How Trustworthy Is Robert Mueller And Should We Put Any Faith In Mueller’s Russiagate Report? Some Answers From This Year’s Left Forum, Including One From Left Field

At the 2019 Left Forum in New York: Clockwise from upper left- Aaron Maté, Michael Isikoff, Jeremy Kuzmarov, Peter Kuznick.  All of these panelists, and others discussed the trustworthiness of Robert Mueller and his Russiagate Report. Only one of them was odd man out in his opinions, and probably at odds with the facts too.

I wrote in National Notice in early May (May 4th) about how Robert Mueller and his Russiagate report are probably not to be trusted. . . .  particularly the way Mueller seemed to be doing a coordinated dance with Attorney General William Barr respecting that report calibrated to further senselessly distract and preoccupy the public with Russiagate nonsense.  See: The Mueller Report And William Barr Summaries- So Perfectly Calibrated To Keep Us Distracted With “Russiagate” . . . Noticing That The Public Isn’t Served By This (And Noticing Who Exactly Is).

Visual for earlier National Notice article

This June, I had the chance to get some amplifying opinions from several very knowledgeable panelists at the Left Forum in New York City about whether Mueller and his report should be trusted.  I got opinions from a number of panelists, including some recognized as top-notch Russiagate afficionados: Aaron Maté, Jeremy Kuzmarov, Peter Kuznick (with some related input about the persecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning from Jordan Chariton and Katie Halper), plus I got one opinion that was a significant outlier from Michael Isikoff who is held by himself and others to be an expert on Russiagate.  (I also was, myself, at the Forum on a panel respecting the threats to libraries I put together through Citizens Defending Libraries- NYC Libraries: A Public Realm And Democratic Commons Under Siege As A Panoply of Interests Align To Dismantle Them.)

Should we trust and put faith in Mueller and his report?. . .  Here is an answer cobbling together everything collected:

Who is Robert Mueller?

Mr. Mueller has familial roots in the intelligence community that go way back. Mueller’s great uncle, Richard Bissell, was one of the top people, that Kennedy purged from the CIA in the fall of 1961 two years before he was assassinated in the fall of 1963.  Likewise, Charles Cabell, grandfather of Mueller’s wife, Ann Cabell Standish, was another of those top people removed by Kennedy in his purge of the agency at that time.  Kennedy was angry he that had been lied to about the Bay of Pigs invasion by top intelligence officials who were attempting to manipulate him into war.  The triumvirate of top CIA officials that he famously purged in November of 1961 was Allen W. Dulles who, appointed in 1953, had been its first civilian director since the Agency’s its creation in 1947 via a law signed by Truman, Richard Bissell and Charles Cabell.

There are those who say, in retrospect, that Kennedy's housecleaning was not thorough enough.  In fact, on December 22, 1963, the one-month anniversary of Kennedy's assassination, former president Truman wrote and published an op-ed in the Washington Post saying that the CIA's role going forward needed to be limited to intelligence and that the agency's "operational duties" should be terminated.  The Washington Post quickly removed (censored?) the ex-president's op-ed from its later editions.  Despite pressure, Truman remained a critic of how the CIA was out of the control of the presidents following him, including the inability to do "any housecleaning because everything that goes on is a damn secret."

When Mueller was brought in to head the FBI he started in that position on September 4, 2001, exactly one week prior to 9/11.  (His was one of the multiple oddly timed 9/11 appointments.)  At the FBI Mueller dismantled- shifted/- at least half of the investigative resources and focus of the bureau away from white collar crime (to “terrorism”)— People seem to forget how 9/11 has, in this way, been a boon to white collar crime.

As FBI Director, Mueller went before Congress and said that he was concerned about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, which, of course, we now clearly know didn’t exist.  Mueller helped sell the Iraq War, among other things saying that Iraq might supply weapons of mass destruction to terrorists (Al-Qaeda?) even though Al-Qaeda was Iraq’s enemy at the time.

Mueller was instrumental in the passage of the PATRIOT Act.  Mueller immediately (on September 14, 2011) went before Congress to argue for passage of PATRIOT Act testifying that the 9/11 attacks might have been averted through the existence of such a law, because it would have allowed for discovery of warning signs about the Florida flight school training of those who were identified as the terrorists. To boot, three days later, Mueller said: “There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country.”  It wasn't until months later, May, that it was revealed that FBI agents, in fact, had this information, but that the Bureau simply sat on it and did nothing.  This caused the New York Times to say that Mueller's contradiction of his past statements about the FBI's "bungling" of the matter raised "new concern today on Capitol Hill about his leadership of the embattled agency."  The Wall Street Journal went further, calling for Mueller's resignation due to Mueller's lack of credibility over the course of months and his mischaracterization of the FBI investigation along with the promotion of at least one of the people who was involved in thwarting proper investigative follow up and action on these matters.

