I just recently finished a National Notice story about whether Robert Mueller and his Russiagate Report should be trusted that incorporated assessments from a number of panelists with relevant expertise who were speaking at this year's Left Forum in New York City. See: 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.
As set forth in that last article, the answer as to whether to trust Mueller and his report is a resounding and convincing NO, unless you are going to listen to the one reporter I asked this question of who is surfing his media fame with an anonymously sourced Russiagate book and associated warnings about the Russians.
For that article, I put together a list of reasons why Mueller seems an altogether suspicious person based on the input and feedback I got at the Left Forum, which I combined with research I did about Mueller for a previous article (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). I also added in some additional research I did afterward. Much of the grounds for suspicion involves Mueller's intelligence community connections, particularly the way he has been connected to the CIA in a number of ways. (He is not just an FBI guy.)
Mueller's activities in the past have overlapped with his long time personal and family friend and frequent work associate, William Barr. I have specifically raised the question of whether Mueller and Barr have been far too cooperative as adversaries as they've done their dance around Mueller's Russiagate report.
Much of what I found made it surprising that Mueller was ever confirmed to head the FBI. (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.)
There was a lot more hard to forget bad news about Mueller while he headed the FBI, so it was similarly quite startling that, he afterwards was accepted, without question, to handle the Russiagate investigation. There is a third time Mueller's past misdeeds seemed to be conveniently forgotten: That was when the legislatively enacted ten-year limit on the FBI Director's term was set aside to allow Mueller to continue in office until September 2013.
Much of this had to do with the way that Mueller was portrayed by the press at various key moments. Moreover, the way that Mueller was portrayed in the press appeared to shift at key junctures.
I thought that I should go back and look at how Mueller was portrayed in the press coverage (particularly the New York Times) when he was nominated and confirmed to head the FBI. Indeed, the coverage in the New York Times was odd in its apparently willful forgetting as Mueller was nominated. That willful sort of forgetting seems to have occurred again when Mueller's term was up for renewal and then as the corporate media told us to put our faith in Mueller for the Russiagate investigation. . . . In fact, I was led on to further research to discover still more about Mueller and his resume that makes even more suspicious what seems, in toto, to have been willfully overlooked and forgotten at all these critical junctures.
What I discovered and covered before in my previous article. I noted:
• That Mueller has 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.
• Mueller's shift of FBI resources away from white collar crime, although perhaps explicable.As can be readily noted from the above alone, Mueller has a history of unsatisfactory investigations; unsatisfactory in that the investigations have left things hanging and unresolved, looked like cover-ups, delivered misinformation, unproductively pursued red herrings and/or the wrong people, involved conflicts of interest that have made them suspect, and been explained forgivingly as bungled. . . . Now I need to add a number of things I've since researched to the previous compiled list set forth above.
• How Mueller helped sell the Iraq War with lies to Congress about weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaed.
• 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. The Wall Street Journal called for Mueller's resignation, the New York Times said there were concerns about his leadership of the FBI.
• Mueller not only covered up other FBI mishandling of 9/11, he promoted those responsible for such failures.
• Mueller oversaw and defended mass surveillance including illegal warrantless surveillance.
• Mueller was sued (but let off the hook) for rounding up hundreds of Muslims and South Asian Immigrants after 9/11 and putting them in detention facilities (or they may have been sent to foreign countries for torture).
• Mueller micromanaged and conspicuously bungled the anthrax letter investigations leaving 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.
• 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.
• Mueller and Barr were accused of coverup activity in the investigation of two other scandals that tied in with Iran-Contra, the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International) investigation and another banking scandal "Iraqgate." Among other things, both of those scandals also involved covert U.S. government funding of weapons acquisitions by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. (And such Iraq weapons were why Mueller later testified we should invade Iraq!)
• And finally, Mueller's Russiagate investigation is replete with a number of conspicuous problems that undermine the credibility of many of its key points.
Mueller Involvement in Documents Withheld in Timothy J. McVeigh Oklahoma City Bombing Case.
Shortly before Mueller was nominated to be appointed FBI Director Mueller was revealed to have been aware that there were thousands of pages of investigative report documents concerning the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that had not been turned over to Timothy J. McVeigh’s defense lawyers as they should have been. CNN reported that there was “some concern” Mueller wouldn't get the FBI job because “he failed to warn Attorney General John Ashcroft early about the FBI's failure to turn over the documents,” but it “was quickly discounted by Justice officials.”
Newsweek had earlier covered the matter more fully with a version of the story recounting in terms highly sympathetic and excusing of Mueller about how, with involvement of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, there was a failure on Mueller’s part to inform Ashcroft, President George W. Bush and top White House aides about the documents that were withheld. With a fly-on-the-wall, your-are-in-the-room opening, the Newsweek story, written by “staff,” running a few weeks before Bush nominated Mueller, noted that Mueller, the “jut-jawed ex-Marine” and “hard-line prosecutor, not a politician,” was being “touted” to replace Louis Freeh as FBI director.
Describing McVeigh as “a stone-cold killer” of 168 “innocent victims” in “the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history” Newsweek quoted Gonzalez as saying “I was left with a clear impression that [Mueller] didn't believe this would be a problem--that it had absolutely nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of Timothy McVeigh.” Newsweek went on to provide its own assurance that“the flap seems to have changed few minds about McVeigh's ultimate guilt,” and that for “many Americans” it was “largely about one of the oldest of human conundrums: what makes seemingly ordinary people go wrong and commit unimaginably evil acts?” Ashcroft announced that McVeigh's execution was delayed for a month, and Newsweek wrote about the “obvious” “frustration” for victims' families while “McVeigh's lawyers were talking about appeals that could drag on indefinitely.”
Newsweek said, “top officials at Justice also seemed surprisingly unperturbed about the missing documents,” and that the“Justice Department spokesmen insisted that the newly discovered documents were innocuous--that they cast no doubt on McVeigh's guilt and offered no proof of other conspirators,” and that the delay was “not an attempted cover-up.”
Newsweek expressed some concerns, however, that “The new documents are sure to provide fodder for conspiracy theories, no matter how farfetched.” It said that “from seemingly harmless errors and petty evasions grow conspiracy theories about monster plots. If McVeigh's wish is for publicity and martyrdom, the FBI has inadvertently added fuel to the pyre.” And, indeed, Newsweek had to note that such “conspiracy theories” already had application in this case: McVeigh's former lawyer Stephen Jones, according to Newsweek “has always asserted that McVeigh was not working alone, that he was part of a larger conspiracy. Some witnesses claim to have seen a mysterious `John Doe Number Two' at the time of the bombing.” Newsweek had to note that “Some of the investigation reports that turned up in the missing documents deal with reported sightings of John Doe Two,” although it countered that “FBI officials say that none is credible.”
Newsweek was good enough to also include this little bit of skepticism:
Some Justice officials were immediately skeptical about the suggestion that the FBI headquarters found out about the problem only a few days before it exploded on the evening news. Telling NEWSWEEK that Justice had only "sketchy" information about what really went on in the FBI, one official wryly added, "Volumes of documents don't assemble themselves."Newsweek included the explanation that the FBI “was aware of the problem by April,” but was not going to turn the documents over without knowing what was in them first. The FBI said that most of what was finally turned over was “totally irrelevant to the case,” and that nothing turned over “would be remotely exculpatory.”
Timothy McVeigh was executed on June 11, 2001. On that day Mueller was considered the "leading contender" with "Ashcroft's backing for the F.B.I. job" and Mueller was, in fact nominated to be FBI Director a few days later, on July 5, 2001. Mueller was confirmed by the Senate on August 2, after the completion of two days of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings that on August 1 that were reportedly "largely uncontentious."
It might seem, that as CNN said it was worried, that there would be concerns coming forward, first and foremost about Mueller's faults and questionable conduct like reportedly sitting on the information and failing to warn the Attorney General about the withheld documents, plus earlier criticism of Mueller for obstructing, impeding and maybe covering up with respect to the BCCI investigation and similar, if smaller scale Iraqgate investigation. (At this time, no one seemed to have yet picked up that Mueller had any involvement respecting the pardon-obstructed Iran-Contra prosecution.) In other words, it might seem that it would be pointed out that Mueller was a suspect, fault-impaired and broken candidate for the office of FBI director.
But the New York Times ran many articles about Mueller in the run up to his appointment, most of them admiring and complimentary. Most of them were by David Johnston.* Those articles mentioned BCCI only once, and rather than saying that Mueller's BCCI obstruction was a Times concern, it said it had been a concern of Senator Kerry. Mueller's Iraqgate investigation problems were mentioned only once by conservative columnist William Safire who refused to forget his previous strong attacks on Mueller: "I remember him as an intelligent apparatchik who showed a marked lack of interest in pursuing the Iraqgate investigation. He helped staff the Public Integrity Division with time-servers who would not rock the boat." Safire's column also inserted the only mention of Mueller's withholding of the McVeigh documents into the Times.
