Robert Mueller's America--A Farce Wrapped in Hypocrisy by Publius Tacitus

The indictment unveiled last Friday by Assistant Attorney General Rob Rosenstein, charging 13 Russian nationals with posting "false" information on the internet would be great grist for a satirical send up of government incompetence except the underlying premise of the charges is nothing short of a road map for authoritarian governments who will want to treat anyone who dares post contrarian material on the internet as a criminal. Let me state it succinctly--if you posted a blog suggesting that Hillary deserved to go to jail then you might be a criminal.

The indictment is nothing more than a rancid puff pastry. It pretends to have a mountain of evidence of evil doing by the Russians. But if you simply ask probing questions about the underlying proof of the misdeeds you will quickly discover that this document is a piece of political theater rather than an actual listing of criminal deeds. What do I mean?

The indictment states that "THE ORGANIZATION" (i.e., THE INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY) had the strategic purpose of sowing political discord in the United States. Okay. How do we know that? Did the owner of the IRA make such a statement or is there a written document or recorded conversation in which he made the claim? We do not know. There is not one piece of solid evidence in the entire document that substantiates that claim. It is nothing more than an assertion of belief. That is not how one writes an indictment alleging criminal conduct.

Also worth noting that the indictment provides not hard evidence, either documentary or the claim by a confidential informant, of THE ORGANIZATION acting on behalf of or at the direction of the Russian Government. Again, it is assumed but nothing even approaching solid evidence is proffered in this document.

There are three Federal statutes that the Russian citizens are alleged to have violated:

 

18 USC Section 371:

The general conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. § 371, creates an offense "[i]f two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose. (emphasis added). See Project, Tenth Annual Survey of White Collar Crime, 32 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 137, 379-406 (1995)(generally discussing § 371). . . .

The intent required for a conspiracy to defraud the government is that the defendant possessed the intent (a) to defraud, (b) to make false statements or representations to the government or its agencies in order to obtain property of the government, or that the defendant performed acts or made statements that he/she knew to be false, fraudulent or deceitful to a government agency, which disrupted the functions of the agency or of the government. It is sufficient for the government to prove that the defendant knew the statements were false or fraudulent when made. The government is not required to prove the statements ultimately resulted in any actual loss to the government of any property or funds, only that the defendant's activities impeded or interfered with legitimate governmental functions.

18 USC Section 1349:

Any person who attempts or conspires to commit any offense under this chapter shall be subject to the same penalties as those prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the attempt or conspiracy.

18 USC Sections 1028 A (a) (1) and 2:

(a)Whoever, in a circumstance described in subsection (c) of this section—

(1)

knowingly and without lawful authority produces an identification document, authentication feature, or a false identification document;

(2)

knowingly transfers an identification document, authentication feature, or a false identification document knowing that such document or feature was stolen or produced without lawful authority

 There is actual criminal conduct listed in the indictment, but that pertains to identity theft and other irregular financial activity. Left unanswered, however, is the explanation for how the Mueller team discovered these activities. Short of a cooperating witness, it appears that material from the NSA was turned over to Mueller and his team. We will likely never find out because none of the people named in the indictment will ever be tried. 

This case is far from a slam dunk for the Mueller team. If it ever did come to trial there are significant gaps and vulnerabilities in the indictment that a competent defense attorney could savage. Nope. This is not about punishing lawbreakers. This is political theater designed to feed the meme promoting anti-Russian hysteria. 

An objective examination of the "meddling" by this Russian company would conclude that the activities of the IRA bordered on irrelevant and ineffective. I am surprised that so many Americans are ignorant of two critical facts. First, Russia has been carrying out intelligence operations, including a whole host of propaganda schemes, inside the United States and against the United States for at least 80 years. Duh!!

Second, the United States has carried out comparable operations inside and against Russia/the USSR and has been involved in the covert interference in elections around the world.

That is the hypocrisy. We are having a hissy fit over laughable internet shenanigans by a small group of Russians who were poorly funded and generated little activity, while ignoring our own history of having actually overthrown other legitimately elected governments. There it is. Farce and hypocrisy.

Comments

[johnf]

Freedonia Fries.

[steve]

Don't think so. The GOP made the Benghazi investigations last 4 years.

Steve

[c1ue]

Great writeup.
Have you considered the thesis offered by some other blogs - particularly moonofalabama.org and johnhelmer.net - that IRA is just a for-profit organization?
In particular, I recall the Macedonian conspiracy: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-news-macedonia-teen-shows-how-its-done

The online advertising industry is a $360 billion dollar annual revenue one, and 2016 saw 0.5% to 1% of that revenue coming from the political campaigns.

