Bulletin: A New Original

From RealClearInvestigations

5 Big Holes in Robert Mueller's Work

New article by Aaron Maté in RealClearInvestigations

Publishing Thursday, August 1, 2019

Robert Mueller was supposed to dispel clouds over American democracy by giving the American people definitive answers regarding Donald Trump, Russia and the 2016 election. Although he resolved some major issues - there was no conspiracy with Russia - Mueller and his team closed shop leaving many fundamental questions unanswered.

In an article essential for understanding where Russiagate stands today, Aaron Maté reports in RealClearInvestigations on five major mysteries Mueller was unwilling or unable to solve.

• Who is Joseph Mifsud and was he the actual trigger for the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign? Mueller repeats the FBI's claim that it started its counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign after Trump adviser George Papadopolous told someone that Mifsud had told him that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of emails. But Muller never established that Mifsud was a Russian agent, or why the FBI would take such an extraordinary step based on a second-hand rumor.

• What was the role of the Steele dossier? Before it handed off the Trump/Russia investigation to Mueller's team, the FBI relied on the series of unverified and salacious opposition research memos against Trump, secretly financed by the Clinton campaign and compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. But the FBI has never been clear about how and why it relied the partisan, unverified reports. Mueller does not get to the bottom of that or the role of the opposition firm that hired Steele, Fusion GPS.

• Why did the Mueller's team invent a false theory about polling data and fail to mention the U.S. ties of an alleged Russian agent? In the run-up to the election, onetime Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort shared polling data with Konstanin Kilimnik, a man the FBI had assessed as having a "relationship with Russian intelligence." In court Mueller deputy Andrew Weissman repeated that ambiguous claim and tacked on a tantalizing flourish that generated media headlines of collusion: "This goes to the larger view of what we think is going on, and what we think is the motive here." Mueller's report pulled back from that inflammatory claim, without saying why it had or why the claim had been made in the first place. The report also failed to note that Kilimnik had been a "secret source" for the U.S. government.

• Why did the Mueller team falsely suggest that Trump Tower Moscow was a viable project - and what was the role of FBI informant Felix Sater? House Democrats repeatedly played up the Mueller team's indictment of Michael Cohen for lying to Congress about the failed effort to build a Trump Tower Moscow. In court filings, the Mueller team insinuated that the project was viable and lucrative without providing a basis for this claim. Mueller's team also failed to address the fact that the once-dead project was almost single-handedly resurrected by Felix Sater, a shadowy Trump associate who had once been an FBI informant.

• Was specious information leaked to justify the absence of Trump-Kremlin links? Mate reports that in the absence of evidence tying the Trump campaign to the Kremlin - and a preponderance of leads involving key figures actually tied to the West - U.S. intelligence officials helped cast a pall of suspicion through misleading, and sometimes false, media leaks. Again, Mueller never addresses these leaks.

Maté writes that Mueller's awkward performance before Congress suggested he was not the hard-nosed investigator the media portrayed him to be. Perhaps he was a figurehead. And perhaps continuing Justice Department investigations will get closer to truths that either eluded Mueller or he avoided.

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