(* I found David Johnston's collected works at the New York Times, 1987 to 2009, intriguingly odd, and will have to write a short article on that subject some time.)
There were other mentions in the Times of the withholding of the McVeigh prosecution documents, but these mentions did something insidious; they accomplished a neat flip. Instead of raising questions about Mueller himself, the Times articles repeatedly cited the withholding of the documents as an example of the way that the FBI was broken in a way that Mueller was the perfect man to be brought in to fix it. Did David Johnston set up these repeated Times mentions with his articles?
In fact, the day after Mueller's nomination, the Times ran an editorial that while it was, albeit, somewhat cautiously tempered, more or less endorsed Mueller for the job: a "seasoned, non-ideological prosecutor
thoroughly familiar with the F.B.I. and its parent agency, the Justice
Department" who "has the rare distinction of having been
the United States attorney in two major cities, Boston and most recently
San Francisco" with "extensive Washington experience," who has "worked
productively with both Republicans and Democrats" and has "investigative experience and sound prosecutorial judgment." The carefully crafted Times editorial portrayed the F.B.I. as needing to be fixed ("balkanized" and insufficiently effective) and cited the mishandling of the documents as "in the McVeigh case" as an example, while it envisioned that Mueller, if appointed was likely a man who could fix it.
The Times editorial included a sentence telling us that one of the reasons the F.B.I. needed to be fixed is that it is "the nation's primary defense against domestic terrorist attacks and computer crime."
Flipping the narrative to say that the FBI was broken and needed to be fixed by Mueller, rather than that there were problems with Mueller himself that needed to be fixed, also fit in with another narrative that was getting heavy promotion in the Times right at that time, that both the FBI and the CIA were broken and needed to be fixed. The narrative was about to get turbocharged and reflown in an even bigger way right after the 9/11 events that took place one week after Mueller assumed the office of FBI Director. One of the 'fixes' was the passage of the PATRIOT Act, which was being readied even before 9/11.
Mueller's Prosecution of the Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie, Scotland Crash Case With Unsatisfactory Results.
In February 2001, not that very long before Mueller was being discussed for appointment to the FBI, his prosecution of the Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie, Scotland December 21, 1988 crash concluded. In retrospect, as of 2015, it's been said of Mueller's prosecution, according to PBS's Frontline:
Frontline's presentation notes that although the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found "points . . . worrying enough that the case merited an appeal," that they found "no signs that evidence had been tampered with, that the Libyans had been framed, or that there had been `unofficial CIA involvement in the investigation," as had been raised as "points of contention . . by critics."Nearly 30 years since the attack, some victims’ family members, journalists, and investigators dispute the prosecution’s version of events. Among those who have found fault with the case include a United Nations observer to the Lockerbie trial, the trial’s legal architect and an independent review commission established by the Scottish government.Over the years, alternative theories have proliferated, as have books and documentaries that purport to present the “real story” of what was one of the worst terrorist attacks against Americans before 9/11.
Points of contention? There are those who could feel that the Flight 103 bombing might merit a deeper, more wide-ranging and skeptically oriented investigation unless it was just coincidence that there was a team of intelligence officers on the plane, at least four of them CIA men (U.S. Army Major Charles McKee, a Defense Intelligence Agency employee who had been assigned temporarily to the CIA, accompanied by four CIA men: Matthew Gannon, the CIA’s Beirut Deputy Station Chief; Ronald Larivier, Daniel O’Connor, and Bill Leyrer- maybe more) who, returning without permission to do so, were bringing photos and evidence to inform the government of a drug smuggling operation they had learned CIA people were involved in. They were going to publicize their findings if the government covered it up. There is more to this that makes it very complicated, including the alleged switching of suitcases with drugs in them.
Points of contention? There are those who naturally worried that the intelligence agencies and those investigating were eager to go to war with Libya and topple Gaddafi (we'd even bombed Libya in 1986) and that being able to pin the blame on Libya was a far too attractive convenience. Although it involves a retroactive redirection of suspicion that is itself suspect (notice the timing), it was reported that documents show the CIA may not have believed Libya was responsible. (Iran and Syria were in the running as alternative, convenient candidates for blame.)
The Times ran an article the day of the split verdict of the Lockerbie case. The article, termed "news analysis," was one of the many articles by David Johnston that can be viewed as strange, particularly considered in their totality. The article had quotes from both Robert Mueller and William Barr. While the article referred to a "muddled close" of Mueller's prosecution, the faults of the prosecution that the Mr. Johnston identified and explored were quite different from, and did not foreshadow, the 2015 quarterbacking complaints.
The main point of the article was to suggest that events like these needed to be approached extra-judicially because in the justice system, the "reliance on forensic evidence and the standards of criminal law," was inadequate. Barr said: ''The main question is whether the criminal justice system is in itself the right response.'' Otherwise the results can be "deeply unsatisfying" to victims of terrorism when there was a failure to "punish those viewed by some intelligence and law enforcement authorities as the real culprits."
The article said, "Some experts have said that terrorism cannot be viewed as a criminal justice matter, like a bank robbery or a homicide. Instead, they have said, it is a national security threat that should be dealt with by military force when state sponsorship is proven."
The article brought up Osama bin Laden as an example of the need for military action because of "possible links" that had been "uncovered" to the "bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole." It noted that "no military action has been taken" with respect to this. Rather inconsistently, it also noted that President Clinton ordered cruise missile . . . aimed at Osama bin Laden" because Washington accused bin Laden of being the "mastermind of the attacks" of the East Africa embassy bombings in Kenya. Another problematic aspect of making bin Laden a military target?: The article observed that "the bin Laden-inspired terrorist apparatus is a stateless organization of anti-American Islamic militants."
The Robert Mueller quote in the article about his prosecution was: ''The United States remains vigilant in its pursuit to bring to justice any other individuals who may have been involved in the conspiracy to bring down Pan Am Flight 103.'' . . . Mueller is similarly elsewhere reported to have said at the time, “The case is not closed. The investigation will continue until any individual who played a role in this tragedy is brought to justice.”
Well, as noted, there was still ongoing dissatisfaction with investigation and what was really known at least fifteen years later. . . with unknowns believed to be persisting, actually, a full 30 years after the bombing. BUT we could have been using military options fifteen years ago without knowing what was what. We could have militarily effected regime change in Libya! Actually, we did, in fact, finally get around to that anyway, working with NATO in 2011.
And Mueller? The Chicago Tribune reports that, “according to Lisa Monaco, a former chief of staff, the Lockerbie case affected him particularly. For years later, Mueller quietly attended the December memorial services organized by the families.”
Mueller was involved in the investigation of another terrorist bombing, the June 25, 1996 Saudi Arabia's Khobar Towers bombing, analyzed as an intelligence failure in a report by the New York Times twelve days later, July 7, 1996: When "Mueller was deputy attorney general, he directed prosecution to Comey, then a prosecutor in Virginia."
Robert Mueller's and William Barr's Involvement In Paving The Way For The Invasion of Panama
Robert Mueller and William Barr were both involved in clearing the way for the United States to invade Panama in 1989 and seize Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega. And estimated 3,000 Panamanians died when the U.S. sent in 24,000 troops and aircraft. It was president George H. W. Bush's first year in office.
The U.S. had 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. Iran-Contra was not just one scandal. It was broadly diffuse, branching out into a myriad of scandals, including the Mueller investigated BCCI scandal and the Noriega tie-ins involved there. Noriega's days were said to have been numbered in 1986 when reporter Sy Hersh published a story June 12 in The New York Times, heavily sourced from within U.S. intelligence agencies (including Iran-Contra's John M. Poindexter). The story detailed Noriega connections with drug running, murders, and his deep involvement in narcotrafficking. Late 1986, a few months afterward, was when the whole Iran-Contra scandal began to come to light. Coincidence?
It is possible to get the impression from a number of historical accounts that Sy Hersh precipitated Noriega's downfall and the end of Noriega's covert relationship as a CIA asset by outing Noriega with his reporting; that it was Hersh's reporting that turned Noriega into a liability. But, if you read Hersh's story it appears more likely that the story was fed to Hersh because the intelligence agencies had already decided to terminate their relationship with Noriega.
