ERIC ZUESSE -- Why a Special Counsel Should Be Appointed to Investigate Robert Mueller

ERIC ZUESSE | 07.11.2017 | WORLD

Why a Special Counsel Should Be Appointed to Investigate Robert Mueller

Some of the finest investigative journalists have recently documented different parts of what constitutes, in its totality, a single consistent narrative portrayal of Robert Mueller, as being a person who can be understood only as either incredibly incompetent, or else profoundly corrupt (which latter they all seem to be agreeing that he actually is). This complete collective picture of Mueller, as being profoundly corrupt, will be presented here, with links to all of the journalists’ articles, each of which, I have personally checked and verified its sources. Consequently, I accept as true, and here summarize, their collective account of Robert Mueller — the former FBI Director and current Special Counsel assigned to assemble a case for impeaching President Trump — as being a profoundly corrupt person:

The basic presentation here will be that supplied by the anonymous owner of, and a writer for, a blog for which I also happen to write, Washingtonsblog, who headlined on November 1st, "13 Shocking Facts About Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller”. (That report was also posted on November 2nd at Zero Hedge, which has a much larger audience.) It’s the best report I’ve ever seen regarding Mueller’s consistent background of doing crucial cover-up work on behalf of America’s aristocracy, and I urge anyone who has an open mind about Mr. Mueller to read the entirety of it, because I think that its sources, all of which are linked to and are highly credible, constitute a prima-facie case (that’s at least comparable to an indictment), for Mueller’s being profoundly corrupt. The report includes, among other features: Mueller's assistance to the Fethullah Gulen CIA-linked global Islamic organization that Turkey claims organized the NATO-assisted failed 2016 coup-attempt, for which Turkey has demanded and the US Government still refuses, to extradite to Turkey Mr. Gulen; and, also, Mueller's involvement in the BCCI scandal; and, also, his having urged Congress, on 11 February 2003, that Iraq was the biggest state-sponsor of terrorism and should be invaded (none of which was true, and he was in a top position to know that it wasn’t); and, also, his having blocked FBI investigators who were hot on the trail of 9/11 terrorists before 9/11 occurred; and, also, his having blocked the post-9/11 investigators from having access to crucial information they needed in order for them to get to the bottom of whom the financiers behind the 9/11 attacks were.

Then, we’ll be discussing Sibel Edmonds’s, "Targeting Michael Flynn & Shielding the Radical Cleric Gulen: Special Counsel Robert Mueller MUST Step Down”.

And, finally, we’ll be discussing Andrew Cockburn’s article “Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial?”

Although the washingtonsblog article briefly mentioned and linked-to the two articles by Edmonds and by Cockburn, the present article will be focusing especially on, and will be quoting far more extensively from, those two articles; but, as was earlier mentioned, the main part of our presentation is what was provided in that washingtonsblog article, which is thus the preliminary to this one, which is an extension of that article. 

To start with, here, regarding the testimony Mueller provided to Congress five weeks before we invaded Iraq, when he was being consulted by Congress as an expert on what had been learned from the tortures that the US had authorized to be applied to 9/11 suspects, here is from the key portion of his presentation to the Congress, on 11 February 2003:

Mr. Chairman, although the most serious terrorist threat is from non-state actors, we remain vigilant against the potential threat posed by state sponsors of terrorism. The seven countries designated as State Sponsors of Terrorism — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea — remain active in the US and continue to support terrorist groups that have targeted Americans.

Although Iran remains a significant concern for its continued financial and logistical support of terrorism, Iraq has moved to the top of my list. As we previously briefed this Committee, Iraq's WMD program poses a clear threat to our national security, a threat that will certainly increase in the event of future military action against Iraq. Baghdad has the capability and, we presume, the will to use biological, chemical, or radiological weapons against US domestic targets in the event of a US invasion. We are also concerned about terrorist organizations with direct ties to Iraq. … Northern Iraq has emerged as an increasingly important operational base for al-Qaeda associates, and a US-Iraq war could prompt Baghdad to more directly engage al-Qaeda.

