PART TWO

Most of what goes on in a legal case is private and never becomes public. But sometimes a judge manages to see things that the public never gets to see. And, furthermore, sometimes even the press gets to see, and even to report, things that don’t fit with a ‘stellar’ lawyer’s stellar reputation amongst the holders of power.

Mueller’s first big impact was obscure and little-reported at the time. The Khobar Towers event was already four years in the past. The rabidly pro-Saudi and anti-Iranian FBI Director Louis Freeh was retiring just when President George W. Bush was coming into office, and Freeh chose Deputy Attorney General Robert Mueller to be the person to appoint Freeh’s replacement: James Comey. That’s the very person whom Freeh had wanted to get the job.

It’s hardly possible to understand Rubert Mueller’s role in America’s leadership without understanding his close relationship with James Comey, the mutual-benefit-society that their association, with each other, has been, ever since 2001.

On 30 May 2013, Mueller’s worshipful biographer Garrett M. Graff headlined at The Washingtonian, “Forged Under Fire — Bob Mueller and Jim Comey’s Unusual Friendship”, and he reported how the two men, Mueller and Comey, had become bonded together at the start of 2001, before 9/11, by the retiring FBI Director Louis Freeh’s determination to place the blame for the 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia, on Iran, and not on Al Qaeda or the Saud family. Graff wrote:

 

As the Bush administration took office in 2001, Freeh asked Bob Mueller, who was acting as John Ashcroft’s deputy attorney general, to transfer the case to Comey.

When he finally did so, Mueller called Comey with a warning: “Wilma Lewis [from the Clinton Administration] is going to be so pissed.” Indeed, Lewis blasted the decision, as well as both Freeh and Mueller personally, in a press release, saying the move was “ill-conceived and ill-considered.” But Freeh’s gambit paid off.

Within weeks, Comey had pulled together the indictment [against Iran]. During a National Security Council briefing at the White House, under the watchful gaze of Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Comey presented overwhelming evidence of Iran’s involvement.

On the eve of the expiration of the statute of limitations, fourteen individuals were indicted for the [1996] attack. Freeh, who stepped down the next day, said the indictment was “a major step.”

 

Bill Clinton’s people saw the case against Iran on Khobar as having been incredibly weak and concocted by the Sauds. Freeh accepted on pure faith the representations the Sauds made. Comey and Mueller did, too. This — the Sauds’ case — was the basis of the U.S. Government’s charge that Iran is ‘the top state-sponsor of terrorism’: the country that the Sauds hated thus became the country that received the blame for this bombing, which was done by Al Qaeda as a warning to the Saud family to expel U.S. military from Saudi Arabia.

The liberal Republican James Comey became the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Lockheed Martin Corporation during 2005-2010, where his 2009 pay was $6,113,797. During that time, he also was a Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center, which works to support business interests in the courts, especially the interests of U.S.-based international corporations, including Lockheed Martin. Furthermore, as of 12 March 2010, Comey also had been granted 162,482 free shares of stock in Lockheed Martin, which number was higher than that of anyone except the Chairman, the CEO President, and an Executive Vice President; so, Comey was among the very top people at Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin’s largest foreign customer was the Saudi Government, which is 100% owned by the Saud family. Today, those Comey shares are worth $47,119,780 — after his five years with the company, plus nearly nine years of growth in that stock, from the war-producing policies that Comey had helped to initiate.

Then, Comey bought a $3M mansion in Connecticut and became the General Counsel and a Member of the Executive Committee at the gigantic hedge Fund, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, in Connecticut, where Comey’s only publicly known pay was $6,632,616 in 2012. Dalio and Comey became very close — Dalio called Comey his “hero.” But Obama then hired the liberal Republican Comey as FBI Director in 2013, replacing the liberal Republican Mueller in that role, from which Obama’s successor President Trump fired Comey, and congressional Democrats then succeeded in getting Mueller assigned to become the Special Counsel who would supposedly investigate the legitimacy of that firing.

On 21 May 2013, Marketwatch bannered “Bridgewater Associates’ trades for Q2”and reported that:

 

After a number of tech companies — including those we’ve mentioned [Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel] and EMC — the largest single-stock holding in the fund’s portfolio was its roughly 220,000 shares of Lockheed Martin LMT, +1.93%. The company recently reported an increase in earnings compared with the first quarter of 2012, but revenue was down slightly and there is a good deal of speculation that the business will be impacted by cuts in U.S. military spending. … Billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group reported a position of 1.2 million shares at the end of December.

 

Lockheed Martin is by far the largest U.S. ‘defense’ contractor, taking 8.3% of all U.S. Government purchases during 2015, as compared to #2 Boeing’s 3.8%, and #3 General Dynamics’s 3.1%.

Other than sales to the U.S. Government, the largest customer of Lockheed Martin is the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia and own the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, and who hate Shia Muslims and especially hate Iran, which has the most Shia.

As Open Secrets has reported about Comey:

 

He left Bridgewater and became senior research scholar and Hertog Fellow on National Security at Columbia Law School in February 2013, and also joined the board of London-based HSBC Holdings. As the Center has reported, Comey maxed out his contributions to Mitt Romney in 2012 in an effort to unseat his new boss, and also gave to Obama’s 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

 

This is a team that’s pro-Saud and pro U.S. billionaires, and pro Israeli billionaires, but rabidly anti Iran and Russia and China, and looking for a fight — war and increased ‘defense’-spending — against any nation (such as Syria) that’s favorable toward those ‘enemies of America’.

As of August 2009: “HSBC is the largest and most widely represented international bank in the Middle East. … SABB is a Saudi joint stock company that is listed on the Saudi stock exchange (Tadawul). The HSBC Group has a 40% shareholding in SABB. … SABB is one of the largest banks in Saudi Arabia. … HSBC Saudi Arabia is HSBC’s investment banking arm in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, owned 60% by the HSBC Group and 40% by SABB.”

Neither HSBC nor SABB has any branch either in Iran or in Syria. HSBC Bank Middle East does have branches in Israel, and in the Palestinain Territories, and in nine Sunni Arab kingdoms, as well as in secular and democratic Lebanon, but not in Iran and Syria (the two Middle Eastern countries that the U.S. sanctions against — partly because of Comey’s decisions).

On January 26th, Russian Televison headlined “New Integrity Initiative leak: Make Muslims love NATO, target anti-frackers, plan for nuclear war”, and reported that, “A new batch of leaked files from the covert influence network exposes how the Integrity Initiative recruits high-flying businessmen for intel ops, shows UK Muslims ‘why NATO matters’ and prepares for nuclear conflict with Russia. … Two HSBC officials are on the list of intelligence assets, as part of a plan to attract talent from the City to serve as military intel experts.”

PART THREE

Ideology is definitely involved in this; and the U.S. Government — in its policies though generally not in its rhetoric — is the leader on the side of hereditary rule and of countries that are ruled by an alliance between state and church. These are countries that are ruled not by the public, but by the aristocracy, and the dominant clergy.

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni took control in Shia Iran after overthrowing the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1979, he was reasserting something from the very origin of Shia Islam, which was the Battle of Karbala. Whereas Islam started as one faith in 610, the separation into Shia Islam and Sunni Islam started in 680, at the Battle of Karbala, where “Hussain (or Husayn) ibn Ali, the grandson of Muhammad, along with many other prominent Muslims, not only disapproved of Yazid’s nomination for Caliph (or leader of Islam) but also declared it against the spirit of Islam (because only an imam or cleric, a scholar of Islam, should lead the faith).”

Yazid was the first hereditary Caliph; and Hussain, on principle, rejected hereditary dynasties. This Battle was between supporters (Sunnis) of monarchies (hereditary caliphs, or “kings”), versus opponents (Shia) of monarchies. “Husain ibn Ali believed the appointment of Yazid as the heir of the Caliphate would lead to hereditary kingship, which was against the original political teachings of Islam. Therefore, he resolved to confront Yazid.”

Though there have been Shia dynasties (such as the Pahlavis), Khomeni’s Shia Iran raised up a revolutionary spirit within Islam threatening all dynasties, and the Saud family immediately feared this threat. This became an additional reason (besides the Saud family’s 1744 sworn eternal anti-Shia contract with the Wahhab clergy) for the Sauds to be opposed to post-1979 Iran.

The Sauds, and the other hereditary monarchies in the Islamic world (all of whom are major importers of U.S. weapons), are frightened by Shia, and by Shiism itself — Shia belief. There also are many Sunni followers who reject monarchy (hereditary/dynastic rule), even though Sunni Islam doesn’t itself reject dynastic rule, in any way. Unlike with Shiism, the rejection of monarchies isn’t, at all, a part of Sunni tradition. Furthermore, in Sunni monarchic countries, the aristocracy are funding clerics who accept monarchies. Therefore, the Sunni-Shia split, that was initiated in 680, escalated greatly after the 1979 Iranian revolution, which actually carried out a monarch’s defenestration — it therefore terrifies today’s Islamic monarchs (all of whom are Sunnis), but especially the Sauds, who are the most fundamentalist of all Sunni rulers. They are determined to conquer Iran. To protect their dynasty, for themselves and their descendants, they aim to destroy Iran, and conquer all Shia. Every single one of today’s monarchical Islamic countries is run and owned by a Sunni family. Each one of them is allied with the U.S., and they’re all among the largest foreign buyers of weapons from Lockheed Martin and other U.S. ‘defense’ contractors.

The United States Government supports Sunni Islam, which functions mainly by means of hereditary rule, by a family that has received the clergy’s blessing from God to rule that country, as Emir, King, or other monarch. Although Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, inherited his post from his father, that was only because the secular, non-sectarian Ba’ath Party, which had appointed his father, Hafez al-Assad, to lead the country, chose his son as the best person to succeed him, and it was not an assertion of the dynastic principle that Shia Islam intrinsically opposes. It certainly had nothing to do with the will of the local clergy. By contrast, the clergy in Saudi Arabia hold veto-power over the Saud family’s choice as to which of the Princes will become the next King. The clergy are called “Ulema,” and “Ulema, essentially they are the king maker. If — if the ulema say that you should not take power, you are not going to take power. And the ulema were important because they are the people who — who — who certify the Islamic legality.” That’s the way it is in fundamentalist-Sunni Saudi Arbia. The U.S., ever since at least 1949, has been trying to overthrow Syria’s secular Government and replace it with one that would be controlled by individuals who are selected by the fundamentalist-Sunni Saud family — intense haters of all Shia, and of Iran. After all: Iran is founded upon a rejection of dynastic rule.

Paragraph 101 of the U.S. judge’s 22 December 2011 “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law” against Iran as being the cause of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing states:

 

On June 25, 1996, terrorists struck the Khobar Towers housing complex in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, with a powerful truck bomb, killing nineteen (19) U.S. servicemen and wounding some five hundred (500). … FBI investigators concluded the operation was undertaken on direct orders from senior Iranian government leaders, the bombers had been trained and funded by the IRGC [Iranian Republican Guard Corps] in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, and senior members of the Iranian government, including Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the Supreme Leader’s office had selected Khobar as the target and commissioned the Saudi Hizballah to carry out the operation.

 

No solid evidence has ever been published — not even by the proponents — to support those allegations.

Even as late as 15 August 1996, the Sauds hadn’t yet thought up the ‘explanation’ that Iran had perpetrated the bombing, and the New York Times headlined “Saudi Rebels Are Main Suspects In June Bombing of a U.S. Base”, which reported that, “Prince Nayef said Saudi Arabia would make an announcement as soon as the investigation is completed. His comments were also viewed as refuting earlier suggestions by Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, who had said that Saudi investigations might point to an Iranian connection. Subsequently, the American official suggested he did not have direct evidence linking Iran to the bombing.” Clinton’s Defense Secretary Perry introduced the concept that Iran might be to blame. Furthermore, “Abdelbari Atwan, editor of Al Quds, said today that Saudi authorities ‘are still refusing to let United States investigators see the suspects.’”

Perry, who had introduced that false idea in 1996, casually said in 2007 that he no longer believed it was true. UPI reported on 6 June 2007: “A former U.S. defense secretary says he now believes al-Qaida rather than Iran was behind a 1996 truck bombing at an American military base. Former Defense Secretary William Perry said he had a contingency plan to attack Iran if the link had been proven, but evidence was not to either his nor President Bill Clinton’s satisfaction.” Having come up with the false idea that served as the basis for calling Iran “the top state sponsor of terrorism,” he quietly abandoned it 11 years later, 11 years too late, but the myth that he had introduced, was and still remains, official U.S. Government dogma.

Louis Freeh had immediately accepted that false idea, and he blamed the Clinton Administration for not acting on the basis of it. Freeh had co-created this myth, along with Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, who was a buddy of both George W. Bush and of G.H.W. Bush. And Mueller and Comey carried through on Freeh’s intention: to blame Iran. U.S. international policies are based on such lies as that.

Here is Gareth Porter’s complete defenestration of that entire fraud against Iran:

Gareth Porter’s complete 22 June 2009 series on the Khobar Towers bombing:

• EXCLUSIVE — PART 1: Al Qaeda Excluded from the Suspects List
• EXCLUSIVE — PART 2: Saudi Account of Khobar Bore Telltale Signs of Fraud
• EXCLUSIVE — PART 3: U.S. Officials Leaked a False Story Blaming Iran
• EXCLUSIVE — PART 4: FBI Ignored Compelling Evidence of bin Laden Role
• EXCLUSIVE — PART 5: Freeh Became “Defence Lawyer” for Saudis on Khobar

 

On 8 August 2015, the man whom the Sauds and the U.S. Deep State had been claiming to have been the planner and ringleader of the Khobar Towers bombing, Ahmed Ibrahim al-Mughassil, was allegedly captured in Beirut and sent to Riyadh for trial. However, nothing has been made public about or from him since that date. On 1 September 2015, Gareth Porter headlined “Who Bombed Khobar Towers? Anatomy of a Crooked Terrorism Investigation”, and he pointed out glaring evidence that this alleged capture of the ringleader was just more of the Saud and American lies, such as:

 

In order to build a legal case against Iran and Shi’a Saudis, Freeh had to get access to the Shi’a detainees who had confessed. But the Saudis never agreed to allow FBI officials to interview them. In early November 1998, Freeh sent an FBI team to observe Saudi secret police officials asking eight Shi’a detainees the FBI’s questions from behind a one-way mirror at the Riyadh detention center.

By then Saudi secret police had already had two and half years to coach the detainees on what to say, under the threat of more torture. But Freeh didn’t care. … [And,] Freeh made a deal with the Justice Department to remain FBI director long enough to get the indictment of Mughassil and twelve other Saudi Shi’a. The indictment [by Comey] was announced on June 21, 2001, Freeh’s last day as FBI director.

