MUELLER APPEARS AFTER SOMETHING REALLY BIG: READING BETWEEN THE LINES IN ADVANCE OF THE SPECIAL COUN
MUELLER APPEARS AFTER SOMETHING REALLY BIG: READING BETWEEN THE LINES IN ADVANCE OF THE SPECIAL COUNSEL’S REPORT
The trick to understanding Mueller’s intentions may lie not in his hundreds of pages of previous indictments and filings, but in the material that he has omitted from them. Is the great unwritten story of Russian collusion hiding in plain sight?
BY ABIGAIL TRACY
FEBRUARY 25, 2019 6:01 PM
Robert Mueller is nothing if not deliberate. When he was investigating the N.F.L.’s handling of the Ray Rice domestic-violence scandal in 2014, Mueller accounted for each of the 1,583 telephone calls made to and from the league’s headquarters during the time period relevant to his probe. As Wired’s Garrett M. Graff recently noted, however, Mueller’s conclusions were frustratingly narrow. Despite trawling a sea of data—5 pages of his 96-page report were dedicated to the N.F.L. mail room’s procedures—Mueller refused to issue a conclusion about the the culture of the N.F.L., its pursuit of justice, or its long suspected inclination to manage its largest crises with a lack of transparency. Instead, he focused narrowly on the precise case in front of him. Now, with Mueller expected to turn over his confidential findings in the Russia investigation to Attorney General William Barr in the impending weeks, some wonder whether the special counsel will remain similarly disciplined, or if he will widen his aperture. (A judge dismissed domestic-violence charges against Rice.)
Clues abound. Mueller may indeed be writing his report in plain sight before our very eyes. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted last week, his team has already composed and released nearly 300 pages of plea deals, indictments, and shadowy details regarding the behavior of Trump grifters like Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and George Papadopoulos. The details have often been scintillating, in part, because Mueller has generally employed in his filings a litany of “speaking indictments”—a colloquial term that is applied when a prosecutor offers greater detail than necessary to prove their charges. In his indictment of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm behind the 2016 election disinformation effort, Mueller included the details of a hoax that Russian operatives played on an unwitting U.S. citizen. In his subsequent indictment of 12 G.R.U. intelligence officers, he detailed with remarkable specificity their Internet searches during one 37-minute window. Perhaps the most curious detail comes elsewhere in the G.R.U. indictment, when Mueller notes how one particular spear-phishing attempt aimed at the Hillary Clinton campaign was both a “first time” effort, and conducted “after hours.” These may seem like bread crumbs to a popular audience, but they’re more significant Morse-code tappings to jurisprudential scholars, suggesting that the hackers’ strategy could have shifted at a crucial moment.
Mueller may be deliberate, but he’s not necessarily straightforward. As his investigation appears to draw to a close, the key to understanding his intentions relies not only on examining the information he has included in previous filings, but also upon considering the information that he appears to have omitted, or redacted, from them. Mueller’s 24-page indictment of Roger Stone, issued in January, revealed that the self-described dirty trickster encouraged radio host Randy Credico “to do a ‘Frank Pentangeli’”—a reference to a character in The Godfather: Part II, who lied to Congress only after his mobster brother showed up in the courtroom. But Mueller, the former Marine, also included numerous vagaries in the document. He outlined a series of cases where Stone was in contact with Trump campaign officials about WikiLeaks’ plans to release stolen e-mails, but did not identify said officials, in accordance with D.O.J. policy. Resultantly, we are left guessing the identity of the person who “directed” an unnamed “senior Trump campaign official “to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the Clinton Campaign.” In the end, the filing prompted nearly as many questions as it answered.
Mueller also dedicated much of the January indictment to unraveling the various lies that Stone told about his contacts with Credico, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi. But the special counsel did not explicitly say whether Stone, Credico, or Corsi were ever actually in contact with WikiLeaks or Assange about the stolen e-mails. In a court filing three weeks later, Mueller at least partially addressed this issue. After previously describing Stone’s attempts to contact Assange through hapless go-betweens, the special counsel’s team said for the first time that it “obtained and executed dozens of search warrants on various accounts used to facilitate the transfer of stolen documents for release, as well as to discuss the timing and promotion of their release.” Consequently, prosecutors wrote, “Several of those search warrants were executed on accounts that contained Stone’s communications with Guccifer 2.0”—the Russian entity that hacked the Democratic National Committee—“and with Organization 1,” a.k.a. WikiLeaks. In other words, Mueller has the receipts when it comes to Stone’s contacts with Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks. What is unclear is the substance of these contacts, and whether they are limited to what is publicly known.
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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/donald-trump-robert-mueller-special-counsel-report
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