As to whether he had simply been fooled by liars, Mueller had himself participated in the creation of the bad ‘investigative’ practices, which had helped to cause false testimony from suspects. As one official testified, “Mueller was even okay with the CIA conducting torture programs after his own agents warned against participation.” So, Mueller was supportive of President George W. Bush’s aim to coerce (by torturing) suspects to supply ‘evidence’ that Saddam Hussein had been behind the 9/11 attacks; and, as the FBI chief, Mueller enforced such lie-generating practices even though he had been informed by the FBI’s own experts that it would only produce ’testimony’ so unreliable that it couldn’t stand up in any court of law. Was his support of torture really due to Mueller not knowing this? How likely is it that he knew better than the FBI’s own experts about such a matter? And, if he didn’t ‘know’ better than the FBI’s own expert interrogators — as subsequently became clear — then why did he take upon himself the demanding of his agents to participate in producing coerced ’testimony’ that was too unreliable to stand up in court? Isn’t he supposed to be a lawyer, and don’t lawyers know that ’testimony’ obtained under torture, or the threat of torture — or even under any type of coercion at all — is inadmissible in a court of law, in a democracy? Isn’t this knowledge basic? Would Mueller have passed a US citizenship test, if he were applying, and if the examiner were to ask well-informed follow-up questions about the admissibility of coerced testimony?

This is just a small part of the evidence that’s supplied in the washingtonsblog article, showing Mueller to be either incredibly incompetent, or else profoundly corrupt.

The next article, then, to be mentioned and linked-to here will be the one by Sibel Edmonds, who had been fired by the FBI in March 2002 for trying to make public some of the things that Mueller had done in order to obstruct the FBI’s investigators who were on the trail of some of the 9/11 terrorists prior to the attacks, and also to obstruct the work of the 9/11 Commission, and of the US Congress’s more reliable 858-page JOINT INQUIRY INTO INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES BEFORE AND AFTER THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. Famously, “the missing 28 pages” from that congressional report were withheld from the public until 15 July 2016. The very end of “the missing 28 pages” is also the very bottom of the web-page about “the missing 28 pages”; it’s the end of page 443 of the 858-page congressional report about 9/11; and it says:

In the October 9, 2002 closed hearing, Director Mueller acknowledged that he became aware of some of the facts regarding the Saudi issue only as a result of the investigative work of the Joint Inquiry Staff:

“I’m saying the sequence of events here, I think the staff probed and, as a result of the probing, some facts came to light here and to me, frankly, that had not come to light before, and perhaps would not have come to light had the staff not probed. That’s what I’m telling you. So I’m agreeing with you that the staff probing brought out facts that may not have come to this Committee.”

Senator Dewine: “But what you’re also saying though is that probing then brought facts to your attention.”

Director Mueller: “Yes.”

In other words: though his field agents, whose work he had squelched, had been urgently trying to obtain from their superiors an authorization to launch an intensive investigation into the matters that “the missing 28 pages” dealt with (which was the financing, and possible direction, of the 9/11 attacks, by top officials of the Saudi Government), Mueller told Congress, on 9 October 2002, that because “the staff” of the congressional investigation “probed” into this FBI information, this information that his agents had actually tried so hard to get him to support and investigate further “came to light … and perhaps would not have come to light had the [congressional] staff not probed.”

That passage can also be seen on page 35 of the original, here. (This pdf of it is supplied here because that testimony from Mueller was so unbelievable, that intelligent readers here will be skeptical that he actually implied that Congress’s staff had dug up new information which even Mueller’s own FBI didn’t know about — information that he himself had actually personally squelched.) Mueller was obviously perjuring himself to Congress there (his assertion was ludicrously false, especially because he was the person who had required this information to be hidden and squelched), and this would be one of the matters that a Special Prosecutor would need to be obtaining, from Mueller, testimony under cross-examination, to find what defense Mueller might have, against a perjury charge on that matter.