 

An excellent summary of the evidence that Khobar was a Sunni not a Shia event was posted online at the Pakistan Defence site, on 24 July 2016, and it included this:

 

The Sunni detainees over Khobar included Yusuf al-Uyayri, who was later revealed to have been the actual head of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. In 2003, al-Uyayri confirmed in al Qaeda’s regular publication that he had been arrested and tortured after the Khobar bombing.

A report published in mid-August 1996 by the London-based Palestinian newspaper Al Qods al-Arabi, based on sources with ties to the jihadi movement in Saudi Arabia, said that six Sunni veterans of the Afghan war had confessed to the Khobar bombing under torture. That was followed two days later by a report in the New York Times that the Saudi officials now believed that Afghan war veterans had carried out the Khobar bombing.

A few weeks later, however, the Saudi regime apparently made a firm decision to blame the bombing on the Saudi Shi’a.

 

So, America’s supposed ‘justification’ for hostility toward Iran — as opposed to American cooperation with Iran — is entirely fraudulent. It can be taken only on faith.

The Sauds block any outsiders from having access to the evidence, and have required the U.S. regime to trust their allegations on faith alone, but the U.S. authorities find that acceptable, and constantly recite that Saudi-American line. The families of the 19 American dead and the 372 wounded in that attack are simply being lied-to, by our own Government. The American Government (and not merely Al Qaeda) is those Americans’ enemy.

However, Khobar is hardly the only instance where Mueller has been key in assisting to create one of Big Brother’s lies. He worked hard to achieve many others.

PART FOUR

On 19 June 2005, the AP headlined “Terror Expertise Not Priority at FBI,” and “FBI: Experience not needed in terror fight” and “FBI failed to seek terror expertise after Sept. 11.” Their John Solomon reported: “In sworn testimony that contrasts with their promises to the public, the FBI managers who crafted the post-Sept. 11 fight against terrorism say expertise about the Mideast or terrorism was not important in choosing the agents they promoted to top jobs. And they still do not believe such experience is necessary today. … ‘A bombing case is a bombing case,’ said Dale Watson, the FBI’s terrorism chief in the two years after Sept. 11. … The FBI’s current terror-fighting chief, Executive Assistant Director Gary Bald, said his first terrorism training came ‘on the job’ when he moved to headquarters to oversee anti-terrorism strategy two years ago. ‘You need leadership. You don’t need subject matter expertise,’ Bald testified. … ‘It is certainly not what I look for in selecting an officer for a position in a counterterrorism position.’” The next day, U.S. News & World Report headlined “Case Mismanagement,” about Bush’s FBI chief, Robert Mueller’s, having botched his promised computerization of his agency’s files: “The week began with tough talk from some former members of the 9/11 commission about what they characterize as the FBI’s failure to follow through on promises of fundamental reforms.” This computerization “project had 10 different FBI case managers who rejiggered the contract 36 times,” and so now “Mueller pulled the plug on the $170 million Virtual Case File system in March,” and his technology division “estimated the replacement costs at $792 million.”

Then, on July 28th, the New York Times bannered “FBI’s Translation Backlog Grows,” and reported that, “The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s backlog of untranslated terrorism intelligence doubled last year, and the time it takes the bureau to hire translators has grown longer.”

On 20 September 2005, the Washington Post headlined “Recruits Sought for Porn Squad,” and reported: “The FBI is joining the Bush administration’s war on porn. … Early last month, the bureau’s Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad. … The new squad will divert eight agents [from other assignments] … to gather evidence against ‘manufacturers and purveyors’ of pornography — not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults. ‘I guess this means we’ve won the war on terror,’ said one exasperated FBI agent, speaking on condition of anonymity. … ‘We must not need any more resources for espionage.’” Commented another agent — also anonymously — “Honestly, most of the guys would have to recuse themselves” from serving on this squad, because they have such “pornography” at home. The new squad was being demanded by Bush’s new Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. “Christian conservatives, long skeptical of Gonzales, greeted the pornography initiative with what the Family Research Council called ‘a growing sense of confidence in our new attorney general.’” Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda would probably have seconded that endorsement, but they knew better than to say so publicly.

Bush’s people, FBI Director Mueller and Alberto Gonzales, and others, were efficiently doing their jobs for their White House boss, but he wasn’t efficiently doing his job to protect Americans from terrorists. On Saturday, 13 August 2005, the AP headlined “FBI Counterterror Head to Run New Division,” and reported, “Gary Bald, the FBI’s counterterrorism chief, was named director of the bureau’s new National Security Service on Friday, a day after a senator sharply criticized his lack of experience and knowledge of the Mideast and terrorism. … ‘Gary Bald brings to this new position a wide range of operational and leadership experience,’ … said FBI Director Robert Mueller.” Unfortunately, it was the wrong type of experience — but wrong experience is exactly what Bush wanted. It’s also what he had wanted as the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency when Hurricane Katrina struck, and it’s even what he wanted throughout the federal Government. In fact, he preferred to hire lobbyists, rather than tested-and-proven proven public servants. From time immemorial, kings have preferred lobbyists or the spokesmen for “aristocrats,” not representatives of the public.

On August 7th, the New York Times bannered “9/11 Group Says White House Has Not Provided Files,” and reported, “The White House has failed to turn over any of the information requested by the 10 members of the disbanded Sept. 11 commission in their renewed, unofficial investigation into whether the government is doing enough to prevent terrorist attacks on American soil, commission members said. … Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who led the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission, said he was surprised and disappointed.” Three days later, the Times headlined “9/11 Panel Members Ask Congress to Learn if Pentagon Withheld Files,” and reported, “Members of the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks called on Congress to determine whether the Pentagon withheld [from the commission] intelligence information showing that a secret American military unit had identified Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as potential threats more than a year before the attacks. … ‘I think this is a big deal,’ said John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the commission. … ‘If this is true, somebody should be looking into it,’ said [fellow Republican member] Thomas H. Kean.”

Then, on 14 September 2005, the Times headlined “F.A.A. Alerted On Qaeda in ’98, 9/11 Panel Said,” and reported, “American aviation officials were warned as early as 1998 that Al Qaeda could ‘seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark,’ according to previously secret portions of a report prepared last year by the Sept. 11 commission.” The White House had “been battling for more than a year” to prevent the 9/11 Commission from making this information public, but “commission members complained that the deleted material contained information critical to the public’s understanding of what went wrong on Sept. 11,” and the White House was now finally partially relenting. “Commission officials said they were perplexed” at why the White House had prevented the Commission from including this information in their previously published report. These formerly redacted passages showed that the FAA had raised in 2000 the level of its terrorist warnings, and had kept these warnings high in 2001, but that after President Bush came into office, the FAA “allowed screening performance to decline significantly,” in the months right before the 9/11 attacks.

On Thursday 22 September 2005, the Times headlined “Senators Accuse Pentagon of Obstructing Inquiry on Sept. 11 Plot,” and reported: “Senators from both parties accused the Defense Department on Wednesday of obstructing an investigation into whether a highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger did indeed identify Mohamed Atta and other future hijackers as potential threats well before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” One of the few witnesses whom the Bush Administration permitted to testify to the Senate on this matter said that, by a (for the Bush Administration) fortunate coincidence, he had been “forced to destroy all the data, charts and other analytical product” concerning this operation. President Bush’s people were stonewalling the former 9/11 commission, the U.S. Senate, and anyone else who was trying to determine how far, deep, and wide, the President’s 9/11 lies had extended.

On 27 March 2005, Eric Lichtblau at the New York Times, headlined “THE REACH OF WAR: ARRANGED DEPARTURES; New Details on F.B.I. Aid for Saudis After 9/11”and reported that:

 

The episode has been retold so many times in the last three and a half years that it has become the stuff of political legend: in the frenzied days after Sept. 11, 2001, when some flights were still grounded, dozens of well-connected Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, managed to leave the United States on specially chartered flights.

Now, newly released government records show previously undisclosed flights from Las Vegas and elsewhere and point to a more active role by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in aiding some of the Saudis in their departure.

The F.B.I. gave personal airport escorts to two prominent Saudi families who fled the United States, and several other Saudis were allowed to leave the country without first being interviewed, the documents show.
The Saudi families, in Los Angeles and Orlando, requested the F.B.I. escorts. …

 

Bush has always been a famously arrogant man, who showed noticeable difficulty acknowledging whenever he botched. Is part of the reason for this that he simply didn’t feel that he had botched; is part of the reason that he was authentically satisfied with the Presidency he had wrought upon the U.S. throughout his two terms of office?

The signs of severe trouble in his Presidency were painfully evident since very early on — sufficiently severe to give any reasonable person cause to worry, even though this President exhibited no such signs of distress.

Shortly before the 2002 mid-term congressional elections, a major report on the war against terrorism was issued by a blue-ribbon commission, at the U.S. billionaires’ Council on Foreign Relations, and was widely publicized at the time, concluding that domestic security was being woefully underbudgeted by President Bush. Published on 24 October 2002, and titled “America — Still Unprepared, Still in Danger,” this report, to a nation about to vote for a new Congress, mentioned that more than a year after 9-11, the nearly 300,000 foreigners in the U.S. who had overstayed their visas were still here, and that — because of the President’s refusal to do anything to control guns — the FBI, under this gun-fanatic pro-NRA President, was still prohibited from cross-checking its database of gun-owners with its database of American terrorist suspects.

The report also said that the “650,000 local and state police officials continue to operate in a virtual intelligence vacuum, without access to terrorist watch lists.”Furthermore, the report noted that a nuclear weapon could easily arrive unnoticed on any one of the 21,000 shipping containers entering each day into America’s 361 ports, but that only $92 million had been budgeted of the required $2 billion in stepped-up port security to prevent such a catastrophe. The President ignored these needs, because his $1.4 trillion-dollar tax-cut (going mainly to the nation’s wealthiest 2%) left no money to pay for it. Whereas the CFR represented nearly all of America’s billionaires, Bush’s Republican Party represented only the Republican ones. Perhaps the Democratic ones and a few of the Republican ones had pushed this report. Anyway: it was true.

On 27 October 2002, CBS “60 Minutes” reported that an FBI translator of Middle Eastern languages, Sibel Edmonds, was fired by the Bush Administration for doing too good a job of translating documents: her FBI superior had ordered her to be slower and less productive (major details of her case were provided by her, years later, on 21 June 2005, at www.antiwar.com/edmonds), but she disobeyed because she felt that the war against terrorism was urgent. She especially offended her boss by calling his attention to the mis-translations that had been intentionally done by one of her FBI colleagues, who turned out to have been spying against the U.S. for a certain Middle Eastern country. The FBI refused reporters’ questions.

President Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft also had no comment. And the conscientious and industrious translator of Arabic languages, Ms. Edmonds, now had no job, while her FBI boss, who had fired her, was promoted by Bush. Subsequently (as was extensively documented at https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Sibel_Edmonds), Attorney General Ashcroft retroactively classified Ms. Edmonds’s public testimony and banned her from testifying in lawsuits that 9/11 families had brought against him. President Bush consistently opposed whistleblower-protection laws, and Ms. Edmonds was a whistleblower, who was now subject to retaliation from her former employer.

On 6 July 2004, Judge Reggie Walton, whom George W. Bush had appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, dismissed Edmonds’s case against Ashcroft, citing the alleged “state secrets privilege,” which Ashcroft had put forth.

Subsequently, on 14 January 2005, the Minneapolis Star Tribune headlined “Government: FBI Translator’s Complaints Were Supported by Evidence, Witnesses,” and reported: “Evidence and other witnesses supported complaints by a fired FBI contract linguist who alleged shoddy work and possible espionage within the bureau’s translator program after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, according to a report Friday from the Justice Department’s senior oversight official. The department’s inspector general, Glenn Fine, said the allegations by former translator Sibel Edmonds ‘raised substantial questions and were supported by various pieces of evidence.’ Fine said the FBI still has not adequately investigated the claims.”

And, still, George W. Bush and his Administration continued to ignore the charges, and to treat Edmonds as their enemy. They dragged out her agony: on 22 February 2005, the ACLU headlined “Administration Blinks; Admits Retroactively Classified Information Not Harmful to National Security.” The reason Ashcroft had cited for asserting the “state secrets privilege” was that making public this information would be “harmful to national security.” However, the Administration continued to deny to Edmonds a restoration of her employment, even though no excuse was now being provided for the denial. Meanwhile, the Middle Eastern spy whom Ms. Edmonds had exposed to the FBI fled the country and retaliated against her and her family, who now lived in constant fear.

Ms. Edmonds sued the U.S. Government on 16 March 2005, under the Federal Tort Claims Act, seeking $10 million in damages for her now ruined life. She established a website, www.justacitizen.com, to post news about her case. Her investigative series there, “The Highjacking of a Nation,” employed publicly available, non-classified information, which probed the Saudi/Bush financial ties she believed stood behind her muzzling regarding the documents she had translated.

Meanwhile, to make the nation even more vulnerable, as the AP reported on 14 November 2002, “Nine Army linguists, including six trained to speak Arabic, have been dismissed from the military because they are gay. The soldiers’ dismissals come at a time when the military is facing a critical shortage of translators and interpreters for the war on terrorism.”

George W. Bush continued, in his second term, to sabotage the U.S. Government’s acquiring the Arabic translators it increasingly desperately needed: The lead story in he New York Times on 8 June 2005 opened: “The Central Intelligence Agency is reviewing security procedures that have led the agency to turn away large numbers of Arabic-language linguists and other potential recruits with skills avidly sought by the agency since the attacks of 2001.” A bit slow on the uptake there? This was now almost four years after 9/11. Unnamed “intelligence officials” were cited as the news sources — these people evidently feared retaliation from the U.S. President, for speaking out. This issue might never have become public if Democrats in Congress hadn’t pushed it.

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said, of many of the applicants who had been turned away, “We have cut them out at our peril.” “Many of those rejected, the officials say, have been first-generation Americans who bring the linguistic facility and cultural knowledge that the C.I.A. has been trying to develop in seeking to improve its performance in penetrating terrorist organizations.” The Times reporter sought comment from the Administration. A CIA spokesperson responded: “We are taking a fresh look at the process.” Why didn’t they take that “fresh look” as soon as they knew that Al Qaeda was behind 9/11?

On 26 June 2006, Newsweek headlined “Smart, Skilled, Shut Out: Intel agencies are desperate for Arabic speakers. So why do they reject some of the best and brightest?” The reason was: “The security-clearance system is still stacked against some of the best linguists — those who learn their language natively.” Because of the far-Right Republican U.S. Government’s assumption that native Arabic speakers must be suspect, America’s “intelligence” agencies were favoring non-Muslims (Christians) who had studied Arabic in college. No wonder America’s penetration of terrorist cells was so disastrously poor.

