Posted on 07/12/2019 3:25:48 PM PDT by Jack Black
A Robert Mueller with a surprisingly frail voice took to the lectern on May 29, 2019. Visibly uncomfortable, he delivered a puzzling address to reporters curious about the strangely timed press conference. Mueller spoke for a few minutes until arriving at what now appears to be the real purpose of the press conference: damage control.
“As the grand jury alleged in a separate indictment, a private Russian entity engaged in a social media operation, where Russian citizens posed as Americans in order to influence an election,” he said. “These indictments contain allegations, and we are not commenting on the guilt or the innocence of any specific defendant. Every defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.”
We already knew at that point that Mueller had worked with Attorney General William Barr to redact the report to remove references which could harm “ongoing investigations,” or infringe on the privacy of “peripheral third parties.” But he overlooked one category in redactions: Prosecutors aren’t supposed to try cases in newspapers and press conferences.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
It's clear that the Judge sided heavily with Concord Management in their complaint, and was on the verge of issuing contempt findings against the State.
Mueller's presser may have prevented that. The fight they lost was this: both the Mueller Report and Barr had made the assertion that Concord Management and Catering, the Russian firm that showed up to answer charges of election interference in running the so-called "troll farm", were directed by or working for the Russian government.
But the actual indictments againt Concord do not include that allegation.
Prosecutors are not allowed to give press conferences expounding on the guilt of the defedant before the trial, nor are they allowed to make prejudicial allegations about accused people.
The Judge agreed that the DOJ had violated this long standing rule with both the Mueller Report, and Barr's comments in his Congressional testimony.
She ordered the Prosecution to stop saying that Concord was working for or directed by the Russians.
It's amusing, if a bit time consuming to read.
I'll cut to the decision at the end (page 47):
Now comes the fun part, hopefully. Imagine one of the GOP Congressmen closely questioning Mueller on this, to force the soundbite:THE COURT: So I am not going to rule now. I am going to order some supplemental briefing on this issue.
First, I want to direct the parties to abide moving forward by Local Criminal Rule 57.7(b), and I want to make clear that any willful failure to do so will result in the initiation of contempt proceedings.
I am also going to direct the government to refrain from making or authorizing any future public statement that links the alleged conspiracy in the indictment to the Russian government or its agencies.
And to the extent the government makes or authorizes any public statement about the allegations in the indictment, any such statement must make clear that, one, the government is summarizing the allegations in the indictment which remain unproven and, two, the government does not express an opinion on the defendant's guilt or innocence or the strength of the evidence in this case.
CONGRESSMAN TRUEBLUE: "So, Mr. Mueller, does your report allege that the "Social Media Operation" which you say was run by Concord Management and Consulting, was a Russian government operation, either paid for, supervised or directed by the Russian Government or its agencies?"
MUELLER: "Uh, ah, no, Congressman, we do not."
CONGRESSMAN TRUEBLUE: "How would you describe Concord then, in your own words? Were they merely a private entity"
MUELLER: Yes.
CONGRESSMAN TRUEBLUE:
Yes, I'm sorry please be more specific and answer directly: What sort of organization was Concord catering? A government run entity, a government contractor, a charity, a private business entity?
MUELLER: A private business entity.
CONGRESSMAN TRUEBLUE: And, in your estimation they were not working for or directed by the Kremlin or any other Russian government agency or entity?
MUELLER: No, they were not.
CONGRESSMAN TRUEBLUE: So, as far as you allege, they were working on their own.
MUELLER: Yes, that's right.
CONGRESSMAN TRUEBLUE: Thank you, I surrender the remainder of my time and yield back to the chair.
Maybe of interest to your Qrowd, if you haven't seen it yet.
Just some little happenstance coinky dink, huh? Come on, they were working for someone. Lets hear the names.
Republicans first need to get him to say clearly that there is no such connection alleged, and then read him the salient portions of the Mueller Report, and ask him "so this was incorrect, then? This is a mistake in the Mueller report?
CONGRESSMAN TRUEBLUE: How many other mistakes are you now aware of in your report, Mr. Mueller?
Blasphemy.
That lot of worthy insiders knew that stuff sixteen years ago.
Check yo self.
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/07/12/concord-management-and-the-end-of-russiagate/
the latest I could find.
The indictment doesn't make the allegation that troll farm was driven, reported to, or had any relationship to Russian government, but that very insinuation was made in the January 2017 "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections": The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution.
This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment; its conclusions are identical to those in the highly classified assessment but this version does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the influence campaign. ...Moscow's use of disclosures during the US election was unprecedented, but its influence campaign otherwise followed a longstanding Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations--such as cyber activity--with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or "trolls."