Here, then, is the very opening of the October 24th article by the former FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, "Targeting Michael Flynn & Shielding the Radical Cleric Gulen: Special Counsel Robert Mueller MUST Step Down”:

General Michael Flynn, Former National Security Advisor to President Trump, is being investigated by Special Counsel for accepting legitimate payments from Turkish companies for researching and exposing Wanted Terrorist and Radical Islamist Fethullah Gulen and his $25+ Billion criminal network in the United States.

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is Special Counsel in charge of the case. He is the same Robert Mueller who used his position as Director of the FBI to shield and cover up Gulen’s criminal-terrorist network and operations, and take drastic measures to quash a whistleblower’s Gulen-related reports. These previous connections and actions by Mr. Mueller create a direct conflict of interest with his current position as Special Counsel in Flynn’s case, and require that he must immediately step down from the case.

………………………………………..

In May 2017 the Justice Department appointed Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, as special counsel to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.

Not long after being appointed Mr. Mueller began targeting former national security adviser Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, expanded the investigation beyond the Russia-Gate probe, and began a furious pursuit of Mr. Flynn’s Turkish connections and his vocal stand on the wanted radical Islamic Cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Mr. Mueller’s inquiries went from Russia-connections to Flynn’s outing of Gulen’s twenty five-billion-dollar sleeper terror cell in the United States. Not finding any substantial evidence against Flynn within the Russia-Gate scope, the Special Counsel team switched gears and started a Turkey-Gate. During the past several months Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors have used multiple grand juries to issue subpoenas for documents related to Mr. Flynn. All this despite President Trump’s demand that:

Mr. Mueller should confine his investigation to the narrow issue of Russia’s attempts to disrupt last year’s presidential campaign, not conduct an expansive inquiry into the finances of Mr. Trump or his associates.

Mr. Mueller’s prosecution team and F.B.I. agents have spent hours going over the details of Mr. Flynn’s perfectly legitimate business dealings with a Turkish-American businessman who worked with Mr. Flynn’s consulting business, the Flynn Intel Group. Why? Because the business arrangements included research for and exposure of the world’s largest radical Islamist network, operating in the United States for over two decades- the Gulen Network.

The targeting of Mr. Flynn through consolidated Obama Whitehouse leaks and one-sided media attacks began six months prior to the Special Counsel appointment. It started with an editorial penned by Mr. Flynn on November 8, 2016, when he became the first public official to unabashedly expose the radical cleric long protected by multiple government agencies- the CIA, State Department and FBI, starting under President Bill Clinton’s administration:

The primary bone of contention between the US and Turkey is Fethullah Gülen, a shady Islamic mullah residing in Pennsylvania whom former President Clinton once called his “friend” in a well circulated video.

Gülen portrays himself as a moderate, but he is in fact a radical Islamist. He has publicly boasted about his “soldiers” waiting for his orders to do whatever he directs them to do. ...

And, finally, excerpts will be presented here from the terrific 7-part article “Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial?” by Andrew Cockburn in the October 2017 Harper’s — an article that was mentioned only at one other mainstream newsmedium, "Democracy Now”, and that I believe would have received far bigger coverage than it did, if only it hadn’t been so good, exposing so much that’s forbidden to expose to a mass-audience in America (and so Harper’s itself was courageous to publish this).

Here is just one passage from it:

The reason we know so much about the West Coast activities of the hijackers is largely because of Michael Jacobson, a burly former FBI lawyer and counterterrorism analyst who worked as an investigator for the Joint Inquiry. Reviewing files at FBI headquarters, he came across a stray reference to a bureau informant in San Diego who had known one of the hijackers. Intrigued, he decided to follow up in the San Diego field office. Bob Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me recently that Robert Mueller, then the FBI director (and now the special counsel investigating connections between Russia and the Trump campaign) made “the strongest objections” to Jacobson and his colleagues visiting San Diego.

