Opinion | What Mueller Won’t Say
wsj.com
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Fifteen months ago I suggested a likely model for the Mueller report. It was the report that Robert Mueller, as a private lawyer, prepared for the National Football League focusing on the narrow question of whether the league office had seen or possessed a copy of a hotel surveillance video of player Ray Rice striking his girlfriend. Another investigator, retired federal judge Barbara Jones, took on the task of laying out the larger context of the league’s gross mishandling of the Rice case apart from the tiny, exculpating factoid that Mr. Mueller was assigned to document.
Though we’ve seen only a few words of the Mueller report, I’m going out on a limb to predict this is exactly what we’re going to get.
His painstaking and comprehensive effort to find out if the widely promoted “collusion” suspicions against Donald Trump had any basis in fact was, in a true sense, a public service. But there was never evidence of this crime in the first place, and therefore no reason, if the Justice Department’s own rules mean anything, to appoint a special counsel.
What’s more, by the time Mr. Mueller got his hands on the matter, it had already been the subject of a 10-month-long FBI counterintelligence investigation, using the full resources of the U.S. intelligence community, commanded at the highest level of the bureau. This investigation, in the words of Peter Strzok as he contemplated switching over to the Mueller task force, already seemed to indicate that there was “no big there there.”
Look at the exact words of Attorney General William Barr: “The Special Counsel and his staff thoroughly investigated allegations that members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump . . . conspired with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
How is it possible to investigate these “allegations” without holding the Steele dossier, the only real evidence ever offered by those accusing Mr. Trump, up to the light? Mr. Mueller, in investigating Mr. Trump’s associates, made ample use of his coercive powers, including the fact that it’s a crime to lie to the FBI. Did he use the same leverage to get to the bottom of the document that played a key role in originating his investigation? Who really wrote it? Were there any Russian sources at all?
Here’s betting the word “Steele” won’t even appear in Mr. Mueller’s report. He will have his reasons, but this will be the exact equivalent of his deliberately myopic NFL investigation.
We are tired of saying it but there never was anything about the Steele dossier that should have commanded the credulity of a journalist or any other serious inquirer. It doesn’t matter whether the person putting it forward is Christopher Steele or Abraham Lincoln: A claim put forward by somebody who won’t vouch for its accuracy, who got it third-hand through a series of sources he can’t or won’t identify, is a claim that, to a journalist, is worth nothing.
In journalism, we validate statements. Period. That’s the whole job. For about 100 years, the essence of journalistic education has been to teach elementary discipline about the handling of facts, like the need for multiple independent sources. This training is how our industry gets useful work out of employees whose judgment, intelligence and veracity readers otherwise would have no reason to trust. As recent events have proved, let these disciplines slip even a bit, let reporters fall back on their native judgment and instincts and preferred “narratives,” and readers quickly learn just how well-founded such distrust is.
Mr. Barr enumerates: The Mueller team employed 59 professional lawyers and investigators, interviewed 500 witnesses, consulted 13 foreign governments, and executed thousands of search warrants and subpoenas. All this in pursuit of criminal activity for which there was no evidence, on which the full might of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies had already been fruitlessly employed for nearly a year.
For any “intelligence community” worth the name, or any other astute inquisitor, the question long since would have become: How did Mr. Steele, a foreign national secretly promoting wholly unsubstantiated claims from anonymous alleged foreign sources, manage to so scandalize and disrupt our politics for two years with fabricated accusations? Our intelligence community is not interested in this question because the answers would embarrass and likely incriminate its own members.
Unless Mr. Mueller’s report includes a lengthy section showing he made full use of his powers to get to the bottom of the Steele dossier, it will be worse than a coverup. On the contrary: The Mueller investigation’s very existence is itself a triumph of those who promoted the dossier. The whole episode remains a how-to for the next campaign that wants to exploit politicized law-enforcement agencies and a compliant media to give fabricated slanders an aura of legitimacy. |