Then, on 27 July 2006, the AP headlined “Army Dismisses Gay Arabic Linguist,” and reported that among the 11,000 soldiers kicked out of the U.S. military under the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, “nearly 800 dismissed gay or lesbian service members had critical abilities, including 300 with important language skills. Fifty-five were proficient in Arabic,” including this soldier who was the subject of the article. He was trying to get the U.S. Army to stop sabotaging his career by revealing to prospective employers that he was gay — something he had kept secret until the Army discovered it and kicked him out. Under Bush, “Don’t ask, don’t tell” became simply: Ferret them out, hound them out, then destroy their future careers! This was one reason the U.S. remained largely deaf to Al Qaeda’s communications. This President was more concerned with carrying out the prejudices of Christians’ Bible than with carrying out his nation’s Constitutional duties.

Americans still for a long time loved Bush’s job-performance (and his public-approval now is so high that most Americans would think he couldn’t possibly have been so evil); he shared their religious values. So, in the mid-term elections on 5 November of 2002, he won unprecedented Republican gains, and control, in both houses of Congress, by posing as The Warrior-President who was campaigning against The Obstructionist Democrats. They got the rap, for his failures to protect Americans. And for the results from all of his lies — such as the invasion of Iraq, which the trashiest congressional Democrats (and not merely 98% of congressional Republicans) voted for (thus sharing in Bush’s lies).

Part Two of this article will be published tomorrow, 31/03/2019

 

Meanwhile, Just for fun see SNL spoof on the release of Mueller III report:

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/31/media/snl-trump-mueller-report/index.html

 

PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay.

This is our weekly roundup panel. But before we get started, let me do a bit of a rant introduction here, because we’re going to talk about the Mueller report. On The Real News, we’ve been always extremely skeptical of the whole Russiagate story. We’ve carried many, many reports that said that the evidence of Russian interference was dubious, at best. The collusion story, the evidence seemed rather thin and dubious. But I always said, myself, all through all of this, I actually–I’m sorry–don’t give a damn. I didn’t care whether there was some low-level Russian interference that we all know was mostly ineffective. Not mostly ineffective, was ineffective. I didn’t care whether Trump colluded or didn’t collude with some mostly or completely ineffective Russia troll farm inc. Maybe there was, wasn’t, whatever. Because in the list of the crimes of Donald Trump, all of this was a distraction.

So let me preface our discussion about the Mueller report with that framing, because it still is a major news story. It is a crisis within the political class of the United States. It does reflect real splits amongst the elites. It will affect the well-being of ordinary people, which is what we care about. But we’ve never put any eggs in the “Oh, he didn’t collude” basket; nor were we, a la Rachel Maddow and some others, constantly hammering that his big crime was the collusion. So when the Mueller report briefing, a four page summary, whatever it is Barr did, came out, I didn’t jump for joy that he didn’t collude, as some did. Nor was I disappointed that it didn’t show that he didn’t collude. All of it is so secondary.

That being said, as a political event, it’s actually not secondary. It is a reflection of some real stuff, and that’s what we’re going to talk about. So joining me to talk about all of this, first of all, coming from Woodstock, New York, is Jeff Cohen. Jeff is the founder of the media watchdog FAIR, and he is currently, and was the co-founder of RootsAction.org. And joining me in the studio is Jacqueline Luqman. She’s editor-in-chief of Luqman Nation, and she’s a regular contributor and sometimes host at The Real News. So thanks for joining us.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Thanks for having me.

PAUL JAY: So Jeff, let me start with you. What’s your main takeaway? We’re going to break this down into various categories, but first of all, your main takeaway of the events, the Mueller events of this week.

JEFF COHEN: Well, I think that the Trump team played it well. They had Barr hide the full 300 plus page report, and Barr quoted about 50 words. So Trump’s able to claim vindication. He clearly has not been vindicated. I think that, wearing my media critic hat, this has been a horrific episode in mainstream media; the fixation, the obsession, the exaggerations about Russia election collusion, while excluding far bigger issues and far bigger affronts to U.S. democracy committed by Trump. So as a media critic, what’s happened the last two years is really offensive.

And as a political analyst, the leadership of the Democratic Party putting their eggs in this basket, and every time Nancy Pelosi, for a year and a half, two years, has been asked about impeachment, rather than laying down the many grounds of possible impeachment inquiry–and RootsAction.org has about 15 of them, from abuse of the pardon power, politicizing federal prosecutions, the violation of the anti-corruption clauses of the Constitution because of Trump’s self-dealing–you can go on and on–the discrimination based on religion represented by the Muslim ban, tearing refugee families apart at the border. There’s 15 different grounds, and every time Pelosi is asked about impeachment, she says, “Well, let’s wait for the Muller report.” And all the leaders of the party, “Let’s wait for the Mueller report.” And what that achieved was it tended to take these huge affronts against the U.S. public, against democracy, against the Constitution, and marginalize them like they’re less important than Russian election collusion. I think it was a horrible strategy.

One final point. In November of 2018, the exit polls have shown that virtually no voters cared about Russian election collusion. So if the Democrats had focused on Trump’s corruption and his violation of the two clauses in the Constitution saying you can’t accept a financial benefit from your office, and it had been about his greed and self-interest, that might have impacted the 2018 election, and it might have been a bigger Democratic victory they squandered politically by saying, “We’re waiting for Mueller.”

PAUL JAY: Well, let’s play a clip of perhaps the person who is the face of this media frenzy and what I would call Russophobia. She’s not the only one. I’m talking about Rachel Maddow, obviously, but CNN is every bit as guilty as MSNBC is. But Rachel, her show rose to the top of cable ratings at the height of all this. Back in July of 2018, Trump met with Putin in Helsinki, and this is one of the most highest points of the fever pitch of this craziness. And here’s a couple of clips from MSNBC.

RACHEL MADDOW: I mean, for everything that we have been through as a country, for every kind of trial and challenge and intrigue and embarrassment and scandal that we have been through as a nation, we haven’t ever had to reckon with the possibility that somebody has ascended to the presidency of the United States to serve the interests of another country rather than our own. What’s the corrective to that? How do you remedy that? These are no longer hypothetical questions.

JILL WINE-BANKS: It’s just as serious to me as the Cuban missile crisis in terms of an attack, or the 9/11 attack. The president is taking the side of the people who attacked us instead of trying to prevent a future attack. He has done nothing to make sure that the elections four months away are going to be safe. And I would say that his performance today will live in infamy as much as the Pearl Harbor attack or Kristallnacht. And it’s really a serious issue that we need to deal with.

PAUL JAY: So Jacqueline, the level of that rhetoric is hard to believe, and they put their eggs in the Mueller basket. But to me, the underlying crime here is the beating the drums of a new Cold War. Far more significant than anything Trump may or may not have done.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Yes. I mean, what I think I have to do is make very clear that I think Trump is guilty of something. I’m certain he’s guilty of something, but I think that something is more along the lines of financial crimes. Just from looking at his behavior, the things that have come to light from this investigation, you can look at the way he’s been trying to solidify this deal to build this Trump Tower in Russia for 30 years. And I think any thinking person can look at what’s come out of this investigation and say, “OK, he’s thinking he can capitalize on the presidency to finally get this done.” I think that that makes sense. So yes, he’s guilty of something.

But this whole Russophobia and the level of hysteria from people like Maddow and the other clip, where the woman ended saying that this is akin to Kristallnacht. Are you kidding? This is this is not a situation where the president of the United States is acting on behalf of a foreign government, as opposed to acting on our behalf. First of all, our own government has not acted on the behalf of the people that is supposed to elected it a very long time. So to feign this outrage that this particular president is doing something different from what other presidents have done, as if other presidents have acted on behalf of the people; that, first of all, is just dishonest about our government. That’s just a dishonest premise to start from.

And then, to take this discourse of Russia corrupting our elections and corrupting our electoral process. You had a Democratic Party that was involved in purging registered voters in some places. Then you had a Democratic Party that was also actively colluding, for real, with the media to completely not cover a very popular insurgent candidacy. I mean, I believe these agents in the media have created this narrative that is centered on Russia being the enemy and creating this crisis in this country, when really the crisis is and always has been this really unseemly alliance between both political parties and the media–that is, the corporate media, I should say–that’s more than willing to trot out whatever narrative the highest bidder will pay for. And whoever gets hurt by it–meaning the American people–whoever gets hurt by that level of disinformation, it doesn’t matter, as long as one party is seen as winning over the other.

PAUL JAY: Jeff, when you discuss this kind of within the rough framing of the mainstream discourse, there is something fishy about Barr’s letter, and there is something fishy about the Mueller report; first of all, how on earth the Democrats trusted Mueller. In an interview I did recently with Larry Wilkerson, he called Muller the “cleanup man” for the Republican Party. Years post 9/11, Iraq war, I mean, the FBI was accused by Graham under Mueller’s administration for directly not properly investigating the 9/11 situation. I mean, it goes on and on. And then they put all their eggs in the Mueller basket, so why trust them in the first place? But still, Barr was obviously put in place by Trump to block anything that might hurt Trump in the report, and so far, that’s what he’s doing. The whole thing is pretty fishy.

JEFF COHEN: Yeah. Let’s do Mueller and then Barr. I mean, I’m a person of the left. When I was young, the FBI was spying on me.

PAUL JAY: And I’m sure still is.

JEFF COHEN: Yeah. We have this thing in the mainstream media where there’s Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left. No, MSNBC is not on the left. If you’re on the left, your saviors are not FBI chiefs. For 16 years, Mueller and Comey ran the FBI. During that time, Occupy Wall Street was surveilled, Black Lives Matter was surveilled, The Standing Rock activists, the Water Protectors, were surveilled. So they’re not my heroes. So that’s number one. And all these former generals that got paraded on MSNBC and CNN, they are not the saviors of progressive America. So on the one hand, there really were attempts to collude. Collusion is not a crime, but with the antics of Trump aides like Papadopoulos, Carter Page, trying to arrange meetings with the Russians and getting a green light from the leadership, and then you have the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, that’s not a minor issue.

And when I hear people say, “Oh, who cares if they met,” I mean, think about it. If a foreign power, say Israel or Saudi Arabia, during the Democratic primaries, had contacted the leadership of the Hillary Clinton campaign and said, “As part of our effort to help you defeat Bernie, here’s some dirt on Bernie” And then the leader of that campaign says back in an e-mail, “I love it,” I mean, we’d be outraged. And I don’t know if I agree with Steve Bannon when he referred to the Trump Tower meeting as unpatriotic or treasonous, which is what Bannon said about the Trump Tower meeting, but clearly there was some attempt to collude, and that’s why–getting to Barr–the American public has a right to see the full 300 plus pages. Because all we know from Bar, is which is fascinating, is that Muller punted, he sort of threw up the white flag, he said, “I cannot–this report does not prove a crime of obstruction of justice, but it does not exonerate President Trump.” That’s pretty intense, and I want to hear more about that.

And then, secondarily, that comment that’s been quoted from the report, and we only know it from Barr, which is they did not find that Trump or Trump’s associates conspired or coordinated with the Russians during the election; when they say did not find, in legal terms, when a prosecutor says that–he said did not establish–that means did not establish beyond a reasonable doubt. But clearly, there was some collusion, and I want to hear about it. So I’m happy that there’s activism trying to demand the full report.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Yeah. I do believe there was some coordination to get information, I do think there was some coordination. Again, I really do think the meat of this matter is financial crimes. When this report is released–and I do believe the report absolutely needs to be released, because I’m interested to find out what other things came that Trump hasn’t been exonerated for. I want to know what those things are. I think I have a pretty good idea, but I’d just like to see for myself, as I think we all have a right to.

PAUL JAY: And I think a lot of that’s being followed up by the Southern District Prosecutors in New York, who are going after the financial crime.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Exactly. And it might be that that’s exactly what it said in the report, that because there are these connections to financial misdeeds and questionable financial dealings involving Russia, then these issues are being shuttled to the Southern District of New York, who are continuing an ongoing investigation. That could be the things that Trump is not exonerated for from this report. But again, we don’t know, because we don’t see the full report. But I am really concerned about the damage that the corporate media has done to black activists, to black voters, and to people who they claimed were influenced by this very limited, and not extensive in scope at all, Russian troll farm operation to so-called influence voters not to vote for Trump.

The media, the corporate media, never reported the truth about the extent of that operation. They always inflated the reach and the scope and the influence to make it seem as if this really small agency that didn’t spend a lot of money–the Internet Research Agency, I think they’re called, didn’t spend a lot of money. They actually spent less money on this so-called national troll farm campaign than the New Knowledge Agency that wrote a report spent on their nefarious dealings in the Alabama election. So there is a problem that was never reported by corporate media with this whole situation. But also, they didn’t report that most of the ads didn’t even appear on social media until after the election. Most of them didn’t mention Trump or Clinton or Sanders or the election at all. There were a bunch of memes of Jesus saying, “Click if you if you love Jesus, share,” ridiculous things like that.

PAUL JAY: Although that’s part of data gathering, to figure who they want to talk to, assuming they is they. And that’s still not clear.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: But that’s the same thing that Amazon does, that’s the same things that any online retailer does when they want to build an audience for their product. The Internet Research Agency did not create a campaign that was wide enough, large enough, influential enough to influence anyone to vote one way or another in this election. But these people in the corporate media, the Maddows and the people at CNN, they created this narrative and then they turned it into “black activists were influenced by these ads,” as if we are a bunch of ridiculous, silly, childish people who decide who to vote based on some shoe ads on Facebook. And for me, the damage is done. For me, I think that the corporate media has done an irreparable amount of damage by trotting out that storyline.

PAUL JAY: Jeff, I mean, we’ve said this on The Real News a million times, I’ll say it again. The critical thing that elected Donald Trump is, number one, Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate with a ton of baggage. Two, her campaign itself was awful and didn’t campaign in the swing states the way any normal campaign would. And most importantly, she promised to be the legacy of the Obama administration, under which inequality got far worse. So she was going out there with a message of essentially more of the same, when it was clear that much of the electorate was rejecting more of the same.

JEFF COHEN: There’s no doubt. She got defeated in the Rust Belt. And I worked on a movie, the corporate coup d’etat, and we interviewed workers who voted for Obama, voted for Bernie, and then voted for Trump. She got beat in the rust belt because she was seen as the candidate of the status quo. And so, the day after the election, the Democratic leadership and the Clinton campaign decided, “Well, who are we going to blame this on? Because certainly it wasn’t our fault.” And that was one of the impetuses behind the Russia hysteria. I think we should name some names in terms of the media and some specifics. I mean, the Washington Post reported, and it was false, that the Russians had hacked into the electric utility grid in Vermont. That is false. And again, the big Russia-bashing scare is always big news, and the retraction is always smaller.