Graham and his team defied Mueller’s efforts, and Jacobson flew west. There he discovered that his hunch was correct. The FBI files in California were replete with extraordinary and damning details, notably the hijackers’ close relationship with Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi living in San Diego with a no-show job at a local company with connections to the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation. The FBI had investigated his possible connections to Saudi intelligence. A couple of weeks after the two hijackers flew into Los Angeles from Malaysia, in February 2000, he had driven up to the city and met with Fahad al-Thumairy, a cleric employed by his country’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs who worked out of the Saudi Consulate. Thumairy, reported to be an adherent of extreme Wahhabi ideology — he was later denied a US visa on grounds of jihadi connections — was also an imam of the King Fahad mosque in Los Angeles County, which the hijackers had visited soon after their arrival.

After meeting with Thumairy, Bayoumi had driven across town to a Middle Eastern restaurant where he “accidentally” encountered and introduced himself to Hazmi and Mihdhar. He invited them to move to San Diego, found them an apartment, paid their first month’s rent, helped them open a bank account, and introduced them to members of the local Saudi community, including his close friend Osama Bassnan.

During the time Bayoumi was catering to the hijackers’ needs, his salary as a ghost employee of the aviation company got a 700 percent boost; it was cut when they left town. That was not his only source of extra funds: After Hazmi and Mihdhar arrived in San Diego, Bassnan’s wife began signing over to Bayoumi’s wife the checks she received from the wife of the Saudi ambassador in Washington. The total value reportedly came to nearly $150,000.

Jacobson also found evidence, noted but seemingly ignored by the bureau, that Hazmi had worked for a San Diego businessman who had himself been the subject of an FBI counterterrorism investigation. Even more amazingly, the two hijackers had been close with an FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh. Hazmi had actually lived in his house after Mihdhar left town. Shaikh failed to mention his young Saudi friends’ last names in regular reports to his FBI case officer, or that they were taking flying lessons. Understandably, the investigators had a lot of questions for this man. Nevertheless, Mueller adamantly refused their demands to interview him, even when backed by a congressional subpoena, and removed Shaikh to an undisclosed location “for his own safety.” Today, Graham believes that Mueller was acting under orders from the White House.

Another intriguing document unearthed by the investigators in San Diego was a memo from July 2, 2002, discussing alleged financial connections between the September 11 hijackers, Saudi government officials, and members of the Saudi royal family. It stated that there was “incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi Government.”

Back in 2002, Graham himself was already coming to the conclusion that the 9/11 attacks could not have been the work of a stand-alone terrorist cell. As he later wrote, “I believed almost intuitively that the terrorists who pulled off this attack must have had an elaborate support network, abroad and in the USA.,” with expenses far exceeding the official estimate of $250,000. “For that reason,” he continued, “as well as because of the benefits that come with the confidentiality of diplomatic cover, this infrastructure of support was probably maintained, at least in part, by a nation-state.”

I asked Graham whether he believed that a careful search of the FBI files in Florida and elsewhere would yield similarly explosive disclosures. He told me that the inquiry would have doubtless discovered whom the hijackers were associating with in those places, and where that money came from. Fifteen years on, Graham still regretted not having pursued the possibility of revelatory FBI files in those other locations “aggressively.” Instead, he lamented, the inquiry ended up “with San Diego being the microscope through which we’ve been looking at this whole plot.”

And, here is another passage, this one describing how a US Congress that’s usually owned by the Saud family via their and their friends’ lobbying, came ultimately to vote to pass the “JASTA” or Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, even over President Obama’s veto of it: 

There was one foreign state threatening to strike back at the United States if JASTA became law. Visiting Washington in March 2016, before Congress began voting on the measure, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir explicitly warned that his government might sell its portfolio of “$750 billion” in US Treasury bonds, thereby crashing the market in government securities, should JASTA become law. (The figure was a wild exaggeration — US Treasury figures showed that the real amount was $117 billion.)

