What We've Learned From the Mueller Report So Far

Saturday, April 6, 2019

Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

You wouldn't know that, however, from the breathless editorializing of Mueller's findings by a media industry which not only hasn't seen those findings, but which depends for its present understanding on the supposed summary offered by Trump's Attorney General, who is himself a conflicted and compromised figure in relation to the Special Counsel. Here's how AG Barr described Mueller's findings regarding Russian collusion:

The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

If we take this description at face value, Barr is stating that Mueller was unable to establish conspiracy or coordination between Trump and Russia during the election. While Barr describes the evidentiary standard for obstruction of justice as being beyond a reasonable doubt, no such standard is enumerated here, leaving the question of what constitutes establishment open. It is worth remembering here that the collusion investigation began as a counter-intelligence operation, which does not have a prosecutorial aim, nor are questions of espionage and state security settled on through standards applicable to criminal law.

Nevertheless, major media outlets have been nearly unanimous in their conclusion that as it pertains to collusion, the Mueller investigation found no evidence at all:

MSNBC - Mueller Report: No evidence of collusion between Trump, Russia

CNN - Trump claims vindication after Mueller finds no evidence of collusion

BBC - Mueller Report: No Evidence of Collusion

Today - Mueller finds no evidence of Trump collusion with Russia

NY Times - Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy

US News - Mueller Finds No Evidence Trump Team Colluded With Russia

NPR - Mueller Report Finds No Evidence Of Russian Collusion

Elsewhere, the New York Times described the Report as concluding that Trump did not conspire with Putin, and that Mueller's investigation failed to find any links between Putin and Trump. Farhad Manjoo states unequivocally that there was no collusion, the Washington Post concludes Trump was exonerated by Mueller, Jeffrey Toobin describes the report as a total vindication of Trump on collusion, CNN claims Trump was cleared of collusion charges, and Matt Taibbi compares "Russiagate" with the WMD fiasco in Iraq.

All of this - every last bit, from the most respected and successful mainstream media sources - is dead wrong. There simply is no way to conclude from the decision of Special Counsel not to indict Trump or his family, or from Barr's description of Mueller's findings, that Trump has been cleared, exonerated, and most universally but also most questionably, that no evidence was discovered by the investigation of Trump's collusion with Russia. Not only is this a non-sequitur in that it does not follow from the findings of the Report as we currently understand them, but it outright contradicts the facts as we have long known them.

Coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia was public, explicit, and highly corroborated. We all watched Trump call on Russia to help his campaign, and it subsequently came to light that Russia redoubled its efforts to hack the DNC immediately following Trump's televised plea. This was a clear violation of Federal election law, which carries a penalty of up to five years in prison, a fact which has gone almost entirely unremarked by these same media outlets. Trump's campaign manager is known to have shopped his access to Trump in an effort to "get whole" in his relationship to a Russian oligarch known to be close to Putin and the FSB, explicitly tying Manafort's financial circumstances to the campaign and the campaign to Russian money. Wilbur Ross was formerly the president of a bank in Cyprus suspected of laundering Russian oligarch money into the EU, defeating sanctions against Putin's inner circle. Deutsche Bank is long thought to have similar ties to Russian money, and as Don Jr. publicly admitted the importance of Russian money to the Trump family fortune, and as this Russian involvement occurred during a time in which only Deutsche Bank would lend to Trump, there is definite evidence to suggest a long term and deep relationship between Russian oligarchs and Trump. Donald's efforts at building a Trump Tower in Moscow and his lies regarding it establish motive for such collusion above and beyond mere political gain, as well as awareness of guilt, and thus of intent.

Consciousness of guilt can be demonstrated in Trump's and Kushner's secret communications with Russian intelligence assets, both before and after having become president, as well as his secret talks with Putin. That these meetings were often followed by major policy reversals by Trump on Russia related issues, particularly economic sanctions, US military alliances in Europe and Asia, US policies toward individual Russian companies associated with Manafort, and of course the major overriding issue of American adoption of Russian infants, the Trumpian quid for the Russian quo is materially, objectively evidenced.

To have any semblance of coherence, to say nothing of objectivity, the Mueller Report must detail each of these aspects of the Russiagate narrative and demonstrate why they do not amount to evidence that the House of Representatives might consider sufficient to indict the President of high crimes and misdemeanors. It is not clear from Barr's so-called summary of Mueller's findings that the Report does this, or that it in any way exonerates Trump from secret and unlawful coordination with Russia. What is clear, however, is that by failing to pursue indictments against Kushner or Don Jr., or to personally interview Trump, that Mueller declined to pursue the case to its logical ends. This is despite Mueller's reputation for thoroughness and detail. This just five weeks after Barr became AG, and a mere two weeks before Mueller delivered his initial findings to Barr in which he outlined the inability to establish collusion.

Thus even if we accept Barr's "summary" we must also conclude that Mueller feels he is unable to pursue an indictment of Trump for violation of FEC law, despite the violation having been made on television, before a national audience, in which he explicitly solicited help for his campaign from foreign nationals. We must conclude that Trump's aberrant personal behavior and policy decisions regarding Russia, from which Putin stands to benefit greatly, cannot be considered a reward for Russia's hacking of the DNC following Trump's request for this illegally obtained information, and that this arrangement cannot be considered coordination. We must conclude that the extensive financial ties between Trump and Russia, which might well have been all that stood between Trump and financial ruin, do not constitute motive. More than all that, according to media outlets from the New York Times to the Washington Post to the Guardian, we are too believe that none of this offers any evidence of collusion, of a secret agreement to promote each others interests, between Trump and Putin. If we do not, if we cling to the idea that our lying eyes do in fact perceive evidence, then we are as hopelessly compromised by ideology as the press was during the run up to the war in Iraq, believing as it did that Hussein did harbor WMD to some extent. And this is supposed to signify not just ideological devotion, but blindness to the facts. We are expected, in other words, not to believe what we see, but what the state and its media enablers tell us we should see. Which is nothing, nothing at all. Nada. Zilch.

Only problem is, there were WMD stockpiles in Iraq , Hussein was in material breach of UN Resolution 1441, and legal authority for the response was delineated to the US and its Coalition allies there. Yet today everyone just knows there were no WMD, the war was illegal, that Hussein only wanted to look tough, just as Trump lies about Russian coincidence (collusion, coordination, conspiracy) because it is his nature, rather than in an effort to defraud and subvert American democracy in order to enrich and empower himself. That's just not like him at all, and only the ideologically blind would cling to such a tenuous belief.

If you feel you've suddenly awoken in a Truffaut science fiction film, you're not alone.

B&B orig: 3/25/19, TJ post