The New York Times, wrote about Mueller the day after his nomination to become FBI Director, wrote:
Dick Thornburgh, then attorney general, says he relied on Mr. Mueller for some of the department's most delicate tasks. Before the invasion of Panama in 1989, for instance, Mr. Bush called Mr. Thornburgh in and asked if the drug trafficking case against the Panamanian ruler, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, was solid. Mr. Thornburgh says he relied on Mr. Mueller's assurances that the case would stand up; it did.(See: Man in the News; A Man Made for Law Enforcement -- Robert Swan Mueller III)
Similarly, in 2017, Garrett M. Graff, saying in Politico that he has been writing a biography of Mueller said that "Mueller helped take on Manuel Noriega." Graff is full of compliments for Mueller saying, "Robert Mueller might just be America’s straightest arrow—a respected, nonpartisan and fiercely apolitical public servant whose only lifetime motivation has been the search for justice," and that he (along with James Comey, who "two decades his junior" treated Mueller as a "close friend and almost mentor") were the "crème de la crème of Justice," part of the "the small, elite fraternity of prosecutors at the top of the Justice Department."
The Washington Post recently ran an article challenging as suspect and insupportable actions William Barr took in 1989 when, as the then head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Barr was involved in its issuance of an opinion:
The OLC had determined that the FBI was allowed to take people into custody in foreign countries without the consent of those countries' governments — a ruling that seemed to pave the way, Goodman notes, for the eventual arrest of former Panamanian leader Manuel Antonio Noriega.The invasion of Panama was widely seen as illegal and the US has been called upon to pay reparations to Panama. Greg Grandin, author and professor of Latin American history says:
It was a turning point in international law, in the sense that it overthrew the doctrine of sovereignty, which had been the bedrock of the international system since at least the 1930s, 1940s, the idea that countries can’t invade or intervene in another country’s politics without multilateral consent. The OAS condemned the invasion. The U.N. didn’t support the invasion . .According to the Washington Post account, when Barr was asked to provide the memorandum that detailed his legal rationale for taking people into custody in foreign countries without the consent of those countries' governments, he took the unusual step of declining to furnish the opinion of Office of Legal Counsel (many of which were published to be easily publicly furnished), instead offering a 13-page substitute document. That substitute document supposedly summarized “the principal conclusions” of the opinion, but, in fact, left out several conclusions including that the opinion authorized "the president of the United States to ignore the United Nations Charter." Thus Barr avoided informing Congress of that key fact even while he was telling them he was furnishing his principal conclusions. The actual memo didn't surface until 1991.
. . it set the stage for the wars to come—the legal doctrine, the way it was executed, the spectacular nature of shock and awe, the sending 30,000 troops into Panama, and being covered. . . . this was a real turning point in the public’s acceptance of war, in the executive branch’s ability to justify and wage war. It was consequential in numerous ways, that led directly to the catastrophe that we’re in today.
It's interesting that the Washington Post article about the deceit of Barr's withholding his Noriega opinion was written in the context of the public's perceived Russiagate sparring between Barr and Mueller. It offered the notion Barr would be seeking to conceal Mueller's report finding. The Washington Post article didn't mention that Mueller had also in 1989 weighed in to green light going after Noriega. Mueller probably furnished a legal opinion, albeit, that Mueller opinion may not have been exactly the same one; it may have covered different aspects of why it was alright to go after Noriega.
In Boston, FBI Scandal and Embarrassment Respecting Whitey Bulger, "America's Most Wanted Gangster"
General Noriega is an example of someone allowed to engage in extremely illegal activities like drugs and murders, because he was also considered an asset by intelligence agencies. There are other examples.
In July of 2001 the New York Times (talking about how Mueller could bring the FBI under control) said that one of the two cities Mueller had the "rare distinction of having been the United States attorney in" was Boston. And the Times praised Mueller then as being "thoroughly familiar with the F.B.I. and its parent agency, the Justice Department."
Perhaps it treads close to possible guilt by association connotations, but being "thoroughly familiar" with the FBI and its interactions with the Justice Department when Mueller was in Boston wasn't necessarily a basis for praise.
In October 2018, the notorious Boston Gangster 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." As of the time that the New York Times was writing about Mueller's Boston days, Whitey Bulger had been on the lam fleeing since 1995. Bulger was indicted on murder charges in 2000. Mr. Bulger was charged with complicity in 19 murders, racketeering, extortion, money laundering and other crimes. Ergo, when the Times was writing in 2001, Bulger's involvement from 1965 to 1995 running the Winter Hill Gang in partnership with Stephen J. Flemmi, in cooperation was known.
Robert Mueller was appointed as a prosecutor in 1982 by William F. Weld, who was United States Attorney in Boston. Mueller worked in that office, eventually becoming United States Attorney there, until 1987.
Weld told the Times that "Mr. Mueller's style was to get all the players in a room together, establish the facts of a case and offer his view before inviting others to provide theirs." Weld described him as
"very popular with law enforcement officers from the F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies."
In August of 2013 when Bulger was convicted, the Times quoted Michael D. Kendall, a former federal prosecutor who investigated Mr. Bulger’s associates as saying:
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.During his tenure in Boston at the Justice department part of Mueller's responsibility was to oversee cases on public corruption.
Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy wrote a book about Bulger, "Whitey Bulger- America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought him to Justice." Kevin Cullen is also a columnist for the Boston Globe. While Mueller was still Director of the FBI and reaching his tenth year anniversary in that job, about to be given an exemption from the law limiting, in the aftermath of Hoover, the holding of that office to ten years, Cullen wrote a July 24, 2011 column for the Boston Globe cautioning against lifting that limit. Cullen's column noted a tie-in respecting Robert Mueller and the FBI's misconduct covering up Bulger's crimes: "One lingering question for FBI director Robert Mueller."
Cullen tells the story of how, 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. In the Cullen and Murphy book it is explained that Steve Flemmi and his brother Jimmy were "prolific killers." Steve Flemmi became a close partner with Bulger deeply involved in his myriad sordid deeds.
In 1964, few days after Christmas, Jimmy Flemmi murdered a "small time hood named George Ashe" as two police officers watched. Lucky for Jimmy, the officers were on the take and went straight to his brother Steve to receive "a late Christmas present" to look the other way. In the case of another of Jimmy Flemmi's murders, the 1965 murder of a hoodlum named Teddy Deegan, four men were framed and convicted: Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, Joe Salvati, and Louis Greco. When they were later finally cleared, the Justice Department was ordered to pay them $102 million. (It's reminiscent of, but considerably more than, the $4.6 million settlement the government paid Steven Jay Hatfill for its improprieties when they went after him in Mueller's anthrax investigation.)
Cullen's Boston Globe column tells the story of how, when in the 1980s the Massachusetts parole board was to consider releasing the men, one of the members of the parole board likely to vote for their release got a visit from a pair of FBI agents, John Connolly and John Morris, who intimidated the parole board member, and told him that the framed men should not be released if that parole board member “wanted to stay in public life.” FBI agent Connolly, Cullen notes was Whitey Bulger’s corrupt handler and FBI Agent Morris was Connolly’s corrupt supervisor: “When they weren’t pocketing bribes from Bulger, they were helping him murder potential witnesses who were poised to expose the FBI’s sordid, Faustian deal with the rat named Whitey Bulger.”
Mueller, first as an assistant US attorney, then as the acting US attorney in Boston, “wrote letters to the parole and pardons board throughout the 1980s opposing clemency for the four men framed by FBI lies.” (There's more, so that, if you read the column, it appears the FBI's behavior, and exactly who was involved, make it even more sordid than just described.)
Cullen said that Mike Albano, the threatened parole board member, said that before Mueller’s term as FBI Director was extended “somebody in the Senate or House needs to ask him why the US Attorney’s office he led let the FBI protect Whitey Bulger.’’
Robert Mueller's name is not in the index of the Cullen/Murphy book. His name doesn't turn up via Amazon's "Look Inside" word search of the book. But Mueller is in the book. In the 2013 edition there is an afterword about the trial of Whitey Bulger. Bulger's courtroom tactics, reflected Bulger's own unusual choices; Bulger wanted to make the trial less about defending himself than attacking the FBI.
Several times it has come up in the writing of these pieces that Robert Mueller and William Barr have failed to have respect and avoid conflicts of interests when asked to. They just don't agree that it's necessary. The book's afterward has this about an asserted conflict of interest.
Whitey and his lawyers argued that the judge assigned to hear the case, Richard Stearns, should be recused because, as a former high-ranking prosecutor in the US Attorney's Office in Boston, he had a conflict of interest in hearing the case. Stearns refused to step down, even though he counted FBI director Robert Mueller among his close friends. An appeals court agreed with the defense and ordered Stearns to steps aside.In fact, Bulger's lawyer, threatened to call Mueller and the judge as a witnesses. That could have happened. Mueller, according to a Times article, was part of the background of the case, presiding over FBI agent Connolly "and Mr. Bulger as a '`top-echelon informant.''' To Bulger's chagrin, the result of the efforts to force the judge's recusal, was that a black female judge presided over Bulger's case. Bulger, the book says, was a "a deep-seated bigot and misogynist."