Something else related that Mueller is accused of whitewashing: In 2006, another FBI agent Harry Samit testifying in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui said that he had warned his higher ups over 70 times and confirmed that, in a report, he had attributed FBI inaction to "obstructionism, criminal negligence and careerism." Moussaoui took flight school classes and was arrested by Samit on August 16, 200. Mueller responded to the charges of FBI inaction respecting the Zacarias Moussaoui case making the difficult to believe assertion: “That took us several months, to follow that lead, and it also required the full support of the German authorities, and it would have been very, I think impossible to have followed that particular lead in the days between the time in which Moussaoui was detained and September 11th.”
    
Mueller oversaw the mass surveillance that was going on and defended continuation of it by the NSA testifying before Congress.  That included illegal warrantless surveillance that Mueller favored and made misrepresentations to Congress about.  The FBI itself, under Mueller committed thousands of violations of law respecting its surveillance.

Mueller rounded up hundreds of Muslims and South Asian Immigrants after 9/11 and put them in detention facilities (or they may have been sent to foreign countries for torture), and was sued for it, but the Supreme Court eventually ruled Mueller could not be brought to justice for it.

One factor spurring the speedy adoption of the PATRIOT Act (it was largely drafted before 9/11, brought before Congress as a "terror" bill in early October and, passed by Congress, was signed into law by Bush on October 26, 2001) were the mysterious anthrax attacks that started September 18, 2001, exactly one week after 9/11.  The anthrax attacks were critical and scary, delivering a message of vulnerability to those who where the recipients of poisoned letters: The letters went to members of the media and members of Congress, making clear how easily individuals could be targeted.  And obviously, the press and the media both have important check and balance responsibilities in our society.  Thus, discovering who was responsible for the threats was of utmost importance . . Responsibility for that investigation was to be Mueller's.

. . Those in Congress who received the letters were Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (Democrats held the Senate) and senator Patrick Leahy and in Washington D.C.  Leahy was head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was soon going to be presented with consideration of the PATRIOT Act as part of the process for its adoption.  The members of the media who received anthrax letters were the New York Post and Tom Brokaw at NBC, both important outlets in New York City, and, apparently, American Media, Inc. (AMI) in Boca Raton, Florida.  Florida was where journalist Robert Stevens, a photo editor for the Sun, wound up dying, the first person killed by the anthrax.  The Florida news outlet was in the vicinity of the Florida airport where those identified as hijackers are reported to have been getting their flight training, an airport about which there were ample questions in need of investigation.

Initially there were concocted moves to pin the anthrax attacks on Iraq, including by officials high up in the Bush administration.  Thus the anthrax attacks also helped fuel the impulse to go to war with Iraq, just as the Bush administration wanted and was working to orchestrate.  However, what is now known to a fair degree of certainly is that the anthrax attacks came from within our own government, in other words a "false flag" attack.  The notes that went with the attacks that included things like "ALLAH IS GREAT" and "DEATH TO ISRAEL" pretended that they were from Arab terrorists.
 
Mueller's seven-year FBI investigation of the attacks, although it is widely described as botched, bungled and doubtful in many respects, ultimately had to focus on Americans working for our own United States government.  Mueller's botched investigation, hampered by the FBI's involvement in the destruction of evidence, put the blame, in succession, on two different men, via two different lone mad scientist theories.

The FBI's incorrect, in retrospect apparently frivolous, blaming of the first of these men, Steven Jay Hatfill, a bioweapons scientist for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland who had transferred to work at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), in McLean, Virginia, ultimately resulted in Hatfield suing the government. He won a $4.6 million settlement because those in charge of the investigating FBI agents and Justice Department officials leaked information about him to the press that mislead the public to believe the mystery was solved, and that a culprit, him, had been identified.  SAIC did all sorts of classified work for federal agencies.

The FBI's second lone mad scientist theory was that Bruce Ivins, another top bioweapons research scientist at Fort Detrick, was the lone culprit.  The facts about the FBI's announced suspicions of Ivins were never tested in court.  Ivins was reported to have apparently suicided on August 1, 2008 after it was widely reported that the FBI was about to press charges against him based on largely circumstantial evidence.  On August 6, 2008, federal prosecutors declared Ivins to be the sole perpetrator of the crime thus solving the case: "The genetically unique parent material of the anthrax spores... was created and solely maintained by Dr. Ivins."  And by this time, it might even have seemed that a public, tired of the investigation, could have felt that the investigation had been inconveniently disruptive to the lives of scientists in the bioweapons industry.

But were the FBI's announced conclusions respecting Ivins closing the case correct? In 2015, according to the New York Times, a former senior F.B.I. agent who ran the anthrax investigation for four years says that the bureau gathered “a staggering amount of exculpatory evidence” regarding Dr. Ivins that remained secret.  In 2014, Frontline reported "For a second time in three years, an independent inquiry cast doubt Friday on the FBI’s assertion that genetic testing had cinched its conclusion that a now-dead Army bioweapons researcher mailed anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and terrorized the East Coast in 2001."

