Ten Questions About the Mueller Report
May 6, 2019
Daniel Lazare examines some of the missing pieces in the special counsel's
448-page tome on Russian interference.
By Daniel Lazare
Special to Consortium News
In January 2017, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a
report about Russian interference co-signed by three other agencies - the
National Security Agency, the FBI, and the CIA - that was so evidence-free
that even The New York Times said it was "unlikely to change the minds of
skeptics who . remember the intelligence agencies' faulty assessments on
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction."
"We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in
2016," the report stated. "We also assess Putin and the Russian Government
aspired to help President-elect Trump. . We assess with high confidence
that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence
Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release
U.S. victim data.."
That was it. No back-up, no substantiation, no analysis other than to point
out that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton were on bad
terms and that Russia hoped for better from Trump. Moreover, the report
included a bizarre seven-page attack on RT, the Moscow-backed news outlet
formerly known as Russia Today, for "highlight[ing] criticism of alleged
U.S. shortcomings" by asserting, among other things, "that the U.S.
two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the
population and is a 'sham.'" If Clapper & Co. couldn't tell the difference
between a news agency from a hostile intelligence service - or between
legitimate criticism and a foreign attack - then what good was their
judgment regarding other Russian government activities?
Putin and Trump: Impugned by intel. (President of Russia)
But with Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's 448-page tome on Russian
interference, surely we've turned a corner, right?
Wrong. Mueller's door-stopper of a report may be chockfull of facts, but
it's also filled with the non sequiturs, loose threads and self-serving
arguments that we've come to expect from official Washington. It's good on
collusion, pointing out that reports of a Trump-Russia conspiracy remain
unsubstantiated despite desperate Democratic efforts to spin it otherwise.
But it's lousy on interference, regurgitating the standard
intelligence-community line that Russia "interfered in the 2016 presidential
election in sweeping and systematic fashion." Simultaneously, it is
remarkably incurious about how the scandal began, who propelled it along,
and how it all snowballed into a mega-Watergate.
With that in mind, here are 10 questions that the report should answer but
doesn't.
No. 1: Was it Bernie in a Speedo?
Stretch: "Trillions of posts." (YouTube)
In its discussion of the Internet Research Agency, the alleged St.
Petersburg troll farm that supposedly used social media to interfere in the
2016 election, the report quotes congressional testimony by Facebook General
Counsel Colin Stretch stating that the company had linked the Internet
Research Agency to 470 phony accounts that "collectively made 80,000 posts
between January 2015 and August 2017" that may have "reached as many as 126
million persons."
This sounds alarming. But that's not all Stretch said. He also testified
that American Facebook users received a total of 33 trillion posts over the
same period, a figure more than 400 million times greater. With a typical
user receiving roughly 220 posts per day, he estimated that 29 million
people may have come across one IRA item over more than two years and that
each recipient may have then passed along to three or four others - hence
the figure of 126 million. (See Gareth Porter, "33 Trillion More Reasons
Why The New York Times Gets It Wrong on Russia-gate," Nov. 2, 2018.)
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What might that item have been? Could it have been a cartoon of a
muscle-bound Bernie Sanders in a Speedo? A picture of Jesus arm-wrestling
with a pro-Hillary Satan? Why doesn't the report mention the strange and
inept material the Internet Research Agency put out or the less sensational
figures issued by Facebook? Is it because Mueller wants to perpetuate the
myth of massive Russian interference - the kind of interference, by the way,
in which the U.S. engages with other countries around the clock?
No. 2: Partial Accounting?
The report says that 3,814 Twitter accounts controlled by the Internet
Research Agency may also have reached 1.4 million users. This also sounds
scary. But what the report doesn't say is that while the Internet Research
Agency allegedly posted 176,000 tweets during the 10-week presidential
campaign, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the one billion
election-related messages that Americans tweeted overall. Why not cite that
number too?
(rawpixel.com/ Pexels)
No. 3: Just Another Clickbait Operation?
The report notes that only 8.4 percent of IRA tweets were election-related.
If so, what does Mueller think the other 91.6 percent were about? Could it
be that IRA was not an intelligence agency after all, but, as it's been
argued, a "clickbait" operation aimed at drumming up business?
No. 4: Under-Cover Hoopla?
The report discusses Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Internet Research
Agency, saying that "IRA employees, claiming to be U.S. social activists and
administrators of Facebook groups, recruited U.S. persons to hold signs
(including one in front of the white House) that read 'Happy 55thBirthday
Dear Boss,' as an homage to Prigozhin (whose 55thbirthday was on June 1,
2016)." What kind of intelligence operation calls attention to itself in
such a flamboyant manner? Is this yet more evidence that the Internet
Research Agency was something entirely different?
Prigozhin: Birthday boy. (YouTube)
No. 5: Investigation by News Clip?
Although last summer's indictment of the Internet Research Agency was silent
on the question of Russian involvement in Prigozhin's alleged activities,
the Mueller report argues that his Kremlin links are strong after all. The
evidence: a New York Times article, "Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian Oligarch
Indicted by US., Is Known as 'Putin's Cook.'" After nearly two years, is
this all that 19 attorneys and 40 FBI agents working for Mueller could come
up with - a newspaper clip?
