[NOTE: For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that Robert Mueller was not acting when he seemed vague yesterday. I think this is a correct assumption, although I’m aware of theories to the contrary. I believe that, although Mueller has a history of certain strengths, Oscar-worthy acting is not among them. It wasn’t just his denials and vagueness, it was the relative consistency of those qualities during his testimony. His performance, if indeed it was a performance, was just too pitch-perfect and of-a-piece to be a job of acting.]
So what can we conclude about Robert Mueller and the Mueller Report from yesterday’s congressional testimony by Mueller?
The great majority of onlookers on the right have concluded that it’s highly unlikely that he had much to do with the report that bears his name, or even the investigation it purports to describe. That is troubling, and another troubling aspect of it is that somehow this didn’t get reported previously by our fabulously thorough and brilliant (not to mention objective) MSM.
Funny thing, though, we have an article yesterday in the NY Times explaining what they euphemistically call Mueller’s “hands off” approach:
Soon after the special counsel’s office opened in 2017, some aides noticed that Robert S. Mueller III kept noticeably shorter hours than he had as F.B.I. director, when he showed up at the bureau daily at 6 a.m. and often worked nights.
He seemed to cede substantial responsibility to his top deputies, including Aaron Zebley, who managed day-to-day operations and often reported on the investigation’s progress up the chain in the Justice Department. As negotiations with President Trump’s lawyers about interviewing him dragged on, for example, Mr. Mueller took part less and less, according to people familiar with how the office worked.
That hands-off style was on display Wednesday when Mr. Mueller testified for about seven hours before two House committees.
And the Times knew nothing of this till now? So either they are incompetent as reporters, or they were covering it up. But Now It Can Be Told, because the cat is out of the bag, due to the dogged persistence of Jerry Nadler.
The Times tries to explain it this way:
The team’s loyalty to Mr. Mueller, who insisted on a leakproof operation, remains deep. Little has emerged about the inner workings of the special counsel’s office even in the weeks since the team disbanded in May.
But what has dribbled out suggests that Mr. Mueller’s wobbly performance might not have come as a surprise to his subordinates.
But somehow the Times manages to get leaks when it thinks it will benefit the left. A report on Mueller’s lack of involvement in his own investigation, however, wouldn’t have benefited anyone but Trump had it gotten out earlier. So funny thing, we’ve had no news on it till now. Now, however, it can act as an explanation for Mueller’s poor performance and reassure the troops that the Mueller Report [sic] was written by people other than Mueller, who did know what they were doing.
Questions abound, of course. One is: who actually supervised instead of Mueller, and who actually wrote the report? The Times is suggesting that the answer to the former question is “Aaron Zebley,” and the answer to the latter question is “the group of [Democrat-partisan] lawyers who worked on it under the figurehead Mueller and the real Zebley.”
In that article I just quoted, the Times only identifies Zebley as “a long-time aide of Mueller’s.” But the paper also wrote still another article focusing on Zebley’s lengthy career, some of it in the same law firm as Mueller, and some of it as a federal prosecutor as well as for the FBI, and much of it in association with Mueller.
However, the author of that Times piece entitled “Who Is Aaron Zebley” somehow neglected to mention—of this newly-important figure—that in 2015-2016 Zebley had been (as reported in the Washington Examiner) the counsel to Justin Cooper, who was:
…the controversial IT aide to Hillary Clinton who set up her private email server and smashed some of her mobile devices with a hammer.
Now, a lawyer’s defense of someone doesn’t mean that a person is in league with his client in any political way. But it certainly is a salient fact for the public to know, and the crackerjack reporters on those two Times pieces somehow manage to leave it out.
My questions are as follows: if Mueller was just a figurehead, why didn’t this fact become known, and how bad was the situation? Was he originally more functional, or did people know right from the start that he couldn’t do the job, and was the plan always to have the others set the tone and control the all-important “narrative”?
Perhaps we’ll find some of these things out some day. But if we ever do, I doubt it will be because the Times does its own investigative reporting on it.