So if a bungled seven-year investigation offered red herrings up to the public and never correctly identified who, apparently from within some branch of our own government operations, sent the anthrax letters and for what purpose, an exceptionally critically necessary task was left undone.  Mueller is reported to have “exerted far-reaching control over the FBI-led “Amerithrax’’ investigation” and "micromanaged" it.

Mueller, of course, has more history going further back than we've covered so far.  As Mueller and Trump Attorney General William Barr seemed to spar noisily over Mueller's report, one of the things that people lost sight of is that Mueller and Barr and their families are reportedly good friends, with a relationship going back thirty years.

Barr worked for the CIA (reportedly from 1973 to 1977).  Then he got to make decisions about investigation of the CIA.  One major event in his career for which Barr is well remembered (and people thought it might be a reason Trump appointed him) was the way that Barr oversaw, many say "covered up," the investigation of Iran-Contra involving the CIA and illegal activities of U.S. officials.  It went as high up, perhaps, as George H. W. Bush, the former CIA head who had been Vice President at the time of the affair.

Barr, as Attorney General for President G. H. W. Bush, advised Bush on Bush's 1992 pardons of key players in the scandal.  The pardons, particularly that of Casper Weinberger, who was about to come to trial, effectively shut down the six-year investigation.  Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, heading the investigation noted that in issuing the pardons Bush appeared to have been preempting being implicated himself along with the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials. Evidence respecting the crimes of Iran–Contra that was expected to have come to light during the Weinberger trial.  Walsh noted that there was a pattern of "deception and obstruction" by Bush, Weinberger and other senior Reagan administration officials.

Memos show that Mueller, working for Barr during the Iran-Contra investigation, advised Barr about it, including what Barr should do about Lawrence Walsh, whom Barr had regularly considered firing.  The eventual pardons proved to be an alternative way to neutralize Walsh and his investigation.

Also, back then, Mueller and Barr were accused of coverup activity in the investigation of two other scandals.  One of them, the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International) investigation was related to the Iran-Contra scandal. BCCI was a bank set up to evade the law and was used for a variety of covert operations by the CIA, including transfers of money and weapons for Iran-Contra.  

The BCCI scandal also involved our intelligence agencies illegally funneling funds for weapons to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.  The other investigative scandal, known as "Iraqgate," (not the only scandal to go by that name now), involving a different bank (Atlanta Lavoro bank). It also involved intelligence agencies under the Bush administration illegally funneling funds (through agricultural credits) for a military buildup in Iraq.   Any involvement of Muller in playing down such contributions to military buildups in Iraq could be viewed as ironic given Mueller's later exhortations to invade Iraq because of the supposed threat of its weapons.

Assistant Attorney Mueller was responsible for handling the publicity in 1991 associated with the disclosure of the BCCI investigations. The Washington Post described him as undertaking "an unusual media blitz to declare that the federal government had been investigating BCCI since 1986." When the Justice Department was criticized for responding slowly to and refusing to cooperate in investigating allegations of wrongdoing at BCCI Mueller denied that the department (under Attorney General Thornburgh) had stifled its inquiry.

The New York Times covered the BCCI and Iraqgate scandals.  In particular,  conservative New Times columnist William Safire went after first Mueller and the eventual Muller/Barr team in a number of articles based on Safire's own personal inquiries into what was going on.  (Barr became Attorney General under Bush at the end of November 1991 replacing Thornburgh)  Safire reported Robert Mueller vehemently denied having told British intelligence to stop cooperating with the Manhattan grand jury of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau respecting the BCCI investigation despite what Morgenthau had told a Senate subcommittee about the lack of cooperation he was getting from the Justice Department.

Safire was harsh and blunt saying things like:

Mr. Barr and the chief of his Criminal Division, Robert Mueller, could face prosecution if it turns out that high Bush officials knew about Saddam Hussein's perversion of our Agriculture export guarantees to finance his war machine, and delayed the inquiry into the Atlanta Lavoro bank scandal.

and

When an Iraqgate grand jury is finally impaneled, one of its targets is likely to be Robert Mueller, that same Criminal Division's chief. Here we have the political flunky to that likely target getting copies of, and trying to act as conduit for, all evidence that might be used in questioning his bosses under oath.

* * * *

Coverup-General Barr and Mr. Mueller were instrumental in appointing the lawyer for the American subsidiary of the British company Matrix Churchill to be U.S. Attorney in Atlanta a few months after the raid on the Atlanta bank.

Safire was urging recognition of the implications of obvious conflicts of interest in the Iraqgate investigation:

U.S. Attorney General William Barr, in rejecting the House Judiciary Committee's call for a prosecutor not beholden to the Bush Administration to investigate the crimes of Iraqgate, has taken personal charge of the cover-up. The document that will be Exhibit A in a future prosecution of obstruction of justice is an unsigned 97-page apologia that accompanied Mr. Barr's unprecedented refusal to recognize a "political conflict of interest," as called for in the law.

and

In professing to see no conflict in the investigation of themselves, these political appointees seek to hide behind the professionalism of "career prosecutors" of the Public Integrity Section and the F.B.I.