No. 6: Another Source on GRU Hack?
"By no later than April 12, 2016," the report continues, "the GRU gained
access to the DCCC [i.e. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee]
computer network using the credential stolen from a DCCC employee who had
been successfully spearphished the day before." How does team Mueller know
what the GRU was up to when the Democratic National Committee refused to
grant the FBI access to its computers? Does he have another source he's not
telling us about?
No. 7: More on Mifsud?
The report's discussion of Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud is strikingly
incomplete. After all, it was Mifsud who got Russia-gate rolling by telling
President Donald Trump's foreign-policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, over
breakfast at a London hotel that Russia had "dirt" on Hilary Clinton in the
form of "thousands of emails." It was this tip, which Papadopoulos relayed
to top Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, that prompted the formal FBI
investigation known as "Crossfire Hurricane" when word reached Washington.
Mifsud: Major figure minimized. (Flickr)
This makes Mifsud an important guy. Yet the report says little about him
other than he "maintained various Russian contacts while living in London"
and that one such contact was a former employee of the Internet Research
Agency. Yet abundant evidence suggests that Mifsud in fact enjoyed
extensive ties to Western intelligence.
Stephan Roh, a Swiss-German lawyer who hired him as a consultant, writes in
a self-published book that Mifsud has "only one master: the Western
Political, Diplomatic, and Intelligence World, his only home, of which he is
still deeply dependent." Photographs have surfaced of Mifsud with British
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and with Claire Smith, a top British
intelligence official with whom he taught a course for Italian military and
law-enforcement personnel at a private institute in Rome that Roh partly
owns.
British and Russian intelligence agents normally do not team up in such a
manner. So why doesn't Mueller mention such links? The report also notes
that Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to an attractive young woman named Olga
Polonskaya, whom he falsely billed as Putin's niece and who offered to help
set up a meeting between Trump and the Russian president.
But why would Mifsud go to such lengths? Isn't Mueller curious as to
whether he was trying to lead Papadopoulos into a trap? Or is this another
avenue he doesn't want to go down in order to maintain a narrative about
evil Russians targeting a hapless west?
The report doesn't mention Downer by name and also doesn't mention
Christopher Steele, the ex-MI6 agent whose 35-page "golden showers" dossier
on Trump's alleged Russia links created a media frenzy. It also doesn't
mention that The Washington Post reported that the "golden showers" section
was written by a Clinton operative. Since Steele is as crucial to the story
as Mifsud or Downer, shouldn't we know more about him as well - who
recruited him, who provided him advice along the way, who fed him
information?
No. 8: Something Missing on Millian?
Sergei Millian: Steele source. (YouTube)
On the other hand, the report devotes two pages to Sergei Millian, the
Belarus-American who may also have tried to lure Papadopoulos into a trap by
offering to "share with you a disruptive technology that might be
instrumental in your political work for the campaign." But it fails to
mention that Millian was simultaneously a source for the Steele Dossier. A
connection like this fairly cries out for an investigation. Yet Mueller is
apparently uninterested - why?
No. 9: Failure to Inform on Sater?
Felix Sater: More than a mobster. (YouTube)
Mueller likewise neglects to mention that Felix Sater, the Russian-American
mobster pushing Trump Tower Moscow, was an FBI informant and that Henry
Oknyansky, a Russian expatriate who tried to interest the Trump campaign in
still more dirt on Clinton, was as well. Why the reticence?
No. 10: Eavesdropping on Next Administration?
After President Barack Obama slapped sanctions on Russia for alleged
election interference in December 2016, the report says: "Members of the
intelligence community were surprised by Russia's decision not to retaliate.
When analyzing Russia's response, they became aware of [future National
Security Adviser Michael] Flynn's discussions of sanctions with [Russian
ambassador Sergey] Kislyak."
How did intelligence agents become aware of such discussions? Were they
listening in? Is Mueller at all concerned that intelligence agencies were
apparently eavesdropping on an incoming presidential administration?
One could go on - about the report's dubious attempts to paint WikiLeaks as
an arm of the GRU (see my story, "The 'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full
Report," April 18, 2019), about the thin evidence the report marshals in its
effort to brand Paul Manafort's associate Konstantin Kilimnik a Russia spy
(volume one, p. 133), about the FBI's attempt to use the defunct Logan Act -
a two-century old law banning private diplomacy that has been dormant since
1852 - to launch an investigation into Flynn (volume two, p. 37), and so on.
But the point should be clear. The Mueller report is an exercise in
disinformation. It generates more questions than answers about what may
well have been an effort to sabotage U.S.-Russian relations and cripple the
White House.
"I can't do anything with Russia," Trump complained after two months in
office. "There's things I'd like to do with Russia, with trade, with ISIS,
they're all over me with this." Did it occur to Mueller that this is just
the sort of policy paralysis that a phony Russia-gate scandal was designed
to achieve?
Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is
Paralyzing Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American
politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The
Nationto Le Monde Diplomatiqueand blogs about the Constitution and related
matters at Daniellazare.com.
