In reading the Mueller report a second time I am led to a slightly different conclusion that I did at first blush. I am now convinced we are dealing with two separate authors volume 1 and volume 2.
Volume one is strictly straight to the facts ma’am, and nothing more than that. This strikes me as something consistent with what we know of Mueller in other environments in which he has served.
Volume two, on the other hand, strikes me as a rather partisan op-ed piece, such as one might find on the opinion pages of the New York Times, or coming from someplace like CNN or MSNBC. It seems specifically written to allow the Democrats in Congress to keep hoax alive.
The two volumes are so wildly different with volume two going so far out of line, I am forced to believe that there are two people responsible for the individual volumes.
As an example, the last paragraph of volume two draws the conclusion that they can neither prove nor deny that crimes were committed by Trump and his organization, but that’s not a conclusion that a prosecutor would draw. Indeed, publicizing such a conclusion is precisely against the special counsel statute.
A prosecutor would know full well if there’s nothing that you can indict a person on, you simply hold your silence.
The thing is, Mueller knows this and would instinctively react that way. I am convinced now that volume two was written by his chief of staff, Andrew Weissman, and his thirty some odd Democrat operatives which made up Mueller’s supposed “dream team”. Andrew Weissman is known as a wildly partisan critter around Washington and what is in volume two would be consistent with that positioning.
Ponder…. if this was the outcome, we can’t tell if it was a crime created or not, what in the world did we need a special counsel for in the first place? What was required here both in terms of the law and in terms of the public interest was somebody saying yay or nay. The Mueller report, as presented, fails to do so.
Another clue that this is a document with two separate authors: Look at pages 9 through 12 of volume two. The argument is being made in those pages that anything a president might do, legal or illegal, can be interpreted by a prosecutor as “obstructing justice”.
First of all, I have a little difficulty with the concept of Robert Mueller himself signing off on that kind of a statement.
Be that as it may, and even by that sweeping standard, special counsel’s office still couldn’t decide whether there was a crime or not. Indeed, it seems to me, absent that overly broad standard, they wouldn’t have been able to come to the conclusion that they did, and volume two of this document wouldn’t exist at all.
Given his history, Robert Mueller should have known the moment he walked in the door is that there was no collusion. This is precisely with Devin Nunez said a year earlier and ultimately all that what’s in volume one of the Mueller report does, is lineup completely Nunez’s report which came out in January of 2017.
Somebody’s backside is getting covered here, and it isn’t Donald Trump’s.