Robert Mueller’s investigation has been an exercise in religiosity for many in the beltway. Any questioning of his team, his motives, handling of the situation, or his conclusions has been deemed blasphemy and simply is not allowed.

That’s left it to many outside of the mainstream media sphere to expose the questions surrounding what is actually contained in the Mueller report, as well as the investigations that preceded it.

Much of the criticism has been over how he handled the second half of the report, namely the issue of obstruction of justice (see Mueller’s Handling of the Obstruction Question Was Total Garbage). Instead of doing his job, Muller decided to sidestep his duty and not make a decision while winking and nodding at Democrats to push the issue in Congress. The only reason a special counsel existed in this case was to make prosecutorial decisions involving the President and Mueller’s answer was to shrug his shoulders and feed into further partisan frenzy.

But, now we are starting to see aspects of the first part of his report fall apart as well. We have already learned that Mueller and his team purposely misrepresented a phone call between the Trump legal counsel and Flynn’s lawyers to make it seem like witness tampering. The full transcript would later reveal the exact opposite of how Mueller framed it.

Another big shoe dropped today casting more doubt on the honesty and thoroughness of the Mueller report. One of his chief conclusions that formed the basis for the entire Russian interference narrative just went up in flames.

This is a major blow not just to Mueller but to the entire "Russian Active Measures" talking point. As the judge acknowledges, the IRA (which, btw, put out juvenile clickbait mostly unrelated to the election) is a private entity & Mueller never establishes a Kremlin connection. pic.twitter.com/WT2n5nZ5Fy — Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 9, 2019

This inconsistency, confirmed by a DC judge, raises new Qs about the validity of Mueller's claim of a "sweeping and systematic" Russian gov't interference campaign. If Mueller was disingenuous in falsely trying to link it to Russian gov't, what else was he disingenuous about? — Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 9, 2019

More details about all of this can found at RealClearInvestigations, where Mate lists in long form exactly just what’s missing and wrong with the report given the conclusions it supposedly reached. He goes on to conclude this.

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.

Many were skeptical from the beginning about claims of massive, coordinated Russian interference in the election. It simply didn’t add up given what we actually saw. That’s not to say Russia didn’t try to meddle, but that it’s scope has been blown way out proportion to feed a political narrative.

In the case of the IRA, one of two organizations Mueller claimed made up Russian government coordinated interference, there turns out to be no actual evidence it was being directed by the Russian government. That seems like it’d be pretty important to mention, right?

The fact that the Russians are bad actors does not negate the need to be honest about where the evidence actually led. Instead, Mueller, as he did in several other places in the report, chose to rely on specious or non-existent evidence to state what appears to be a pre-determined conclusion.

I’ll note that we saw the same thing from Mueller’s report in regards to the DNC hack issue. Do I personally believe the Russians were involved in getting the emails from the DNC via a hack or leak? Yeah, I do. Did Mueller actually have evidence to make that claim definitively? No, he didn’t. He once again relied on Crowdstrike’s shaky investigation, which had already been called into question years ago due to inconsistencies in their methodology and how they froze out the FBI.

All of this is piled onto Mueller’s other sketchy actions, like essentially ignoring the Steele Dossier and choosing to only pursue Trump associates in relation to Russia.

I see absolutely no reason to continue to treat the Mueller report as sacrosanct at this point. It’s a document that’s simply got too many partisan omissions and misrepresentations.

————————————————-

Enjoying the read? Please visit my archive and check out some of my latest articles.

I’ve got a new twitter! Please help by following @bonchieredstate.