Investigation and Prosecutions In Enron Case
It does not appear anywhere on Mueller's Wikipedia page, but a New York Times 2017 "news analysis" 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"; that just weeks after Enron's bankruptcy filing:
Mr. Mueller, then the F.B.I. director; Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson; and the assistant attorney general for the criminal division, Michael Chertoff, formed the Enron Task Force, an elite team of F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors assigned to investigate and prosecute crimes related to the Houston-based energy trader. Andrew Weissmann, who recently joined Mr. Mueller’s Russia team, later led the task force.It may be hard to remember, but revelations about ENRON fraud came out in October of 2001, just as after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks were also transfixing Americans and probably giving George W. Bush and those in the government some leeway in escaping criticism for his Enron connections. On October 25, 2001, the New York Times reported the ousting of Eron's CFO, Andrew S. Fastow as the SEC began to investigate, although there were hints of Enron's problems just before 9/11.
As the ENRON investigation got rolling, the Times ran an article on the front of its Business Page detailing the ties between President Bush and his family and Enron in a way that should have invoked caution for the investigators:
With the Justice Department and Congress ratcheting up investigations into the Enron Corporation, President Bush is seeking to play down his relationship with Enron's embattled chairman, Kenneth L. Lay. But their ties are broad and deep and go back many years, and the relationship has been beneficial to both.
. . . In an interview last year with The New York Times and the PBS show ''Frontline,'' Mr. Lay characterized his relationship with the Bush family as ''very close,'' . .Writing in The Nation in May of 2006 on the occasion of Ken Lay's jury verdict conviction, John Nichols argued that Bush was also culpable. He pointed out that the Bush Ken Lay alliance was a major source of money for the political campaigns propelling Bush ultimately into the presidency, that President Bush affectionately referred to Mr. Lay as “Kenny-boy,” and how Lay represented that he was "was very close to George W." Moreover:
Bush took good care of his contributor-in-chief, appointing the Enron founder as one of five members of the elite “Energy Department Transition Team,” which set the stage for the Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force and administration policies designed to benefit corporations such as Enron. A report on “Bush Administration Contacts with Enron,” compiled at the request of Congressman Henry Waxman, D-California, by the minority staff of the Special Investigations Division of the House Committee on Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives, found evidence of at least 112 contacts between Enron and White House or other Administration officials during the month prior to the corporation’s very-public collapse in late 2001. At least 40 of those contacts involved top White House officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, presidential advisor Karl Rove, White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey, White House personnel director Clay Johnson III, and White House energy task force director Andrew D. Lundquist.There were other Bush administration ties. Reportedly, "Donald Rumsfeld, who became Secretary of Defense, was a large stockholder in Enron" and also "Thomas White, former vice-chairman of Enron [Enron Energy Services, an Enron subsidiary], became the Secretary of the Army ." Before White became Secretary of the Army on May 31, 2001 he was Enron's Energy Services vice chairman. Rumsfeld corrected the press reports to say that it was actually his wife who owned the stock.
In fact, financial disclosure forms analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity showed that "fourteen of the top 100 officials in the Bush administration" owned stock in Enron, and with senior adviser to the President Karl Rove being "among the largest" of the shareholders.
Rumsfeld (or apparently his wife) sold a huge amount of Enron stock in April before the prices collapsed. White and Rove also sold their stock before the collapse.
The Guardian analyzed the scandal thus:
The ethical - maybe criminal - core of the scandal is that Enron trapped its employees into a 'stock-lock', whereby they were not allowed to sell share options bought by way of savings. When the company collapsed, they lost everything. Meanwhile, Enron's executives - blessed by inside information and foresight - made a killing by scrambling to sell shares before the price collapsed.That makes it sound rather like a classic stock kiting, pump and dump fraud.
Dick Cheney's Halliburton, which profited handsomely from the wars initiated by the George W. Bush administration, built Enron's baseball stadium. And, if you want to go down a hard to research rabbit hole, it may be that Enron and Halliburton had shared aspirational interests in an oil pipeline to be put through Afghanistan. Indubitably, Dick Cheney was, in any event, in the habit of doing significant favors for Enron.
The SEC was investigating accounting fraud at Enron, and one of the more dramatic aspects of the Enron scandal was the shredding of documents by Enron's accountants at Arthur Anderson after the SEC formally had launched that investigation.
The Guardian commented: about that destruction:
Andersen had good reason to destroy the papers. The reasons for Enron's destruction when all the winds seemed to blow behind the company's fortunes are associated with the labyrinth of subsidiaries built up by Chief Finance Officer Andrew Fastow, fired on 24 October, and other executives.The destruction of documents and banishment of information can be irksome. It leaves you in a limbo of speculation. You can never say you know, for certain, what did or didn't happen. It precludes responsive action.
So, for instance, in terms of just how vexing a void of missing documents can be, there were, coincidentally, complaints of SEC legal investigation documents being lost, just weeks before the Anderson shredding, on 9/11. Building 7, was the third tower destroyed on 9/11. In addition to financial firms such as Salomon Smith Barney, Building 7 contained a number of government agencies: the Securities & Exchange Commission, Internal Revenue Service Regional Council, U.S. Secret Service, Federal Home Loan Bank, and United States Equal Opportunity Commission, so there were complaints about the SEC and others losing records when the building floors pancaked. Without documents it was being said that the SEC was hugely compromised and set back on its preparation of investigations and that the SEC might have to "scrap," or settle on less favorable terms, many cases about Wall Street firms taking financial kickbacks. (See also the September 17, 2001 article that the New York Post now makes hard to find and link to.)
Russ Baker, is the author of the 2009 book "Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years." The book constitutes him as a foremost authority on the subject respecting what the Bush family tries to keep unknown about itself. Baker's book makes only passing mention of Enron and it does not spend much time speaking of Ken Lay either, even though Baker said research he did trying to explain the improbability of George W. Bush being elected president was what drew him into writing about the Bush family and then, ultimately, his book. (Baker's book does include the intriguing statement: "It is a little-known fact that Ken Lay played a central role in the new relationship between the United Sates and Saudi Arabia that developed in the 1970s.")
In a 2010 interview about what the media refrains from reporting, Baker referred to the Bushes as a dynasty that has played a major role in shaping our country in“seen and sometimes unseen ways.” After that (at 50:40) Baker spent several minutes at the interview's end discussing how records and documents relating to the Bushes tend to vanish and be destroyed:
The suppression of information and destruction of records began long before George W. was in office. Records pertaining to his military service, pertaining to things relating to his father, they vanished continuously over the years, microfilms were accidentally destroyed, and so forth; everything was accidental. The moment . . George W. got into office, he began taking measures to suppress information. It had a kind of a police state feeling. They were making it very difficult for people to get information under the Freedom of Information Act . . And then he began, under the Presidential Records Act, changing the rules for when and how presidential records could be released . . . It was all headed in one direction, a kind of a shutdown. And this was way before September 11th, and then, of course, after that, everything got ratcheted up, and you saw all kinds of records being destroyed. And some of the most famous cases. . . many, many examples [There is more as Baker goes on to discuss examples]Baker wrote about George W. Bush's secrecy, how he changed the Presidential Records Act rule to keep more information secret, and Baker also wrote specifically about the ongoing Enron investigation in The Nation in 2002: What Are They Hiding?. In that article Baker worried that such secrecy could “prevent Congress and the public from finding out why no serious indictments occurred,” in the Enron investigation, if for “inexplicable reasons” the Justice Department refused to charge the right people (i.e. people of real consequence). (Baker also noted the irony that "one of the leading architects of the Bush Administration's `don't tell' was Brett Kavanaugh." What qualified Kavanaugh, now a confirmed Supreme Court Justice to engineer such secrecy? Answer: He sought a great deal of presidential information from president Clinton as a former deputy to Whitewater investigator Ken Starr.)
One thesis Baker offers is that it is "dangerous" in a democracy not to be getting information.
The Guardian, like Baker, sensed that the Justice Department was unlikely to appropriately investigate Bush administration involvement with the Enron scandal:
Neither the Justice Department nor Congress appear to be prepared to conduct the sort of investigation that is required to expose the full extent of the Bush Administration’s service to Enron.In 2002, the Nation (the same issue Baker was writing in) complained in an editorial about the circumscription of the investigation within limits casting it as being merely a business scandal. It commented in part (emphasis supplied):
. . make no mistake. The Enron scandal is . . a window on the nexus of money and politics in Washington that is revealing our corrupted electoral, legislative and regulatory infrastructure.The 2017 New York Times piece praising Robert Mueller for his work in connection with the Enron prosecution said:
Perhaps that’s why the Bush White House is pushing the line that this is a business scandal, as opposed to a political one. . . . Enron was able to practice its brand of cutthroat cowboy capitalism only because of the ties it nurtured with the political class . . . the lengths to which politicians from Bush on down will go to help them.
