See the next act of the RussiaGate clown show!

Summary – After two years of RussiaGate, we have enough data to conclude that it is a clown show. Here James Kunstler discusses the next act: Mueller’s performance before Congress. In the Afterword I explain the significance of it all.

Preparing for the Mueller hearings in Congress.

What Goes Around

James Howard Kunstler at his website.
Reposted with his generous permission.

Just how dead is the RussiaGate story – and how brain-dead are the House Democratic Committee chairmen, Nadler (Judiciary Committee) and Schiff (Intelligence Committee) to haul RussiaGate’s front-man, Robert Mueller back into the spotlight where the next thing to roll over and die will be Mr. Mueller’s evanescent reputation? The entrapment operation that was the Special Counsel’s covert mission has turned out to be Mr. Mueller own personal booby-trap, prompting the question: is it possible that he’s just not very bright?

Though Mr. Mueller’s final report asserted that the Russian government interfered in “a sweeping and systemic fashion” to influence the 2016 election, the 450-page great tome contains zero evidence to support that claim, and the discrepancy was actually noticed by federal judge Dabney Friedrich who is presiding over the case against the alleged Russian Facebook trolls that was one of the two tent-poles in the RussiaGate fantasy. The case is now blowing up in Robert Mueller’s face.

In early 2018, Mr. Mueller sold a DC grand jury on producing indictments against a Russian outfit called the Internet Research Agency and its parent company Concord Management, owned by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin for the so-called election meddling. The indictment was celebrated as a huge coup at the time by the likes of CNN and The New York Times, styled as a silver bullet in the heart of the Trump presidency. But the indicted parties were all in Russia, and could not be extradited, and there was zero expectation that any actual trial would ever take place – leaving Mueller & Co. off-the-hook for proving their allegations.

To the great surprise of Mr. Mueller and his “team,” Mr. Prigozhin hired some American lawyers to defend his company in court. Smooth move. It automatically triggered the discovery process, by which the accused is entitled to see the evidence that prosecutors hold. It turned out that Mr. Mueller’s team had no evidence that the Russian government was involved with the Facebook pranks. This annoyed Judge Friedrich, who ordered Mr. Mueller and his lawyers to desist making public statements about Concord and IRA’s alleged “sweeping and systemic” collusion with Russia, and threatened legal sanctions if they did.

“Rule 57.7 imposes a general duty on lawyers in criminal cases ‘not to release or authorize the release of information or opinion …if there is a reasonable likelihood that such dissemination will interfere with a fair trial or otherwise prejudice the due administration of justice.'” {From Judge Friedrich’s ruling.}

Judge Friedrich’s rulings were unsealed in early July, after Messers Nadler and Schiff had already scheduled Mr. Mueller’s testimony before their committees. And now they’re stuck with him. The only purpose of his appearance was to repeat and reinforce the narrative that the Russian government interfered in the election, which he is now forbidden to do, at least in connection to the Concord and IRA’s activities. But the other tentpole of the two-year-plus inquisition has also collapsed: the allegation that Russian intel hacked the DNC servers. It’s now a matter of public record that the DNC servers were never examined by federal officials. They were purportedly scrutinized by a DNC contractor called CrowdStrike, co-founded by Russian Dimitri Alperovitch, an adversary of Vladimir Putin, active in US-based anti-Putin lobbying and PR. CrowdStrike’s “draft” report on their review of the server was laughably incomplete, and the Mueller team’s lawyers took no steps to validate it.

It would be interesting to hear Robert Mueller’s explanation for how come US computer forensic experts were never dispatched to take possession of the DNC servers. Surely a ranking member on either House committee would have to ask him that, along with many other embarrassing questions about the stupendously sloppy and disingenuous work of the Special Counsel’s team. It was only one glaring omission among many.

The whole affair now takes on tragic contours of Shakespearean dimensions. The Attorney General, Mr. Barr, is said to be an “old friend” of Mr. Mueller. They clashed pretty publicly after the release of Mr. Mueller’s long-awaited final report. Mr. Barr must at least be dismayed by the bad faith and deliberate deceit in his old friend’s final report, and he really has to do something about it.

The entire Mueller episode smacks of prosecutorial misconduct. In retrospect, it can only be explained as a desperate act undertaken by foolishly overconfident political activists. If Mr. Mueller thought he was being enlisted to play a historically heroic role to help get rid of an elected president detested by the Establishment, then he made the blunder of a lifetime. It was not the first blunder of his long career, but it was the final and fatal one. It is not out of the question that Mr. Mueller himself may eventually be the one indicted and convicted of real crimes against the people of the United States.

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Editor’s afterword

Don’t tell people we are in ClownWorld. It would scare them.

As was quickly evident, RussiaGate is vast beyond the average citizen’s ability to see and understand. Too many people with too many interrelationships. Too many stories with too many unknowns. Too many confident claims with no supporting evidence. Too many lies, creating layers of deception.

Chasing them down to form a coherent picture is almost impossible. The Mueller report is almost 450 pages, leaves out important aspects of the story, and raises as many questions as it answers. Many of those are central to the narrative. For example, why did Russian officials reveal to Christopher Steele the biggest intel op ever – the suborning of a US President. What did Steele pay them? How quickly did Putin execute them?

After two years, RussiaGate looks like the clown show at a Circus. Asking them about the facts and logic of their performance gets only new antics from the clowns.

I wonder if the complexity of RussiaGate is intentional, to make analysis difficult. Structurally, RussiaGate looks like the JFK assassination. Both are kaleidoscopes of conspiracy theories, impossible to resolve. Whatever the truth of these events, they well serve our ruling elites. They keep us in turmoil, divided and weak, distracted from vital issues.

That the public policy arena is obsessed with such a mess, neglecting urgent and serious problems, is appropriate for ClownWorld!

About James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler (Wikipedia) worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, before working as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he began writing books on a full-time basis. Kunstler is the author of 12 novels and has been a regular contributor to many major media, writing about environmental and economic issues. He is a leading supporter of the movement known as “New Urbanism.”

He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, and many other colleges. He has written five non-fiction books. See more about the most recent one below.

• The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (1993),
• Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century (1996),
• The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition (2001),
• The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Cent (2005),
• Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation (2012).

See some of his recent posts about America. They’re all well worth reading!

• Marching to Gilead – About our detente with North Korea.
• Sunset Boulevard with Chimp – About Michael Jackson.
• The Blind Leading the Deaf and Dumb – about the resistance.

For More Information

Ideas! For some shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.

Please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more information see all posts about RussiaGate, about the Mueller report, about ways to reform America’s politics, and especially these …

1. A review of Russiagate, its propaganda and hysteria.
2. Secrets untold about the DNC hack, the core of RussiaGate.
3. Debunking RussiaGate, attempts to stop the new Cold War.
4. RussiaGate: fragments of a story large beyond imagining.
5. The RussiaGate story implodes. The Left burns with it – by Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report.
6. Peter van Buren shows the path to RussiaGate.
7. The best analysis of RussiaGate: its effects & results – By Emmet T. Flood, special counsel to the President.
8. Craig Murray reveals the mysteries of Mueller’s investigation.
9. The next step: finding the origins of the RussiaGate op.

Books revealing the Deep State

I strongly recommend reading The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren (2016). See the Forward to it. See my review of it.

The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy by Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and professor emeritus at Berkeley (2017). See his website.