But dismayed professionals inside Justice tell me that the Public Integrity chief was reassigned months ago to make way for a more malleable man. The Barr Apology was prepared by political appointees for a political purpose: contain Iraqgate until after the election.

And Mr. Barr has thoroughly abused the F.B.I. Field agents have told me for a year that higher-ups at Justice have steered them away from rewarding lines of inquiry.

The Robert Mueller Russiagate Report

 What about Mueller's Russiagate report?  Was it thorough or reliable?

It was very thorough only in some respects; in others it was clearly not.  With all the very substantial resources Muller had available, he did not do basic things you would expect an investigator to do. Mueller did not:

    •    Interview Julian Assange.  (Assange offered a very reasonable arrangement to discuss “technical evidence ruling out certain parties” with respect to in the leak of the DNC emails, the receipt of which FBI would have allowed Mueller to know who- probably Russia- was not the culprit with respect to the leak.  Mueller didn’t want to know that someone, probably Russia, couldn’t be blamed for the leak?)
    •    Consider the report of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), who conducted their own study and found that it was a leak.
    •    Examine the Democratic National Committee servers from which information was allegedly stolen. (Mueller instead relied for forensics on a discredited, and conflicted DNC-hired private firm named CrowdStrike).

Worsening things, Mueller not only accepted without real proof the conspiracy theory that the Russian government interfered with the U.S. election, he exaggerated the importance of it.  There is also evidence that points to efforts by the FBI to entrap and set up George Papodopoulus from the Trump campaign to create a case that didn’t exist.

Finally there is the coy way that the Mueller report bobs and weaves experimenting at times with teasing innuendo, in the end seeming to say something to please almost everybody even to the point of self contradiction,* but also to the point that sometimes it seems not really saying anything.  This sense of confusion gets compounded when, testifying before Congress about his report Mueller (dishonestly?) can't even seem to remember or vouch for what is basic and critical in his report, or understand the difference between "no evidence" and the innuendo of "insufficient evidence."  Ditto: Mueller's innuendo of "no exoneration" when there is no applicable legal concept to make "exoneration" possible.  And then Mueller and Barr dance a tango that somehow, almost impossibly, perpetuates the Russiagate distractions.  We must ultimately ask whether we think there is something fishy and politicized about Mueller and his report.

(*   Mueller’s report says that he did not investigate whether individuals were colluding-  he did not investigate anything “under the rubric of `collusion’”-  because “collusion,” doesn’t exist as any sort of defined legal theory: "collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the U.S. Code; nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law."  But then, even so, the report says "collusion" is legally synonymous with what "conspiracy" means for the crime in the federal conspiracy statute: "To the contrary, even as defined in legal dictionaries, collusion is largely synonymous with conspiracy as that crime is set forth in the general federal conspiracy statute.")

A Side `Barr' Re Trusting Certain Investigations

Even as we try to conclude our thoughts about Mueller, we are about to be asking a set of similar questions about investigative efforts, conflicts of interest, findings and conclusions with respect to William Barr flowing from the far too convenient death of Jeffrey Epstein in a prison run by Barr's Justice Department.  Barr's conflicts of interest with respect to any Epstein investigation hearken all the way back to his father, Donald Barr's, involvement in the origin story of how Jeffrey Epstein became Jeffrey Epstein.  That began when Donald Barr as headmaster of Dalton appointed a perhaps unqualified Epstein to teach math there.  William Barr's father, Donald, served in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. . .  And his son, William Barr, worked for the CIA?  Do these things run along family lines?  Some will tell you they do.  

Whitney Webb on Epstein and Barr's investigative conflicts

William Barr worked for Kirkland Ellis the law firm that got Epstein the plea deal criticized as ludicrously lenient the first time Epstein was charged with all sorts of systematic pedophiliac misdeeds.  The specter has also been raised of ways in which the Epstein case and his organized activities tie in with Iran-Contra and the CIA.  Mint Press News investigative journalist Whitney Webb has been doing superb work with a series of articles and associated interviews about Jeffrey Epstein's activities as part of a sexual blackmail ring that had intelligence agency involvement.  (See- The Real News Network- Epstein May Be Just One Part of an Intricate Network of Sex and Power, August 15, 2019 and CN Live- Webb on Epstein and the Guardian, the NYT and WikiLeaks: Episode 6 at 1:17)-  

- Perhaps a preview to current breaking news: In a 2010 interview about what the media refrains from reporting, Russ Baker, author of "Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years" recalled (at 46:00) how someone of note, high up and connected in Washington once asked him: "Do you know what the number one industry in Washington D.C, is?"-- "Lobbying?" Baker speculated.  The answer he was given: "sexual blackmail."  And this, Baker said:

is very interesting because there are more things about Watergate that I don't get into in the [Bush] book that have elements of sexual blackmail.  If you are trying to figure out how you can get to someone, there are only a few ways you can get to someone.  . .  so this is a logical recourse. So, if you are in public life, all you've got is your reputation. . . there are all kinds of possibilities for things to happen, and you can't really survive these things.