. . . Representative John Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat who is the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee . . . will need a lot of help preventing the executive branch from weaving a cloak of invisibility around its inner operations.
. . Secrecy is a favored tool of the imperial presidency, and the Bush Administration’s stonewalling on its Enron connections signals that it’s declaring war on openness and is bent on quashing this scandal by any means. How about, for instance, distracting us with an endless war on an “axis of evil”?
After its yearslong run, it set a high-water mark for complex, high-profile financial inquiries, successfully indicting and imprisoning almost all of the company’s top executives.Indeed, true to a certain extent: Sixteen people pleaded guilty for crimes committed at the company, and five others, including four former Merrill Lynch employees, were found guilty at trial, plus Arthur Andersen lost its CPA license and went of business. The convictions were accompanied by the usual prosecutor puffery: "No one, even heads of Fortune 500 companies, is above the law. . . We will continue to pursue relentlessly this type of corruption," said deputy U.S. attorney Paul McNulty.
BUT the convictions of the Merrill Lynch employees were overturned except for a perjury charge against one of them, with six convictions reportedly reversed in total. Jeffrey Skilling, Enron's former chief executive, eventually had his sentence reduced from 24 years to 14. The problem with Arthur Andersen's loss of its license and its subsequent demise as a firm is that, because its criminal conviction was also subsequently also overturned (unanimously, by the Supreme Court), it is held up as an example of overzealous, and irresponsible prosecution. Thus excused, we are getting even less white collar criminal law enforcement as a result.
Additionally, Enron Chairman Ken Lay died at home at age 64 about six weeks after his conviction. His conviction was thereupon overturned based on a ruling that convictions must be revoked "if defendants die without opportunity to appeal." According to the Times:
The decision, which had been expected, prevents the government from trying to seize more than $43.5 million from Mr. Lay's estate that prosecutors claimed he stole from Enron before it collapsed in 2001.Presumably, that would benefit Ken Lay's wife. Lay's wife also initiated the sale of 500,000 shares of Enron stock ahead of the market plunge (from $2.38 per share to $.60) on the day investors realized that Enron was probably heading for bankruptcy. The sale proceeds went into the Linda and Ken Lay Family Foundation. She wasn't charged with anything.
* * *
Tuesday's decision will make it harder for former Enron employees and shareholders to lay claim to the millions in Mr. Lay's estate because they cannot point to his criminal conviction as proof of wrongdoing.
People at Enron and people in the financial industry were prosecuted, and thus it was treated as a "business" scandal, but nobody in government was prosecuted, so it was not treated as a "political" or government scandal as well. One might say it was essentially what was feared and predicted by The Nation in its editorial, by Russ Baker, and the Guardian.
Not even Thomas White, the Secretary of the Army, and the former Vice-Chair of the Eron subsidiary of Enron Energy Services was charged despite evidence that he was involved and in the know at Enron, and that he was also involved in more than one Enron scandal (sorry abut the Jayson Blair link).
Mueller has had stints in private practice. In 1993, before he returned to public practice he was a partner at Boston's Hale and Dorr. And, Mueller had to resign from WilmerHale, the firm Hale and Dorr became, when he became special prosecutor for the Russiagate investigation (he'd rejoined the firm in 2014).
Hale and Dorr was special counsel to Enron during the bankruptcy. The Powers Report was said to be the "driving force in the investigation of crimes" influentially guiding "the thinking of everyone that came after." The Power's Report is named after its titular author, William C. Powers Jr., a Texas law school dean, but "ably assisting in the preparation of the report" was Hale and Dorr. George Bush rejected suggestions that the investigation of Enron's collapse should be handled by a special prosecutor.
A similar report was done for Worldcom. That was done by Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, which merged with Hale and Dorr in 2004.
It may be noted that the 2017 New York Times "news analysis" cited at the outset of this section of this article credits Mueller solely with "overseeing the task force that investigated" Enron and forming, with two other men, the "elite team of F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors assigned to investigate and prosecute crimes." For some that might allow that Mueller is somehow sufficiently distant from complete responsibility from any Enron investigation shortcomings so as to eliminate worry about his Russiagate investigation, . . . BUT remember, that article also says, "Andrew Weissmann, who recently joined Mr. Mueller’s Russia team, later led the task force."
If the results of the Enron investigation don't satisfy you, there is reason to be concerned about the Russiagate investigation.
Last Stop Before Russiagate Probe: Robert Mueller Works With Private Government Surveillance Company, Booz Allen Hamilton, To Protect Its Secrets
The government surveillance industry complex wants a fundamentally unequal, lopsided relationship with the public. The industry wants to be able to ferret out and slurp up all our secrets; that's the "surveillance" part. At the same time, the industry wants to be able to keep secret from the public everything it is doing (as in "secret" agent); that's the part about the industry being outraged that Edward Snowden would disclose to the public that it was engaged in illegal, broad and sweeping surveillance of U.S. citizens, including surveillance that James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, blatantly perjured himself testifying before Congress to deny.
Edward Snowden was working at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the private firms conducting illegal surveillance for the government before he broke ranks to blow the whistle and disclose that conduct. In the fall of 2016, just before Trump was elected, one of Robert Mueller's last professional projects was to hire out to Booz Allen Hamilton to help it keep its secrets, investigating “security, personnel, and management processes and practices” at the company.
This was in connection with the Justice Department's pursuit of espionage
charges against another Booz Allen Hamilton employee, Harold
Martin, "who the FBI said stored a massive cache of `sensitive` materials
in his home and car. Those materials allegedly included cyber weaponry."
What can we presume to truly know about the Martin case, which supposedly involves some bizarre stuff about a tip-off from a helpful Russian a Russian cybersecurity company? Who knows?: And who, after all, says we have that industry contested right? The main gist of what we are told is that Martin, over the course of decades, is supposed to have accumulated over 50 terabytes of government data, a lot of it highly classified, and, he is said to have probably done not much with it.
In 2008, Tim Shorrock, made clear in his book “Spies for Hire- The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing,” that, even back then, a major problem with the intelligence industry complex was the increasing outsourcing of surveillance to private companies. The government's surveillance work is now carried out predominantly through `private' spy organizations like Booz: "About 70 percent of the 2013 U.S. intelligence budget is contracted out, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis." And the U.S. contracts out 80% to just five firms, with Booz Allen Hamilton regarded as the “colossus” of those few. In fact, Booz's spokesperson explained why there were multiple problems like Snowden and Harold Martin at Booz by saying, “There’s only a handful of these really big, what we in government used to call ‘body shops,’ so the chances of a bad person coming out of one of those big-three is really high.”
One problem with government's contracting out surveillance to private firms is diminished accountability. That goes along with how the goals of private companies, mainly profit, cannot be predicted to be fully consonant with what the goals of government should be. These private companies can also compete with the government to hire intelligence analysts, impoverishing the talent that gets hired within the government (including to supervise outside contractors), while, at the same time, those firms get the resources to lobby the government for more secret payments from a secret government budget. The funds then go to the private sector companies enabling them to compete even more aggressively with the government.
Another concern is that some kinds of surveillance that it might be illegal for government to conduct, may not be also be illegal, or not quite so clearly illegal, when engaged in by private companies. That's perhaps irrespective of whether the government finally takes advantage of that private surveillance.
Finally, while private firms may hire out mainly to one government (Bloomberg Businessweek said of Booz Allen, the "federal government" is "practically its sole client"), that doesn't mean that these private firms hire out only to one government, or only to governments. So, for example, in 2007 the New York Public Library hired Booz Allen Hamilton to advise and help oversee a "radical overhaul" of its libraries. While this may have been just at the time that the NYPL trustees were being told that a federal law might "require" the NYPL and "to reengineer their Internet service facilities to enhance law enforcement's ability to monitor and intercept communications," that doesn't mean that Booz Allen was, per se, working for the federal government as it did so. Lastly, while the NYPL, a nonprofit, may be viewed as an extension of New York City's government in its provision of library services, the NYPL is not, per se, a government. (It's got a foreign princess on its board.)
With the ability of the private surveillance firms to also contract out to other governments, departments of government, private companies, or even foreign governments, there is no assurance of strict allegiance. With that untethering, and with government, in any event, increasingly subservient to wealth-wielding private corporations and monopolies, there are questions about whether selling out to the highest bidder is what rules the day.
Firms like Booz Allen can only do the work they do because those who go to work for them, Edward Snowden for example, are able to portably bring their security clearances to their jobs with them. They may go back and forth between the government, and one job or another in the private sector. It is therefore to be imagined that Robert Mueller, albeit a lawyer and bound by confidentiality and the profession's code of ethics, was able to take on the task of helping Booz Allen preserve its secrets partly because he came with a qualifying security clearance.
