SOME RESULTS OF ROBERT MUELLER’S TESTIMONY TO HOUSE COMMITTEES

…Special Counsel, Robert Mueller

Some of the claims made by the GOP Reps were blatantly false.

Okay, I watched the hours of the Mueller testimony.  But the following comments are not so much about Mueller’s words, but instead are about the lack of truth in the comments from the Republicans that were inside the two House committees.

Some of the claims made by the GOP reps were blatantly false, and the American public needs to know that much of what they said was pure B.S..

As an example, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) stated: “President Trump cooperated fully with the investigation.”

Here’s the Truth:

This Republican talking point crosses the line from spin to fiction. An entire volume of Mueller's report covers multiple episodes of Trump’s potential obstruction of justice.

Trump tried to fire the special counsel. The president ordered former White House counsel Donald McGahn to have Mueller removed, but McGahn declined to carry out those illegal instructions and threatened to quit, this is all in the Mueller Report.

McGahn refused to correct a New York Times report about the attempt to fire Mueller, despite Trump's insistence that he do so.  McGahn also refused Trump's request that he create an internal record falsely stating that the president never ordered Mueller's ouster.

Trump also tried to curtail the investigation, which was unsuccessful. The Mueller report says Trump asked Corey Lewandowski, his one-time campaign manager, to tell then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit the investigation to future election interference. Lewandowski did not convey the message to Sessions, who by that point had recused himself from the Russia investigation.

To have the president bearing down illegally like this, even for a prosecutor like Robert Mueller, let's set aside the unsuccessful attempts to fire or restrain Mueller.  Let's also set aside Trump's public attacks on Mueller and his investigation over the two years that many Trump statements were false or misleading.

Trump had declined to sit for an interview with Mueller’s team despite multiple requests. (This is fully cooperating?) The president’s written answers to questions were deemed insufficient, according to the report. Mueller indicated in response to Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) at the House intelligence committee hearing that Trump’s written responses were untruthful in at least some cases.

Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Tex.) stated:  “So most prosecutors want to make sure there was no appearance of impropriety, but in your case, you hired a bunch of people that did not like the President.”

Here’s the Truth:

Another Republican theme was that Mueller stocked his team with Democratic partisans. The claims brought some rare passion from Mueller, who defended his team and noted that 14 of the 19 lawyers were on the detail as career prosecutors from the Justice Department.  “We strove to hire those individuals that could do the job. I have been in this business for almost 25 years. And in those 25 years I have not had occasion, once, to ask somebody about their political affiliation. It is not done,” Mueller said. “What I care about is the capability of the individual to do the job and do the job seriously and quickly and with integrity.”

In fact, federal regulations prohibit the Justice Department from considering the political affiliation or political contributions of career appointees, including those appointed to the Special Counsel’s Office. Therefore, Mueller was legally prohibited from considering the political affiliations of the people he has hired.

While Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) noted $60,000 in donations to “Clinton and other Democrats,” by the fact checker’s acount, only about $10,900 were made directly to Ms. Clinton during her presidential runs.  About half of that amount came just from Jeannie Rhee, who joined the team from Mueller’s law firm, Wilmer Hale; she donated a total of $5,400 to Clinton’s campaign back in 2015 and 2016.

All told, five of the 16 known Mueller team members contributed to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Another six members had made political donations to Democrats over a number of years.

But as to who was running the operation, Robert Mueller is a long-time Republican. The special counsel investigation was overseen by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who was a Trump appointee and also a Republican.

Rep. Gary Steube (R-Fla.) asked: “Mr. Mueller, did you indeed interview for the FBI director job one day before you were appointed as Special Counsel?”

Here’s the Truth:

President Trump has made this same claim from the start of Mueller’s appointment in 2017.  But the Mueller report quotes Trump aides as telling Trump this was silly, and Mueller insisted in the hearing he was not interviewed for the FBI job, which he had already held for 12 years. Instead, he said he came to the White House to discuss what the role was of an FBI director.

