The Durham Report: Part 4 - More Obstruction

My Part 2 post was entitled "Mueller's Obstruction of Justice".  The thesis was:

The Mueller Team Obstructs Justice & Deceptive Congressional Testimony

The Mueller Team deliberately obstructed a full investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election

The Mueller Team lied about whether it had investigated the Steele Dossier

The Mueller Team perpetrated a fraud on the American public in an attempt to influence elections and interfere with the functioning of our democracy

 

 

I recently ran across a reminder of one of the elements of obstruction I'd forgotten about in a Yahoo News article from 2020.  In 2018 and 2019 the Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Justice conducted an investigation into the circumstances under which the FISA Warrant Application and its three renewals, the last two of which were submitted by the Mueller team, was put together and the facts asserted verified before submission to the FISA Court.  The Inspector General found there were twelve material errors or omissions in the applications, all of which overstated the strength of the evidence supporting issuance of the warrant.

What I'd forgotten is that at least 27 cell phones belonging to members of the Mueller Team were wiped clean before the Inspector General had a chance to review them.   Many of the Clinton-associated lawyers working for Mueller claim this happened accidentally, though I will leave you to judge how likely this is, given that, as far as I can tell from this and other similar articles, these constitute ALL the cell phones of the key members of the team.

 

We know from the Durham Report that Robert Mueller repeatedly lied to Congress when he stated the Steele Dossier was outside his purview; contrary to his statements Mueller, after beginning work in May 2017, set up a team specifically assigned to attempt to validate the allegations in the dossier.  When that effort failed, the validation team was disbanded in September 2017 and the cover story invented.  The cell phone data, including texts, which covered that critical period, were directly relevant to both the IG and Durham investigations.  Its unavailability was a major problem for both investigations.

The irony of Mueller's obstruction is highlighted in the last two paragraphs of the Yahoo News article:

In March of last year, Mueller submitted his final report to Attorney General William Barr on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The report, a redacted version of which was released to Congress and the public the next month, concluded that the Trump campaign did not conspire with Russians to influence the election, but said investigators could not reach a conclusion on whether President Trump committed obstruction of justice.

Facing the Justice Department’s frustration that he left the question of obstruction open in his final report, Mueller said in May of last year that charging Trump with a crime was “not an option” since, per guidance issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, a sitting president cannot be indicted.

There is an error in the article.  As AG William Barr noted at the time, although the DOJ guidance was that a sitting president cannot be indicted, he was expecting a finding and recommendation from Mueller, since such an indictment could be filed after the presidency ended.

My speculation is that there were three reasons for leaving the obstruction issue ambiguous in the report (in 2019 I wrote this post summarizing the obstruction section of the Mueller report).  The first was to give the otherwise disappointed Democratic party activists and its allied media something to chew on to keep the whole phony Russia collusion story alive.

The second was despite Trump's occasional rantings about the unfairness of the investigation, the White House had given unprecedented cooperation to Mueller, turning over more than one million documents and allowing White House Counsel to be interviewed, all without raising Executive Privilege arguments.   I think that happened because Trump believed the allegations to be wrong (and he was correct) and the matter would be quickly resolved.  Given that Durham concluded that none of the Steele Dossier allegations had ever been corroborated, Trump's occasional outbursts were understandable as those of an innocent man dragged through an outrageously rigged process.  Even a DC jury might have acquitted Trump of obstruction charges!

The third reason was the Mueller team knew about how false the allegations were and further legal proceedings might expose their whole effort.

I also think that when Mueller accepted the assignment as Special Counsel in May 2017 he thought there was very likely something to the allegations regarding Trump.  Though a long-time "moderate" Republican, I've no doubt he was appalled by Trump and voted for Clinton.  More importantly, Mueller's association with the FBI goes back to his Boston days in the 1980s.  His record demonstrates he believes whatever the FBI tells him and he believed the "evidence" he was shown and the "respectable media" coverage in 2017.  He was played as a sucker for years by the corrupt Boston FBI office in the 1980s and the same happened repeatedly during his stint as FBI Director.  He was also probably starting to suffer from the mental deterioration that was evident during the 2019 Congressional hearings and thus easily manipulated to hire, and then be guided by, the partisan Democratic lawyers and Clinton supporters who staffed the investigation.