I don't find it hard at all to believe that there aren't plenty of people - in Russia as well as all over the world - who want to dip their fingers into that very large pie. The name of the game is aggregation and its purveyors have no goal except self enrichment.

[ISL]

PT: I totally agree about farce and theater, but like TimmyB, I think it is worse.

Additionally, it is a roadmap to remove the free speech of any foreigners living in the US, and also to allow the US to prosecute any foreigner outside the US

For example, could not a resident alien who was applying for citizenship and filed an appeal be subverting the US govt?

And if guilt by innuendo is the new standard of US prosecutions, we are entering a dark place.

I hope the ACLU finds a way to challenge this?

[Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg]

Just as we've seen clamor ing from some quarters to go after environmental protestors as "economic terrorists" we could following this hysteria see heterodox bloggers be indicted for "sowing discord" when they publish revelations of elite malfeasance along the lines of COINTELPRO and Operation Artichoke. The allegations would be "creating mistrust in our nations law enforcement"
And just like that other sacred cow in American politics, "The Troops", "Law Enforcement" is an institution that none dare critique. It's the Israel of internal politics. Even when they go off the rails and slip the leash, the ore patriotic or self declared conservative punditry will go to the barricades to fight off reform or public control.

[David Habakkuk]

PT and all,

Recent developments are raising new questions, as well as giving fresh urgency to familiar ones.

An article by a Los Angeles lawyer called Allan J. Favish which has just appeared in the ‘American Thinker’ is headlined ‘Prediction: Sessions will find FBI lied about Steele credibility to spy on Trump.’

(See https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/02/prediction_sessions_will_find_fbi_lied_about_steele_credibility_to_spy_on_trump.html .)

It provides a concise summary of the evidence in the memoranda from Republicans on the House Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committees that the FBI gave the FISA Court misleading information in relation to Christopher Steele, and that there are strong grounds for suspecting this was done so knowingly and deliberately.

One can however I think take the argument further. I cannot see any cogent reason for believing claims from the FBI that that they were unaware of the contacts Steele had with the press prior to October 2016. Moreover, if they were aware of these contacts, the notion that they were ‘unauthorised’ might also be misleading – this could be a situation where key figures in the FBI knew and approved what their informant was doing, but simply wanted ‘plausible deniability.’

Moreover, the suggestion apparently made by the FBI to the FISA Court that the organisation suspended its relationship with Steele in October 2016 because of his – supposedly – unauthorised disclosures to the press might also be misleading.

Even if the suspension actually happened, this again could have been to do with ‘plausible deniability’, with contacts continuing behind the scenes.

I certainly find it increasingly difficult to see how Mueller can consistently refrain from bringing proceedings against Christopher Steele under the ‘general conspiracy statute.’ The relevant questions, obviously, are whether he was involved in making statements he ‘knew to be false, fraudulent or deceitful’ to the FBI, whether the FBI were involved in making such statements to the FISA Court, and whether Steele and the FBI colluded in a conspiracy to deceive the Court.

An obvious question is whether a significant number of key figures in the FBI, up to and including James Comey, are candidates for indictments under the statute. In view of this situation, of course, it is difficult to see how justice can be served by having a former long-serving director of that organisation, who also appears to be a friend of Comey’s, deciding who is, and is not, to be prosecuted.

[blue peacock]

Was the appointment of Mueller planned and orchestrated at the FBI by Comey?

"I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter [for The New York Times]. I didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-21/judicial-watch-asks-what-fbi-hiding-its-war-protect-comey

[Fred]

Peacock,

It was reported almost a year ago that the "friend" was Columbia University professor and former federal prosecutor Dan Richman. I believe he should have know what he was doing was a felony.

[blue peacock]

... it is difficult to see how justice can be served by having a former long-serving director of that organisation, who also appears to be a friend of Comey’s, deciding who is, and is not, to be prosecuted.

David,

Mueller is a highly compromised person. From UraniumOne to his longstanding role at the FBI and personal friendships with many like Comey.

I believe you have hit the nail on the head. The Fusion GPS dossier is the pivot and simplest path to gain understanding of what happened and what role various individuals in law enforcement and the IC played. IMO, that is why Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley are so focused on all the issues surrounding the dossier.

Nunes in a recent interview stated his game plan. He has seen evidence that the FBI/DOJ lied and misrepresented to FISC which was essentially what the now publicly released memo asserts. His next step is to investigate the role of the State Department & Max Blumenthal and others around the production and dissemination of the dossier. He has also asked the FISC presiding judge for all documents and testimony around the the Page FISA application. He has also this week written a letter to the top officials in the Obama administration asking them 10 questions around their knowledge of the dossier.

