Reuter’s Fake News on the Mueller Indictment

In a busy news week (but aren’t they all these days?) I can barely keep up to read what’s going on, never mind look more deeply into an issue and analyze it.  However, certain things stick out.  And with the latest Mueller indictment of 12 Russian GRU Cyber warriors, a couple of things stuck out.

The Reuters headline to the story, “U.S. indictments show technical evidence for Russian hacking accusations,” was eye popping because I’m not familiar with indictments actually containing evidence, but it wasn’t just a headline blurb that some editor pasted on someone else’s story, it was in the body of the story too:

“SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – U.S. indictments against a dozen Russian intelligence officers on Friday provided detailed technical evidence to back up allegations of Russian hacking and leaking of information to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

The indictment tells a compelling and detailed story, but no evidence.  But such is the strength of Reuter’s reputation that I had a weekend long online argument about whether the indictment consists of “evidence” or not.  But the story in the indictment is good that I didn’t believe that Mueller’s team could have gotten this information.  It had to come from US intelligence sources.  If there is any “evidence’ it resides there, as the article seemed to admit further down:

“Some researchers said the indictment might have depended on U.S. signals intelligence, the fruits of which are rarely revealed, because it quotes electronic messages sent to an unidentified organization presumed to be London-based WikiLeaks.”

Signals Intelligence from the NSA or some other agency makes more sense, but how in the world would that end up in a Justice Department Independent Counsel indictment?  Was it declassified?  Where did it come from?

Well according to Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House select committee on intelligence, in a Daily Caller article:

“…an Intelligence Committee report released to the public on April 27 contained “almost everything” laid out in Mueller’s indictment, which was handed down Friday.

The indictment accuses military intelligence officers with Russia’s GRU of hacking into the DNC and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton campaign’s computer networks and releasing stolen documents through the fake online personas, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks.

Nunes said in an interview on “Fox Sunday Futures” that much of the information was included in Chapter 2 of the House Intelligence Committee’s report, but it was heavily redacted in response to requests from the Department of Justice and intelligence community.”

Hmm.

“Nunes said that the committee’s investigators have had information on the Russian spies for over a year. The committee began investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign back in January 2017. Committee Republicans ended their investigation on March 12, saying that they found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.

Nunes said that if the information in the Intelligence Committee’s report had been declassified, “the American people would have known we basically wrote the indictment for Mueller.””

So Nunes is claiming that virtually the entire indictment was lifted from the classified portion of his committee’s report.  A couple of questions come to mind.

Did Mueller get those portions of the report declassified so he could include it on his indictment?

If so, why couldn’t the House Intelligence Committee release these portions of their report?

If Mueller didn’t get the story of the indictment from the House report, where did he get it from?  An intelligence community leak?

If this information wasn’t declassified, didn’t someone or multiple someone’s release that information illegally?

In any case, whether the release was legal or not, it seems the only place this could have come from was the intelligence community, meaning the actual evidence, sources and methods and classified reports, would NEVER be used in an open court.  There is no way to actually prosecute these 12 Russians, even if you get them in the United States and standing before a judge.

It’s Concord Management all over again.

So this is not only fake news, it’s a fake indictment as well.  It’s a good thing that I no longer concentrate on every detail of these investigations in the same way I used to do.  It seems every time I do, I discover I’ve wasted my time on fake news and fake investigations.

 

In SCOTUS Wars, the Dems Main Attack is Fake News

Last night, President Trump barely had the name “Kavanaugh” escape his lips when the MSM started ginning up their smear mill.  This article, deceptively titled Supreme Court nominee has argued Presidents should not be distracted by investigations or lawsuits, was posted on The Washington Post website at 9:01 pm; a minute before Trump had even declared his pick.

So the online commentary started immediately, with this article as the source to declare that Kavanaugh doesn’t believe that the President has to comply with subpoena. The truth is all right there, you just have to sift for it.  The way the Post article described it is thus:

“U.S. Circuit Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy who was nominated replace him, has argued that presidents should not be distracted by civil lawsuits, criminal investigations or even questions from a prosecutor or defense attorney while in office.

Kavanaugh had direct personal experience that informed his 2009 article for the Minnesota Law Review: He helped investigate President Bill Clinton as part of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s team and then served for five years as a close aide to President George W. Bush.

Having observed the weighty issues that can consume a president, Kavanaugh wrote, the nation’s chief executive should be exempt from “time-consuming and distracting” lawsuits and investigations, which “would ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national security crisis.””

But what did Kavanaugh actually write in the Minnesota Law Review?

“…With that in mind, it would be appropriate for Congress to

enact a statute providing that any personal civil suits against

presidents, like certain members of the military, be deferred

while the President is in office. The result the Supreme Court

reached in Clinton v. Jones—that presidents are not constitutionally

entitled to deferral of civil suits—may well have been

entirely correct; that is beyond the scope of this inquiry. But

the Court in Jones stated that Congress is free to provide a

temporary deferral of civil suits while the President is in office.

Congress may be wise to do so, just as it has done for certain

members of the military. Deferral would allow the President

to focus on the vital duties he was elected to perform.”

So what Kavanaugh actually said was that although he thinks it would be a good thing if a President had relief from suits while in office, he agreed with the Court decision in Clinton v. Jones that said he didn’t, and that relief could only come from the legislature.  So Kavanaugh isn’t going to rule that Trump can ignore any subpoenas from the Muller investigation (which is why the left has gone so crazy about this).

It took me all of about 5 minutes to research this and figure it out, but then, I’m not part of the journalist community, who were reporting the left wing blogosphere’s version all day today.

These reporters would really make me feel smart; if I wasn’t so sure they knew exactly what they were doing and were purposefully crafting phony attack lines to feed to an unaware public.