[rad-green] CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Rep ort Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims

*RealClearInvestigations                     **July 5, 2019*

*CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling
Claims*

*By Aaron Maté*

Amazon.com

At a May press conference capping his tenure as special counsel, Robert
Mueller emphasized what he called "the central allegation" of the two-year
Russia probe. The Russian government, Mueller sternly declared, engaged in
"multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election, and that
allegation deserves the attention of every American." Mueller's comments
echoed a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) asserting
with "high confidence" that Russia conducted a sweeping 2016 election
influence campaign. "I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive
or direct campaign to interfere in our election process," then-Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper told a Senate hearing.

While the 448-page Mueller report
<https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf> found no conspiracy between
Donald Trump's campaign and Russia, it offered voluminous details to
support the sweeping conclusion that the Kremlin worked to secure Trump's
victory. The report claims that the interference operation occurred
"principally" on two fronts: Russian military intelligence officers hacked
and leaked embarrassing Democratic Party documents, and a government-linked
troll farm orchestrated a sophisticated and far-reaching social media
campaign that denigrated Hillary Clinton and promoted Trump.

But a close examination of the report shows that none of those headline
assertions are supported by the report’s evidence or other publicly
available sources. They are further undercut by investigative shortcomings
and the conflicts of interest of key players involved:

   - The report uses qualified and vague language to describe key events,
   indicating that Mueller and his investigators do not actually know for
   certain whether Russian intelligence officers stole Democratic Party
   emails, or how those emails were transferred to WikiLeaks.
   - The report's timeline of events appears to defy logic. According to
   its narrative, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the publication
   of Democratic Party emails not only before he received the documents but
   before he even communicated with the source that provided them.
   - There is strong reason to doubt Mueller’s suggestion that an alleged
   Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange.
   - Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who
   claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to
   explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions.
   - U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about
   the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because
   they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the
   forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a
   neutral party, much as “Russian dossier” compiler Christopher Steele, also
   a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired
   contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key
   circumstance that Mueller ignores.
   - Further, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party's
   legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the
   government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of
   hacking.
   - Mueller’s report conspicuously does not allege that the Russian
   government carried out the social media campaign. Instead it blames, as
   Mueller said in his closing remarks, "a private Russian entity" known as
   the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
   - Mueller also falls far short of proving that the Russian social
   campaign was sophisticated, or even more than minimally related to the 2016
   election. As with the collusion and Russian hacking allegations, Democratic
   officials had a central and overlooked hand in generating the alarm about
   Russian social media activity.
   - John Brennan, then director of the CIA, played a seminal and
   overlooked role in all facets of what became Mueller’s investigation: the
   suspicions that triggered the initial collusion probe; the allegations of
   Russian interference; and the intelligence assessment that purported to
   validate the interference allegations that Brennan himself helped generate.
   Yet Brennan has since revealed himself to be, like CrowdStrike and Steele,
   hardly a neutral party -- in fact a partisan with a deep animus
   <https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/08/19/brennan_on_sunday_i_stand_by_accusing_president_trump_of_treason.html>
toward
   Trump.

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.

More:

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/07/05/crowdstrikeout_muellers_own_report_undercuts_its_core_russia-meddling_claims.html

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