NBC, MSNBC reported that the Russians had used a supersonic microwave weapon against U.S. diplomats in Havana. It wasn’t true. Forbes reported that RT, Russia’s television network, had hacked into C-SPAN and had put RT programming on C-SPAN. And C-SPAN had to rush out and say, “Well, no, no. That was our technical glitch.” But the most damaging story in the whole two plus years of Russiagate was from the Washington Post quoting some research outfit, they were a bunch of hacks, they’re charlatans, claiming to have a list–if it sounds McCarthyite, it was–claiming to have a list of more than 200 websites that were routinely disseminating Russian propaganda during the 2016 election. And that was in the Washington Post, it was promoted by the editor, Marty Baron. And on that list of Russian propaganda websites were credible, important, independent news sites like Truthdig.dot com, truthout.org, Black Agenda Report. It was just old fashioned McCarthyism in the Washington Post.

So you had a series of these stories that not only–again, I’m no defender of Putin. I think he’s a right wing nationalist, anti-gay, sexist, and all of that, but Russia did not do all of these things. And since Russia and the U.S. have 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons at their ready, let’s try to have some sobriety when we talk about U.S.-Russia relations.

PAUL JAY: Just finally, I want to make the point that while I didn’t care whether there was collusion or not collusion because I think in the scheme of things the whole thing was so minor; that being said, I think there’s something good about the fact that one, that the political elites are at war with each other. Because when they work together, it’s usually not good for the rest of us. I also think Trump is–I guess it was Chomsky who said this, but a lot of people have said it–I think Trump is extremely dangerous as a president. And I think the more that this process might wound him. And unfortunately, putting all their eggs in the Mueller basket didn’t play that role. On the other hand, if in fact in the Mueller report is damning evidence, whether it’s about collusion or corruption doesn’t matter, it’s a good thing this comes out and perhaps weakens the Trump presidency. Actually, Jacqueline, do you want to–

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Yeah. I think among those of us who are not Trump’s base–he has a die-hard, hard-core base that I’m telling you, no matter what comes out of this report–I think even if this report actually does say this evidence shows a connection to Trump colluding with Russia, Trump’s base is not going to care.

PAUL JAY: But Trump’s base is not enough to elect him.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: This is true, but I’m just telling you about the political, and maybe more importantly, the social reality.

JEFF COHEN: Let me just jump in. Imagine if even one tenth of CNN and MSNBC and Rachel Maddow program, just one tenth had focused on his greed and self-dealing and his violation of the Constitution with, for example, the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C. You’ve got governments like Kuwait, Bahrain, Malaysia, they’re having their events there. The National Mining Association, they’re having their events there. You have all this greed going on which is in violation of the Constitution. When Jimmy Carter, a businessman, became president, before that, he divested himself of his peanut farm and his peanut warehouse. Trump has refused to divest. I just want one tenth of the time focused on how, in violation of the Constitution, he’s received all these financial benefits at his businesses from international interests and domestic interests. That would have hurt Trump even more in the November 2018 election, would have hurt him even with some of those die-hard members of the base.

PAUL JAY: It may yet get there. Because with these congressional committees following up on Cohen’s testimony, obviously the Democrats have to switch to the corruption story now and the pending release of the Mueller story. So we’ll see. OK, quick last word.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Yeah. I think what I’m trying to get at is there is a section of Trump’s base that no matter what he does, they will see him as their hero.

PAUL JAY: Yeah, and we know that.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: There is no reasoning with these people. There are always going to be people who will respond, “No collusion,” like in New York with the parade with a bunch of Trump supporters who were out there having a parade because the report came back half a nothing burger.

PAUL JAY: We don’t know that because we don’t have the report.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Well, that’s why I said half a nothing burger. So there is a section of this country, of the electorate, of voters, who regardless of what Trump does, regardless of what it’s proven that he does–

PAUL JAY: But it’s not enough for him to get elected. [crosstalk]

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: It might not be enough to get him reelected, but they will always be a factor. They will always be a factor because they will always be that group of aggrieved people who believe that their hero was set upon by this evil liberal government. We’re always going to have to deal with these people, they’re not going to go away.

PAUL JAY: OK, all right. Thanks for joining us, Jeff. Thanks for joining us, Jacqueline.

JEFF COHEN: Thank you.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Thank you.

PAUL JAY: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

 

See the video:

https://therealnews.com/stories/deep-faith-in-the-deep-state-gives-dems-a-set-back

 

UNCLE RUPE HAD ALL TO DO WITH TRUMP'S VICTORY than the russians who had nothing to do with it.

 

 

Read from top.

Mueller’s Record of Framing Innocent People – Chapter Two

Eric Zuesse

 

 

PART FIVE

Soon after the 2002 mid-term elections, Bush virtually abandoned the Afghan people: the BBC’s Michael Buchanan reported on 13 February 2003, under the heading, “Afghanistan omitted from US aid budget,” that even Republican congressmen were “shocked” at the President’s zeroing-out of Afghan-aid funds; and, as a result, “The United States Congress has stepped in to find nearly $300m in humanitarian and reconstruction funds for Afghanistan after the Bush administration failed to request any money in the latest budget.”And the yawning gap in the nation’s domestic security remained.

As one of the nation’s thousands of Bush-unfunded local “first responders” to terrorism, Baltimore’s Mayor Martin O’Malley, noted, in a Houston Chronicle op-ed on 21 February 2003, “With the exception of some additional airport security, next to nothing has been invested in protecting America’s population centers or its economic infrastructure.” He went on to ask rhetorically, and then to answer, his own key questions about the President’s post-9-11 policies:

“If our own teenage graffiti vandals can get to the chemical cars passing through American cities on our railroads, how hard could it be for al Qaeda? Not hard at all, when you consider there are five security guards monitoring CSX tracks between Richmond, Va., and Wilmington, Del., two fewer than there were on Sept. 11, 2001. If the drug cartels’ cocaine and heroin can still flow uninterrupted into America’s unprotected and uninspected ports, how hard could it be for … Osama bin Laden to smuggle a dirty bomb or a nuke? Not hard at all when, on average, 2 percent of America’s incoming port cargo is inspected, about the same percentage as on Sept. 11, 2001.” America’s President, obviously, had other priorities. And O’Malley boldly condemned those priorities, saying, “There is another dangerous, undeniable truth here: The federal government can’t invest in homeland security when the Treasury is bled dry by incessant tax cuts and the ensuing deficits they cause.”

On 31 March 2003, the New York Times editorialized against “Undercutting the 9/11 Inquiry,” and noted that, “the federal investigative committee so reluctantly supported by the White House” was shocked to find that it was unfunded by the White House, whose “assurances led them to believe needed funds would be included in the supplemental war budget sent to the Capitol last week. But the commission’s $11 million request was not there.”

The Bush-appointed, bipartisan, James Baker, Lee Hamilton, Iraq Study Group Report, was issued on 7 December 2006, and it stated:

“All of our efforts in Iraq, military and civilian, are handicapped by … [the fact that] Our embassy of 1,000 has 33 Arabic speakers, just six of whom are at the level of fluency.”

“As an intelligence analyst told us, ‘We rely too much on others to bring information to us, and too often don’t understand what is reported back because we do not understand the context of what we are told.’”

On top of this, the Administration had been outright lying to the American public: “There is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. … A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database.”

Democratic Senator Bob Graham, after ten years on the Intelligence Committee, published in 2004 Intelligence Matters, and stated (p. 169): “Our investigators found a CIA memo dated August 2, 2002, whose author concluded that there is incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi government.” The book’s dustcover summarized highlights from the Senator’s book:

“At one point, a terrorist support network conducted some of its operations through Saudi Arabia’s U.S. embassy — and a funding chain for terrorism led to the Saudi royal family.

“In February 2002, only four months after combat began in Afghanistan, the Bush administration ordered General Tommy Franks to move vital military resources out of Afghanistan for an operation against Iraq — despite Franks’s privately stated belief that there was a job to finish in Afghanistan, and that the war on terrorism should focus next on terrorist targets in Somalia and Yemen.

“Throughout 2002, President Bush directed the FBI to limit its investigations of Saudi Arabia, which supported some and possibly all of the September 11 hijackers.

“The White House was so uncooperative with the bipartisan inquiry that its behavior bore all the hallmarks of a cover-up.

“The FBI had an informant who was extremely close to two of the September 11 hijackers, and actually housed one of them, yet the existence of this informant and the scope of his contacts with the hijackers were covered up.

“There were twelve instances when the September 11 plot could have been discovered and potentially foiled.

“Days after 9/11, U.S. authorities allowed some Saudis to fly, despite a complete civil aviation ban, after which the government expedited the departure of more than one hundred Saudis from the United States.

“Foreign leaders throughout the Middle East warned President Bush of exactly what would happen in a postwar Iraq, and those warnings went either ignored or unheeded.

“As a result of his Senate work, Graham has become convinced that the attacks of September 11 could have been avoided, and that the Bush administration’s war on terrorism has failed to address the immediate danger posed by al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia.”

Greg Palast, the investigative reporter for the BBC and Guardian, wrote in his 2003 The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (pp. 98-100) about George W. Bush’s policy, which Bush put into place right at the start of his Presidency, to squelch all intelligence investigations into the supply of money and weapons to Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists. Palast quoted from FBI memos marked “SECRET,” and also from a source who was “a top-level CIA operative who spoke with us on condition of strictest anonymity.” 

Palast wrote:

“After Bush took office, he [my source] said, ‘there was a major policy shift’ at the National Security Agency. Investigators were ordered to ‘back off’ from any inquiries into Saudi Arabian financing of terror networks.”

Furthermore, “The Khan Laboratories investigation had been effectively put on hold.” 

This was the crucial investigation into the activities of Dr. A.Q. Khan, who was the father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, and who was selling nuclear materials to Islamic groups outside Pakistan. Only after 9/11 did Bush permit these investigations to resume. Until at least 9/11, Bush was stifling ongoing intelligence work against Osama bin Laden. He seems to have been reluctant to permit spying upon Osama or any Saudi aristocrats. The Bushes shared an aristocratic outlook with their friends and business partners the Saudi royals.

On 15 November 2002, Philip Taubman headlined an “Editorial Notebook” in the New York Times, “Inside the Saudi Royal Cocoon: A World Where Flattery And Servility Abound,” and he said that theirs was “a world so distorted by sycophancy that it would be a miracle if they could see the full dimensions of the problems Saudi Arabia faces. Obsequiousness oozes through the Saudi court like oil.”

Taubman noted, however, that, “Fawning aides are hardly unique to Saudi Arabia. The White House has sometimes served as a protective bunker for presidents who were cut off from the country and surrounded by servile advisers.” Bush had been surrounded by that since birth, long prior to the White House’s “protective bunker.” He shared more in common with Osama bin Laden than he did with the victims of 9/11. One thing he shared with bin Laden was religious fundamentalism. Another was a belief that the only moral authority for laws is God — not democracy, not the will of the public.

Maybe the 9/11 families should have been suing President Bush instead of the Sauds.

When the 9/11 Commission was finally established — despite the President’s opposition, but largely under his control — one of the victim family members, Mindy Kleinberg, in testimony on 31 March 2003, available at www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing1/witness_kleinberg.htm, presented a cogently documented argument to the effect that there existed serious reason to believe that the Bush Administration had actively impeded FBI, FAA, NORAD, and other federal agencies’ attempts to prevent the attacks.

She made clear some reasons why the White House would wish to hinder this investigation, as they were in fact so obviously doing. An excellent book that fills in many of these blanks, but that leaves unanswered the questions that the Bush Administration succeeded in blocking, is the 2002 The War on Freedom, by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed.

Since that’s a superb work of comprehensive serious nonfiction portraying the U.S. leadership as assisting anti-U.S. terrorism, it was rejected by all major publishers, and the author was lucky even to find a publisher at all: the obscure Tree of Life Publications. However, that book’s conclusion was implicitly endorsed a year later (29 July 2003) by former White House Counsel John Dean at http://writ.findlaw.com/dean/20030729.html: “The 9/11 Report Raises More Serious Questions About The White House Statements On Intelligence”: “It seems very probable that those in the White House knew much more than they have admitted, and they are covering up their failure to take action” to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

Several articles are available on the web presenting strong evidence that the Bush Administration possessed overwhelming advance-warning to place the U.S. intelligence community on highest alert in August of 2001, for an almost certain huge attack being imminently planned by al Qaeda on targets inside America, using planes as bombs.

One category of such articles are major-media U.S. news reports from the period prior to the Administration’s clampdown on U.S. reporting about the Government’s foreknowledge of Al Qaeda’s plans. On 13 February 2001, UPI’s Richard Sale headlined “NSA Listens to bin Laden,” and revealed that the National Security Agency had decoded Al Qaeda’s encryption system and knew the contents of e-mails and phone calls from Osama bin Laden.

Another was an NBC News report, on 1 October 2001, which the network soon removed from its website, but which remained widely quoted on the web, and which stated that, on September 9th, just two days prior to the attacks, Osama had informed his adoptive mother, Al Kalifa bin Laden, during a phone conversation with her, that, “In two days, you’re going to hear big news, and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.” NBC was reporting this not in order to raise questions about President Bush, but to counter-argue Osama’s public assertions that Osama wasn’t behind the 9/11 attacks.

Perhaps also belonging in this same category, or else reflecting the more disciplined Bush propaganda period afterward, was a Knight Ridder report from Jonathan S. Landay, on 6 June 2002, headlined “NSA Didn’t Share Key Pre-Sept. 11 Information, Sources Say,” and which opened: “A secretive U.S. eavesdropping agency monitored telephone conversations before Sept. 11 between the suspected commander of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and the alleged chief hijacker, but did not share the information with other intelligence agencies, U.S. officials said Thursday. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the conversations between Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Mohammed Atta were intercepted by the National Security Agency.”

If the NSA, or else the CIA, did, in fact, hide such information from the White House, then President Bush should have immediately “cleaned house” at the respective Agency, which he didn’t do. More likely, therefore, is that Bush either received the information (despite his disavowals), or else that he wanted deniability of his possessing the information, and thus practically prohibited such reports from even reaching his desk.

Either way, President Bush would have been co-responsible, along with Al Qaeda, for 9/11 — a conclusion that will be further documented. On 18 October 2003, the New York Times headlined “Early Warnings on Moussaoui Are Detailed,” and reported: “The Central Intelligence Agency warned its stations around the world in August 2001 that Zacarias Moussaoui had been arrested in Minnesota after raising suspicion at a flight school there and that he was a ‘suspect airline suicide hijacker.’”

The attorney for the FBI’s Minneapolis field office, Coleen Rowley, joined local FBI agent Harry Samit, to urge Washington to check out Moussaoui, but the key FBI officials in Washington, David Frasca and Michael Maltbie, refused. Frasca and Maltbie ended up being promoted by the Bush Administration; Rowley and Samit were iced for their having tried to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Samit’s 70 urgent requests to Washington failed to obtain from Frasca and Maltbie anything but runarounds during the two weeks prior to 9/11.

Who was the FBI’s chief during that period? It was Robert Mueller. He led the FBI from 4 September 2001 to 4 September 2013. He was the coverup man, regarding the Sauds, the redirect-blame man, regarding Iraq and Iran.