Consistent Perspectives at The Left Forum

I cobbled together the picture of who Robert Mueller is and whether he and his report should be trusted from the answers I got to the questions on this that I put to the panelists at the Left Forum, combined with what I previously wrote on the subject when I noted how Mueller's handling of his investigation and his report had contributed so suspiciously to the publicly harmful distractions of Russiagate and to the misdirection of animosity (as well as blame for the 2016 election) towards Russia, Julian Assange and, as a byproduct of that, Chelsea Manning.  I added in the results of some more recent research I was compelled to do.  Obviously, reactions to Mueller's late July testimony are likewise more recent.

For most of those reading this, I think the answer is that, of course, Mueller should not be trusted and that we should be careful about putting too much stock in his report, irrespective of whom it pleases, why, how or when.  People may observe that such conclusions are startlingly different from what they have been led to expect from the mainstream corporate conglomerate media in recent years.  There the message and meme was that Mr. Mueller (albeit a Republican) is a “straight arrow” (with uncompromised integrity) and that we could trust and just wait for delivery of Mueller's report to understand the world in a way that might even set things right.  Quite the contrary: It might better be said that the selection of Mueller for various job assignments over the years has been reflective of an appreciation for his skill set and dependability in controlling and withholding information and skewing how it is perceived when it finally reaches public ears.

A Very Inconsistent Perspective From Isikoff
 
The one Left Forum panelist whose answer I could not meld into the pictures painted above (the other's melded easily) was Michael Isikoff whose credentials in this regard involve writing, with co-author David Corn, the book, "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump."

For those checking out Isikoff's book on Amazon, a bunch of other Russiagate type books will be pushed at them, including the Mueller Report itself and a book by James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, who perjured himself lying to Congress about mass surveillance. 

The New York Times gives this "#1 New York Times bestseller" a good review : "the authors make their view clear from the start, referring to Russian help as the perceived “original sin” of Trump’s presidency. . . The authors are respected journalists, and one can trust their use of anonymous sources or not. . [one] anonymous source reveals one of the book’s most significant revelations . . — [he] told his interlocutor as early as 2014 that the Kremlin was planning to undermine democracy in the West."  And the book was also reviewed respectfully in the Washington Post (republished by the LA Times): “Russia, write Isikoff and Corn, remains “the original sin of [Trump’s] presidency, a scandal that raise[s] questions about both his legitimacy and the nation’s vulnerability to covert information warfare.” . .  `Russian Roulette’ draws heavily on news stories that Isikoff and Corn filed on what would come to be known as the [largely misleading] Steele dossier before most Americans had ever heard of it.”

The book got Isikoff on MSNBC, of course both with Rachel Maddow and without, also CNN (Jake Tapper, you know), NBC, CBS, PBS, Fox, CSPAN Book Talk, NPR, including through Terry Gross on Fresh Air, even included in the news delivered through Comedy Central.  Do you ever feel like everyone is pumping the same stories at you devoid any critical awareness?

At the Left Forum Mr. Isikoff's advice to the audience was basically to trust Mueller based on "a pretty consistent record for reliability and credibility" and to assure that there was "absolutely no doubt" in his mind "that the Muller Report is 100% correct."  To be absolutely fair to Mr. Isikoff, I will give you his complete and full response and the exact question posed.  We'll get to that shortly.

Panel on Combating the Corporate Media Propaganda Machine

Left to right: Jordan Chariton, Malaika Jabali, Katie Halper, and Aaron Maté

The first panel where I asked my questions about the trustworthiness of Mueller and his report was Combating the Corporate Media Propaganda Machine, the video of which can be watched on YouTube.  The panel for the discussion was Jordan Chariton, the Nation writer Aaron Maté, and Katie Halper, host of The Katie Halper Show, a conversation about "Making America Sane Again."  Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi, who was advertised as being on the panel, did not make it.  Malaika Jabali, an attorney and journalist filled in as an addition to the panel.

Here is my (MDDW) question which I asked keeping my previous National Notice article in mind.  On the video it is about 1:30.  It is followed by the answers I received from the panelists.

MDDW:

I agree totally about the bogusness of Russiagate and everything that’s been said about how it has been used as a distraction, but could we add a few words about how, with media complicity, Russiagate has also been used as a fulcrum to go after Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning (again), and, at the same time turn the intelligence community and people like Robert Mueller into heroes, when, I think, if you look into it, he’s a pretty scary individual.  And I don’t rule out the fact that he’s actually calibrating his work to keep Russiagate going and working with Barr actually. . . 

. . .  And lastly, since Matt Taibbi is not here, and I want to throw out a lot to chew on: He has “ten rules of hate” in his new book, and we haven’t talked about how the media is working to sell us the idea that we are divided, and to divide us and get us hating each other.