My sense is that after the DOJ IG report is released, there will be calls for another special counsel with a broad mandate to investigate the findings of the Congressional Republicans. Mueller may get ensnared in that investigation.

[pj]

Blue Peacock, I think you mean Sidney Blumenthal, the Clinton fixer and father of Max, who is a complete Russiagate sceptic.

[Account Deleted]

Very much looking forward to seeing the FBI, the organization, referred to in upper case.

[Anna]

An opinion of a layperson: Mueller is either a first-rate opportunist looking forward for a fat pension as a reward for his blatantly unpatriotic, anti-Constitutional activities or he is in cognitive decline. Perhaps both. The indictment is laughable for any sane person (see a comparison with a comic book https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-21/stockman-blasts-muellers-comic-book-indictment-how-prosecute-great-big). Unfortunately, the indictment creates a legalistic danger for a blanket punishment of any critique of the government. Another Q is what kind of electoral process the US could have from now on? Here is a CNN reporter accusing an elderly lady, who has been supporting Trump, in acting on Putin's orders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsEnh1zilec These frivolities distract from the really important questions: Who in the FBI have made the decisions to meddle in the US electoral process? Why the FBI allowed to be shooed away from the DNC “compromised” computers and instead the FBI let an avowed Jewish Russophobe Dm. Alperovitch, associated with the openly Russophobic Atlantic Council, to do a judgment (in 10 sec!) on “Russian meddling?” What about Brits’ meddling in the electorate process in the US? What about Seth Rich murder and the incredible Awan affair? What about Uranium One? The Union is indeed in crisis. It is rather insulting that the serious measures are substituted with the cartoonish “Indictment of Trolls.”

[Anna]

"I suppose hacking the DNC and Podesta is perfectly fine."
Considering the numerous publications about the probable impossibility of the hacking as compared to the much more probable leaking, your statement is rather misleading. The opportunistic and viciously Russophobic Mr. Alperovitch of CrowdStrike fame is not a reliable person -- whereas the American Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) are: https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/12/us-intel-vets-dispute-russia-hacking-claims/

[J]

Colonel,

What troubles me is the apparent deep penetration of FBI's CI by a foreign intelligence agency, and it ain't/isn't the Ruskies or the Chicoms.

[Anna]

"War is a racket" and a special role of the security apparatus in the racket (from a report on the Munich Security Conference, 2018) http://www.voltairenet.org/article199781.html
"... three bosses -- German BND (Bruno Kahl), British MI6 (Alex Younger) and the French DGSE (Bernard Emié), who explained in a private room, in front of an audience chosen for their naïveté, how nervous they were about the Turkish operation in Syria. The three men pretended to believe that the combatants of the YPG constitute the safest barrier against Daesh. Yet they were supposed to create the Frontier Security Force with certain ex-members of Daesh. ... It’s clear that the job of these three super-spies is to know to whom they owe the truth, and to whom they can lie. Sustaining their momentum, they hinted that the Syrian Arab Army uses chemical weapons – profiting from the absence in the room of the US Secretary for Defence, Jim Mattis, who had testified a few days earlier that proof of this claim is inexistant."
--- No wonder that the Internet, social media, and alternative media present such a danger for the masters of the universe, who make the decisions about the mega-racket.

[blue peacock]

pj,

Yes, you are correct.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/31/cody-shearer-sidney-blumenthal-emerge-russia-dossi/

[Procopius]

I think the parallels are because the neocons are still in control, though this time more firmly ensconced in the State Department (which is why I'm ambivalent about Tillerson destroying it) than at Defense (where only the ones who had grabbed headlines left -- for very, very well paying jobs elsewhere for a while). Although there may be a counter-cabal at Defense, because they seemed to be at odds with the CIA in Syria at times, this only serves to confuse the overall strategy.

[English Outsider]

Anna - "What about Brits’ meddling in the electorate process in the US?"

I was a "Brit" during the Falklands War and proud to be one. That goes for a lot else too. But the Steele episode? That's down to Westminster and with any luck not too much of it.

I used to own, or you might say I used to feed and house, a Labrador that wanted to be a Rottweiler. A sneaky Rottweiler - he'd eye up the opposition first and if he thought he was in with a chance he'd be off. His way of fighting was scarcely honourable either. It was always difficult, when apologising to the opposition's owner, to explain quite how I came to be walking around with such an animal.

The aggrieved owner would sometimes point out that I ought to have the brute on a lead. Of course they were right and that's how I usually walked him. The trouble is in the case of Westminster generally, and in such cases as the Steele episode in particular, that there are several tens of millions of us here who can't find the blasted lead.

