that Julian Assange is a Russian intelligence agent.

Two elements stand out here. First, referencing redacted intelligence material, volume one, page 42 of the report states "information about Assange's computer and its possible operating system," in relation to the Russian GU/GRU's suspected transmission of seized John Podesta emails to Assange. This quote is in reference to Assange's computer at the Ecuadorian embassy in London (where Assange took refuge between 2012-2019).

Then comes volume one, page 46 of the report, which notes that "The [Special Counsel] was able to identify when the GRU (operating through its personas Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks) transferred some of the stolen documents to WikiLeaks through online archives set up by the GRU. Assange had access to the internet from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, England."

First, that Assange was personally in contact with the GRU in receiving the mail material that the GRU had seized. Second, as with other elements of the Trump-Russia investigation, that the redactions are almost certainly in protection of Britain's GCHQ (signal) or MI5 (domestic) intelligence services.

Yet, considering that Mueller's report also details Assange's repeated efforts to shield Russia as the sourcing agency for the hacked emails and notes Assange's disgusting effort to suggest that the source was actually the innocent murder victim Seth Rich, we are left with a simple, sustaining question: As I asked last week, why wasn't Assange charged as having conspired with Russian intelligence officers to illegally attack the U.S. election in 2016?

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The Mueller Report Apr 25, 2019 17:34:58 GMT

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Post by Admin on Apr 25, 2019 17:34:58 GMT

Mueller discloses no evidence of any personal involvement from Trump pertaining to Russian contacts from George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Carter Page, or Jeff Sessions. He found “no documentary evidence” that Trump was aware of his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer beforehand.

And, of course, Mueller found no conspiracy between Trump and Russian government officials to interfere with the election — and his report does not give off the impression that he was anywhere close to making such a charge.

Rather than any super-spy conspiracy involving the highest levels of the Trump campaign, then, the Mueller report seems to tell a story of a series of disorganized contacts, missed opportunities — and, occasionally, outright bullshit.

What Trump was personally involved in
The Mueller report’s first volume, on Russian interference with the election, covers a host of events, but only goes into detail about Donald Trump’s personal role in three of them.

1) Trump Tower Moscow: Michael Cohen told Mueller that while Trump was running for president in 2015 and 2016, he approved Cohen’s effort to get a Trump Tower built in Moscow. Cohen said that “on several occasions,” Trump would bring up the project and ask for updates. At one point, Cohen reached out to Vladimir Putin’s press secretary’s office to try to advance the project; he then briefed Trump on the ensuing conversation, he says.

In May 2016 — when Trump was the Republican nominee-in-waiting — Cohen says Trump told him he’d be willing to travel to Russia if that could nail down the deal. That summer, after Trump publicly denied having anything to do with Russia, he checked in with Cohen on the status of the Moscow project, Cohen says. In the end, Cohen was unsuccessful in moving the project forward and it fizzled out that summer.

None of this was criminal, but the details of Trump’s long-running interest in this potentially “highly lucrative” Moscow business deal cast new light on what might have been motivating his unusually warm words for Putin on the campaign trail.

2) WikiLeaks and Roger Stone: Did Donald Trump have some sort of inside information on WikiLeaks’ plans to release hacked Democratic emails? We still don’t know, because this is one of the most heavily redacted sections in the report — though what we can see of it makes clear that this section describes conversations Trump had with his advisers.

The redactions apparently hide references to Roger Stone, so as not to prejudice his upcoming trial. Prosecutors have alleged that Stone tried to get in touch with Julian Assange in the summer of 2016 in order to get ahold of future WikiLeaks releases related to Clinton. But while the indictment against Stone presented some evidence that he learned the group had leaks related to John Podesta coming, it didn’t attempt to tell the whole story of what he knew.

That whole story — at least as far as Mueller could nail it down — appears to be in pages 51 through 59 of the report’s first volume. And the unredacted bits there have several references to Trump, Cohen, Rick Gates, and Paul Manafort discussing WikiLeaks, apparently with or about Stone.

Last Edit: Apr 25, 2019 17:35:39 GMT by Admin