Not just the report itself, but his investigation, too, that was the subject of his report. What were the circumstances of the investigation’s start? What triggered it? Who leaked so many parts of it?
Now that Mueller’s report of his investigation has been released, and especially since it largely exonerated President Donald Trump, it’s necessary to see what led to the expenditure of two years of personnel resources and millions of dollars on an investigation of a President of the United States that accomplished so little—and in some cases so redundantly.
The role of senior FBI personnel, the importance of the Steele dossier in the trigger event(s), the lies told the FISA courts to get warrants, the FISA court itself, the behaviors and roles of members of Mueller’s investigation team—these all have severely damaged the reputation of the FBI, and of DoJ generally in te case of the FISA court, and they have damaged more than that—they’ve severely harmed the ability of the FBI to function as a Federal law enforcement agency and of DoJ’s ability to handle actual justice.
Investigations into this, like the one to which AG William Barr has committed, are critical to restoring the FBI and DoJ and producing substantive sanction on those personnel who misbehaved during the run-up to the investigation, its start, and its conduct.
Largely exonerated: the putative purpose of the investigation was to look into Russia’s interference into our 2016 election process and attempted interference in that election itself. On this, the investigation found conclusively that Russia did do those things, and it found that the Trump campaign, personnel involved, and Trump himself did not collude—had nothing at all to do with those attempts. And that outcome, despite repeated attempts by Russian agencies to get those personnel to collude or to con them into colluding.
The investigation, on turning to claims of one form or another of “obstruction of an investigation/of justice/of…,” did find quite a bit of embarrassing information and a number of embarrassing incidents that will be used to attack Trump—and much of this derogatory information was cynically leaked over the course of the investigation. Withal, a closer look reveals the overall exoneration here, too.
Much is made, in the report, of Trump’s public “attacks” on the investigation itself and its conduct. This was, supposedly, pressure, interference, obstructive in nature. This is, actually, nonsense—and it’s insulting to the personnel conducting the investigation, from Mueller on down. Suggesting that Trump expressing his anger and distrust of the investigation and the investigators in Trump’s inimitable way is capable of influencing the investigators by the slightest iota is to suggest that those investigators—every single one of them, from Mueller on down—are such timid summer pansies that they would be bothered by those words. On the contrary, there’s nothing more to these public remarks than those implied insults and textbook projection by those expressing concerns about the impact of Trump’s words. Even when those expressions come from the investigators themselves via the report. Perhaps those investigators didn’t belong on Mueller’s team—their weakness, if not their bias, is exposed by their “findings.”
Much is made, also, of Trump’s (at least according to the claims of Mueller’s interrogatees over the course of his investigation) ordering various staff members to fire Mueller, to “influence” witness/interrogatees prior to their interrogations, of Trump’s personal attempts (allegedly) of such tampering. What’s ignored here, too, in assessing the meaning of these things (stipulating they’re accurately, if narrowly, described) are three things in particular.
One is that Mueller was never fired, nor was his investigation ever actually interfered with. It proceeded to its full and Mueller-style objective finish.
Another, regarding the behind the scenes interactions, is that had Trump been serious about firing Mueller or interfering with the investigation, Mueller would have been fired, the investigation actually interfered with, witnesses/interrogatees actually interfered with, and so on. In the realization, though, Trump did none of these things, staffers were not fired and replaced with those who would obey those “instructions,” Trump did not bypass those staffers and act himself, and on and on. He did none of those things because he wasn’t serious, except in the anger of the moment, as a man falsely accused (not just wrongly so) and faced with a years-long drumbeat of biased publicity and petty partisan attacks (and not just on himself, but on his family and his friends and his advisors) vented his anger in those moments. The fact is, despite the claims of interference, of outright obstruction, none occurred. None occurred, not because staffers disobeyed Trump, as so many of the NLMSM would have it, but because there was nothing to disobey.
A third thing is all the information and documentation—millions of pages of it—that Trump willingly and voluntarily released to Mueller and his investigation. All of this information was free for the asking. All of this information would have exposed the contradictions of Trump’s…obstruction…and they did not because there was none.
And all of that information freely provided is cooperation, not obstruction, except in the Newspeak dictionary of Progressive-Democrats and the NLMSM.
This is the backdrop that emphasizes the importance of Barr’s investigation, separate from that of the DoJ’s Inspector General.
