Notes on the Mueller Report: A Reading Diary

[brooklynite]

Lawfare

Thursday I surveyed the entire Mueller report. I read some sections carefully; I skimmed others. My job was to anchor Lawfare’s initial coverage, so I needed to have a sense of the big picture, as well as detailed knowledge of certain findings and arguments. Starting Friday, however, I am reading the entire document carefully, starting at the beginning. I’m writing up my thoughts as I go in this post. There will be no cohesive argument to this journal. It will simply be a collection of my observations, questions and thoughts as I go through the document. It will get long. I will not attempt to summarize the underlying document, merely to reflect on it, but I will organize this post by document section. I will update the post as I read. I hope people find it useful.

The following table of contents are links to the sections of this journal, which correspond to sections of the report itself:

Introduction to Volume I

This is a short little section, barely two pages, but it has several interesting items in it, starting with Mueller’s almost casual endorsement of the FBI’s historical account of the Russia investigation’s origins. In the middle of page 1, Mueller describes the investigation as beginning when “a foreign government contacted the FBI about a May 2016 encounter with Trump Campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos.” Papadopoulos, Mueller writes, had “suggested to a representative of that foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.” It was that information, the paragraph concludes, that “prompted the FBI on July 31, 2016, to open an investigation into whether individuals associated with the Trump Campaign were coordinating with the Russian government in its interference activities.”

Sorry, Devin Nunes. There's no mention of the Steele Dossier.

[empedocles]

1. Thank you brooklynite, this lawfare is exactly what I need to - got to get to it later.

[better]

2. One interesting snippet...

Two of the people contacted by Flynn were Barbara Ledeen and Peter Smith. Ledeen had been working on recovering the emails for a while already, Mueller reports. Smith, only weeks after Trump’s speech, sprang into action himself on the subject. The result was the operation about which Matt Tait wrote a firsthand account on Lawfare. “The investigation established that Smith communicated with at least [campaign officials] Flynn and [Sam] Clovis about his search for the deleted Clinton emails,” Mueller writes, though “the Office did not identify evidence that any of the listed individuals initiated or directed Smith’s efforts.” Ledeen obtained emails that proved to be not authentic. Smith, for his part, “drafted multiple emails stating or intimating that he was in contact with Russian hackers”—though Mueller notes that the investigation “did not establish that Smith was in contact with Russian hackers or that Smith, Ledeen, or other individuals in touch with the Trump Campaign ultimately obtained the deleted Clinton emails.”

In other words, it wasn’t that Trump was above dealing with Russian hackers to get Hillary Clinton’s emails. He not only called publicly on the Russians to deliver the goods on his opponent, but he also privately ordered his campaign to seek the material out. He did this knowing himself—clear from his public statements and very clear from the actions of those who acted on his request—that Russia would or might be the source.

The reason there’s no foul here is only that the whole thing was a wild conspiracy theory. The idea that the missing 30,000 emails had been retrieved was never more than conjecture, after all. The idea that they would be easily retrievable from the “dark web” was a kind of fantasy. In other words, even as a real hacking operation was going on, Trump personally, his campaign and his campaign followers were actively attempting to collude with a fake hacking operation that wasn’t going on.

It is not illegal to imagine stolen emails and try to retrieve them from imagined hackers. But it’s morally little different from being spoon-fed information by Russian intelligence. The Trump campaign was seeking exactly the spoon-feeding it was accused of taking; it just couldn’t manage to find the right spoon, and it kept missing when it tried to put any spoons in its mouth.