In another category of documentation of the Administration’s advance warning of the 9/11 attacks are independent reports on the web bringing together the revelations from numerous other reliable sources. One such report, from Michael C. Ruppert, at fromthewilderness.com, on 22 April 2002, is titled “The Case for Bush Administration Advance Knowledge of 9-11 Attacks.” It assembled numerous indications that someone, or some group, possibly Al Qaeda itself, possibly Bush insiders, knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance, and were even set up to profit enormously from this advance knowledge. For example:

A jump in UAL put options 90 times (not 90 percent) above normal between Sept. 6 and Sept.10, and 285 times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack. [CBS News, Sept. 26]

A jump in American Airlines put options 60 times (not 60 percent) above normal on the day before the attacks. [CBS News, Sept. 26]

No similar trading occurred on any other airlines. [Bloomberg Business Report, the Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT), Herzliyya, Israel citing data from the CBOE]

Morgan Stanley saw, between Sept. 7 and Sept.10, an increase of 27 times (not 27 percent) in the purchase of put options on its shares. [ICT Report, ‘Mechanics of Possible Bin-Laden Insider Trading Scam,’ Sept. 21, citing data from the CBOE]

Merrill-Lynch saw a jump of more than 12 times the normal level of put options in the four trading days before the attacks. [Ibid]

How much money was involved? Andreas von Bülow, a former member of the German Parliament responsible for oversight of … intelligence services estimated the worldwide amount at $15 billion, according to Tagesspiegel on Jan. 13. Other experts have estimated the amount at $12 billion.

Not a single U.S. or foreign investigative agency has announced any arrests or developments in the investigation of these trades, the most telling evidence of foreknowledge of the attacks. This, in spite of the fact that former Security and Exchange Commission enforcement chief William McLucas told Bloomberg News that regulators would ‘certainly be able to track down every trade.

The Bush Administration failed to pursue, at all, this goldmine trail of evidence. Robert Mueller failed to follow any of those leads.

If the inside investment group carrying out these transactions — and presumably profiting billions from them — was Al Qaeda (or else an Al Qaeda front), then Al Qaeda must have greatly increased its financial resources from the 9/11 attacks. If, on the other hand, it was, let’s say, the Republican Party, then the beneficiaries would have been Al Qaeda’s American allies — not much different.

Two other such comprehensive reports suggesting possible Bush complicity in the 9/11 attacks include, first of note, from Kate Clark in Britain’s Independent, on 7 September 2002, “The Taliban minister, the US envoy and the warning of September 11 that was ignored”; and second of note, from truthout.com’s Wm. Rivers Pitt, on 20 June 2002, “All Along the Watchtower.”

The piece by Pitt was especially incriminating, because it discussed the $7 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of 14 victim families and 400 other plaintiffs of the 9-11 attacks, filed by Republican attorney, Stanley Hilton, on 3 June 2002, in San Francisco U.S. District Court, alleging that Bush “let it happen on purpose,” and that “the Bush administration got the pipeline it wanted.” Pitt added that, “Even the most hardened political observer must admit the dismal truth — September 11th was the greatest thing ever to happen to the Bush administration.” 

Osama bin Laden did far more for Bush than even Enron corporation’s Ken Lay did, though not quite as much as did the 2000 Green Party U.S. Presidential candidate Ralph Nader. (Nader’s nearly 2% of the Florida vote placed G.W. Bush into the White House, by draining from Democrat Al Gore far more than the mere one-hundredth of one percent of Florida’s votes that separated Gore from Bush. Nader also tipped New Hampshire to Bush. If either state had gone to Gore, there wouldn’t have been able to be any Supreme Court resolution of the election and Gore would straightforwardly have become President.) Osama bin Laden’s 9-11 terror attack did more than anything else to retain Bush in the White House. A community of interests certainly existed between bin Laden and Bush, perhaps even stronger than that which had existed between Ken Lay of Enron, and Mr. Bush.

Furthermore, Bush blocked progress on the fight against Al Qaeda, until 9/11 hit. On 5 August 2002, TIME’s Michael Elliott bannered “They Had a Plan: Long before 9/11, the White House debated taking the fight to al-Qaeda”, and Elliott reported, for example, that “John O’Neill led the FBI’s National Security Division, commanding more than 100 experienced agents. … O’Neill’s boss, Assistant FBI Director Barry Mawn, spent part of his time pleading with Washington for more agents, more linguists, more clerical help. He got nowhere.”

O’Neill’s office was in the World Trade Center, and had responsibility for the investigation of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, the ship which Al Qaeda had struck during the closing days of the Clinton Administration. “Heeding the pleas from the FBI’s New York City office, where Mawn and O’Neill were desperate for new linguists and analysts, acting FBI Director [Thomas] Pickard [the temporary FBI chief, between Freeh and Mueller] asked the Justice Department [including, until 10 May 2001, Deputy Attorney General Mueller] for some $50 million for the bureau’s counterterrorism program. He was turned down. In August, a bureau source says, he appealed to Attorney General Ashcroft. The reply was a flat no.”

Mueller also was active in the cover-up of Bush’s lies about Iraq.

On 11 February 2003 — shortly before we invaded and destroyed Iraq — FBI Director Mueller testified, to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, that: “Secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam may supply al-Qaeda with biological, chemical, or radiological material.” He just reiterated the President’s lies, and his concern wasn’t to raise any question about them, but to reinforce them.

That was the actual counter-terrorism performance of the George W. Bush Administration: an American bulls-eye waiting passively for whatever Al Qaeda would fire at it. And all of this occurred after Berger had told Rice, “I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject.” Berger had simply assumed that the people replacing the Clinton Administration would care about the welfare of the American people, just as Bill Clinton’s people did (at least somewhat). This assumption turned out to be false.

PART SIX

As for the devout Bush Administration’s “services” to the direct victims of the 9/11 attacks, there was a little-noticed major news story from Newsweek reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, on 16 April 2003, which, for some mysterious reason, appeared only on that magazine’s website, at http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/901320.asp.

Inconspicuously headlined there as, “A Legal Counterattack,” it reported that the law firm defending Saudi Arabia (or, more appropriately, defending the Saudi royal family), against a $1 trillion lawsuit on behalf of the victims of 9/11, was Baker Botts, headed by Bush confidant and former Secretary of State, the WASP gang’s leading consiglieri, James Baker, who had also masterminded G.W. Bush’s legal campaign to stop the 2000 Florida vote-recount, and co-headed the White House’s official ‘investigation’ and account of 9/11. This report mentioned that the Saudis had approached many other high-priced law firms, but were turned down by several, because, as one of these lawyers said, “I kept asking myself, ‘do I want to be representing the Saudis against the 9-11 families — especially after all the trouble we had getting cooperation from the Saudis on terrorism’,” and, “I finally just said no.”

Salon.com’s Eric Boehlert headlined, on 18 June 2003, “Bush’s 9/11 Coverup?” reporting that, “Family advocates … wanted to know why the government — and specifically the Bush administration” (including Bush’s FBI-coverup Director, Robert Mueller) was “so reluctant to find answers to any of the obvious questions about what went wrong that day, why so little has been fixed, and why virtually nobody has accepted any responsibility for the glaring failures.” But what were failures from the victims’ standpoint, were Mr. Bush’s (and his sponsors’) greatest triumph, from his (and their) political (and financial) standpoint. And then President Bush returned Al Qaeda’s favor, by invading Iraq, thus pumping up Islamic hatred of Americans, and recruitments by Al Qaeda — and weapons-sales by Lockheed Martin etc.

Back again to Newsweek’s Isikoff and Hosenball (only three weeks after their notable “A Legal Counterattack”), and buried again only on the magazine’s website, at http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/910676.asp, were more ugly details of Bush’s dogged efforts to sabotage the investigation by the 9/11 commission whose very creation he had opposed. This 7 May 2003 article was titled, “September 11 Showdown.” Among the barriers the White House was putting up: “Commission members argue that they can’t possibly do their job to write the authoritative history of 9-11 if they can’t discover what the federal government has learned from al Qaeda operatives” whom the Government had in custody.

An AP story on 24 June 2003 by Ted Bridis and John Solomon was headlined, “Officials: U.S. Slow on Bin Laden Drones,” and reported that, “When President Bush took office in January 2001, the White House was told that Predator drones had recently spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times and officials were urged to arm the unmanned planes with missiles to kill the al-Quaida leader. But the administration failed to get drones back into the Afghan skies until after the Sept. 11 attacks later that year.” Bush wanted to protect bin Laden at least until he hit.

On 15 August 2005, Michael Hirsh of Newsweek headlined “CIA Commander,” subheaded that the U.S. “Let bin Laden Slip Away,” and reported: “In a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora — intelligence operatives had tracked him — and could have been caught. ‘He was there,’ Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK.” Berntsen’s book, Jawbreaker, was published later in 2005, providing extensive details on this operation, despite the Pentagon’s continued denials that anyone knew whether bin Laden was among the Al Qaeda forces fleeing Tora Bora.

During the President’s press conference on 13 March 2002, just shortly after his initial failure to have captured/killed bin Laden, he was asked, “Mr. President, in your speeches now you rarely talk or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that?”In his response, Bush said, “You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you.” The reporter, obviously shocked, followed up with, “But don’t you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won’t truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?” Bush replied: “I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.” He never had been; he had refused to be — especially prior to 9/11. Does this suggest he wanted the 9/11 attacks in order to have a “justification” to invade Iraq? Was President Bush a traitor, or only a fool?

Either way, thousands of Americans died on 9/11 due to bin Laden — and Bush’s approval ratings from voters shot up by 40% as a result of bin Laden’s attack, and stayed high through the 2002 mid-term congressional elections, and even till the 2004 Presidential election. America has a history of re-electing wartime Presidents. (The only exception was Lyndon Johnson, who quit because his own Party didn’t support his Vietnam war; Republican presidents never face that kind of problem, because conservatives support conquest in principle.) Bush followed this long tradition, even though he failed miserably as Commander-in-Chief and didn’t even really care about the public, at all.

Fairly late in the Bush II regime, on 10 September 2006, the Washington Postheadlined “Bin Laden Trail ‘Stone Cold’: U.S. Steps Up Efforts, But Good Intelligence On Ground Is Lacking.” Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson blew the lid off the Republicans’ claims to be strong against terrorism. They reported that bin Laden was initially concerned about his danger of being captured. “That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts … that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan.”

These Special Forces were pulled out “to prepare for war in Iraq.” Even in March 2002, Bush was so obsessed with Saddam Hussein, that resources were drawn off from the bin Laden hunt. “‘I was appalled when I learned about it,’ said [Flynnt L.] Leverett,” who was “then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council. … ‘It’s very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn’t done that.’ … White House spokeswoman Michele Davis said she would not comment.”

(We’ll have occasion to come back to that report again later, because the rest of it deals with how the Administration wasn’t even primarily concerned with success in the war against terrorists. He didn’t have his eye on that ball.)

CNN’s “Inside Politics” with Judy Woodruff, reported, on 30 April 2001 — in other words prior to 9/11 (and this “prior” is shocking in the given context) — “The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year [under President Clinton], there’s no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and ‘personalizing terrorism.’” Bush downplayed bin Laden as soon as Bush entered the White House. Instead, he refocused against Saddam Hussein, right away.

As Afghanistan was falling back under increasing Taliban control during 2006, President Bush’s friend and head of the Senate, Bill Frist was quoted in an AP article on October 3rd, from Afghanistan, “Frist Says Afghan War Can’t Be Won”: “U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said Monday that the war against Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan could never be won militarily, and he urged support for efforts to bring ‘people who call themselves Taliban’ into the government.” Did the Democrats, and Presidents FDR and Truman, say to Germany, “Let’s bring ‘people who call themselves Nazis’ into the German Government”?

The only war that Republicans were really determined to win was the one which Bush had in mind from even before he entered the White House: the war in Iraq. Forget about 9/11, was the Republicans’ real attitude. Bush had brought on the 9/11 attacks only so that he could have a pretext for “regime change” in Iraq. Once that objective in Iraq was achieved, the Republicans didn’t much care about what happened in Afghanistan (no oil there) — let the Taliban and Islamic Law come back in that country, and all those Afghan girls be kicked out of school again. What was really important now was keeping our military bases in Iraq.

Forget about the bloodshed and the futility of it all, the never-ending war and death. What’s important is that military contractors were making billions, and were kicking back millions of it into Republican campaign war chests (and into the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and other neoconservative Democrats) — for the Republicans’ real domestic war, against the (non-neocon) Democrats. Thus, “Frist said … the only way to win [in Afghanistan] was to ‘assimilate people who call themselves Taliban into a larger, more representative government.’” (So: goodbye, Hamid Karzai; you’ve served your purpose.)

The 9-11 Commission, which the President and his Republican Congress reluctantly set up to investigate the attacks, was, at its start, strongly inclined to shift blame away from the Bush Administration. And yet a Bush-incriminating story from this commission appeared in the New York Times as early as 23 November 2002, under the headline “9/11 Report Says Saudi Arabia Links Went Unexamined.”

Then, another, and even more incriminating, report appeared in the pro-Bush Chicago Tribune as early as 24 May 2003. Bryan A. Keogh wrote from Washington, under the headline, “9/11 Panel Told of Cover-Ups Before Attacks,” and subheaded, “Witnesses: U.S. suppressed warnings.” This story said: “The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were made possible by gaping holes in airline security, government cover-ups that prevented problems from being fixed and a failure to respond to a growing threat that terrorists might use airliners as weapons, witnesses told an independent commission this week.

‘The notion that these hijackings and terrorism were an unforeseen and unforeseeable risk is an airline and FAA public-relations management myth’ said Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general at the Department of Transportation, in testimony Friday [May 23].”

Remarkably, “Despite often-conflicting testimony at the hearings, commission chairman Thomas Kean, a former New Jersey [Republican] governor, said the panel gained considerable insight into how the attacks occurred. ‘We’ve certainly learned about the failures of the system on 9/11,’ he said.” The Guardian reported on 10 July 2003 that Mr. Kean had said the day before, “I think the commission feels unanimously that it’s some intimidation” the Administration was applying against all government employees who wished to cooperate with their investigation. Even Republicans had to admit that President Bush, whose sole supposed argument for re-election was that he was good at protecting the American people from terrorism, had no real argument at all to continue in office, other than his possessing the largest campaign kitty in history.