We may then suspect that those then floating through the surveillance industry complex, sometimes back and forth and in and out of government, with most of them working in the private sector, and with the private sector being where you will also find the ones who are most highly paid, are apt to congeal into a kind of club or fraternity. The question is where the loyalty of that club lies.
Thus, when we are routinely presented with the picture of Edward Snowden and Harold Martin as threatening examples of individual intelligence contractors going rogue, it might be better to reflect on the bigger picture of whether we have, or should have, concerns about to what extent an entire industry could be going rogue and whether that problem is, even to an extent, systematically ingrained.
When the surveillance industry complex operates with the arrogant paternalism of "I can know all your secrets, but you have zero right to know mine," the question is: To where does this club of mostly private sector actors head off when accountability and strict allegiance to our elected governments are jettisoned? There is little assurance that the judgement or the priorities of the people involved will be good: It is probably, for example worth remembering that the FBI, under Mueller, was spying on nonviolent, faith-based peace groups. As noted, the FBI justified and characterized that surveillance as "anti-terrorist" work. What does it say when the vigilance of our intelligence community is directed to fending off the possibility of peace?
Three Decision Points Respecting Mueller's Career Where The Press Pivoted On Its Criticism To Promote Mueller
While early on, public opinion was largely irrelevant to appointments Mueller got to move forward his career, there were three decision points where public opinion was likely to matter. In each case, we can see the press pivot. Press reporting ignores previously published criticism and forgets previously reported facts to promote Mueller as somehow a perfect and logical choice for a pending appointment to be made. Those three points in time are 1.) Mueller's appointment to head the FBI just before 9/11, 2.) Elimination of the ten-year term limit for the Director of the FBI to keep Mueller in office as FBI Director in 2011, and 3.) Mueller's appointment to serve as Special Prosecutor for the Russiagate probe.
So, in the case of Mueller's appointment as FBI Director before 9/11, when the press promoted Mueller as the one who could fix a broken FBI, the press forgot about how he had been criticized for lack of zeal and possibly covering up in the BCCI and Iraqgate investigations that were linked to Iran-Contra. As noted, the New York Times managed to magically invert into an asset Mueller's questionable presence when documents were withheld in the Timothy J. McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing case. The sentencings in the Flight 103 Lockerbie, Scotland bombing case were only freshly being reported, so the press had not yet detected reasons for dissatisfaction with that investigation. . . but Whitey Bulger was already on the lam. and problems of Bulger's relationship with the FBI during Mueller's tenure had already been raised- It didn't get mentioned.
Likewise, the press seemingly didn't figure out or report that William Barr, criticized loudly and publicly for covering up Iran-Contra, including his pardons of the main players indicted as perpetrators, had worked with Mueller on Iran-Contra investigation matters. Mueller and Barr's work respecting another matter with Iran-Contra, BCCI tie-ins went unremarked upon: General Manuel Antonio Noriega and the invasion of Panama.
The next decision point in Mueller's career was ten years later when more of these things and much else negative about Mueller was known. That was when Obama proposed to keep Mueller in office by overturning the ten-year limit on the term of FBI Directors. Again, the press pivoted away from previous criticism and ignored reported facts.
Extension Of Ten-Year FBI Director Term Limit To Keep Mueller In Office
Robert Mueller's term as FBI Director was limited by law to ten years. That law limiting his term was imposed during the post-Watergate era, after the lessons of living with J. Edgar Hoover. It meant that Mueller was to step down as FBI Director on August 2, 2011. The law is somewhat akin to the rule that organizations should not want to continue with the same auditors without interruption. One wants to switch off and regularly bring in a new set of auditors so that secrets don't continue to get buried or overlooked and so that auditors don't become complicit in covering up and letting past problems go undetected. The law also partakes in the philosophy that limits the terms of powerful chief executive positions so that those executives don't use the accumulating powers of office for their own self perpetuation at a cost to the public and a concomitant sacrifice of checks and balances. It was well recognized that, for years, Hoover had been doing precisely that, abusing secretly accumulated power; he had been accumulating blackmail material to ensure that the president and those who formally made the decisions kept him in office. The law was passed after Hoover's death.
So breaking with such an important rule limiting the FBI Director's term was a significant matter deserving careful consideration and scrutiny. Among other things, for ten years Mueller was the only FBI Director in office since 9/11, a significant event from which much flowed in a highly secretive environment with greatly enhanced surveillance.
The ten-year term limit law was superseded by a unanimous vote of the U.S. Senate extending Mueller's term on Wednesday, July 27, 2011. The extension was "for about two years."
President Obama asked Congress in May to allow Mr. Mueller to stay on, "arguing that his national security team needed continuity because the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency were getting new leaders." Obama inverted any concern that might have existed about Mueller being the only FBI Director since 9/11 saying: “Given the ongoing threats facing the United States, as well as the leadership transitions at other agencies like the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency, I believe continuity and stability at the F.B.I. is critical at this time” and “In his 10 years at the F.B.I., Bob Mueller has set the gold standard for leading the bureau.”
When Obama announced his intentions to extend, the New York Times reported that Obama's proposal "was quickly endorsed by leading lawmakers of both parties — an indication that each side sees extending the shelf life of Mr. Mueller’s directorship as serving its interests." When the bill was introduced, the New York Times reported that the House was "expected to pass the bill swiftly" and that the Senate had already "already agreed to vote on confirming him after just two hours of debate."
Initially, before the process formally started (July 15th), the Republicans, Senator Rand Paul, being the main individual in question, briefly opposed the bill for largely unstated reasons, although the New York Times commented that the hold up raised only an "outside chance" that Mueller would have to step down even "temporarily." A soupçon of crisis urgency had been added to the situation because Obama's "administration legal team" had lately decided that Mr. Mueller’s last term limit day probably had to be August 2nd rather than September 4th as first supposed.
The brief Republican hold up was at a time when the Republican's were reflexively, as a matter of strategy, routinely opposing any Obama actions. There was one tactical reason for Republicans to like the Obama proposal: If a Republican was elected president in 2012 they'd soon get to appoint their own FBI Director. Details were worked out-- It technically wasn't an extension of Mueller's term; the appointment of Mueller actually approved was to a new term after the law was changed to create a new shorter second term to which he could be appointed.
There was more, however, in the vein of this unquestioned backing for Mueller: The New York Times cheerfully reported, "Mr. Mueller is widely respected in Congress, and leaders from both parties quickly agreed to Mr. Obama’s request."
"Mr. Mueller is widely respected in Congress, and leaders from both parties"? The point is, that in Hoover's day it would have been difficult to find Congressional leaders willing to openly say they did not `respect' Hoover. That only became possible when Hoover was out of office and dead.
While Democratic Senator and head of the Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy reportedly told Obama that "he and other lawmakers would have concerns about the precedent of overriding the term limit, given its history," he told him that Congress would probably change to the term-limit law as Obama requested "in light of Mr. Mueller’s popularity." This gave the Times the one opportunity it took to amplify that the "history" was that the term limit law was "widely seen as a reaction to the power amassed — and abuses committed" by Hoover. And yet the Congressional debate on the subject was "just two hours"?
Like Mayor Michael Bloomberg's 2009 gift to himself of a third term as New York City Mayor, another extension of term limits excused, in part by the theoretical exigencies of 9/11, it was made fairly clear that the extension of the FBI Director's term was ad hominem for Mueller as an individual. Senator Charles E. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was in the chorus of praise for Mueller as the extension was allowed, but he reportedly wanted "assurances that it would not become a more permanent extension and that it would not undermine the principle of the term limit `as an important safeguard against improper political influence and abuses of the past.'"
Two years later, when Mueller had his two year extension under his belt, Grassley could safely and retroactively be more expressive on the subject, about how it shouldn't be about one particular man; Grassley said the purpose of the law limiting the director’s term “is to make sure we don’t get into this J. Edgar Hoover syndrome, that one guy is so indispensable . . . We don’t want to get caught in that syndrome again.” A Republican, Comey, was about to be nominated by Obama who had won reelection to his second term. Grassley was theoretically, at a very late date, saying that Mueller's term shouldn't be further extended.
Just in case there was any doubt that what was wanted was Mueller, and only Mueller, the Times said that, were Mueller to have been replaced, the goal of those looking for a replacement was "essentially" to "search for a clone of Mr. Mueller." In fact, when Mueller was at long last replaced by James Comey, in September of 2013, Comey may have been just that, far too dangerously a clone and continued extension of Mueller.
What happened then to the previous press reports and criticism? What about how the New York Times having once said that Mueller's contradiction of his past statements before Congress concerning 9/11 and the FBI's "bungling" of it raised more concerns "on Capitol Hill about his leadership of the embattled agency"? What about how the Wall Street Journal had called for Mueller's resignation due to Mueller's lack of credibility over the course of months and his mischaracterization of that 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 9/11? (One thing that happened was that, in the ongoing course of media consolidation, Rupert Murdoch had interveningly acquired the Wall Street Journal in 2007.)
