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Rare bipartisan moment: Both sides embrace Robert Mueller as special counselFor more than a year, while serving as a CIA officer, I was his daily intelligence briefer in his role as director of the FBI. Five, often six, days a week I delivered to him the president’s daily brief (PDB) as well as voluminous other pieces of intelligence information and analytic assessments, primarily on terrorism.
The relationship between daily intelligence briefers and their “customers,” as CIA officers for many decades have called senior policy makers, is a special one. The details of the briefing materials—including, but not limited to, information about intelligence sources and methods—and the sensitive conversations in that room remain sacred. I won’t discuss those things here, or anywhere.
But presenting complex information to Mueller, watching him digest it, answering his inevitable questions, and chatting with him and his staff on the margins of the sessions afforded me insight that I can appropriately share regarding his approach to complex problem sets—from L’Affaire Russe to Mueller’s personal style. This experience gave me confidence then about the fight against terrorism and the integrity of the Bureau under his watch, and it gives me confidence now in the work he is doing as special counsel.
What stood out to me most upon my starting the job, just months after 9/11, were Mueller’s attention to detail and his desire to understand how the CIA analysts arrived at their assessments. For a while, most of my briefings devolved into de facto intelligence hazing rituals. I discovered the hard way that when my presentation casually offered judgments lacking robust sourcing or logic, Mueller would ask me about the substantiation or argumentation until either my desperate searching through background materials could satisfy him or—more often in those first few months—I admitted that I’d have to get back to him after talking to the experts on that issue.
He wasn’t sending me down rabbit holes for the joy of doing so; he simply didn’t seem to trust analysis anchored to weak evidence or unclear reasoning.
As he investigates Trump's aides, Robert Mueller's record shows surprising flawsToday, nearly three eventful decades later, what makes this Great Escape more than just a faded episode from yesteryear’s gangland chronicles, but rather relevant and even instructive, is the identity of the man who ultimately had to sign off on the operation: then U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Robert Mueller.
It is, one person close the administration recently observed, a “classic Gambino-style roll-up.” To understand how Mueller might now proceed, to get a sense of the compromises he’d be willing to make to bag the larger prosecutorial targets in his sights, it’s eye-opening to go back to the deal he cut with Sammy the Bull.
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The questions I have for all those who have been counting on Mueller proving collusion with Russia is, will you be able to handle the truth, whatever that truth is? What will CNN, MSNBC, and 90% of print media do if Mueller came up with nothing on Trump? Will they have any kind of response that admits they were wrong to assume he was guilty? Will they probe deeper into how the whole investigation was started based on a fake dossier paid for by his opponent (yes, I know, it was all because of Popodopolus who got a couple weeks in jail...haha). Will they look into how the FISA warrants were obtained and if the investigation was tainted with bias? (and it was)homeagain wrote: www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-rus...-probe-idUSKCN1R3195
TEAM M. is the true north for our nation......THIS is the reason the king is spinning and spewing shit.....his demands are being met with dismissal and decidedly defiant actions. The
TRUTH is his enemy and it is emerging that his reign is coming to a conclusion.jmo
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[/b]Rick wrote:
The questions I have for all those who have been counting on Mueller proving collusion with Russia is, will you be able to handle the truth, whatever that truth is? What will CNN, MSNBC, and 90% of print media do if Mueller came up with nothing on Trump? Will they have any kind of response that admits they were wrong to assume he was guilty? Will they probe deeper into how the whole investigation was started based on a fake dossier paid for by his opponent (yes, I know, it was all because of Popodopolus who got a couple weeks in jail...haha). Will they look into how the FISA warrants were obtained and if the investigation was tainted with bias? (and it was)homeagain wrote: www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-rus...-probe-idUSKCN1R3195
TEAM M. is the true north for our nation......THIS is the reason the king is spinning and spewing shit.....his demands are being met with dismissal and decidedly defiant actions. The
TRUTH is his enemy and it is emerging that his reign is coming to a conclusion.jmo
I'll tell you the answer to all these questions... NO, not ever. This whole thing will be dropped like a rock and your fine sources will move onto the next shiny object for you to chase. There will never be any apologies from Democrats who claimed Trump was some kind of Russian agent, never, It will be pretty embarrassing for those of you who have staked the last two years of this partisan investigation on being able to take down the president... but you too will move on and never want to speak of this again.
And if Trump is so king-like, why would he have allowed all of this to go on for two years? I thought kings had that kind of power... I guess not.
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When Mueller is finished, he must turn in a “confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions” — essentially why he chose to bring charges against some people but not others. His reasoning, according to veterans of such investigations, could be as simple as “there wasn’t enough evidence” to support a winning court case.
Then, it will be up to DOJ leaders to make the politically turbo-charged decision of whether to make Mueller’s report public.
Government officials will first get a chance to scrub the special counsel’s findings for classified details, though, involving everything from foreign intelligence sources to information gleaned during grand jury testimony that the law forbids the government from disclosing.
As for the crafting of the report itself, Mueller has significant leeway. He can theoretically be as expansive as he wants. But sources who have worked closely with Mueller during his lengthy career at the Justice Department say his by-the-books, conservative style is likely to win out, suggesting he might lean more toward saying less than more.
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homeagain wrote:
YOU(Rick) do not know me.....I am straight up and IF I am wrong, I will be the very first to
state so......it's called integrity and wisdom to own up to your errors.
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Rick, #1 is particularly for you, and as I've said before the investigation did NOT start with the Steele dossier (and why does everyone keep ignoring that Steele was first hired by Republicans, not Hilary?). It began with counterintelligence intercepting communications that indicated members of Trump's campaign were working with Russians. Trump himself was warned that Flynn, whom he chose as his National Security Advisor, was a Russian asset by Obama and Sally Yates, yet he ignored that advice. Flynn, whom I will remind you the judge presiding over his trial said: "In the White House! In the West Wing. By a high ranking security officer who up to that point had an unblemished career of service to his country,” the judge said. “It's a very serious offense. ... Arguably, this undermines everything this flag over here stands for! Arguably, you sold your country out!"Robert Mueller’s report is finally here and without having read it I can make you a promise: It isn’t going to settle anything.
Fights like this never end conclusively. The subject is too big and complicated to give a single, clean inarguable answer. And people’s partisanship is too strong to override a consensus consideration of the merits at scale.
So what are you supposed to do if you’re in the camp that’s persuadable and wants to take the Mueller report seriously? There are three things: read the report; grapple with the facts; and try to come to reasonable conclusions—accepting right out of the gate that all stories this big will be messy and incomplete.
But before you read the report, there are four arguments that you are absolutely, positively, 100 percent going to hear from Trump supporters that you should dismiss out of hand:
(1) It’s fruit of the poisonous tree.
(2) None of this is about Russian collusion.
(3) It’s not an impeachable offense.
(4) There’s no smoking gun.
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