From the video which can be watched on YouTube

 Aaron Maté: 

On the veneration of intelligence, the biggest illustration of that is the fact that CNN, one of their top analysts in the Russiagate era has been James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, blatant perjurer to Congress, denied mass surveillance.  On MSNBC, it’s John Brennan, former head of the CIA, a guy who spied on the Senate when they were investigating torture, a guy who oversaw the drone program, the assassination program under Obama, helped fuel the Syria proxy war– on and on and on.  These people are treated– talk about state TV– I mean these people are treated as sober analysts on state television, beside the fact that they also had a pretty major role in the genesis of Russiagate itself.  And now they’re on to be supposedly sober voices, but the fact is that they’re former inelegance officials, which speaks to a broader trend of putting up military veterans, military generals and intelligence officials in expert roles.

In terms of the veneration of Mueller, yeah, we are told to believe in this guy as a savior even though he went before Congress as the FBI Director and said that he was concerned about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam was going to pass them on to terrorists; so he helped sell the Iraq War.  Mueller also rounded up hundreds of Muslims and South Asian Immigrants after 9/11 and put them in detention facilities, and was sued for it, was never held to justice for it of course.  But we are supposed to believe these people are now our saviors, and it’s . . .  Part of the result of it, if not the intent of it, is to push back real resistance, figures like Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, Medea Benjamin, [the latter two were present in the audience] and to instead point us to the national security state. . . And of course to demonize people like Julian Assange, who has the temerity to blow the whistle and to tell the secrets of all these people. 

Jordan Chariton: 

And just pointing out that Julian Assange, my opinion, if you don’t see . . .  – I don’t mean Occupy Wall Street in terms of the same principles– if you don’t see a force of people out in the streets on a daily basis, panels like this don’t matter.  Because if they get away with basically giving him a death sentence, whether it’s the death penalty or solitary confinement, that’s a slippery slope, and do not think that the Democratic party, once in office, will suddenly not use that as precedent.  So I think it’s super-important, I myself, probably should be covering it way more.  And Chelsea Manning!: I think she’s now in solitary confinement, again, for several weeks— This gets no coverage. . . . .

Katie Halper: 

Which they did last time when she was suicidal; their response was to put her in solitary confinement, which is to torture her.

Jordan Chariton: 

   . . . And, by the way, talking about propaganda and no facts, if you read the indictment of Julian Assange, the only thing they have that they are indicting him on, with no evidence, is, I think, three or four words: “not yet,” where he said to Chelsea Manning, “Nothing yet.”  That’s their evidence that Julian Assange, himself, was working himself to hack government systems.  There is a reason why Obama, himself, who is no friend to journalists or whistleblowers, did not indict him.  So they have not provided any evidence, and of all the things they require protests– Listen if Julian Assange— To me it’s a show trial; they are going to extradite him and they are going to torture him. If people aren’t out in the streets about that, then we have a lot more concerns than, you know, `Amazon.'

If you want to watch the video, what followed next was more discussion about this and some of the other sorts of threats, intimidations and fears to which journalists are likely now subject.

Panel on Russia Gate and the New Cold War: Critical Perspectives

Left to right: Priya Reddy, Peter Kuznick, Jeremy Kuzmarov

The next panel discussion where I asked a similar question was Russia Gate and the New Cold War: Critical Perspectives.  The panelists, with Priya Reddy introducing them were Jeremy Kuzmarov, author, with John Marciano, of "The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce" and Peter Kuznick, author of "The Untold History of the United States," which he turned into a documentary series working with Oliver Stone

When the Q&A started after the main presentations, here is what I asked and the responses I got from the panelists.
 
MDDW:

Neither of you mentioned the overlay of the Mueller investigation and the report and the way that’s being handled, which it seems that Mueller and Barr, who have done a lot together in the past, are dancing together on this one, and then they agree that the Russians have done something terrible that’s being used as an excuse to go after Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, and at the same time, for a lot of people on the left, Mueller and the intelligence communities are being elevated to some kind of hero worship, and obviously you [Peter Kusnick] know enough from your book that people like him, and him specifically, and Barr were involved in very terrible intelligence stuff in the past.

Jeremy Kuzmarov:

On the Mueller investigation, there has been some critical analysis: I would recommend some articles by Gareth Porter- the story of news.  I was also critical, because, I mean, Mueller never interviewed Julian Assange; he never considered the report of the Intelligence Veterans for Sanity [Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)], who conducted their own study and found that it was a leak, not a hack of the emails indicating that the DNC had plotted against Bernie Sanders.  The Intelligence Veterans hired an expert who concluded that the email came from the East Coast of the United States and had to be a leak, and was not a hack.  Mueller has millions of dollars at his disposal– Why did he not engage with this study, and try to follow up with that study?  Why did he not interview Julian Assange?  Why did he not examine the [Democratic National Committee] servers?  So you become very suspicious and he did not carry out a very thorough investigation.  He had all the resources.  There is something fishy and politicized about this.

