Investigation reveals holes in Mueller's conclusions

Robert Mueller

Some of the key claims in Robert Mueller's 448-page special counsel report on allegations of Trump-Russia collusion aren't supported by evidence, according to an analysis.

Real Clear Investigations reports Mueller that while Mueller found no conspiracy between Trump's campaign and Russia, he presented "voluminous details to support the sweeping conclusion that the Kremlin worked to secure Trump's victory."

The Mueller report "claims that the interference operation occurred 'principally' on two fronts: Russian military intelligence officers hacked and leaked embarrassing Democratic Party documents, and a government-linked troll farm orchestrated a sophisticated and far-reaching social media campaign that denigrated Hillary Clinton and promoted Trump."

Real Clear Investigations, however, said "a close examination of the report shows that none of those headline assertions are supported by the report's evidence or other publicly available sources."

And they are "further undercut" by details that the Mueller report essentially ignored, such as that Obama CIA Director John Brennan was involved in many of the facets of the investigation.

Mueller is expected to testify before Congress next week, and there already have been concerns expressed that he's working behind the scenes with Democrats to create "sound bites" that they could use repeatedly to blast Trump.

The Real Clear Investigations project reveals, however, a number of failings that have not yet been fully explored.

They include:

The [Mueller] report uses qualified and vague language to describe key events, indicating that Mueller and his investigators do not actually know for certain whether Russian intelligence officers stole Democratic Party emails, or how those emails were transferred to WikiLeaks.
The report's timeline of events appears to defy logic. According to its narrative, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the publication of Democratic Party emails not only before he received the documents but before he even communicated with the source that provided them.
There is strong reason to doubt Mueller’s suggestion that an alleged Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange.
Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions.
U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as 'Russian dossier' compiler Christopher Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key circumstance that Mueller ignores.
Further, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party's legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking.
Mueller's report conspicuously does not allege that the Russian government carried out the social media campaign. Instead it blames, as Mueller said in his closing remarks, 'a private Russian entity' known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
Mueller also falls far short of proving that the Russian social campaign was sophisticated, or even more than minimally related to the 2016 election. As with the collusion and Russian hacking allegations, Democratic officials had a central and overlooked hand in generating the alarm about Russian social media activity.
John Brennan, then director of the CIA, played a seminal and overlooked role in all facets of what became Mueller’s investigation: the suspicions that triggered the initial collusion probe; the allegations of Russian interference; and the intelligence assessment that purported to validate the interference allegations that Brennan himself helped generate. Yet Brennan has since revealed himself to be, like CrowdStrike and Steele, hardly a neutral party -- in fact a partisan with a deep animus toward Trump.

Real Clear Investigations' report found, "None of this means that the Mueller report's core finding of 'sweeping and systematic' Russian government election interference is necessarily false. But his report does not present sufficient evidence to substantiate it. This shortcoming has gone overlooked in the partisan battle over two more highly charged aspects of Mueller's report: potential Trump-Russia collusion and Trump's potential obstruction of the resulting investigation."

The report, in fact, uses the word "appear" when describing how Russian agents stolen DNC emails for later release. This despite extreme specificity about how the situation developed.

"The report's use of that one word, 'appear,' undercuts its suggestions that Mueller possesses convincing evidence that GRU officers stole 'thousands of emails and attachments' from DNC servers. It is a departure from the language used in his July 2018 indictment, which contained no such qualifier," the analysis said.

Real Clear Investigations noted the opinion of former FBI special agent Coleen Rowley: "It's certainly curious as to why this discrepancy exists between the language of Mueller's indictment and the extra wiggle room inserted into his report a year later."

"It may be an example of this and other existing gaps that are inherent with the use of circumstantial information. With Mueller's exercise of quite unprecedented (but politically expedient) extraterritorial jurisdiction to indict foreign intelligence operatives who were never expected to contest his conclusory assertions in court, he didn't have to worry about precision. I would guess, however, that even though NSA may be able to track some hacking operations, it would be inherently difficult, if not impossible, to connect specific individuals to the computer transfer operations in question."

The analysis also points there are other facts that were not established by Mueller's report, including how Democratic material was given to WikiLeaks.

Then there's a timely: "The report's timeline defies logic: According to its account, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the publication of the emails not only before he received the documents, but before he even communicated with the source that provided them," the report said.

And there's the instance of a "Russian intelligence cutouts running a sophisticated interference campaign" but willing to communicate over an "easily monitored social media platform."

"In one of many such instances throughout the report, Mueller shows no curiosity in pursuing this obvious question," the investigation concludes.

And why did not Mueller interview Assange? "According to a 2018 report by John Solomon in The Hill, Assange told the Justice Department the previous year that he 'was willing to discuss technical evidence ruling out certain parties' in the leaking of Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks."

Real Clear Investigations goes into detail about many of the facets of Mueller's report.

Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson featured the Real Clear Investigations story on her website, writing, "Sensational news headlines after the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Trump-Russia collusion often missed the mark."