The government is engaged in advancing falsehood to the public and withholding supporting evidence under the cover of classified information. This tactic breaks down under court process, but is very effective in manipulating public impression via the press and Congress.
Heh. I tried to post that as a thread. Source is unwelcome on FR.
sorry
Concord Management and the End of Russiagate?
Don’t look now, but a federal judge in Washington, D.C., has just shut down half of Robert Mueller’s Russian-interference case.
In February 2018, the special prosecutor indicted a St. Petersburg troll farm called the Internet Research Agency along with two other companies, their owner, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, and 12 employees. The charge: fraud, traveling to the United States under false pretenses, and using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to “sow discord” and “interfere in US political and electoral processes without detection of their Russian affiliation.”
The charge was both legally dubious and heavy-handed, a case of using a sledge hammer to swat a fly. But Mueller went even further in his report, an expurgated version of which was made public in April. No longer just a Russian company, the IRA was now an arm of the Russian government. “[T]he Special Counsel’s investigation,” it declared on page one, “established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election principally through two operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working in the Clinton campaign and then released stolen documents.”
[snip]
Contrary to internet chatter, Friedrich did not offer an opinion as to whether the IRA-Kremlin connection is true or false. Rather, she told the special prosecutor to keep quiet because such statements go beyond the scope of the original indictment and are therefore prejudicial to the defendant. But it may be a distinction without a difference since the only evidence that Mueller puts forth in the public version of his report is a New York Times article from February 2018 entitled “Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian Oligarch Indicted by US, Is Known as ‘Putin’s Cook.’”
It’s a case of trial by press clip that should have been laughed out of court – and now, more or less, it is. Without the IRA, the only argument left in Mueller’s brief is that Russia stole some 28,000 emails and other electronic documents from Democratic National Committee computers and then passed them along to WikiLeaks, which published them to great fanfare in July 2016.
But...that’s dubious as well. The reason: it rests on a timeline that doesn’t make sense.
[more at link]
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/07/12/concord-management-and-the-end-of-russiagate/
LANGUAGE WARNING - Loads of F-bombs and other cursing.
It's an awesome dissection in spite of the language.
The Mueller Indictments Are A F**king Joke & It's Dangerous [Web Exclusive] (15:09)
The bottom line is this company in Russia is a click-bait farm. They had no interest in interfering with our election or creating any chaos here.
It existed only to make money through the cyber equivalent of creating and selling client lists.
Oh, I found the article informative, and seeing as how I tried to post it as a thread, I think others should read it. I was just informing you of the experience I had trying to post it yesterday.
Ah you got there first :-)
Thanks for finding it.
As skeptics have pointed out, the IRA’s social-media campaign was both more modest and more ineffectual then the Mueller report’s over-the-top language about a “sweeping and systematic” conspiracy would suggest. Yet after Facebook Vice President Rob Goldman tweeted that “the majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election,” he was forced to beg for forgiveness like a defendant in a Moscow show trial for daring to play down the magnitude of the crime.But it wasn’t Goldman who shaved the truth. Rather, it was Mueller. Thanks to the unexpected appearance of Concord Management, he’s now paying the price.
There are two allegations against Russia in the Mueller Report, each tracks to one indictment. The Concord one is truly weird.
In discussion with my 'tard acquaintances I've asked the questions over and over - what makes this illegal?
At this point, now that the Feds have dropped the claim that Concord was acting on behalf of a foreign government, we are left with they are being charged with some mix of the above.
If it's illegal for foreigners to try to influence an American election or politics using social media then Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are going to need to cut off all the French, British and other European left-wing hipsters posting anti-Trump memes on their pages.
If it's illegal for foreigners to post aobut our politics on Social Media all those Google and Microsoft employees here on H1-B visas, who opine continuously about the evils of Orange Man need to be indicted, and just like the company Concord was indicted for what it's employees did to unduly influence an American Election (TM), well the volume and impact of H1-Bs from the tech giants probably outweighs Concord's contribution by orders of magnitude.
Where are the indictments?
If Barr believes in the Concord witch-hunt, then I hope he extends it to the wide audience of "criminals" out there who are foreign and looking to influence American Elections (TM) on Facebook.
The net is world wide. Anyone can post something. Free speech is limited or should be limited only by porn or “yelling fire”. P>Opinions is one of the purposes of twitter and the like.
They seem designed to be circulated for fun. They "attacked" all sides, and at other points sided with all sides, too.
There were anti-immigrant memes, anti-patriot memes, pro-patriot memes, anti-white-racist memes, white-racist memes, anti-Islam memes, pro Islam memes, pro-gay memes, anti-gay memes, etc.
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