As the articles have been ignored (should I blame Google?- They are hard to find when searching), I figured it would be worthwhile to at least provide, a short form reference, an index to much of what can be found in those articles concerning the major takeaway they provide. The major takeaway of those articles, which was easy to infer from the pattern of facts that kept repeating, is that Mueller’s forte is craftily botching investigations to reach incorrect and misleading results. The investigations in which he has been involved regularly focus on, pursue, and indict the wrong people for the wrong things.
Researching and writing about Mueller's record, I discovered more than a dozen extraordinarily high profile cases and investigations running from the 1990s consistently to the present where his results were conspicuously suspect. At one time or another the inadequacy of all these various investigations were all covered by the mainstream corporate media, but the media usually has a conveniently short memory when they want to report about Mueller’s record. When you come right down to it, Mueller sadly doesn’t seem to have very much in his record to boast of where the results of his investigations, when examined, do not seem to involve misdirection.
Also worth noting: Mueller has often worked with William Barr in his a career. Notwithstanding what looked like public jousting between those two men over Russiagate, they are reportedly well known to be good friends.
Before listing the many investigations with odd results that Mueller has been involved in, it is worth noting that Mueller has significant family connections that go back and link him to the intelligence community. He is related to two of the three top men that President Kennedy fired from the CIA when Kennedy cleaned house in the fall of 1961.
Here then is a list of botched Mueller Investigations, and since there are repeating patterns to the botching and the botches often look like they align with certain purposes we might attribute a certain amount of craft and intentionality to the botches:
• Anthrax Investigation. Mueller micromanaged and conspicuously bungled the anthrax letter investigations that left hanging the question so vital to answer of who within in our government sent the letters (originally blamed on Iraq) that, one week after 9/11, threatened the press and particular leaders in Congress as the Bush administration was pressing to pass the PATRIOT Act.That's my list. I'm happy to add to it if I have overlooked anything. There is much more in the articles worth knowing about Mueller's background and the long form articles provide more details, a zillion links, as well as more analysis. Aside from Mueller's repetitive involvement in highly suspect investigations, Mueller oversaw and relentlessly defended mass surveillance including illegal warrantless surveillance. Mueller's last stop before his Russiagate Probe was working with the ginormous private government surveillance Company, Booz Allen Hamilton, to protect its secrets.
• Iran-Contra investigation. Mueller worked with William Barr and advised him about handling the Iran-Contra investigation being conducted by Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh concerning misconduct by the CIA and intelligence community. Barr, who previously worked for the CIA, is notorious for the way he is considered to have helped "cover up," an investigation leading perhaps as high up as former CIA head and Vice President George H. W. Bush, when he advised Bush on Bush's 1992 pardons of the key players in the scandal. Afterwards, George H. W. Bush, was able to become the first U.S. president known to come with a CIA background.
• BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International) investigation. Mueller and Barr were accused of coverup activity in the investigation of two other scandals that tied in with Iran-Contra. One was the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International) investigation.
• Iraqgate. The other banking scandal was "Iraqgate." Among other things, both of those scandals also involved covert U.S. government funding of weapons acquisitions by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. (And Saddam Hussein's weapons in Iraq were why Mueller later testified we should invade Iraq!)
• Timothy J. McVeigh Oklahoma City Bombing Case. Mueller was involved in how documents were withheld in the Timothy J. McVeigh Oklahoma City Bombing Case. Thousands of pages of investigative report documents concerning the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were turned over to Timothy J. McVeigh’s defense lawyers as they should have been. It was shortly before Mueller was nominated to be appointed FBI Director. It was considered that it could have affected that appointment. There were questions about Mueller's failure to inform Ashcroft, President George W. Bush and top White House aides about the documents that were withheld.
• Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie, Scotland Crash. The investigation and prosecution of the Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie, Scotland crash for which Mueller was responsible produced very unsatisfactory results.- The case concluded in February 2001, not that very long before Mueller was being discussed for appointment to the FBI. Lockerbie may have helped set Mueller up for getting that promotion. The Lockerbie case raises questions about whether people were framed and facts manipulated by those eager to go to war with Libya. In connection therewith, a very strange article about Mueller's Lockerbie case appeared in the New York Times that presaged 9/11 as an excuse to change models and handle such investigations "extra-judicially" in order to move away from the justice system's "reliance on forensic evidence and the standards of criminal law." Read what I wrote then to hear how William Barr chimed in with his opinion in the article.
• Whitey Bulger. In Boston, when Mueller was in charge at the Justice Department there (and had specific responsibility regarding "public corruption," he was involved in the FBI scandal and embarrassment respecting Whitey Bulger, "America's Most Wanted Gangster." Mr. Bulger was charged with complicity in 19 murders, racketeering, extortion, money laundering and other crimes. A former federal prosecutor who investigated said, "This was the worst case of corruption in the history of the F.B.I., . . It was a multigenerational, systematic alliance with organized crime, where the F.B.I. was actively participating in the murders of government witnesses, or at least allowing them to occur." With FBI participation, four men were framed and kept in prison for a murder they did not commit to keep Bugler and his partner out on the streets. Mueller, first as an assistant US attorney, then as the acting US attorney in Boston wrote multiple letters to the parole and pardons board to keep the framed men in prison. Richard Stearns, the judge hearing the Bulger case, a close friend of Mueller's, was forced to step aside by an appeals court because of his conflicts of interest. Whitey Bulger was killed in prison, shortly after the federal government moved him to a new penitentiary, in what the New York Times says may have been "a hit."
• Investigation and Prosecutions In Enron Case. It does not appear anywhere on Mueller's Wikipedia page, but the New York Times credits and highly praises Mueller for "overseeing the task force that investigated one of the biggest fraud cases in American history: the collapse of the energy giant Enron." What about involvement of top federal government officials? The involvement of people like Donald Rumsfeld and his wife or Karl Rove? Fourteen of the top 100 officials in the Bush administration owned stock in Enron. What about President George W. Bush's close relationship with Enron's chairman, Kenneth L. Lay? Dick Cheney's Halliburton built Enron's baseball stadium. Did any government officials go to jail? Enron was treated as a business scandal, not a political one; it was investigated and prosecuted accordingly, with only non-government officials pursued. Did the convictions hold up? Things worked out rather oddly with the timing of Ken Lay's death (at 64 about six weeks after his conviction) and how Lay's wife benefitted. Hale and Dorr, Mueller's law firm when Mueller's revolving door revolves, was special counsel to Enron during the bankruptcy and it is credited with being the "driving force in the investigation of crimes" influentially guiding everyone. Documents were destroyed as the SEC was investigating accounting fraud at Enron when Enron's accountants at Arthur Anderson shredded them. Coincidentally, there were complaints of SEC legal investigation documents being lost, just weeks before the Anderson shredding, on 9/11 when Building 7 collapsed. (An investigation-driving report similar to the one by Hale and Dorr for Enron was done for the Worldcom scandal by the firm that merged with Hale and Dorr in 2004.)
• The Boston Marathon Bombing. Mueller's role in the Boston Marathon bombing, and specifically his failure to follow up on tips the FBI was given ahead of time (it occurred at the end of his terms as head of the FBI) was said to have been so badly botched that the New York Times predicted with apparent confidence that Mueller’s legacy would be unforgettably besmirched. That was May 9, 2013. Just four years later, May 17, 2017, the Times was writing about Mueller’s “unblemished reputation” and sterling qualifications to be the Russiagate Special Prosecutor.