That money shared common interests with the Saudi royal family. Catherine Arnie headlined “The Secret Saudi Flight on 9-13 Could Be the Key to the Bush-Saudi-Al Qaeda Connection” at www.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=14289, arguing credibly that President Bush was on the side of the people who financed the 9-11 attacks, namely the Saudi royal family, and not on the side of the United States. This would also explain a report from Jeff Gerth in the New York Times on 15 May 2003, headlined, “C.I.A. Chief Won’t Name Officials Who Failed to Add Hijackers to Watch List.” It opened:

Seven months after telling Congress he would do so, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, has yet to provide the names of agency officials responsible for one of the most glaring intelligence mistakes leading up to the attacks of Sept. 11, according to Congressional and agency officials. Soon after the attacks, the mistake emerged, showing that the Central Intelligence Agency had waited 20 months before placing on a federal watch list two suspected terrorists who wound up as hijackers. Had the information about the two hijackers been promptly relayed to other agencies, the government might have been able to disrupt, limit or possibly even prevent the terrorist attacks, intelligence officials and Congressional investigators said.”

The report went on to note that, though Mr. Tenet would not name the C.I.A. officials who had failed, he did, in fact, promote two of them. So, he, himself, was responsible for this. The same day’s edition of the Times led with a story headlined, “Ambassador Says Saudis Didn’t Heed Security Request,” reporting that though the car bombing of the American compound in Riyadh that had occurred on 12 May 2003 had been anticipated and the U.S. had requested the Saudi royal family to increase its security protection of Americans in their country, this request had gone unheeded.

On 28 May, the Times headlined, “A Saudi Editor Who Offended Clerics Is Ousted From His post.” It reported that the Saudi royal family had fired an editor for his criticizing Muslim clerics who were preaching support for terrorism against the West. This same Saudi royal family are present and past business partners of the Bush family. 15 of the 19 9-11 hijackers were Saudis. Immediately after 9-11, when all U.S. flights were grounded, the only non-military planes in the U.S. skies were the Bush Administration’s whisking out of the United States members of both the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family. Rumors of this were confirmed by Bill Andrews writing in Scotland’s Edinburgh Evening News, on 3 September 2003, under the heading “Bin Laden Family’s US Exit ‘Approved’.” His report opened: “The United States allowed members of Osama bin Laden’s family to jet out of the US in the immediate aftermath of September 11, even as American airspace was closed. Former White House counter-terrorism tsar Richard Clarke said the Bush administration sanctioned the repatriation of about 140 high-ranking Saudi Arabians, including relatives of the al-Qaeda chief.” 

Apparently, the order came through the State Department; it would have to have originated from President Bush himself. On 11 April 2004 writing in the Boston Globe, Craig Unger said, “The White House told me that it is ‘absolutely confident’ the Sept. 13 flight from Tampa did not take place.”

Then, on 9 June 2004, Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg [Florida] Times, reported, “For nearly three years, White House, aviation and law enforcement officials have insisted the flight never took place and have denied published reports. … But now, at the request of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, TIA [Tampa International Airport] officials have confirmed that the flight did take place.” On 22 July 2004, Dana Milbank headlined in the Washington Post, “Plane Carried 13 Bin Ladens,” and reported: “At least 13 relatives of Osama bin Laden, accompanied by bodyguards and associates, were allowed to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a passenger manifest released yesterday. … The passenger list was made public by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who obtained the manifest from officials at Boston’s Logan International Airport.”

Bush had been lying during almost three years. As Gerald Posner pointed out in an op-ed in the New York Times on 27 July 2004, the final report of the 9/11 Commission “fails to mine any of the widely available reporting and research that establishes” Saudi royal financing of the attacks. Furthermore, “The report fails … to note that when the flights occurred, air-space was open only to a limited number of commercial — not private — planes,” and these jets were all private.

The Times headlined on 17 October 2002, “Report Says Saudis Fail to Crack Down on Charities That Finance Terrorists,” and reported:

“Al Qaeda’s terror network derives most of its financing from charities and individuals in Saudi Arabia, but the kingdom has ‘turned a blind eye to this problem,’ according to a new report … by a committee sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. … The council’s report goes further by concluding for the first time that Saudi Arabia is the single largest source of terrorist financing. … In one of its starkest conclusions, the report said, ‘It is worth stating clearly and unambiguously, if only because official U.S. government spokespersons have not: for years, individuals and charities based in Saudi Arabia have been the most important source of funds for Al Qaeda, and for years Saudi officials have turned a blind eye to this problem.”

On 10 September 2006, the Washington Post, in that blockbuster story mentioned earlier, “Bin Laden Trail ‘Stone Cold’: U.S. Steps Up Efforts, But Good Intelligence On Ground Is Lacking,” reported that: “Bureaucratic battles slowed down the hunt for bin Laden for the first two or three years, according to officials in several agencies. … In early November 2002, … a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader,” and Donald Rumsfeld got angry at this, because the NSA had given the intelligence to the CIA for this job. “‘Why aren’t you giving it to us?’ Rumsfeld wanted to know. [Michael] Hayden [the NSA chief] … told Rumsfeld that the [NSA’s] information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well.” 

It’s not yet clear whether Rumsfeld was an insider on the 9/11 operation. How could he not have been, given the facts which Michael Kane brought together on 27 March 2004, at Global Research, under the headline “Elephants in the Barracks”? But the indications are even stronger that Bush, Cheney, Rice, Hayden, Mueller, and Comey were. (Comey, as the Deputy Attorney General in 2005, endorsed a memorandum that approved the use of 13 enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding and sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, which methods were used by the CIA when interrogating suspects. However, he famously objected to further torture-methods. He knew that all of the proposed torture-methods were illegal, and he endorsed only the ones he considered necessary in order to be able to extract from detainees ‘evidence’ that Saddam was involved in 9/11.)

PART SEVEN>/H4>
AS WAS DOCUMENTED IN 2003 AT “INVESTIGATE AND IMPEACH BUSH FOR FAILING TO ACT ON 911 WARNINGS – AND THEN LYING ABOUT IT”, THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION PREVENTED FBI TERRORISM EXPERTS FROM INVESTIGATING SAUDI ARABIAN TIES TO AL-QAEDA BEFORE 9/11, LEADING TO THE RESIGNATION OF FBI DEPUTY DIRECTOR JOHN O’NEILL IN DISGUST ONLY TWO WEEKS BEFORE 9/11. O’NEILL ALLEGEDLY ASSERTED THAT, “THE MAIN OBSTACLES TO INVESTIGATE ISLAMIC TERRORISM WERE US OIL INTERESTS, AND THE ROLE PLAYED BY SAUDI ARABIA.” BUSH ON 6 AUGUST 2001 PERSONALLY IGNORED A WARNING IN A TOP-SECRET BRIEFING MEMO HEADLINED, “BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S.” THAT BRIEFING EVEN STATED THAT THERE WAS A REPORT “IN 1998 SAYING THAT BIN LADIN WANTED TO HIJACK A US AIRCRAFT. … FBI INFORMATION SINCE THAT TIME INDICATES PATTERNS OF SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY IN THIS COUNTRY CONSISTENT WITH PREPARATIONS FOR HIJACKINGS.”

This memo was clearly warning of a likelihood in the present time that Al Qaeda would finally do that; yet Bush did nothing to prevent it. There clearly was virtual certainty that crashing an airliner into key U.S. building(s) was now imminent. The Administration received these dire warnings; only the American public did not. Then, despite repeated warnings from CIA Director George Tenet not to do so, President Bush actually ordered counterterrorism agencies to “stand down” from the existing highest level of alert, which had pertained before August. Bush’s reaction to the warnings was to reduce the level of threat-preparedness; not to raise it. This reduction in alertness also ignored urgent warnings from an FBI agent in Phoenix, from Jordanian intelligence, from Israeli intelligence, from Russian intelligence, and from Moroccan intelligence.

Also, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said that he warned “the Americans” on 31 August that “something would happen.” Yet, still, President Bush held to the newly reduced alertness status. Right before the planes struck, the U.S. stock market was flooded with “put” orders to dump the whole range of stocks that ended up being directly crumpled by 9/11. Only the U.S. public was being kept in the dark.

Subsequently, both Rice and Bush lied to Congress saying that all of these warnings were purely of a “historical” nature and concerned nothing at all after 1998. However, this intelligence was, in fact, all fresh — that’s the reason why Clarke, Tenet, and others, were so alarmed, frantic even — and it was now pouring in, and rising to a crescendo, during the summer of 2001, right up until 9/11. And yet the President’s response to it was to have the agencies “stand down.”

This was especially stunning after Bob Woodward’s 2006 State of Denial, which reported that on 10 July 2001, as the New York Times confirmed on 2 October 2006, “Records Show Tenet Briefed Rice on Al Qaeda Threat.” The reporters said: “A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda. … The account … came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall” the meeting. Also on 2 October 2006, McClatchy newspapers reported, “Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target. … One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a ‘10 on a scale of 1 to 10.’” And yet, “Many officials [including Rice] have claimed they never received or don’t remember” it. Of course, when faced with irrefutable facts, which contradict what one is saying and what one has repeated numerous times, the standard response of a liar is to claim “they never received or don’t remember.”

A lot of the intelligence that the President had received prior to 9/11 became public afterwards; and good summaries of it appeared at CBS and at the Britannica site. It’s not merely about events that ‘concerned nothing at all after 1998’, but entailed enormous detail about the trendline and the intentions of Al Qaeda during the buildup toward 9/11.

On 26 February 2013, CBS headlined “The 1993 World Trade Center bombers: Where are they now?”, and reported that “By 1997, seven men had been convicted for the attack: [Kuwaiti Ramzi] Yousef, [Jordanian Eyad] Ismoil, Egyptian Mahmud Abouhalima, Palestinian Mohammad Salameh, Kuwaiti Nidal A. Ayyad, Iraqi Abdul Rahman Yasin and Palestinian Ahmad Ajaj. Only six of them, however [all but Yassin], had been caught.” In addition, there was their inspirerer, “Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind sheik” who also was caught, and “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who also was caught, and who is not only Yousef’s uncle, but also later claimed to be the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks which ultimately brought the Twin Towers down. Mohammed gave Yousef advice, tips, and cash in the run up to the 1993 bombing.”

Furthermore, the Britannica article on “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed” indicates that “Although he later claimed responsibility for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Mohammed first came to international attention for his participation in the so-called Bojinka Plot, a deadly and wildly ambitious plan concocted by Mohammed’s nephew, Ramzi Yousef.” That article continues:

One proposed aspect of the Bojinka Plot involved hijacking an aircraft and using it as a missile to attack the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Mohammed took this plan to Osama bin Laden in 1996, with the suggestion that it be used to attack symbolic targets in the United States. It is believed that bin Laden approved the plan at some point in late 1998 or early 1999, and Mohammed began his formal affiliation with al-Qaeda. Mohammed, along with bin Laden andMuhammad Atef, began assembling the hijacker teams. In early December 1999 Mohammed held an instructional meeting with three al-Qaeda operatives who would carry out the September 11 attacks.

After those attacks, Mohammed’s cachet within al-Qaeda skyrocketed. He was involved in other plots against the United States, including the attempted “shoe-bombing” of an American Airlines jet by Richard Reid that was foiled by passengers on December 22, 2001. Mohammed also claimed to have beheaded The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearlin 2002, a claim that was later verified by independent sources. In early 2003 Mohammed was planning an attack on London’s Heathrow Airport, but the plot was disrupted by the United States and its allies. Soon after, on March 1, 2003, he was captured by U.S. and Pakistani officers in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

During his interrogation by the CIA, Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding more than 180 times. After spending several years in classified CIA “black site” prisons in central Europe, he was transferred to Guantánamo Bay detention camp in 2006.

With all of that background, how could George W. Bush not have known, in advance, that something like 9/11 was about to occur? Only if he was an idiot. And, although he tried to play that role, not much intelligence is required in order to recognize that his “aw, shucks” act was only an act. He was no genius, but he also was no one’s fool. He was, in fact, quite cunning, and very effective at what he was trying to do.

Other important details of the Bush Administration’s failings to prevent the 9/11 attack were made public by a joint congressional report (not the official 9/11 report but the far less Presidentially controlled congressional one) on 18 September 2002. Here are some of the highlights: In May 2001, the CIA learned that seven of bin Laden’s operatives were on their way to the U.S. via Canada and Britain and “were disappearing while others were preparing for martyrdom,” because they “were planning attacks in the United States.” Furthermore, a July 2001 briefing for senior government officials had stated: “Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that UBL [Usama bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.” President Bush ignored this stunning warning: he didn’t place the government on high alert, much less make preparations to strike immediately against bin Laden and Al Qaeda, both in the U.S. and in Afghanistan, so as to avert the planned attack.

Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, admitted, “We know now that our inability to detect and prevent the Sept. 11 attacks was an intelligence failure of unprecedented magnitude. [This was a lie; the failure was in the White House, not the CIA.] … Some people who couldn’t seem to utter the words ‘intelligence failure’ are now convinced of it.”

Since he was a Republican Senator, covering up for the Republican President, his comment shifted to the CIA — to the messenger which had brought to the Administration the bad news or warning of the “imminent” attack — the blame that actually belonged instead directly in the Oval Office, which did nothing to prevent that attack. Shelby’s conclusion blaming the intelligence services was reiterated by the final 9/11 Commission report, because President Bush appointed its members, and the Commission agreed in advance not to find blame with the President himself.

The intelligence services therefore took the fall for the President, just as they did when Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction that President Bush alleged to have been the reason for invading Iraq turned out not to exist. However, on 14 September 2004 the New York Times headlined “Review at C.I.A. and Justice Brings No 9/11 Punishment,” and reported that all of the studies and reviews of these intelligence failures “have not resulted in any disciplinary actions” against any of the intelligence personnel either. The reason for this is that the President was, in fact, warned by the CIA. So, Bush made sure that no one would be blamed.

The voters considered this to be acceptable; there was no accountability and Bush was even re-elected. To the contrary of accountability, President Bush was viewed by the voters as overwhelmingly superior to any Democrat for protecting the U.S. against terrorism. This proven failure was greatly preferred by the public, against all alternative candidates. In the 2004 Presidential contest, the results, like in 2000, were so close that a ‘win’ turned out to be stealable. What should have been a clear win for the Democratic Party’s candidate, turned out to be instead just another nail-biter.

Confirming this cover-up for the President was www.truthout.org/docs_03/062603B.shtml, “Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran” by Ray McGovern, 26 June 2003, in which McGovern said, “My analysis is that George Bush had no option but to keep George Tenet on as Director, because George Tenet had warned Bush repeatedly, for months and months before September 11, that something very bad was about to happen. … Bush was well briefed before he went off to Texas to chop wood for a month.” Subsequently, of course, Tenet retired from the CIA.

PART EIGHT

On 16 June 2003, Laura Blumenfeld of the Washington Post reported, under the headline, “Former Aide Takes Aim at War on Terror.” A national security aide to the President, Rand Beers, who was a man that had replaced the neo-fascist Oliver North in the Reagan White House, and that had then served under the senior Bush, and then under Clinton, and now the junior Bush, resigned from George W. Bush’s Administration, because “They’re making us less secure, not more secure. … As an insider, I saw the things that weren’t being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out.”

