What Did Mueller Know and When Did He Know It?

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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
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Robert Mueller by DonkeyHotey, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

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The Mueller investigation is basically over and all the Left/Democrats and the NeverTrumpians have left are really weak and inept attempts to read into his report, as summarized by Attorney General William Barr, facts that are not there.  They will parse words and wonder what really appears before a bracketed statement, but the fact remains there was no conspiracy or anything else regarding the Trump campaign and Russia.  If the Trump campaign/administration/Trump himself had no crime which to obstruct the administration of justice, there can be no obstruction of justice either.

Trump was wise not to fire Mueller when you think about it.  Perhaps he knew that there was no conspiracy with Russian agents and that was the only conclusion Mueller would have to come to and that he would be exonerated in the end.  In fact, that may be why he is taking his victory lap right now.  Along the the very long trail to this point, we heard how great a guy Mueller was and that he was above reproach.  The Democrats put a lot of stock in that belief so to now turn against him because he did not deliver the goods they were expecting would reveal them for the huckster frauds they are.  So, instead they attempt to kill the messenger, in this case Barr.

Although Mueller eventually delivered a determination that most knew logic, evidence and the law would lead, however, does not make him above reproach.  The whole underlying basis of this investigation was that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russian cyber-espionage efforts.  In the end, we discovered that there was no evidence that Trump or his surrogates were involved in Putin’s hacking and propaganda campaigns.  The reason is simple: Putin and the Russians are quite adept at political cyber-espionage.  They did not need nor did they want American help.  Their efforts occurred before Trump entered the campaign and some of their efforts were anti-Trump.

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In effect, the Mueller probe took over the counterintelligence operation started by the FBI into the Trump campaign.  That original operation, however, was baseless because of the prime evidence of collusion, no matter how defined, since it was based on the now discredited Steele dossier.

The whole Mueller thing started on May 9, 2017 when Trump fired Comey from the FBI.  Eight days later on May 17 Mueller was appointed special counsel in the investigation.  The appointment of Mueller wrested control of the investigation from Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI director at the time.  For nearly a year prior to Mueller’s appointment, the FBI had vainly tried to corroborate the Steele dossier without much, if any, success.  In Congressional testimony, FBI officials and investigators admitted as much even though they on three occasions used that very dossier to obtain FISA warrants.

In every application for such a warrant, the DOJ asserted:

The FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election were being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with [Donald Trump’s] campaign.

They made these assertions even after Trump was sworn in.  In June, 2017- soon after Mueller was sworn in as special counsel and was not fully up to speed- the DOJ went to the FISA court and obtained a fourth warrant (each warrant lasts 90 days).  They yet again used the Steele dossier and yet again failed to notify the court that it was compiled on behalf of the Clinton campaign.  They also failed to reveal to the FISA court that Steele himself had been less than truthful with the FBI regarding his media contacts.

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So here we are in June 2017.  Mueller has taken over the investigation.  The DOJ has a fourth FISA warrant in hand.  Two months later, Mueller has to relieve one of his lead investigators- Peter Strozk- over text messages between he and Lisa Page, a top FBI official who served as McCabe’s counsel.  Page has resigned earlier in May.  Meanwhile, the FBI’s top counsel, James Baker, was reassigned and later resigned.  McCabe came under investigation for leaking details of the investigation and then lied about it and then was eventually fired.

By the end of August 2017, most of those within the FBI and DOJ who were pushing the collusion angle with the FISA court were sidelined one way or another.  In September, the fourth FISA warrant comes up for renewal.  By this time, Mueller’s investigative machinery is up and running.  Yet, Mueller decides NOT to seek renewal of the FISA warrant which was issued for the ostensible reason he was appointed in the first place.

It becomes obvious at this point that Mueller’s investigators were more skeptical of the Steele dossier and certainly found it not worthy of renewing a FISA warrant.  Hence, they did not seek renewal of the warrant because there was just nothing there.  In order to obtain the warrant, the DOJ must prove there was probable cause to believe that Carter Page- the target of the warrant- was an agent of Russia and involved in an illegal act, like espionage or coordinating hacking activity.  Yet despite it all, this assertion was made four times based on the Steele dossier which the DOJ swore by.  Still, Mueller charged Carter Page with absolutely nothing.

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When Mueller closed his investigation recently, he knew for almost a year that there was no collusion, coordination, conspiracy or even obstruction of justice, unless one wants to stretch the definition of “obstruction of justice.”  Any indictments his investigation did bring actually exonerate the Trump campaign/administration.

Still, the investigation continued.  Mueller and his team made no interim announcement or public determination that no collusion existed.  Meanwhile, Trump’s detractors continued to make claims that Trump was a tool of the Kremlin and distracted the administration from the jobs and goals Trump was elected to do.  From at least September 2017 to March 2019, the Trump administration was forced to operate under a cloud of suspicion and claims of illegitimacy.

Further, there are reports that as of August 2018- more than a year after his appointment- Mueller had definitive proof that the Trump campaign did not collude with the Russians to sway the election of 2016.  So the question now is why did Mueller wait until after the 2018 midterm elections to make public what he knew at least three months prior to the midterm elections?

As everyone is aware, the Democrats running in the midterms were using these fabricated lies about Trump in their campaign platforms.  They won and they won big at the expense of Republicans on the back of a massive lie that Mueller knew was a lie well before the midterms.

So although Mueller is ultimately the person who exonerates Trump, his campaign, his family members and his administration in this fabricated hoax more byzantine than anything Jussie Smollet can cook up in his demented mind, he too has a ton of explaining to do.  Specifically, when did he know there was no evidence of collusion?  More importantly, why did he sit on this conclusion until now?

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In this writer’s eyes, Mueller is as tainted and dirty as all the scum in the DOJ and FBI who foisted this hoax upon the country.  To the this writer, the saint sleeps with demons.

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