And you know there have been some articles by Porter, I think Aaron Maté was here yesterday.  Some believe that the social media was actually a bait and click operation, a commercial operation, and was not tied to the Russian government.  We know for a fact that there was a lot of exaggeration about the social media operation, most of them are apolitical.  A Facebook executive admitted that the numbers were quite limited.  Those ads extended well beyond the election season.  The number of articles pertaining to the election and the number of views was actually a very small percentage of the numbers that the media is often claiming, you know that they impacted a “million” a “hundred thousand” Americans.  It was actually a very small number.  And most people don’t read the news feeds from Facebook, at least an executive said that when he was asked to testify before Congress.

So there are grounds to question– This whole thing is very, very politicized and that the investigation is not all that thorough.  Although, in some areas, it clearly was thorough and substantial and did come to a conclusion that there was no collusion.  Also, if you read George Papadopoulos’ memoir, it’s clear he was entrapped and set up, and that’s when Stefan Halper and the CIA were trying to set him up to make it look like he was collaborating with the Russians.  So there’s a lot of empty politics so we don’t know what went on here.

Peter Kusnick:

Mueller has been sanctified, and Mueller walks on water in the American media.  The actual Mueller is not quite as saintly as he makes himself out to be.  First of all, he covered up the FBI incompetence in 9/11.  One of the FBI agents, Harry Samit, testified [at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial] that the FBI behavior represented criminal negligence on the part of the agency.  Mueller’s job was to whitewash that.  Mueller was instrumental in the passage of the PATRIOT Act.  Mueller then was instrumental, and the FBI, in interning Muslim Americans.  Mueller also reinforced the idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  He also said they might supply those weapons to Al-Qaeda, even though Al-Qaeda was Iraq’s enemy at the time.  He oversaw the mass surveillance that was going on.  So Mueller is not quite as clean as the media would like to make him out to be.               

The report itself and the impact it had has been greatly exaggerated.  There are a lot of things we could cite.  Reuters, for example, talked about the amount of money that was spent compared to the billion dollars spent on political ads— Adrian  Chen who wrote the big article about the internet research agency in the New York Times magazine, got so fed up with the hype about this that he wrote that he’d seen his influence blown way out of proportion.  He said, “I agree with my colleague Masha Gessen that the whole issue has been blown out of proportion. . .  if I could do it all over again, I would have highlighted just how inept and haphazard those attempts were.” He said the IRA [Internet Research Agency] is not the savvy and efficient manipulator of American public opinion it is portrayed as by the experts in the U.S. media.

One of my favorite commentators on this is Nate Silver, who is the New York Times expert on electioneering, and also the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC.  He said, if you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election, I am not sure Russian social media memes would be among the top one hundred.  He said the scale was quite small; there’s not much evidence that they were effective.  It goes on `Ya, I think the Russians interfered, I don’t know, probably on both sides to seem extent; might have had a little bit of an impact.' But the reason why the Democrats lost in 2016 is because Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate, and she didn’t mobilize.  My students didn’t go out.  My students mobilized en mass for Obama in 2008, 20012.  They could care less about Hillary Clinton.  African Americans didn’t show up.  Working class didn’t show up.  Anti-war movement didn’t show up.  So there were a lot of other reasons.  If the Russians interfered it had little impact. Maybe there was, but it certainly wasn’t what has been attributed to them.

Question from Pro-Russiagate Conspiracy Theorist (This next Q&A question came from someone I know who, contrary to the disagreement I have expressed to him, has been lobbying for the Pacifica Radio station network to- credulously?-  devote a lot more time and attention to the Mueller report.):

The issue of the automatic sort of dismissal of the Mueller report, I think we have to question our own assumptions about this, because Putin had absolutely justifiable reasons, given his own self interest and his own perception of his state interest to interfere in the election.  And we have not seen the documents that back up the conclusions of Volume 1 [of the report].  They’re still classified, so we can’t even look at the electronic intelligence data that backs up the conclusions that say that practically every voter in the Unites States was impacted by that.  Because he had his own reasons, because again, precisely what was raised, that there was a need to attack his political stability previously by the United States.  So, I just mean that perhaps there’s a different way of looking at this: He had a justifiable reason for his own self interest to do these things, and we just shouldn’t walk back from it, simply because Assange might have been pushed into a corner, because of his status to have to cooperate with the GRU [the military intelligence service of the Russian Federation], which isn’t, again not beyond the realm of possibility, in terms of what could have happened.

So we don’t know what happened, you know.  We are just dealing with our functions about how we perceive power and its relationships.  We don’t know what happened.  I don’t know what happened.            

Jeremy Kuzmarov:

I think that’s a good point: We don’t know what happened– The Mueller report did not cover and did not do things that a basic investigator would do such as interviewing Assange or following up on the VIPS study.  Then you become suspicious, but we don’t know. . .

Mueller should have followed up on that study, but he didn’t, so that raises suspicion– But all the things that Peter said about who Mueller really is becomes very suspicious.

