Bloomberg News has an interesting story today describing remarks delivered by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. According to Jennifer Jacobs the DAG told the audience at a private Metropolitian Club lunch the Mueller Report will highlight the primary investigative focus of “Russian Cyber Crimes”.

If this report is accurate, and CTH believes it is, this goes a long way to explaining why U.K. authorities moved now to throw a bag over Julian Assange. First the report:

(Bloomberg) Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Friday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report describes Russian cybercrimes during the 2016 election. The report, which is expected to be released soon, will clear up questions about the Russian campaign to interfere in the election President Donald Trump won, Rosenstein said in a speech given to a private group at the Metropolitan Club of Washington, according to three people in attendance.

Rosenstein joked that his last day at the Department of Justice will be “one of these days,” the people said. He also said that it will take the U.S. some time to extradite WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange from the U.K. in order to prosecute him. He declined to speak to reporters outside the club. (link)

As AG William Barr shared in his letter to congress, the aggregate of the Mueller report has two facets for Russian Interference: (1) “Disinformation” from the IRA (Internet Research Agency); and, (2) “Computer hacking operations”:

In order for Mueller and Rosenstein to maintain the ‘Vast Russia Conspiracy Narrative’, which is tenuous at best, it is absolutely necessary to maintain the premise that Russia hacked -or attempted to hack- into the DNC servers. Further, to maintain this premise the special counsel must inject WikiLeaks as the distribution hub for the Russian effort.

This Mueller/Rosenstein Russia narrative builds upon the Joint Analysis Report (JAR December 2016), and the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA January 2017). Both of those documents are sketchy, with the JAR being abject nonsense and the ICA being a political document stating specifically that Russian President Putin was trying to help Trump win the election.

Rosenstein’s comments to the Metropolitan Club gives us some insight into how dependent Mueller’s report is to maintaining this baseline of Russia interference:

(LINK)

Additionally, these comments by Rosenstein highlight the U.S. intelligence community need to throw a bag over Julian Assange; IF they are going to retain the premise that Mueller needs to justify the CIA/FBI predicate for the counterintelligence operation.

Mueller and Rosenstein’s special counsel was an extension of the original counterintelligence operation. Mueller and Rosenstein need to preserve the predicate in order to avoid questions around why they continued and extended a fraudulent probe.

If Assange can disprove the Russia DNC hacking claims by the CIA (Brennan), ODNI (Clapper) and FBI (Strzok and Comey), which are more likely fraudulent justifications to execute the Trump campaign surveillance operation, then Assange becomes a risk that must be controlled/removed. The timing here is not ‘suspicious’ but rather ‘conspicuous’.

To maintain the claim the DNC was ‘hacked by Russians‘ Julian Assange must be made public enemy #1. We should expect to see current elements within the intelligence apparatus pushing hard to frame this Assange narrative through the New York Times (FBI), Washington Post (CIA), and CNN (State Dept./ODNI).

The amount of media pressure to originate the “Russian Interference” narrative in early 2017 was off the charts. The media will have to double-down exponentially because they are tied directly to this claim.

It will be interesting to see if AG William Barr goes along with the focus on cybercrimes as the impetus for Mueller’s investigation. This is where the need to preserve the integrity of the institutions comes into play; there will be massive pressure on Barr to go along.