He committed himself to ousting George W. Bush from office. His wife commented, “This is an administration that determines what it thinks and then sets about to prove it. There’s almost a religious kind of certainty. There’s no curiosity about opposing points of view. It’s very scary. There’s kind of a ghost agenda.” Bush shared the public’s religious values, so Americans felt confident with him protecting them. They had faith.

By the time of 8 July 2003, even the pro-Bush Wall Street Journal was leading off with, “White House Hurdles Delay 9/11 Investigation,” and reported that, “so far the probers have made little progress. The commission is embroiled in tense negotiations over the level of access it will have to White House documents and the federal personnel it wants to interview.”

Consequently, “the commission may not be able to complete an exhaustive investigation before its deadline next May” (which it did not). Republican Senator John McCain was quoted as saying, “Excessive administration secrecy on issues related to the Sept. 11 attacks feeds conspiracy theories.” Long Island Newsday headlined a month later, 7 August, “U.S. Clamps Secrecy on Warnings Before 9/11,” saying that it wasn’t only Saudi royal involvement in 9/11 that the Bush Administration was hiding, but that “a deeper, darker problem is our own government’s refusal to fill in the blanks about itself,” regarding what the President knew, and when he knew it.

In December 2003, one of the ten members of the 9/11 Commission quietly quitted, after months of very publicly decrying Bush’s uncooperativeness. Max Cleland said he refused to be part of the White House’s “cover-up.” www.newsofinterest.tv/911.html posted “A Summary of Issues About the 9/11 Attacks”, and on one of its pages, titled “Military, Intelligence, and Government Officials Questioning 9/11,” are quoted Louis Freeh, Curt Weldon, Mark Dayton, Max Cleland, and others, all saying that the work of the 9/11 Commission was so compromised by the President, that the only thing which was really clear is that he must have had lots to hide, because he was certainly hiding things he had no right to be hiding from that commission.

Furthermore, the entire Administration was uncooperative. On 2 August 2006, Dan Eggen headlined in the Washington Post, “9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon,” and even the very highly partisan Republican Chairman of the Commission, Thomas Kean, was quoted, “We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us. … It was just so far from the truth.”

However, Louis Freeh was himself on the inside as a strong supporter of the Saudi royal family, the al-Sauds, who own that country. And Robert Mueller and James Comey were his key acolytes who assisted him to transfer the blame for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing away from Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda and instead onto Iran, which was completely innocent of the charge but became officially blamed for it, which started the U.S. Deep State’s standard accusation against Iran, that it (and not the Saud family) is ‘the top state sponsor of terrorism’ — a blatant and evil lie.

On 20 June 2018, the Washington Examiner bannered “OPINION Robert Mueller was the biggest obstacle for Sept. 11 families who wanted to sue Saudi Arabia”and opened: “A lawyer representing the families of 9/11 victims says Robert Mueller engaged in a cover-up of evidence that the Saudi government aided the attackers.”

That’s the “opinion” which had been expressed to the newspaper’s reporter, Ryan Gidursky. He wrote: “New York-based lawyer Jim Kreindler, representing the families of the Sept. 11 victims, said in an interview with me that Mueller and his successor, James Comey, engaged in a systematic cover-up of evidence that the Saudi government aided the terrorists who committed the Sept. 11 attacks.”

That report went on to say that:

Several people formerly associated with the investigation stated that Saudi Arabia was financially involved with the Sept. 11 attacks, including John Lehman, a Republican member of the 9/11 Commission, and former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time. Graham’s testimony during an appearance on “60 Minutes” was especially damning: “the hijackers received active support and guidance from rich Saudis, Saudi charities, and top members of the Saudi government.”

Stephen K. Moore, the retired FBI agent who led the Sept. 11 probe in Los Angeles, also confirmed in an affidavit back in December 2017 that the Saudis played a significant role.

Despite mounting evidence and testimony from key players in the investigation as well as former politicians, Kreindler told me that he ran into significant roadblocks from the FBI and former directors Mueller and Comey.

“We’ve really been stymied over the last 17 years from getting information from the FBI, State Department, and Department of Defense,” Kreindler said in an interview. “From day one, instead of focusing on the evidence, there was an effort to not look at the Saudis and [instead to] get their help in launching the Iraq War.”

Kreindler said that retired FBI agents had told him that they also believe Mueller lied in 2002 before the joint congressional inquiry that he was unaware of Saudi government involvement.

On 11 August 2017, The Hill headlined “Former Mueller deputy on Trump: ‘Government is going to kill this guy’”, and Joe Concha reported that his source

said Trump’s defense of Russian President Vladimir Putin has compelled federal employees “at Langley, Foggy Bottom, CIA and State” to try to take Trump down.

“Let me give you one bottom line as a former government official. Government is going to kill this guy,” Mudd, a staunch critic of Trump, said on “The Lead.”

“He defends Vladimir Putin. There are State Department and CIA officers coming home, and at Langley and Foggy Bottom, CIA and State, they’re saying, ‘This is how you defend us?’”

Those Government officials were outraged against the President. Though they worked under his Administration, they worked for the Deep State, against him — their nominal boss. Trump’s constant defenses of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud are acceptable to those retinues of America’s billionaires, but for Trump to say anything favorable regarding Putin is totally unacceptable to them. It’s like “Russia, enemy; Saudi Arabia, friend.” That’s the Deep State’s position. And any nation that is at all favorable toward Russia — such as Saddam’s Iraq, Qaddafi’s Libya, Assad’s Syria, and Khomeini’s Iran — is also no “ally” but instead only a target for the weaponry that’s manufactured by America’s top 100 ‘defense’ contractors. And that will mean more sales-volume for those firms.

Mueller protects the Sauds, who buy more U.S.-made weaponry than any other country except the U.S. Government itself. And he’s the ideal person to work against Russia. The billionaires who control Lockheed Martin (and other such companies) want their biggest foreign buyer protected, and want the main target of the weapons they sell to continue to be their target, because that nation is the target of their costliest weapons, the nuclear forces; and those billionaires define which nations the U.S. Government calls ‘allies’ (meaning markets for those manufacturers). So, ‘Saudi Arabia is an ally of America’.

Iran, Russia, and China don’t buy their products at all, but are instead their biggest and ultimate targets to invade and conquer, or else to overthrow via a coup and take over as the ultimate prizes to add to the U.S. empire; so, those countries are ‘America’s enemies’. This has nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the American public, and everything to do with boosting the profits to the owners of those companies. Doing that is the bipartisan goal of today’s U.S. Government.

And, of course, as was pointed out and documented earlier in this series, James Comey became one of the three highest-paid executives at America’s largest weapons-manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, and then became General Counsel and Member of the Executive Committee at one of the three largest Hedge funds, which happened to be the second-biggest stockholder in Lockheed Martin.

And, as was also documented at the start of this series, Louis Freeh retired to become the chief personal attorney representing the Saud family in the United States — and that family are Lockheed Martin’s second-largest customer.

On Tuesday, 22 January 2019, at the time of the longest stalemate and shut-down of the U.S. Government ever, Reuters headlined “House approves bill warning against U.S. NATO pullout” and reported that:

In a warning to President Donald Trump not to try to withdraw the United States from the NATO military alliance, the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday approved legislation aimed at preventing such a move.

The Democratic-led House approved the measure by a bipartisan 357-22 vote, with the only “no” votes coming from Republicans. It now goes to the Republican-majority Senate, where its future is unclear, although a similar measure has been introduced there.

At a news conference before the vote, Democratic lawmakers said they were alarmed by reports of the Republican president’s low regard for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a 70-year-old military alliance that joins the United States and Canada with allies in Europe.

The New York Times said last week that several times over the course of 2018, Trump privately told his advisers he wanted to withdraw from NATO.

NATO, of course, is the anti-Russia military alliance that had been started after World War II, against the communist Soviet Union, which nation and ideology ended in 1991 while that sales-organization for American-made weaponry against it continued. Though the Congress was extremely split on everything else, they were virtually 100% united against the U.S. President who is the first ever that wants to terminate this sales-promotion organization for U.S. weapons-firms.

The U.S. Deep State is even more united on that against Russia than on its support for the Saud family. And Robert Mueller has been a key person at both ends of that Deep State agenda: against Russia, and for the Sauds.

Now, if you really want to get to know Robert Mueller, here’s the low-down on him: https://caucus99percent.com/content/what-mueller-wont-find

He (like Obama) was born into the retinues of the Deep State, and he (like Obama) throughout his life has continued loyally to serve the Deep State — America’s billionaires and a few centi-millionaires, the individuals who own and control America’s international corporations. That’e the Deep State, and people such as Mueller and Comey and Freeh are important servants to it.

And that’s the reality about today’s international Deep State. It controls America’s foreign policies. It controls the empire.

The way the Deep State shows itself in domestic national (as opposed to international) U.S. policies is reported with remarkable honesty and effectiveness in Michael Moore’s 2018 documentary film, Fahrenheit 11/9 (which is not to be confused with his 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11), the best film he has yet made.

An excellent example of how the Deep State misrepresents and criticizes that masterful documentary film was the review published in Britain’s Guardian, which was headlined “Fahrenheit 11/9 review: Michael Moore v Donald Trump = stalemate”.

That review was skillfully written so as to discourage the public from seeing this film and learning the reality, both about today’s America and about the film itself. The Guardian nowadays represents the interests of liberal billionaires who backed the Clintons, Obama, and Tony Blair, none of whom come across in this film as being anything other than political prostitutes of those billionaires. But the documentary is just as devastating about the the politicians representing the opposing side of the aristocracy, politicians such as George W. Bush and Donald Trump. It’s hardly the sort of movie that hero-worshippers on either side of today’s U.S. politics would want to see. But it’s a film that everyone around the world ought to see, because it is true, deeply true, about the aristocracy, and about the way they deal with the public, as objects to be used and callously disposed of (as is documented in that film).

And that side, the domestic side, is the side of the U.S. aristocracy’s operation Robert Mueller doesn’t much get involved with. He specializes mostly in carrying out the U.S. aristocracy’s international dirty-works. That’s what he’s mainly there for. This is why Mueller is going after Trump, because Trump isn’t sufficiently against Russia and sufficiently supportive of NATO.

Maybe Trump had thought that his rabid hostility toward Iran, and his deregulation of America’s companies, and his lowering of their taxes, would be enough to keep those hyenas away. But, clearly, that’s not the case. They want lots more from a U.S. president than Trump is delivering. And Mueller was the man they had hired to lead the pack to replace him with Mike Pence. But all that they ended up with was a shoddily ‘documented’ case that ‘Russia interfered in the 2016 election’. At least they increased American fools’ fear of ‘those scheming Russians’, who, unquestionably, interfere in foreign domestic politics far less than the U.S. Government itself does. Russia is the chief punching-bag for America’s billionaires. They got what they want: an ‘indictment’ of Russia.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/04/02/muellers-record-of-framing-innocent-...

 

 

Read from top.

Mueller Objected to Barr’s Description of Russia Investigation’s Findings

• Robert S. Mueller III is said to have taken issue with a description from Attorney General William P. Barr that appeared to clear President Trump of wrongdoing.
• 
  
• The letter adds to the growing evidence of a rift between the two men since the conclusion of the Russia investigation.

 

 

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Mueller failed to "convict" Trump of any crime, though he has suspected something but has not found any evidence of crap... A normal jury could not convict Trump on the Mueller Flimsy Evidences... So Mueller is pissed off and will do anything to justify his failure and clear his name... Blame the other guy is a normal tactic. READ FROM TOP.

SHARMINI PERIES: It’s The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.

Robert Mueller was very nuanced in his press conference held Wednesday when he clarified what was in his Russia interference investigation of 2016.

ROBERT MUELLER: If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.

SHARMINI PERIES: Mueller went on to say:

ROBERT MUELLER: It explains that under longstanding department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that, too, is prohibited. Charging the president with a crime was, therefore, not an option we could consider.

SHARMINI PERIES: On to talk about these statements with me is Professor Doug Colbert. The professor teaches criminal law, constitutional law, at the University of Maryland School of Law. Good to have you here, Doug.

DOUG COLBERT: Good to be here, Sharmini. Thank you.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right, Doug, let’s take apart what Mueller said. Now, he said if he or his team had confidence that the president clearly did commit a crime, he said, we would have said so. Then he went on to say he had no authority to charge him due to a longstanding Department of Justice policy, that the DOJ policy actually prevented him from doing so. Now, a sitting president apparently cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office, and Muller says that is unconstitutional. So explain all of this.

DOUG COLBERT: Sure. Well, DOJ, Department of Justice, made a ruling about 45 years ago that indicated just that, that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime because of the responsibilities that the commander in chief has, and that the president has. And because DOJ policy controls Robert Muller’s appointment as a special prosecutor, Mr. Muller is simply emphasizing that he had no option here to charge President Trump with a crime. And at the same time, he’s saying that there was insufficient evidence to exonerate the president, to say that no, you did not commit a crime, you did not obstruct justice or collude with the Russians.

So he’s clarifying for us something that’s very important. And it’s contrary to what Attorney General Barr had told the nation weeks ago when he indicated that the DOJ policy was not taken into consideration, was not the basis for Mr. Mueller not reaching a decision himself. And so you have a real inconsistency here between what the attorney general said and what Mr. Mueller told us today.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right. Now, it seems to me it is a closely guarded principle here in the United States that no one is above the law, not even the president. That is, you know, when you talk to people, not just legal scholars and lawyers, but just average people believe that. So why is it unconstitutional, according to Mueller, to charge a president with a crime?

DOUG COLBERT: Well, it has to do with the process by which a president would be accused in this situation. What Mr. Mueller basically said today was I have done my job for the last two years. I’ve given you a 440-page+ report, I’ve documented what witnesses have said. So I’ve done what I was asked to do. I’m not able to do anything more because of the DOJ ruling and policy. So now it’s up to Congress, now it’s for the elected officials to hold hearings and to decide whether or not sufficient evidence exists to impeach the president, to formally accuse him of different high crimes and misdemeanors.

SHARMINI PERIES: Now, that is a DOJ policy, but there’s nothing in the Constitution that says this, is there?

DOUG COLBERT: Well, the constitutional reference that Mr. Mueller refers to is a legal opinion that was offered by the Department of Justice. You’re absolutely right that the president is not above the law. The question is whether or not he can be charged with crimes while in office, or whether–he certainly could be charged with crimes once he leaves office. So that’s that’s the difference here. It’s a question of process and timing of any possible charges against the president.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right. Now, Mueller squarely puts the responsibility to carry on this issue in the hands of Congress. So what do you anticipate will be the next steps of Congress with this information that’s now been bestowed upon them by Mueller?

