The Briefing Room
General Category => Trump Legal Investigations => Topic started by: mystery-ak on January 03, 2019, 03:27:37 pm
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WSJ: Prepare to yawn at Mueller’s final report
Ed MorrisseyPosted at 5:01 pm on January 2, 2019
A new year offers the best chance for optimism, but perhaps the Wall Street Journal might be overdoing it here. We may be only a few weeks away from the end of Robert Mueller’s investigation, but Holman Jenkins advises everyone to scale down their expectations for any blockbusters in the special counsel’s final report. There won’t be much fire to go with all the media-created smoke, Jenkins predicts, but there would be more to report if Mueller focused on the real problem of the 2016 election — a counterintelligence establishment that tried to interfere with the election:
Maybe the story here is simply one of unintended consequences. Maybe it all comes down to an overly bumptious FBI chief who couldn’t let pass an opportunity to be really, really important. But I don’t think so. Before there was the Steele dossier or the warrant to eavesdrop on Carter Page, there was the Hillary email investigation, which we now know launched a series of intelligence-agency interventions in U.S. domestic politics in which ostensible concerns about Russian intelligence activities were opportunistically entwined with anti-Trump motives.
Especially if you’re unhappy about Mr. Trump, this untold story shrieks for more attention. Unfortunately, much of the alleged reporting consists of waiting around for anti-Trump tidbits to be dropped in the press’s lap. Mr. Mueller himself has taken a tack seemingly designed to make sure that, even after the desired collusion is not found, the FBI’s pre-election activities seem justified.
Mr. Mueller might well issue a report in 2019 that concocts a confection of guilt by innuendo based on the Russia-related dealings and statements of Mr. Trump and the people around him. Alternatively, he could clear the air: Mr. Trump’s election was the doing of the American voter and nobody else.
But it’s already pretty obvious that he’s not going to tell us anything that will greatly shift our understanding of the 2016 race. Whereas, in the still-classified appendix of the Justice Department inspector general’s report on Mr. Comey’s actions are the beginnings of an untold and important story: how U.S. intelligence agencies, using Russia as an excuse, fiddled ineptly and improperly in our election and quite conceivably undermined the Hillary victory they were so obviously trying to secure.
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https://hotair.com/archives/2019/01/02/wsj-prepare-yawn-muellers-final-report/