Is the Mueller Report the Son of the Steele Dossier?

Rep. Devin Nunes chairs a Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on China’s Worldwide Military Expansion at U.S. Congress in Washington on May 17, 2018. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Commentary

Hesitant about working my way through the Mueller report, I found myself gratified to hear Rep. Devin Nunes’s assessment of the thing.

According to Nunes (R-Calif.), there is only one item of relevance in the entire 450-page document. While it is an item of significance, it confirms something many have long suspected.

Nunes explained that on Page 11, there is a veiled disclosure to the effect that the “scope memo,” the directive that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave special counsel Robert Mueller in August 2017, included “the Steele dossier, the Clinton dirt, the Clinton-paid-for dirt as part of the memo for the special counsel that directed the special counsel what to do.”

Nunes elaborated on the implications:

“The Mueller report ignored a wide range of abuses committed during the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. And now, with the revelation that the Special Counsel was authorized at the outset to investigate Carter Page for allegedly colluding with Russians to hack the election, it’s clear that false allegations from the Steele dossier played a major role not only in the FISA warrant application on Page, but in the appointment of the Special Counsel as well.”

As numb as we are to the machinations of the anti-Trump conspiracy, this is a crowning outrage.

It means the Mueller report is more than just a prosecutor’s brief written, as Frank Miehle put it, “by Democrats for Democrats.” It means it is more than just a political salvo to reshape the anti-Trump battlefield, as discussed here, by surrendering the “Russian collusion” narrative—Mueller likely knew for at least 18 months it was a fake—while falling back to the phony Russian hacking story as the Deep State’s vital line of defense against exposure of its role in a criminal conspiracy to overturn an election.

Given this confirmation that the Steele dossier was used not only as “evidence” to authorize spying on the Trump campaign and presidency, but also as “evidence” to further investigate the Trump campaign and presidency by the special counsel, the resulting Mueller report is really the Son of the Steele dossier.

Think about it. So long as anyone pretends the Mueller report is anything but an extension of the Steele dossier disinformation campaign to overturn the 2016 election and destroy the presidency of Donald Trump, the hoaxing continues. Yes, the report says there was “no collusion,” but we already knew that. We didn’t need Mueller & Co. to tell us that.

This helps explain why it was so unsettling, to say the least, to hear Attorney General William Barr commend Mueller in his remarks on the report’s release:

“I would also like to thank special counsel Mueller for his service and the thoroughness of his investigation, particularly his work exposing the nature of Russia’s attempts to interfere in our electoral process.”

An “investigation” predicated on a hoax (the Steele dossier) is nothing to be commended by any principled law enforcement officer—and certainly not for its “thoroughness,” not when the special counsel ignored, as Nunes pointed out, “a wide range of abuses committed during the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign.”

The dirty little secret is this: Had the special counsel investigated these same FBI abuses, he would have exposed the Steele dossier hoax at its core, and thus pulled the plug on the anti-Trump conspiracy operating inside the Washington Swamp.

This, however, is the last thing a Deep State denizen such as Mueller would ever do; indeed, it is more likely that he did all in his power to ensure that such an investigation never comes to fruition.

Of all people, surely Barr understands this, even as he pretends the Mueller investigation proceeded legitimately. Note, too, that Barr congratulated Mueller especially for “his work exposing the nature of Russia’s attempts to interfere in our electoral process.”

This is troubling. Not for the first time, Barr has aligned himself with Mueller to perpetuate the unproven allegation that “the Russians” “hacked” the DNC server and conveyed emails revealing that the DNC “colluded” with Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders to Wikileaks—a foundational myth of the “Trump–Russia” disinformation campaign. (For all of his vaunted “thoroughness,” Mueller did not even interview WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, although that didn’t stop Mueller from making grievous accusations against Assange.)

The basic fact to hold onto is that this unproven allegation of “Russian hacking” depends on the say-so of a partisan actor—a DNC contractor named Crowdstrike (co-founded by Shawn Henry, a protégé of Mueller). Incredible but true: The DNC claimed that its server was cyber-attacked by a hostile foreign power, but the FBI never confirmed it.

Crowdstrike’s analysis, meanwhile, has been called into serious question by research conducted by VIPS, a group of retired intelligence professionals led by two former technical directors of the National Security Agency. VIPS’s analysis points to a “leak” of the emails from within the DNC organization, not an external “hack” from a foreign intelligence service.

It would seem, then, that a stream of disinformation continues to course through the Democratic Party into our government, polluting our nation’s life and times with the Steele dossier, the Crowdstrike analysis, and, now, the Mueller report.

Will our government ever become clean again? Not until we recognize how dirty it has become.

Diana West is an award-winning journalist and author whose latest book is “The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.