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Read the Mueller Report
Attorney General Bill Barr released the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller today. Here it is so you can read it and draw your own conclusions.
Let us know in the comments what you think.
Fox News has also uploaded the report to Scribd, which you can view below. This may take up to a few minutes to load on your device, however.
Mueller Report by Fox News on Scribd
Published in Politics
Not being indicted is the lowest bar I’ve ever seen for declaring somebody a good guy. All that means is that they either didn’t finish recruiting him, or that they did but the FBI didn’t collect enough evidence that he conducted any espionage yet on their behalf. Heck, that’s probably exactly why they started surveilling him – to find out which of the two it was!
I was talking about the leaking part.
Are you joking? The entire first section of the Mueller report is about all of the Russian interference efforts, not about the Trump campaign. Mueller didn’t “decide to focus on Donald Trump”. He was given a job with two parts: find out what the Russians did to interfere with the election, and find out what if anything the Trump campaign did to facilitate it. He did both jobs, and in so doing gave the Trump campaign a clean bill of health. What more do you want?
Yet somehow you desperately want to avoid the Steele Dossier, just as Mueller did in the first section. You want to avoid asking how it was used; any questions about the origin of the investigation; what Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe etc were up, to any question of the involvement of the Clinton campaign. Wait, I already know your response – that’s about Americans trying to impact the election, not Russians, so out of scope!
It is true. Listen to The Byron York Show #6.
I don’t “desperately want to avoid the Steele Dossier”. I just don’t care about it. I care about the truth – and therefore only care about the parts of the dossier that are true. It’s one of the reasons I never bothered to read it when it was first released. I knew it was unverified and full of scurrilous and baseless accusations, and so I didn’t bother. Whereas I’m reading the Mueller report from cover to cover (though hampered by the fact that I’m on vacation and therefore have little time between watching the kids).
Well, yes, it is out of scope. Mueller is given a specific job to do, and you want him to go charging off and investigating whatever he likes instead? If you want an investigation into whether the FBI and DOJ did anything inappropriate – it looks like you’ll get your wish. But you can’t blame Mueller for not doing it, because that wasn’t what he was tasked with doing.
I said FBI, DOJ and Mueller – go back and read Rosenstein’s original scope letter to Mueller.
It is claimed to be true by one of Trump’s lawyers, who was not personally a member of the investigation. That makes three reasons not to take the claim at face value.
If it is, it wasn’t mentioned in Mueller’s charter. Why not? Why didn’t Mueller turn down the assignment, given the lack of statutory authority due to lack of an identified crime to investigate?
But the point remains.
At its heart, the Trump-Russia probe was about one question:
Did the Trump campaign conspire, coordinate, or collude with Russia to influence the 2016 election?
Mueller concluded that did not happen.
Mueller should have submitted a report as soon as he reached that conclusion. Volume II of his report is all [eight letter word that violates the Code of Conduct, the same eight letter word that is in the Byron York column of April 18, 2019].
I’m only objecting to your inclusion of “Mueller” in that trio. If you want to criticize the FBI and DOJ, I’m in no position to argue against that. (Though the Mueller report does seem to make it clear that the FBI had a prior, ongoing investigation into the IRA’s interference independent of the Trump situation.)
The scope for Rosenstein allowed Mueller to investigate:
“any matters that arose, or might arise directly from the investigation”
So Mueller had the discretion to investigate that once he knew the Steele Dossier was unverifiable and used in obtaining the Page warrant. He had the ability to investigate the leaks, often inaccurate, from the FBI and DOJ. He had the ability to investigate whether Clapper told Congress the truth when he denied leaking the Steele Dossier. He had the ability to investigate why Comey tried to dissuade Trump from asking the FBI to investigate the dossier. He had the ability to investigate whether there had been any FBI or intelligence agency investigation going on prior to July 31, 2016 and the justification for it. Any number of things. After all, that was the clause he used to investigate Trump for obstruction.
He chose not to. I believe because of his desire, based on his past history, to protect the FBI and DOJ along with the desire of he and his team to get Trump. That is my surmise. I think the promised investigations will help determine if that is true.
There’s no statute governing the special counsel’s activities – not since the independent counsel’s remit expired. It’s entirely an internal procedural matter of the structure of the FBI. The FBI can give whatever investigations it likes to the special counsel – whether we’re talking about a criminal investigation or a counterintelligence investigation. In this case, it’s the latter.
Surely you must be aware that the investigation wasn’t conducted in the order that the report is written down.
Would approving of surveillance of someone who was only approached by someone who turned out to be an intelligence agent qualify as a higher bar? I’d put it a great deal lower.
You didn’t answer the other question. Why would the Russians want to use someone whom they should avoid like the plague in order to conduct “collusion?” Who do you send to make contact? A new guy? Better be expendable then. Don’t send the boss’ nephew. Send Sergei from Accounting: we’ll never miss him if he gets burned.
Given that it was the basis for this whole two-year circus, you really should care about it. And about the fact that it was complete and utter bulwarky.
You can’t be serious. Of course there’s a statute governing the Special Counsel’s appointment. (Why you wrote “activities I have no idea). If there were no statute governing the Special Counsel (as well as the DoJ and the FBI) then all of its activities would be extralegal. No matter which statute it is, the implementing regulations for appointment of a Special Counsel require the identification of a crime. No crime was identified in Mueller’s appointment.
