Mueller’s “Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election” is not an easy read — not unlike those “easy-to-assemble” manuals that come boxed with multi-part children’s toy on Christmas Eve.
Nonetheless, considering the exceedingly damaging effects Russiagate has had on America at home and abroad for nearly three years, the report will long be studied for what it reveals and does not reveal, what it includes and does not include.
— Mueller begins, on page one, with this assertion: “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” Maybe so, but Mueller, who is not averse to editorializing and contextualizing elsewhere in the report, gives readers no historical background or context for this large generalization.
— It has occasionally been suggested that Russiagate was originated by high-level US officials who disliked candidate Trump’s pledge to “cooperate with Russia.” This suspicion remains unproven, but throughout Mueller repeatedly attributes to Trump campaign members and Russians who interacted in 2016, potentially in sinister or even criminal ways, a desire for “improved U.S.-Russian relations,” for “bringing the end of the new Cold War,” for a “new beginning with Russia.” Even Russian President Vladimir Putin is reported to have wanted “reconciliation … between the United States and Russia.” (See, for example, pp. 5, 98, 105, 124, 157.) The result is, of course, to discredit America’s once-mainstream advocacy of détente.
Mueller even brands American pro-détente views—as Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan held in the twentieth century—as “pro-Russia foreign policy positions” (p. 102). Does this mean that Americans who hold pro-détente views today, as I and quite a few others do, are to be investigated for their “contacts” with Russians in pursuit of better relations Mueller seems to say nothing to offset this implication, which has already adversely affected a few Americans mentioned and not mentioned in his report.
— As reflected in the text and footnotes, Mueller relies heavily on reports by US intelligence agencies, but without treating the recorded misdeeds of those agencies, particularly the CIA under John Brennan, in promoting the Russiagate saga. He also relies heavily on contemporary media accounts of Russiagate as it unfolded, but without taking into account their journalistic malpractices, as abundantly documented by Matt Taibbi, who equates the malpractice with news reports leading up to the US invasion of Iraq.
— Nor does Mueller consider alternative scenarios and explanations as any good historical or judicial investigation must do. For example, he accepts uncritically the Clinton/Democratic National Committee allegation that Russian agents hacked and disseminated their emails in 2016. Again, maybe so, but why did he not do his own forensic examination or even mention the alternative finding by VIPS that they were stolen and leaked by an insider? Or why did he not question Julian Assange, who claimed to know how, and by whom, the emails reached WikiLeaks? And how to explain Mueller’s minimal interest in the shadowy Professor Joseph Mifsud, who helped entrap George Papadopoulos in London? Mueller reports that Mifsud “had connections to Russia” (p. 5), although a simple Google search suggests that Mifsud was indeed an “agent” but not a Russian one, as widely alleged in media accounts.
— Toward the end of volume one (pp. 144, 146), Mueller produces a truly stunning revelation, though he seems unaware of it. After the 2016 US presidential election, the Kremlin “appeared not to have pre-existing contacts … with senior officials around the President-elect.” Even more, “Putin spoke of the difficulty faced by the Russian government in getting in touch with the incoming Trump Administration … Putin indicated that he did not know with whom formally to speak and generally did not know the people around the President-Elect.”