Panel on Mueller Investigation of Roger Stone and Randy Credico- Mueller and Me and Bianca Make Three

Left to right: Martin Stolar, Michael Isikoff, Randy Credico

The last Left Forum panel discussion where I asked a very similar question was where I got a very different response from panelist Michael Isikoff.  It was Mueller and Me and Bianca Make Three.  This discussion consisted of Isikoff querying comedian-journalist Randy Credico about his communications and interactions with political operative Roger Stone, who was a member of the Trump campaign team.  Credico was poised to testify at an upcoming trial of Stone arising out of the Mueller investigation. Isikoff had broken the story about Credico's coming testimony.

Also on the panel, to answer questions and amplify insight (plus ensure his client stayed within legal limits), was Credico's counsel, Martin Stolar, the civil rights lawyer.  As a government witness, Credico was to be testifying to refute allegations of his being a backchannel to Wikileaks for Stone. Although complicated, this would be bad news for Stone who, as Credico tells it, like to play games with the truth.  Lying to the FBI is a crime, even if you have committed no other crime.  If one talks to the FBI, one should strive not to lie, even by accident.
         
As Credico and his lawyer were both needing to stay in the good graces of prosecutors whom they were at the mercy of, I limited my question.
  
MDDW:

Mr. Isikoff, this question is for you, because it would be unfair to ask it of either of the other two gentlemen up there: You are offering faith in the Mueller Report, faith and credulity and faith in Mueller– Do you have any thoughts about who Mueller is, what his background is?– and I’ve asked this at a couple of other panels and I’ve gotten answers from very well informed individuals, so whatever your answer is about what you know about his background that should make us suspicious of him and not take his report or anything he offers on faith?  Are you suspicious of Mueller?  Does he have a background that raises questions?   Can you inform the audience about that please?

Michael Isikoff:

He was the head of the criminal division of the Justice Department; he was the director of the FBI for twelve years; he was appointed originally by Bush and then Barack Obama wanted him to stay on; he was named as the special counsel here, and that was all because most people in Washington thought he had a pretty consistent record for reliability and credibility.  Has the FBI made mistakes over the years, including under Robert Mueller?  Absolutely.  Have they misrepresented things over the years?  Absolutely.

I have been one of the many reporters who has aggressively reported on things the FBI has gotten wrong, the things that the FBI has misstated, the things for which the FBI has charged the wrong people.  I have aggressively reported on that, but I take everything on an individual basis.  I look at the facts.  I look at where the evidence is, and in this case, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Muller Report is 100% correct, even though the FBI, over the years, has gotten a lot wrong, but, in this case, it didn’t.

Immediately afterwards another member of the audience began to ask Mr. Isikoff what would probably have been a challenging follow-up question getting out the name "Ray McGovern."  . . . But before they could get out any more of their question Itsikoff fired off “Ray McGovern is full of shit.”  (He said it a second time as well.)  The questioner said “is that the best you can do.”  Itsikoff explained he was upset that McGovern had “misrepresented” what Itsikoff wrote in Russian Roulette.

Ray McGovern, a former CIA officer, is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals, a group that, as noted, has challenged the Mueller report in a number of respects.

After some further exchanges about how what credence should be given to Ray McGovern and to Bill Binney, still another former senior CIA intelligence officer who has cast doubt on official government and corporate media narratives, Randy Credico said as follows:

Randy Credico:

I don't know, all I know is that I am here to stick up for Assange.

I don't want to give Mr. Credico the last word, but the fact is that we live in a scary world.  If we shut down and intimidate the few courageous journalists we have like Assange (in this world Assange sets a high bar) and if we further limit the already very limited transparency with respect to our military and intelligence agencies we are in deep trouble. . .

. .  Frankly, we probably also need to do some "housecleaning," as Truman referred to it. That's something we'd probably better comprehend if there was a lot less that was so "damn secret."

Postscript (added September 5, 2019): After this article was finished, I went on to amplify it with another, so that I realize that I now have a three-part series on the trustworthiness of Robert Mueller and his Russiagate report.  That third new article is: When It Was Time To Promote Robert Mueller, The Press Publicly Promoted Mueller: Comparing The Strange Episodes of Forgetting and Résumé Cleansing That Covered Up Concerns About Mueller’s Past.

In that article, you can go on to read about Robert Mueller being there when documents were withheld from the defense in the Timothy J. McVeigh Oklahoma City Bombing case, Mueller’s unsatisfactory prosecution of the Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie, Scotland crash case plus the comments respecting it by Mueller and Barr right before 9/11, Mueller's and Barr's involvement in paving the way for the invasion of Panama, Mueller’s involvement in the FBI covering up and participating in the crimes of Whitey Bulger in Boston, Mueller’s involvement in the unsatisfactory prosecution of the Enron case, and Mueller works for the nation’s largest private surveillance firm to help it keep secrets.  . . .   Respecting all of this, as well as what you have just read, you can read about how the corporate press failed to recollect and present the public with the information it needed to know and an accurate portrait of Mueller when important decisions about his career were being publicly discussed.