DOUG COLBERT: Well, it gives a big boost to those who are calling for impeachment hearings. And I think in many ways it is even gives their leader Nancy Pelosi more reason, after the Mueller press conference, to be able to say we have a job to do here. We have to have a hearing. We have to call witnesses. We must determine whether or not the President obstructed justice.

I mean, Mr. Mueller made two very important points here at the outset. One had to do with the fact that Russia clearly interfered with a national election in 2016. And you couldn’t find a more serious intrusion on the democratic electoral process than to have a foreign country do everything it could to upset the will of the voter.

And secondly, he also talked about the fact that obstructing justice is a very serious crime, as well. And I think without his making specific reference, we’re watching right now witnesses being instructed by the president not to testify before congressional committees, not to turn over documentation. And so this becomes a very serious obstruction charge. And I think that everything that Mr. Muller said will lead–should lead–to other actions being taken by our elected officials.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right, Doug, now, if Muller felt constrained, he did put out there that, you know, there may have been a crime committed. What prevents the DOJ from actually moving forward on indicting or laying charges against the co-conspirators of Trump’s crimes?

DOUG COLBERT: Well, I think Mr. Muller would probably say that they indicted quite a few people who had a substantial role in the collusion effort. And I think what he would also say is that he would not go as far as he could have gone with other potential co-conspirators, because they would have implicated the president. And I think he probably found that the impeachment process would be the best way to bring out the evidence against other co-conspirators, rather than using the criminal process. There is a statute of limitations. It’s not as though the president or members of his family got a clean bill of health today at all. It’s simply that Mr. Mueller wanted to clarify, also wanted to put some distance between himself and Attorney General Barr. And I think he did both in a way that was without the drama, was without the exclamation mark, but certainly allows people, elected officials, and the public to understand there’s a lot that still needs to be told here before the president could ever assert that he had nothing at all to do with the Russian effort to undermine our election.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right, Doug, let’s leave it there. I’ve been speaking with Professor Doug Colbert, who teaches criminal law and constitutional law, among other subjects, at the University of Maryland School of Law. Thank you so much for joining us today.

DOUG COLBERT: My pleasure. Thank you very much.

SHARMINI PERIES: Thank you for joining us here on The Real News Network.

 

Read more:

https://therealnews.com/stories/muellers-statement-why-is-it-unconstitut...

 

We're still sailing circles in foggy weather, while there is not a Russian in sight. Mueller is wiping his hands with self-soiled toilet paper... He was REALLY unable to find any Russian influence on the 2016 US presidential elections though he "suspects" (or not) that there was some "relationship" THAT DID NOT INFLUENCE THE RESULT...

 

Still in the dark? As mentioned many times on this site, the most influential sordid character who sunk Hillary la Madam Clinton was Uncle Rupe, that ULTRA-CONservative bloke from Aussieland. While everyone was looking at "the first female President's clean underpants", his media was quietly modifying the electoral landscape in some key states with the evangelicals, the farmers and the gun lobby... LOOK, you mugs, Uncle Rupe has just done the same caper once more in AUSTRALIA. And some people mentioned a "MEERAKLE". Bullshit.  We funken' know how Murdoch's media operatives work: it's not rocket science, but sledge-hammer psychological manipulation of the unwashable folks, the individual and collective brains of which is smaller than that of one gnat. Nothing new. 

 

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Why is it that special counsel Robert Mueller cannot say clearly and concisely what he means?

His nine-minute summary of the findings of his office, after two years of investigation, was a mess. It guaranteed that the internecine warfare that has poisoned our politics will continue into 2020.

If it was the intention of the Russian hackers and trolls of 2016 to sow discord within their great power rival, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Consider. Of the charge of conspiracy to collude with the Russians to hack the emails of the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Mueller said, “there was insufficient evidence to charge a larger conspiracy.”

This suggests that there was at least some evidence to conclude that Donald Trump’s campaign did conspire with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to fix the 2016 election, just not enough to sustain a charge of treason.

Didn’t they use to call this McCarthyism?

On obstruction of justice, Trump attempting to impede his investigation, Mueller said: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

“Mueller Declines to Absolve Trump” was the New York Times headline.

That tells us that Mueller would not give Trump absolution. But why would Trump need absolution if he did not commit the crime?

Mueller implied that his refusal to charge Trump publicly was based on a Justice Department ruling that presidents cannot be indicted.

But if the special counsel cannot indict a sitting president and ought not charge him, as, said Mueller, it is “unfair to accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge,” then what was the point of naming a special counsel?

If Mueller actually believes Trump was guilty of obstruction, why did he not forthrightly declare “While the Justice Department’s interpretation of the Constitution precludes my office us from indicting President Trump, we believe his actions during the course of our investigation constituted an obstruction of justice”?

At least we would have clarity. Now we have Mueller walking out without taking questions, and leaving us with this toxic mush.

Republicans should not let Mueller skate on this. For the James Comey-Mueller investigation is itself in need of investigation.

Among the questions that need answering: if, after two years, Mueller found “insufficient evidence” of collusion by Trump, what was the compelling evidence that justified launching the investigation during the Obama era?

Did that earlier “evidence” turn out to be false allegations and lies?

When did Mueller discover that George Papadopoulos and Carter Page were not agents of the GRU or KGB?

When did Mueller decide there was no collusion or conspiracy? Was it not until this spring? Or has Mueller known for a good while?

Why are these questions important? Because the investigation itself, leaving as it did a cloud over the legitimacy of the president, was damaging not only to Trump but also to the nation. As long as half the country believed Trump was an agent or asset or blackmail victim of Putin, America could not come together.

Did Mueller feel no obligation to clear up that false impression as swiftly and fully as possible, if, indeed, he believes it is false?

When did Mueller discover that the Steele dossier was the product of a dirt-diving operation financed by the Clinton campaign and fabricated by a Trump-hating ex-chief of British intelligence with long ties both to former agents of Russia’s FSB and James Comey’s FBI?

Did Mueller ever suspect that the investigation he inherited was a takedown operation, instigated by enemies of Trump who were determined that he never become president or, if he did, that his tenure would be short?

Mueller’s performance Wednesday has reinvigorated the impeach Trump caucus. But it has disserved the Democratic Party as much as it has the country.

The progressive left and its media auxiliaries, rabid on the subject, are egging on and cheering for candidates who call for impeachment. As of now, at least eight Democratic presidential candidates favor hearings.

The Democratic left is out to break Nancy Pelosi’s resistance.

If they succeed and this city and the nation turn their attention to a titanic battle to see if the Democratic Party can remove the Republican president, it will be bad news for the republic.

The real business of the nation will be put off until 2021.

Meanwhile, the Venezuela crisis is smoldering, and Senator Lindsey Graham is urging an ultimatum to Cuba to get its forces out.

North Korea is testing missiles again, and few believe Kim Jong-un will give up the security provided by his nuclear weapons.

And John Bolton is in the Middle East accusing Iran of acts of sabotage, war in Yemen and the Gulf, and making threats to American forces in Iraq.

Mueller’s assignment was to give us answers. After two years, he gave us options.

The nation will pay a price for such muddling indecisiveness.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

 

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https://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/the-hash-mueller-has-ma...

 

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Note that no Russians interfered with the 2016 US Presidential election. That Trump is a psycho or not is not a Mueller question. A lot of the witnesses in the case against Trump, from Comey to Papadopoulos, had no proof of anything. The Steele dossier was crap and Mueller spent two years collecting fairy tales... We expected better than this half-glass full of opaque mud.

New documents show the FBI was aware that the infamous dossier used as a pretext to spy on President Donald Trump’s campaign was unreliable, and that the New York Times published false information about the ‘Russiagate’ probe.

The two documents were published Friday by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), as part of an ongoing probe of the FBI’s investigation of Trump. One is a 59-page, heavily redacted interview of the “primary sub-source” for Christopher Steele, the British spy commissioned through a series of cut-outs by the Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump during the 2016 election campaign. 

While the identity of the source is hidden, the document makes it clear it was not a current or former Russian official, but a non-Russian employee of Steele’s British company, Orbis. The source’s testimony seriously questioned the claims made in the dossier – which is best known for the salacious accusation that Trump was being blackmailed by Russia with tapes of an alleged sex romp in a Moscow hotel.

The second, and more intriguing, document is a 5-page printout of a  February 14, 2017 article from the New York Times, along with 13 notes by Peter Strzok, one of the senior FBI agents handling the Russiagate probe. The article was published five days after the FBI interview with the sub-source, and Strzok actually shows awareness of it (in note 11, specifically).

In the very first note, Strzok labeled as “misleading and inaccurate” the claim by the New York Times that the Trump campaign had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials before the 2016 election, noting there was “no evidence” of this.

Likewise, Strzok denied the FBI was investigating Roger Stone (note 10) – a political operative eventually indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller over allegedly lying about (nonexistent) ties to WikiLeaks, whose sentence Trump recently commuted to outrage from ‘Russiagate’ proponents. Nor was Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort on any calls involving Russian government officials, contrary to the Times (note 3). 

Not only did the FBI know the story was false, in part based on the knowledge they had from Steele’s source, but the recently ousted FBI Director Jim Comey had openly disputed it in June 2017. The paper stood by its reporting.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/495125-fbi-strzok-documents-russiagate/

 

 

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An ex-FBI lawyer is expected to admit falsifying a document that was used as part of the inquiry into alleged Russian interference with the 2016 US presidential election.

Kevin Clinesmith's plea deal comes as prosecutors investigate the origins of the investigation by Robert Mueller.

His inquiry found no criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the Trump campaign, though it did not clear the president of obstructing justice. 

Mr Trump says it was a "witch hunt".

• Eight new things in the Mueller report
• Mueller: Trump was not exonerated by my report
• What does the special counsel do?

The president has repeatedly said there was no collusion with Russia resulting in his victory over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

What did the ex-FBI lawyer do?

Mr Clinesmith is due to accept responsibility for altering the contents of an email which was used to obtain permission to wiretap Trump campaign aide, Carter Page. 

The changes resulted in information being withheld from the court that authorised the surveillance.

"Kevin deeply regrets having altered the email," his lawyer Justin Shur told the Associated Press news agency. "It was never his intent to mislead the court or his colleagues, as he believed the information he relayed was accurate, but Kevin understands what he did was wrong and accepts responsibility."

 

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53784048

 

It is likely that Mueller knew that a document had been forged in order to "get Trump"... Either way, Mueller should have known that all he was doing for the best part of his two-years "investigation" was a lot of codswallop... Read from top.

Don’t believe the left: This anti-Trump FBI lawyer’s abuse was outrageous

By Post Editorial Board

August 14, 2020 | 8:09pm

Democrats — and their puppets in the media — are pooh-poohing news that anti-Trump ex-FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith will plead guilty to lying in Robert Mueller’s Russiagate probe.

They want you to believe it was all “an innocent mistake.” Don’t buy it. This is an outrageous case of official abuse.

Clinesmith, for starters, was not a bit player in Crossfire Hurricane — nor was he innocent. He changed an e-mail to delete the fact that Trump aide Carter Page had provided information to the CIA. His clear goal was to make Page’s interactions with foreigners look more suspicious — as if he was trying to hide information, rather than feeding intelligence to the United States. Clinesmith’s ultimate goal: further a dubious investigation of President Trump, whom he despised.

If the roles were reversed and a pro-Trump lawyer lied to hide info and promote an unwarranted investigation, Democrats would be screaming bloody murder.

Clinesmith also worked with another disgraced FBI official, Peter Strzok, to arrange sending an agent into the Trump-Michael Flynn counterintelligence briefing. He was one of the FBI lawyers who took part in interviews with George Papadopoulos in February 2017 and was a material part of the FISA process to obtain wiretaps.

Later, he himself was so concerned about his role in framing the Trump campaign that he wrote fretful text messages: “I am so stressed about what I could have done differently,” he sighed. “Plus, my god damned name is all over the legal documents investigating [Trump’s] staff.”

It’s beyond doubt that Clinesmith longed to see Trump toppled: In a Nov. 22, 2016, text message discussion about Trump, Clinesmith cheered: “Viva le Resistance!”

Make no mistake: A lawyer who worked for the nation’s top law-enforcement agency worked to take down the president. That’s a big deal. No matter what Democrats would have you believe.

 

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2020/08/14/dont-believe-the-left-this-anti-trump-fbi-lawyers-abuse-was-outrageous/

 

This editorial in the New York Post (a Murdoch rag) is fair enough. Even before the onset of Trump's presidency, the Obama administration's dogs were already working to make Trump's unimaginable victory a nightmare, just in case. Russiagate was a hoax and the Bidengate (the Ukrainegate) that led to impeachment proceedings of Trump should actually prevent Biden to get the presidency. But this is politics: dirty and deceitful, even at the hand of the progressives.

see also: selling shit sandwiches...

 

 

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WASHINGTON — The team led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, failed to do everything it could to determine what happened in the 2016 election, shying away from steps like subpoenaing President Trump and scrutinizing his finances out of fear that he would fire them, one of Mr. Mueller’s top lieutenants argued in a new book that serves as the first insider account of the inquiry.

“Had we used all available tools to uncover the truth, undeterred by the onslaught of the president’s unique powers to undermine our efforts?” wrote the former prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, adding, “I know the hard answer to that simple question: We could have done more.”

Mr. Weissmann sharply criticized the president as “lawless” but also accused Mr. Mueller’s deputy, Aaron M. Zebley, of being overly cautious, according to an account in The Atlantic of the book, “Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation.” Random House, which will publish the book next week, also provided an early copy to The New York Times on the condition that it not publish information from its own access until after an embargo that lifts at 7 p.m. on Monday.

Previously a longtime lawyer at the F.B.I. for Mr. Mueller, who was the bureau’s director for 12 years, Mr. Weissmann ran one of three major units for the special counsel’s office: Team M, which prosecuted Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort for numerous financial crimes.

Mr. Manafort had worked for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, and the investigation uncovered ties by his business partner, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, to Russian intelligence. The Mueller team learned that Mr. Manafort had shared internal campaign polling data with Mr. Kilimnik, who in turn sought Mr. Trump’s approval for a plan by which all of eastern Ukraine would be broken off, and Russia would essentially take over the region.

Mr. Manafort’s interactions with Mr. Kilimnik were also a major focus of a recent bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, which explicitly labeled Mr. Kilimnik a Russian intelligence agent. But investigators did not obtain any final puzzle pieces and lacked the evidence to charge anyone in the campaign with a criminal conspiracy to trade a promise of policy concessions for Russia’s covert electoral assistance.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/politics/andrew-weissmann-mueller.html

 

 

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Yep, the Mueller investigation, using fake indictments, could have done more, say till July 2025.6 and still not find a single speck of Russian payola in the election of Trump. But in this election year it's like gold to mention that "they could have done more digging"... MORE! And that after two years of finding nothing, they just could not let the bone fall on the ground, because they we so close to find more — more of nothing...