• Khobar Towers Apartment Complex Bombing. Mueller, as deputy attorney general, was the one who directed 1996 Khobar Towers Apartment Complex Bombing investigation to James Comey, for prosecution in Virginia. The apartment complex in the city of Khobar, Saudi Arabia provided housing used living quarters for coalition forces who working on a U.S. Defense Department operation in Iraq. The investigation of the bombing and ensuing prosecution continued well into the era that Mueller was head of the FBI (a judge ruled in the case in 2006). There was top-level FBI coordination (FBI Director Louis Freeh) with top Saudis in shaping the investigation and the official story. That official story, seeming to go out of its way to ignore facts, was apparently shaped to blame Iran in order to stymie possibilities of U.S. rapprochement and more peaceful relations with Iran. Worse, there was reportedly, in the background, a contingency plan for the U.S. to attack Iran. Those who were more likely responsible for the bombing were native Saudis, all Sunni Muslims, with no outside connections to either Iran or Iraq. And those individuals who the FBI, veering far afield in its investigation, did not pursue may have had connections with . . . ?
• Investigation of Poisoned Ricin Letters. Under Mueller two theatrically back-to-back incidents of poisoned ricin letters were investigated. It's another investigation where, attracting a lot of press attention, the wrong man was arrested. This was all happening in a time period that overlapped with the Snowden revelations about secret illegal government surveillance that the Obama then had to acknowledge and which Mueller, before leaving office, recommended be continued without cutting back.
• The After-The-Fact Investigation of 9/11. Mueller covered up FBI mishandling of 9/11. Not only that, he promoted those responsible for such failures.– According to papers filed by the 9/11 families in their court proceedings, Mueller threw up roadblocks in the path of his own investigators working the 9/11 case, while making it easier for Saudi suspects to escape questioning. The legal filings say that Mueller was not appropriately interested in investigating “multiple, systemic efforts by the Saudi government to assist the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks,” that Mueller covered up evidence pointing to Saudi government involvement, deep-sixed evidence his agents managed to uncover, and that Mueller may have lied to Congress.
• Russiagate investigation. Mueller's Russiagate investigation is replete with a number of conspicuous problems that undermine the credibility of many of its key points. That includes how the investigation was apparently calibrated to distract the public and how, even though it did not find any of Trump's people involved, Mueller's investigation found that the Russians had interfered to influence the 2016 election when that was essentially bogus.
• Non-Investigation of White Collar Crime. Should we count "non-investigations" when we are compiling a list of Mueller's "investigations"? Given that Mueller's great skill is avoiding investigation of what he ought to investigate when given assignments, this is probably highly appropriate. Nor is it completely oxymoronic. Mueller officially started as head of the FBI one week to the day before 9/11. As the head of the FBI, with 9/11 as an excuse, Mueller's shifted more than half of the FBI's resources away from white collar crime. This certainly meant that white collar crimes that had not yet been investigated or not yet uncovered when investigated went uninvestigated. It also meant that the FBI must have had to pull back from white collar crime investigations that were already underway and that selections would need to have been made when doing so. We have already mentioned, as a specific investigation, the Enron investigation involving events that happened before 9/11 then came to light contemporaneously, and which were investigated after 9/11. That's why it's not completely oxymoronic to include such "non-investigations" in the list of investigation handled by Mueller. Anyone tracking Mueller's career activities should rightly wonder about how Mueller exercised his discretion at this time when white collar and Wall Street criminals seem to have benefitted because of 9/11. Mostly, coverage of Mueller's cutback on white collar crime investigation has been viewed as a general boon to Wall Street and misbehaving mortgage lending banks that could have been prosecuted as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. There seems to have been no analysis offered about how Mueller may have exercised discretion in specific cases.
