Russiagate After the Fireworks

A really slow day, mostly recycled news, but one decent one from Aaron Maté at RCI: CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims

While the 448-page Mueller report found no conspiracy between Donald Trump's campaign and Russia, it offered voluminous details to support the sweeping conclusion that the Kremlin worked to secure Trump's victory. The 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.

But 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. They are further undercut by investigative shortcomings and the conflicts of interest of key players involved:

• The 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.

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. As Mueller prepares to testify before House committees later this month, the questions surrounding his claims of a far-reaching Russian influence campaign are no less important. They raise doubts about the genesis and perpetuation of Russiagate and the performance of those tasked with investigating it.

And this will probably earn him another accusation of Obstruction of justice, Trump to hold campaign rally on day of Mueller testimony (Tal Axelrod, Da Hill)

Asche Schow at Da Wire, notices how It Turns Out A Russian Oligarch Paid The Man Hired By Hillary Clinton To Claim Trump Colluded With Russia. Clinton campaign colluding with the guy who colluded with Russia.

The more we learn about the origins of the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, the more Russian connections link back to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

And a much more detailed account by Sundance at CTH,  Oleg Deripaska Confirms He Was Employing Chris Steele in 2016, While Dossier Was Being Assembled…

Did Robert Mueller omit any mention of Oleg Deripaska from his 2017 Manafort indictment purposefully? Was Deripaska’s denial of any information about Manafort actually Brady material that Mueller and Weissmann intentionally kept from Manafort’s defense team?   And/or was Robert Mueller hoping to hide his prior professional work relationship with Deripaska?

Now that we know Deripaska was employing Chris Steele; and now that we know the FBI was aware that Deripaska was employing Chris Steele, this set of questions from Tom Cotton to FBI Director Christopher Wray has additional context.

Dan Bongino on the IG Horowitz investigation being in the write up phase, DOJ Inspector General’s Investigation COMPLETE, Report to Follow

The Congressman does expect the reports by both Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Durham to be “significant.”

“But Michael Horwitz and his findings and John Durham and his findings, those are going to be significant. Those relate not to Trump misconduct, but potential Obama misconduct,” he said.

Ace stirs himself to respond in Rep. John Ratcliffe: Inspector General Horowitz's Investigation Is Complete, Report Is Being Written

I guess we'll see.

I'm not hopeful.

I urge cautious optimism; Horowitz was responsible for the takedowns of McCabe, Strzok and Page, so I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt. But we all know that DOJ people really hate to treat fellow DOJ people like they would the hoi polloi.