The House Democrats’ ongoing debate about whether to push for a full-blown impeachment proceeding may be dominating the news, along with President Trump’s visit to the UK, but the Mueller report isn’t going away, especially after more tidbits about the investigation itself are coming to light. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is gone. His investigation is over. And yet, we have stories about key witness’s child porn charges being ignored. The Federalist’s Sean Davis did not mince words. He feels that the Mueller report that debunked Russian collusion showed that the special counsel and his team of die-hard Democrats tried to prove that there was such a conspiracy. For two years, they dug and found nothing. Now, after being unable to give Democrats the impeachment ammunition the needed, Mueller, in his exiting presser, all but gave the green light to start such proceedings. It’s that presser that many saw this whole investigation as nothing more than a political hit job and a perversion of a basic tenet of our legal system: innocent until proven guilty. Granted, a lot of us already knew there was no collusion.
I mean after the 456thbombshell on this story that had zero evidence to back it up—because there was none—the writing was on the wall months ago. The liberal media continued to peddle it, however, because Trump Derangement Syndrome is real and the Left is desperate to get rid of the president. As for the FBI, well, did they even verify the Trump dossier that was compiled by ex-MI6 spy Christopher Steele and used reportedly as credible evidence to secure a FISA spy warrant against Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign? Based on these glaring errors in the report, don’t bet the mortgage on it. Also, the State Department knew this document, funded by the Democrats and the Clinton campaign, was biased political opposition research. John Solomon of The Hill has been doing excellent work tracking the sordid details of this investigation. So, while the focus is on the DOJ/FBI for their alleged misdeed with this investigation, the State Department could be yanked into this storm:
Donald Trump’s campaign, it sat buried for more than 2 1/2 years in the files of a high-ranking State Department official.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec’s written account of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline.
And that confession occurred 10 days before the FBI used Steele’s now-discredited dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s ties to Russia.
And now we have this omission about a Russian who was actually a State Department intelligence source, though he’s portrayed as some nefarious Kremlin operative working with Paul Manafort. Solomon detailed this “deception by omission” in a lengthy piece (via The Hill) [emphasis mine]:
In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence.
But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
Why Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny.
[…]
Kilimnik was not just any run-of-the-mill source, either.
He interacted with the chief political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, sometimes meeting several times a week to provide information on the Ukraine government. He relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words, the memos show.
The FBI knew all of this, well before the Mueller investigation concluded.
Alan Purcell, the chief political officer at the Kiev embassy from 2014 to 2017, told FBI agents that State officials, including senior embassy officials Alexander Kasanof and Eric Schultz, deemed Kilimnik to be such a valuable asset that they kept his name out of cables for fear he would be compromised by leaks to WikiLeaks.
[...]
Three sources with direct knowledge of the inner workings of Mueller’s office confirmed to me that the special prosecutor’s team had all of the FBI interviews with State officials, as well as Kilimnik’s intelligence reports to the U.S. Embassy, well before they portrayed him as a Russian sympathizer tied to Moscow intelligence or charged Kilimnik with participating with Manafort in a scheme to obstruct the Russia investigation.
Kasanof’s and Purcell’s interviews are corroborated by scores of State Department emails I reviewed that contain regular intelligence from Kilimnik on happenings inside the Yanukovych administration, the Crimea conflict and Ukrainian and Russian politics. For example, the memos show Kilimnik provided real-time intelligence on everything from whose star in the administration was rising or falling to efforts at stuffing ballot boxes in Ukrainian elections.
Those emails raise further doubt about the Mueller report’s portrayal of Kilimnik as a Russian agent. They show Kilimnik was allowed to visit the United States twice in 2016 to meet with State officials, a clear sign he wasn’t flagged in visa databases as a foreign intelligence threat.
The emails also show how misleading, by omission, the Mueller report’s public portrayal of Kilimnik turns out to be.
For instance, the report makes a big deal about Kilimnik’s meeting with Manafort in August 2016 at the Trump Tower in New York.
By that time, Manafort had served as Trump’s campaign chairman for several months but was about to resign because of a growing controversy about the millions of dollars Manafort accepted as a foreign lobbyist for Yanukovych’s party.
Specifically, the Mueller report flagged Kilimnik’s delivery of a peace plan to the Trump campaign for settling the two-year-old Crimea conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
“Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine,” the Mueller report stated.
But State emails showed Kilimnik first delivered a version of his peace plan in May 2016 to the Obama administration during a visit to Washington. Kasanof, his former handler at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, had been promoted to a top policy position at State, and the two met for dinner on May 5, 2016.
[…]
So Kilimnik’s delivery of the peace plan to the Trump campaign in August 2016 was flagged by Mueller as potentially nefarious, but its earlier delivery to the Obama administration wasn’t mentioned. That’s what many in the intelligence world might call “deception by omission.”
Yeah, sounds like “deception by omission” indeed. I’ll let you debate among yourselves, but this sounds like another example that the Mueller team tried to twist the fact in order to prove that Trump-Russia myth was real. At the same time, while the staff was loaded with liberal Democrats, I see that as a positive. There was nothing to this investigation and that fact that only partisan lefties were digging and still found nothing only adds more credibility to the conclusion: no collusion. There’s no way to pivot away from this. No wonder why Attorney General Barr is investigating the investigators who conducted this circus.
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