What part of “the Trump-Russia probe was about one question” don’t you understand?
The one question was answered well before the end of 2017. For those paying attention, it was answered before that.
I want to correct something in what I wrote, based upon reviewing some additional documents (including the Papadapolous testimony to the House Intelligence Committee) relating to this sentence above:
P was indeed contacted out of the blue by what he says were two individuals at the embassy who apparently worked for DIA. However, the suggestion to meet with Thompson came from an Israeli embassy contact of P’s. That meeting did occur on May 6 and at that meeting P is alleged to have told Thompson about the Russians having thousands of Hillary emails, information he received from Mifsud. It was Thompson who suggested they meet with her boss, Downer, which occurred on May 10.
My questions remain relevant.
I did answer the other question, obliquely. Page is incidental at best to the Buryakov et al. complaint, appearing in only 3 of the 74 paragraphs, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that he “cooperated with the FBI” – that idea was made up by the Townhall article out of whole cloth. Therefore there’s no reason that the Russians should “avoid him like the plague”.
The basis for “this whole two-year circus” was Papadopoulos’s meeting with the Australian ambassador, the unrelated years-long investigation into IRA activities, and Trump’s inability to open his mouth without lying. The Steele Dossier could be eliminated from history and it wouldn’t have changed anything about how the investigation progressed. The obsession with it is inherently dishonest.
Statutes govern the general purpose of an organization; Congress doesn’t write out in law literally every aspect of how the organizational tree is structured. The independent counsel statute expired in 1999 and was not replaced by anything; therefore, the law returned to the way it was prior to the independent counsel’s existence, namely, there’s no statute governing it.
Put it this way: If the FBI investigates a run-of-the-mill kidnapping, there’s no law that governs exactly how it’s supposed to pick who runs that investigation. It can pick anybody it wants fairly freely. The only difference between that and a special counsel is that the special counsel is designed to be specifically independent of influence from the higher-ups in the Executive Branch, because it’s investigating the Executive Branch itself. Throughout history, the structure of the special counsel has been handled solely by internal FBI regulations; it was only governed by statute for the short period 1978-1999.
There are two things wrong with this.
First of all, the FBI’s remit includes countersurveillance matters that are not always necessarily criminal in nature; there’s no reason you can’t appoint a special counsel for those matters.
Second of all, there was the identification of a crime: many of them, in fact, mostly related to Russian hacking and impersonation and illegal influence in the election. The “Prosecution and Declination Decisions” part of the report lists the relevant crimes in detail. The Russians attempted to interfere in our electoral process (the campaign finance section on page 184 is particularly relevant to explaining the reasoning behind needing to investigate such things thoroughly), and Mueller was tasked with investigate that. How can you claim that there was no crime here?
The part where the probe was responsible for extensively investigated the IRA’s activities, which did not involve Trump in any way and involved many crimes committed by Russian nationals and organizations. Also the part where the probe was responsible for extensively investigating whether Trump’s attempts to kneecap the investigation amounted to obstruction of justice, which is a question that needs to be answered regardless of whether there collusion.
So I suppose the part of that sentence that I don’t understand is the same part I don’t understand in the sentence “2+2=690” – namely, the part where it’s patently false.
Wrong.
@danielsterman, it seems you are stating that Republicans and Trump, whom you accuse of lying and whatever else you can slip into your dialogue, as long as it is demeaning, should stop any further investigation and consider ourselves lucky that our President was not proven to be a traitor.’This is the best we will get’, is your point, I believe. However, it doesn’t seem that the Democrats have anywhere near the same intention. So, in light of the behavior by the previous administration in using his IC and Justice departments to spy on the opposing Party’s campaign, coming up empty, you want to quit right when we can turn the tables. I hope you do not believe this “investigation” has been purely intended and run by angels searching for truth. They are part of an opposing team that includes the media, the Democrat Party, and the previous administration who have been doing everything possible to throw our duly elected President out, and if they can’t do that, make it nearly impossible for him to run his administration. We now have a chance to turn the tables. We finally are in a strong position to uncover the origins and show that the predicate for accusing Trump of treasonous behavior were non existent. That the real lawbreakers were men and women of the previous administration who were determined to not let Trump win, and when he did, to not let him succeed. Now is not the time to “quit while we’re ahead” unless you are actually wanting to lose the Presidency in 2020. Now is the time to step on the throttle and show the American people how badly they have been misled these past two and one half years.
Incorrect. I’m not saying you shouldn’t investigate whether or not there were improprieties. I’m saying we should be very very careful about how we describe the events leading up to what happened, so that we don’t sound like conspiracy-mongering lunatics, and so we don’t make accusations with no basis with reality, and so we don’t twist facts and lie.
For example,
I want to pursue truth. That’s all I want – truth above all. I’m obviously not getting it from the Left, but I used to be able to get it from the Right. But not since Trump took over.
I’d say you are wrong on all four points–including “And so on” but I’ll just leave it here for you to pursue your truth…and wish you well in doing so.
Bleah! Need an antidote, stat!