What about what was, by this time, Mueller's clear bungling of the anthrax investigation? What about Mueller's misleading testimony before Congress about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction? Were people really happy with the Enron investigation? By this time it was also far more clearly and widely understood that the results of the Flight 103 Lockerbie, Scotland bombing case investigation and prosecution were questionable.
What Happened During Mueller's Extra Two Years At The FBI- The Boston Marathon Bombing, And. . .
The extra two years of Mueller's term enabled Mueller to be at the helm of the FBI for the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Mueller was promptly criticized for not heading off "one of the most spectacular attacks on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001," because Russian officials had reportedly provided a tip about one of the accused bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and the FBI did not tell the Boston police, and "the F.B.I. had interviewed, and closed its file on, Mr. Tsarnaev."
The tone of the New York Times shifted from the accolades it transmitted when his term was being extended:
Now, Mr. Mueller’s 12-year tenure under two presidents is facing scrutiny, months from his longtime plans to step down in September, as hearings begin on Capitol Hill into what happened in Boston and why.
Although his privileged roots and sometimes wooden personality have not made him a beloved figure in the F.B.I.’s beer-and-brats culture, he has always had supporters in both parties in Congress. Now, instead of coasting into retirement, Mr. Mueller will spend his final months answering tough questions about how the bombing suspects slipped away.The Times quoted credentialed pundits saying that the FBI's handling of the bombing would be a permanent, unforgettable stain on Mueller's record.
Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton historian and author of a book on the politics of national security):
If an attack of this scale happens toward the end of your tenure and there is evidence that the F.B.I. had its hands on the people years ago and missed them, that is what people will remember.Lee H. Hamilton (co-chairman of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks):
He can’t avoid it. It happened, so it’s part of his legacy.Really? That was the spring of 2013. Just four years later, in the spring of 2017 Mueller would be appointed special counsel to investigate Russiagate and the Times would be writing:
By appointing Mr. Mueller, a former federal prosecutor with an unblemished reputation, Mr. Rosenstein could alleviate uncertainty about the government’s ability to investigate the questions surrounding the Trump campaign and the Russians.
* * *In fact, as partial proof of why Mueller deserved such praise, the Times noted that Mueller's term as FBI Director had been extended: The "only time a modern-day F.B.I. director’s tenure has been extended." There is more praise for the "legendary" Mr. Mueller in that Times article if you can stomach it.
Mr. Mueller’s appointment was hailed by Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, who view him as one of the most credible law enforcement officials in the country.
Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said Mr. Mueller’s “record, character, and trustworthiness have been lauded for decades by Republicans and Democrats alike.”Senator Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland and the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said Mr. Rosenstein “has taken an important step toward restoring the credibility of the D.O.J. and F.B.I. in this most serious matter.”
Similarly, when it came time to define "Who Is Robert Mueller" and why he should be trusted with the Russiagate investigation NPR explained that "President Barack Obama asked Congress to extend his term for two extra years in 2011" and that "Congress voted unanimously" to approve the request, which "showed Mueller's broad appeal to Republicans and Democrats." NPR, pretty much in lockstep with painting the same rosy picture the media formally recognized as corporate was painting, defined `who Robert Mueller is' by interviewing his hagiographer, Garrett Graff. (“Bob Mueller is as straight an arrow as they come. . . I mean, he is very straight and narrow. . . . famous in the FBI for always wearing a white shirt, dark suit and red or blue tie. . . longest serving FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover himself .”)
In 2017 the decision about the 2011 decision extended Mueller’s term was cited as somehow self-proving that Mueller is in no way controversial, but it seems that, back in 2011, when the decision about Mueller’s extension was being made, the decision was hardly considered at all. You probably had to be in what was a small minority of the public reading The Nation’s June 14, 2011 editorial to hear any informed cautions about that decision. The Nation's editorial was very direct: Robert Mueller’s Questionable Extension as FBI Director– No FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover has served more than ten years. Should Mueller, who oversaw a massive expansion of the bureau's domestic surveillance, be the first?
The editorial began with just breaking news that the FBI was raiding the homes of peace activists in the Midwest, groups openly critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South America. The subjects of the raids denied any ties to terrorism, but the FBI conducted its raids under the apparently flimsy pretext that they possibly providing “material support” for Colombian and Palestinian groups designated by the U.S. government as terrorists. No, they are “public non-violent activists with long, distinguished careers in public service, including teachers, union organizers and antiwar and community leaders,” said their lawyer. The Washington Post skillfully managed to report news of the raids without ever mentioning Mueller or connecting the news to the proposed extension of his term, that other major news event.
There was more in the Nation's editorial that was damning of Mueller, more described in raw terms that was cautionarily damning of the abuses during Hoover's reign. It included questioning of Mueller by Senator Al Franken about “ten years” of “significant misuse of the department’s surveillance powers” and “other major civil liberties violations,” and, for instance, it brought up the findings of the Justice Department’s inspector general in 2007 that the FBI engaged in serious abuse of national security letters. And yet, in the end, even Franken didn't dare break ranks with the unanimous Senate vote of approval.
More About Mueller's Extra Two Years
What else was Mueller able to do in the two additional years that he got as FBI Director by virtue of the extension of his term?
His FBI came up with a "plan for a sweeping overhaul of surveillance laws that would make it easier to wiretap people who communicate using the Internet rather than by traditional phone services" that "required Internet communications services to each build in a wiretapping capacity" thus upsetting "advocates of Internet privacy and freedom."
Mueller was there when the Obama administration was forced to admit the existence of the government intelligence agency Prism program's internet surveillance and data collection. He sought to defend it. This was part of what came out when Edward Snowden revealed sweeping and illegal government surveillance and Mueller was able to respond advocating that changes not be made.
The reported timeline on Edward Snowden is that December 2012 and January 2013 Snowden reached out to journalist Glenn Greenwald, and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, respectively. May 2013 is the month documents began to flow to them, and May 20th the day Snowden arrived in Hong Kong where he would meet the journalists. June 5, and June 6, are the dates of first publication of information from his leaks and on June 9, 2013 Snowden was disclosed as the source. Before Mueller left office he warned against cutting back on surveillance programs.
Overlapping with the Snowden dates were two theatrically back-to-back incidents of poisoned ricin letters being mailed to President Obama (and, in each case, to others as well): April 15, 2013 and May 24, 2013. Explanation for the "mirrored" episodes was that the first probably inspired the second. Somewhat reminiscent of the anthrax investigation, three people in all were arrested as suspects, but one, Paul Kevin Curtis, an Elvis impersonator (Prince, Johnny Cash, Bon Jovi and others too), who "battled mental illness" and was involved in legal scrapes, was cleared and released. In the case of the April letters, it was concluded that J. Everett Dutschke, was the culprit and that he was trying to frame Mr. Curtis, the Elvis impersonator. In the case of the May letters, it was concluded that Shannon Guess Richardson, a marginally known actress ("The Walking Dead") was the culprit and that she was trying to frame her husband. It would take a very good imagination to make up stuff so bonkers.
Mueller warned Congress about "terrorist hackers" and was theoretically on guard against "cyber threats" from Russia and China.
The FBI and the CIA both worked on censoring a book about 9/11 that made the point that there were actions not taken by the agencies that could have derailed the event and that the torturing of suspects was "unnecessary and counterproductive." That's true: There is an earlier National Notice article about the counterproductivity of torture that coerces false confessions; people tell you whatever you want them to say rather than the truth. It is also about how Gina Hapsel, responsible for such tactics, has now been made head of the CIA.
Mueller managed to be around in the spring of 2012 when Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi died. He was the only man convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, and his New York Times obituary cited that:
controversy still rages over who was ultimately responsible.Through The Robert Mueller Lens-- What Is Happening To Our Press? What Is Happening Respecting Our Intelligence Establishment? Does The Past Matter?
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The outcome [of the trial] failed to satisfy those who continue to insist that the Libyan was framed, for political reasons, and that responsibility for the outrage lay elsewhere.
To write this and the previous two National Notice articles about whether Robert Mueller and his Russiagate report should be trusted, I mostly didn't range far from what was at one time or other reported in the corporate press about Robert Mueller. I did, however, do some time travel, some hop-skipping, and jumping in time to research about Mueller.