[Leaky Ranger]

Mueller has filed detailed new charges against Manafort and Gates. Covers time they were on the Trump campaign payroll. Judge has denied Manafort bail. Mueller moving very, very fast.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/02/22/mueller-files-new-charges-against-former-trump-aides-paul-manafort-rick-gates/364943002/

[Fred]

Leaky,

How's Huma Abedin doing? Mueler investigate her yet about destruction of evidence? How about Imran Awan? Crimes they committed "covers time" of campaign interference. Was that what Pakistan was doing with Mr. Awan - influencing US elections - or was he just your every day crook?

"accusing them of lying to banks to obtain millions of dollars in loans." wow, that's what Meuller charged Manafort with? Boy isn't it just wonderful Trump fired him all those months ago? BTW I don't see the names "Christoper Steele" or "Russia" in that article. I wonder if Mueller will get on the money trail of the $4.5 billion that reportedly went through Ukraine for that revolution that Victoria Nuland passed out cookies for in Maidan Square. I wonder how much made its way back to people connected to people connected to political campaigns in the USA.

[Anna]

On the domestic "brew" of incompetence and politicization: https://joeforamerica.com/2017/12/awan-brothers-and-dws-scandal-resurfaces-as-details-of-shadiest-deal-yet-emerge/
"Based on the modest way Awan was living, it is my opinion that he was sending most of his money to a group or criminal organization that could very well be connected with the Pakistani government,” stated Wayne Black, a private investigator who formerly served as supervisor of a Miami public corruption unit under former Attorney General Janet Reno. “My instincts tell me Awan was probably operating a foreign intelligence gathering operation on U.S. soil.”
-- How come that this affair was flourishing for years without being detected by the FBI and the CIA?

[mikee]

It is time for Mueller to unite the country and prosecute Fergie.

Worst National Anthem, Ever

https://jonathanturley.org/2018/02/19/where-is-mueller/#more-133679

[The Twisted Genius]

Fred,

Awan was arrested while trying to flee back to Pakistan last July. In August, he and his wife were indicted for conspiracy, making false statements, bank fraud and unlawful monetary transactions. Charges eerily similar to those new ones against Gates and Manafort. They're all crooks as far as I can tell. Awan had nothing to do with what Mueller is charged to investigate. I'm curious to see how these new charges tie into his investigation. I don't see where he's going with it other than half the new charges against Manafort covering the time he was Trump's campaign manager.

[Leaky Ranger]

Fred. Get real. Trump's campaign manager was living an extravagant lifestyle financed by Russian oligarchs via dirty money. If his Russian connection hadn't been exposed during the campaign, resulting in his getting fired, he could be Director of the CIA right now. This is a serious business. The White House is awash in vodka.

[Anna]

Here is an older – and much more important – case re national security than the petty dealings with Ukrainians by Manafort: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-22/uranium-one-undercover-fbi-informants-attorney-demands-doj-inquiry-coordinated
"The essential question is whether the Obama Justice Department provided notice of the criminal activity of certain officials before the CFIUS approval of the Uranium One deal and other government decisions that enabled the Russians to trade nuclear materials in the U.S,” Grassley scolded."
---Meanwhile, the senior-level officials at the politicized DOJ and FBI have been insulting and destroying William Douglas Campbell, "a man who dutifully served the CIA and FBI for decades until he chose an opportune moment to reveal a monumental corruption." "As part of the smear, Campbell's name was divulged in a public filing by the DOJ, "making him unemployable in the industry and leaving him to survive on Social Security" after decades of loyal service to both the CIA and the FBI. … Campbell's lawyer Victoria Toensing, a former Reagan Justice Department official and former Chief Counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, fired off a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday demanding an investigation into Campbell's character assassination - CC'ing DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, along with several Congressional Investigators and others involved in the matter. The letter reads:
"We write on behalf of our client, William Douglas Campbell, to request an investigation of disclosures by anonymous "federal officials" to the media and of Congressional briefings by "senior officials" of the Justice Department. The former provided false information about Mr. Campbell to the media. The latter provided false information about Mr. Campbell to Senate and House committees."
-- Again, how does the petty case of Manafort dealings with Ukrainian oligarchs compare to the massive corruption permeating Uranium One deal that is of utmost importance for the US national security? Who has orchestrated the smearing of William Douglas Campbell?
Then there is the dereliction of duty by the FBI/CIA brass re Awan affair -- the greatest DOCUMENTED breach in the US cybersecurity. Add to that the FBI’s amazing shyness in relation to the DNC allegedly hacked computers: How come that the Russophobic Dm. Alperovitch took over the FBI duties and made a politically convenient conclusion (“Russians hacked the computers”), which since then was debunked by the patriotic U.S. Intelligence Veterans – and yet the FBI still is not ready to touch the “compromised” computers?