“It was about the job and not about me applying for the job,” Mueller told Steube, and this statement was made under oath.

Former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon previously told investigators the purpose of the meeting was not a job interview, but to have Mueller “offer a perspective on the institution of the FBI,” and “although the White House thought about beseeching Mueller to become Director again, he did not come in looking for the job.”

The Washington Post had reported that when the issue came up of whether Mueller might be interested in once again becoming FBI director, he said he could not take the job unless a law was changed.  Mueller has already served a full ten-year term as FBI director and Congress in July 2011 passed legislation allowing Mueller to serve an additional two years.  But the original 10 year term is still the rule.

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) stated to Mueller: “Your report famously links Russian Internet troll farms with the Russian government. Yet, at a hearing on May 28th in the Concord Management IRA prosecution that you initiated, the judge excoriated both you and Mr. Barr for producing no evidence to support this claim. Why did you suggest Russia was responsible for the troll farms, when, in court, you’ve been unable to produce any evidence to support it?”

Here’s the Truth:

In his line of questioning, McClintock pushed back on a widely accepted finding from the US intelligence community and the Justice Department: that Russia's government ordered up a social-media influence campaign to help Trump and hurt Clinton.

Before Mueller’s grand jury indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers working directly for Putin’s government, it indicted several Russian individuals working for a “troll farm” called the Internet Research Agency. Two Russian companies, called Concord Catering and Concord Management and Consulting, they provided the Internet Research Agency with millions of dollars to buy digital ads and to pump pro-Trump and anti-Clinton messaging into the US ecosystem in 2016, Mueller’s indictment alleges.

Among those indicted was Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin, one of the richest men in Russia. Prigozhin, who “controlled” the two Concord companies that funded the troll farm and directed its work.. “He is a caterer who has been nicknamed ‘Putin’s chef’ because of his close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin,” The Washington Post reported.

The New York Times reported that Prigozhin has received contracts from the Russian government worth $3.1 billion over the past five years, citing research by the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a group set up by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

The US Treasury Department in 2016 imposed sanctions on Prigozhin and Concord over Russia’s occupation of Crimea and military actions in Ukraine, and then imposed more sanctions in 2018 based on “malicious cyber-enabled activities.” “Prigozhin has extensive business dealings with the Russian Federation Ministry of Defense, and a company with significant ties to him holds a contract to build a military base near the Russian Federation border with Ukraine,” the Treasury Department said in 2016 when it announced Prigozhin’s Ukraine-related sanctions. “Russia has been building additional military bases near the Ukrainian border and has used these bases as staging points for deploying soldiers into Ukraine.”

In a 2018 news conference with Trump in Helsinki, Putin said Concord did not “represent” or “constitute” the Russian state.  But the indictment leaves open the possibility that Russian government officials contributed to the Internet Research Agency’s efforts; it says the named defendants worked “together with others known and unknown to the Grand Jury.”

“Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations — such as cyber activity — with overt efforts by Russian government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls,’” according to the January 2017 assessment by the US Intelligence community.

Overall Results:

The above are only a few of the times that the GOP members of the two committees tried in vain to smear the Special Counsel Mueller’s testimony.

Those Republicans on the two committees did their best to cause an upset of the conclusions that were offered up by Robert Mueller.

The main results of the two committees testimony that became obvious were:

• Trump did perform "obstruction of justice" multiple times, and it has been shown in the report.

• Due to the Justice Department, President Trump cannot be indicted while he’s president, but he can be charged for his obstruction, after he leaves office.

• Donald Trump was not exonerated from being charged after he leaves office for obstruction of justice.

• The Russians did attack our 2016 election and they did their best to help Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton become president.

• The Russians are already at work to help Trump in the 2020 election and they will continue up to and beyond the November 2020 election.

• The NAACP has asked the US House of Representatives to impeach President Trump.

• The ACLU is expected to become involved going forward.

Copyright G. Ater 2019