Mueller’s
Own Mysteries
By Stephen F. Cohen
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.
Little-noted
aspects of the first volume of the Mueller report.
By Stephen F. Cohen
May
03, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Special
prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III’s two-volume “Report on the
Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential
Election” is not an easy read—not unlike those manuals that come
boxed with “easy to assemble” multipart children’s toys on
Christmas Eve. Nonetheless, considering the exceedingly damaging
effects Russiagate has had on America at home and abroad for nearly
three years, the report will long be studied for what it reveals and
does not reveal, what it includes and does not include.
Because
of my own special interest in Russia, I read carefully the first
volume, which focuses on that country’s purported role in the
scandal. I came away with as many questions about the report as about
the role of Moscow and that of candidate and then President Donald
Trump. To note a few:
§
Mueller begins, on Page 1, with this assertion: “The Russian
government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping
and systematic fashion.” Maybe so, but Mueller, who is not averse
to editorializing and contextualizing elsewhere in the report, gives
readers no historical background or context for this large
generalization. In particular, was the interference—or “meddling,”
as media accounts characterize it—more or less “sweeping and
systematic” than was Washington’s military intervention in the
Russian civil war in 1918 or its very intrusive campaign to reelect
Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996—or, on the other side of
the ledger, the role of the Soviet-backed American Communist Party in
US politics in the 20th century? That is, what warranted a special
investigation of this episode in a century of mutual American-Russian
interference in the other’s politics? Put somewhat differently:
Readers might wonder if, had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election,
there even would have been a Russiagate and Mueller investigation.
§
It has occasionally been suggested that Russiagate was originated by
high-level US officials who disliked candidate Trump’s pledge to
“cooperate with Russia.” This suspicion remains unproven, but
throughout, Mueller repeatedly attributes to Trump campaign members
and Russians who interacted in 2016, potentially in sinister or even
criminal ways, a desire for “improved U.S.-Russian relations,”
for “bringing the end of the new Cold War,” for a “new
beginning with Russia.” Even Russian President Vladimir Putin is
reported to have wanted “reconciliation between the United States
and Russia.” (See, for example, pp. 5, 98, 105, 124, 157.) The
result is, of course, to discredit America’s once-mainstream
advocacy of détente. Mueller even brands American pro-détente
views—as Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan held in the 20th
century—as “pro-Russia foreign policy positions” (p. 102). Does
this mean that Americans who hold pro-détente views today, as I and
quite a few others do, are to be investigated for their “contacts”
with Russians in pursuit of better relations? Mueller seems to say
nothing to offset this implication, which has already adversely
affected a few Americans mentioned and not mentioned in his report.
§
As reflected in the text and footnotes, Mueller relies heavily on
reports by US intelligence agencies, but without treating the
recorded misdeeds of those agencies, particularly the CIA under John
Brennan, in promoting the Russiagate saga. He also relies heavily on
contemporary media accounts of Russiagate as it unfolded, but without
taking into account their journalistic malpractices, as abundantly
documented by Matt Taibbi, who equates the malpractice with news
reports leading up to the US invasion of Iraq.
§
Nor does Mueller consider alternative scenarios and explanations, as
any good historical or judicial investigation must do. For example,
he accepts uncritically the Clinton/Democratic National Committee
allegation that Russian agents hacked and disseminated their emails
in 2016. Again, maybe so, but why did he not do his own forensic
examination or even mention the alternative finding by VIPS that they
were stolen and leaked by an insider? Why did he not question Julian
Assange, who claimed to know how and through whom the emails reached
WikiLeaks? And how to explain Mueller’s minimal interest in the
shadowy professor Joseph Mifsud, who helped entrap George
Papadopoulos in London? Mueller reports that Mifsud “had
connections to Russia” (p. 5), although a simple Google search
suggests that Mifsud was indeed an “agent” but not a Russian one,
as widely alleged in media accounts.
§
Though he may do so in the second volume of the report, Mueller oddly
does not focus in the first volume on the Steele dossier, where it
surely belongs as a foundational Russiagate document and whose
anti-Trump “information” is now widely acknowledged to have been
“salacious and unverified.” At one point, however, Mueller
delivers a telling report: “Trump would not pay for opposition
research” (p. 61). Can this be anything other than a damning, if
oblique, judgment on the Clinton campaign, which is known to have
paid for the Steele dossier?
§
Toward the end of the first volume (pp. 144, 146), Mueller produces a
truly stunning revelation, though he seems unaware of it. After the
2016 US presidential election, the Kremlin “appeared not to have
preexisting contacts…with senior officials around the
President-Elect.” Even more, “Putin spoke of the difficulty faced
by the Russian government in getting in touch with the incoming Trump
Administration…. Putin indicated that he did not know with whom
formally to speak and generally did not know the people around the
President-Elect.”
So
much for all the shameful Russiagate allegations of Trump-Putin
collusion, conspiracy, even treason. Surely it means the United
States needs another, different investigation, one into the actual
origins and meaning of this fraudulent, corrosive, exceedingly
dangerous, and still unending American political scandal.
Stephen
Frand Cohen is an American scholar and professor emeritus of Russian
studies at Princeton University and New York University. His academic
work concentrates on modern Russian history since the Bolshevik
Revolution and the country's relationship with the United States.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.
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