Among other things, I went back to the early 1990s and even to the 1980s. Iran-Contra was happening in the 1980s, the Noriega affair (invasion in1989), which tied in with Iran-Contra was happening then too. The Lockerbie Flight 103 bombing was 1988, the trial with respect to it ending just before 9/11. Whitey Bulger and the FBI were conniving and committing crimes, murders and coverups in Boston in the 1980s. In the early 1990s you had the BCCI and Iraq investigations tying in with Iran-Contra, plus the Iran-Contra pardons. The very unsatisfactory anthrax investigations followed 9/11, lingering for seven years before getting closed out with a 2008 suicide rather than a trial with presented and contested proof. Ditto, the unsatisfactory Enron investigations that went until 2006, or much longer if you count the subsequent overturning of verdicts as being part of the resolution of that case, or the non-resolution of matters.
Repeatedly there were things that were fair game to report at times in the past, and then forgotten when they needed to be remembered. No dots were connected.
More recently, there was the dissatisfaction expressed with the FBI bungling of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. It was predicted that it never would be forgotten, and then promptly was forgotten when Mueller was getting his reputational retread to head the Russiagate investigation.
What are we to think of this "now you see it, now you don't" kind of blind forgetting? What are the rules?
Is it OK to go ahead and report some particular news of the moment because it is too attractively sensational, too much of a scoop to ignore it, so long as you know and understand, that the public has a short memory, so that when decision making junctures come later, it won't matter if you discreetly don't re-report it then? By the same token, does Mueller get briefly taken to task about something like the Boston Marathon bombing, the Anthrax investigation bungling, lies about the FBI's 9/11 failures, lying about going to war with Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, because the cognitive dissonance of not doing so at the time would be overwhelming, but that's fine because, with a non-recollecting press, it will soon be forgotten anyway?
Traveling through time as I did to write these articles, I looked up close at some of the reporting of the past, and I had to ask myself whether part of the problem might be that the quality of journalism has been deteriorating over time? Did, for instance, the quality of New York Times articles slide as 9/11 arrived and transpired? Could one maybe see deterioration of quality even in articles with the same bylines?
That's a big question. I think I detected a lowering of standards in journalism overall. I believe that there has been a decline since the media consolidations occurring after the legal framework overall of the 1996 Telecommunications Act passed during the Clinton administration: Were only fifteen corporations delivering the news too few then?--- now we have only six. Furthermore, although the internet has certain benefits, it has been bleeding away financial support for newspapers. Newspapers can increasingly be easily acquired by moguls (likely connected with others) who have vain and self-interested ideas about what they would like to see published. However, this analysis is going far afield. It is not one I can do here before wrapping up.
As I ranged back in time, I am well aware that I have friends who have asked me: Does what happened a long time ago matter? Iran-Contra happened a long time ago. Does it matter?
I think that, charting the Mueller coverage over the years, it is possible to notice that what Mueller has gotten away with over those years has involved a cumulative lack of accountability: Each step where he has not been held accountable along the way has given him escalating license. No questions were asked as the ten-year term limit on his FBI Directorship was plowed under, so the assumption was put out that no questions should be asked when he took up the Russiagate investigation.
The multiple questions that should be asked about Mueller personally in these regards, should also be asked about our intelligence establishments in general: Has the lack of accountability to which we and our corporate press hold our intelligence agencies serially emboldened them? . . That question to be asked about our intelligence agencies must go back at least to Iran-Contra. The question should be applied to everything that has happened along the way since.
Those who axiomatically say that "past is prologue," are correct. And past, being prologue, it would be ever so valuable to have a press with a cadre of journalists able, ready and willing to remember the past and then connect the dots that lead to the present.
Postscript (09/08/2019): Two days after I published this article another opinion piece story was published about Mueller in the New York Post that, although it's quite pertinent, is not incorporated in the main body of what I wrote: Robert Mueller helped Saudi Arabia cover up its role in 9/11 attacks: suit, By Paul Sperry, September 7, 2019.
The article, reporting on the lawsuit by 9/11 families against Saudi Arabia and at least one affidavit submitted as testimony from a former FBI agent submitted therein says that “former FBI investigators say” Mueller, as head of the FBI, 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 they uncovered, that “also involved foreign intelligence officers,” and that “the record shows” Mueller “covered up evidence pointing back to the Saudi Embassy and Riyadh — and may have even misled Congress about what he knew.”
That:
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, multiple case agents told me. Then he deep-sixed what evidence his agents did manage to uncover, according to the 9/11 lawsuit against the Saudis.FBI Agent Mark Wauck said, Mueller, who used to be his boss, has a long history of acting as a “servant of the deep state,” or the permanent DC ruling class, and, in the article, another former US counterintelligence official is reported to assert: “Bottom line is, Mueller did not do an investigation on people involved in the 9/11 attacks who were connected to the Saudi government, . . . . he was not interested in investigating [Saudi] terrorists who murdered Americans.”
The article includes seven bulleted paragraphs providing more details fleshing out this picture more fully.
Khobar Towers Apartment Complex Bombing Research Update. In addition, the New York Post article (partly through Zero Hedge and some articles in it by Eric Zuesse with links I researched) led me to more investigation respecting the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex. As noted in the body of my own article, Mueller, as deputy attorney general, directed that bombing to Comey, for prosecution in Virginia. The investigation and ensuing prosecution continued well into the era that Mueller was heading the FBI. It turns out to be another investigation where probably obscurant FBI involvement seems to have been extremely unhelpful in determining the truth.
The story of the FBI investigation of Khobar Towers bombing also necessarily deeply involves Mueller's boss when it happened, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and Freeh's top-level coordination with top Saudis in shaping the investigation and the official story. Freeh was FBI Director until June 21, 2001. Mueller took over as the next appointed FBI Director.
In 2006, the Washington Post reported the ruling of a federal judge in the case in Virginia that Iran was responsible for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. The theory of the ruling was that the Iranian government “financed and directed the bombing by a militant Saudi wing” of the Islamist terrorist group Hezbollah. The judge’s ruling ordered Iran to pay $254 million to the families of the Americans who died in the attack. The judge, Royce C. Lamberth, said that "overwhelming" evidence had been presented and that the “totality of the evidence at trial . . . firmly establishes” Iran’s responsibility. The judge’s finding was based on a trial without any Iranian participation. Iran insisted it had “no connection to the bombing.” The ruling about the “overwhelming evidence” required reversal of “a lower magistrate judge who said evidence linking the Iranian government to the bombing was not convincing.”
And the timing of the ruling came just as the Bush administration was resisting “recommendations that it engage in diplomatic talks with Iran” with hopes to “enlist Iran's help in stabilizing Iraq and the Middle East.” The effect of the ruling, said the Washington Post, was to throw up a hurdle for those wanting such obvious benefits of such a “rapprochement with Iran.
But Hezbollah, blamed in the ruling as having a “wing” in Sunni Saudi Arabia, is a Shia Muslim group, and the New York Times, in August of 1996, reported, quite inconsistently with the ruling, that the suspects reported to have confessed to the bombing at that time were (emphasis added) “native Saudis, who are all Sunni Muslims with no outside connections to either Iran or Iraq.”
After Lamberth's 2006 ruling, in 2007, former Defense Secretary William Perry said that the evidence that Iran was behind the bombing, i.e. the “strongly believed” theory of the FBI, was not to his own satisfaction (or at the time President Clinton’s). Thus was avoided a fairly significant “contingency plan to attack Iran” that would have entailed striking “a number of their military facilities that would have weakened -- substantially weakened ... the Iranian navy and air force.”
It gets more complicated when you next theorize who may have actually been responsible for the bombing. Perry (speaking in 2007, as noted) theorized “in retrospect” that it was “probably masterminded by Osama bin Laden.” That was probably an easy to believe theory, easy for many to swallow after 9/11. Perry was not the only one who so theorized, BUT. . .
In his 2007 interview Perry suggested that Saudi officials “tried to discourage” the theory that the bombing was ordered by Iran, because the Saudi's “feared what action we would take,” i.e. the contingency plan of the U.S. attacking Iran. Is that true? Consideration of whether it is true has to be evaluated in terms of the general hunger the Saudis have had over the years (along with the other members of the triumvirate alliance of Israel and the United States) for militarily expressed hostilities with Iran.
In any event, it is reported that in a number of respects neither the FBI, nor Saudi Arabia were keen to see any investigation or transparency that would bring out the facts of the event, and there is much to consider about reported collaboration between the FBI and Saudi Arabia that suppressed discovery and tended conceal facts in various related investigations. That extends to concealment of the Saudis' own supportive involvement in terrorism, plus a fair amount of what was likely misdirection in considering Iran as culpable . . . Read more, the full extended version of this postscript, through to its conclusion with more details about the FBI/Saudi collaboration and concealment of facts, here-
Postscript For Our National Notice “How Trustworthy Is Robert Mueller?” Series: A NY Post Article “Robert Mueller Helped Saudi Arabia Cover Up Its Role in 9/11 Attacks” Evokes Consideration Of The Strange FBI/Saudi Khobar Towers Bombing Investigation.