• Panama Invasion- Noriega Drug Trafficking Investigation. I mentioned above Mueller's involvement with the investigation of Whitey Bulger, "America's Most Wanted Gangster." That investigation involved investigating Bulger and his associates for ongoing crimes they were committing, and as noted, in some cases, a misdirection to charge others with the crimes of Bulger and his associates. Normally, an investigation of someone is for the purpose of charging them with their crimes. With Bulger it was trickier. Because Bulger was being treated as an "asset" by law enforcement officials, it was incumbent upon law enforcement officials to be investigatively aware of Bulger's activities to keep him on a short enough leash to justify the tolerance extended to him. Bulger's case involved another investigative side: That was all the investigation necessary and appropriate to discover how the FBI's own conduct had, itself, crossed the line into inexcusable corruption. In the longer form article I wrote I noted that Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, the president of Panama, was analogous to Bulger. The U.S. had a long-standing and close alliance with Noriega who was on the CIA Payroll, including when George H. W. Bush was CIA director. Bush had to have known that. Further, Noriega was a key asset in Iran-Contra. Noriega had connections with drug running, murders, and deep involvement in narcotrafficking. Noriega apparently went from being a CIA asset to being a liability just as the whole Iran-Contra scandal began to come to light. George H. W. Bush sent American troops in to remove Noriega in his first year in office. Robert Mueller and William Barr were both involved in paving the way for the invasion of Panama by furnishing opinions and advice that the actions being taken were legal. Mueller, privy to whatever facts concerning the investigation he apparently thought were necessary, provided assurances for President G. H. W. Bush that the drug trafficking case against Noriega was solid and would stand up. It's another instance where Mueller's involvement assessing an investigation paved the way for the U.S. to go to war.
• 2003 Iraq Invasion- Weapons of Mass Destruction. Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction?: Is that something that should have been "investigated"; can we properly consider that this should be another on the list of "investigations" in which Mueller participated? In the run up to the Iraq War evidence was supposedly presented, matters were supposedly being looked into and evaluated. Mueller helped sell the Iraq War with lies to Congress about weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaed. Maybe, instead of putting this formally on the list of "investigations" which Mueller was involved with, we should simply treat it as another example of how willing Mueller is to engage in baseless shilling for war. As noted above, Mueller's warnings about Iraq weapons can be viewed as ironic given his questionable Iraqgate investigation about how the intelligence agencies under the George H. W. Bush administration illegally funneled funds (through agricultural credits) for a military buildup in Iraq.
• A Basis For Hundreds of Imprisonments (and Worse). Is it naive to believe that when the government imprisons people and/or subjects them to abusive punitive actions (physical abuse and solitary confinement) or worse, it should be predicated upon some sort of investigation that justifies the actions taken? Mueller was sued (but let off the hook) for rounding up hundreds of Muslims and South Asian Immigrants (762 of them) after 9/11 and putting them in detention facilities (or they may have been sent to foreign countries for torture). Another example of Mueller distressingly going after and locking up innocent people?
• The Before-The-Fact Investigation of 9/11- The PATRIOT Act. Mueller helped push through passage of the PATRIOT Act by furnishing misinformation to Congress about what the FBI knew and could have done about stopping 9/11. Mueller told Congress that the PATRIOT Act needed to be passed because there were no warning signs about 9/11 and that, had the PATRIOT Act been in effect, it would have allowed for discovery of warning signs about the Florida flight school training of those who were identified as the terrorists. In fact, FBI agents had this information ahead of time, but the Bureau simply sat on it and did nothing. Based on this, The Wall Street Journal called for Mueller's resignation and the New York Times said there were concerns about his leadership of the FBI.
Probably the best reason to be familiar with Mueller's list of botched investigations is to also learn something about the media and power structure in this country. While Mueller was conducting his "Russiagate: investigation we were subjected to all sorts of descriptions of Mueller as a "straight arrow," someone who was almost boring, universally respected in Washington D.C., and someone who trusted to be fair and reliable by both Republicans and Democrats in a bipartisan consensus. More likely the "respect" Mueller gets is fear based, because the one thing Mueller can be trusted to do at this point is to keep getting away with things without consequence.
Every time there has been an important juncture in Mueller's career, a moment when he is about to be promoted into some new significant office, all his prior scandals have been mysteriously forgotten by the media and Mueller has been praised instead. This is what happened when Mueller was under consideration to first head the FBI, the office he took one week to the day before 9/11. It is what happened when there was lobbying to change the law, enacted following J. Edgar Hoover's departure, to give Mueller an extra two-year extension of his term as head of the FBI. It is what happened when Mueller was proposed to be put in charge of the Russiagate investigation. That is what has allowed Mueller to continue and persist in his patterns allowing this list of highly questionable investigation to keep getting longer. Yes, all this is despite how the scandalous facts of these botched investigations are out there available to be discovered.
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