Even with all the threats and warnings, the House passed the bill that September, whereupon Obama announced he would veto it, which he duly did. The battle resumed with greater intensity as both sides prepared another vote. “President Obama, you can’t hide! We’ll get Congress to override,” protesters chanted outside the White House.

Despite frantic efforts by the administration, and ranks of lobbyists for the Saudis, the Senate crushed Obama’s veto, 97 to 1. It was the first and only time Obama suffered such an indignity. Reportedly, he was “furious.” Meanwhile, bipartisan pressure to release the censored twenty-eight pages in Graham’s original report had been building for some time, led by congressmen such as the Democrat Stephen Lynch and the Republican Walter Jones. Jones, once a fervent hawk, had turned sharply dovish, through guilt, as he told me, over voting for the Iraq war on the basis of “lies.” (He writes a letter of condolence to the family of every single casualty of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) Jones, Lynch, and others on both sides of the aisle held regular press conferences about the twenty-eight pages “to keep a drumbeat going to give the 9/11 families the complete truth.”

With the exception of that committed group, Owens was not impressed by what she found on Capitol Hill. Most of the senators and representatives she met didn’t seem to care who was behind 9/11. “They just didn’t want to be seen as voting against the 9/11 families. So they would vote yes for it, and then try to sabotage it behind the scenes. . . . Washington is an ugly place.” Encouraging this assessment was her discovery that at the very moment they were voting almost unanimously for the bill, a significant number of senators from both parties were quietly circulating and signing a letter citing “concerns” regarding JASTA’s “potential unintended consequences” to “the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” In effect, they were suggesting that the law they had just been seen enthusiastically supporting be weakened.

My conclusions:

Of course, an honest Special Prosecutor would be able to get to the bottom of this, and perhaps my reading of the situation is overlooking some important facts, which are yet to be revealed; but, I think that, at the present stage, a reasonable hypothesis, as regards whom Mueller has consistently been protecting here, can be presented:

President Bush was a buddy of the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, nicknamed “Bandar Bush.” Former US Senator Bob Graham "believes that Mueller was acting under orders from the White House.” That “White House” was George W. Bush, a friend of the Sauds and especially of Prince Bandar. Everybody knows that Bush and Cheney protected the members of the Saud family who live in the United States, to allow them to escape unquestioned from the US right after the 9/11 attacks. Afterward, both Bush and Obama protected the Sauds to the fullest extent possible, and Obama even vetoed the bill allowing the lawsuit by the 9/11 families against the Saudi Government (namely, against the family who own it) to go forward. Congress reluctantly but overwhelmingly overrode Obama’s veto (because doing otherwise would have been seen as scandalous by the voters back home).

Mueller’s entire record is consistent with his being an agent for both the Bush and Saud families, and this would mean he’s an agent of both the US and Saudi aristocracies, a “fox guarding the chicken coop” before and after the 9/11 invasion. He was selected to be the Special Prosecutor by the American Establishment in order to force US President Donald Trump to do even more than he has thus far done in service to the Sauds. Previously, Trump had allowed, which even President Obama did not, a world-record all-time high $350 billion sale during the next ten years to the Sauds, of US-made weaponry. Though it’s gigantic, the multi-trillionaire Sauds won’t be paying for it only with their money but also with the money extracted from the Saudi public, whom they also own. For the Sauds, it’s a long-held dream come true, to gain all this killing-power against Shiites, in Syria, Iran, Yemen, and elsewhere. And, Trump has come out strongly against the two countries whose governments the Sauds desperately want overthrown and replaced by Saudi vassal-states: Syria, and Iran. But what else can they extract from Trump? Perhaps Trump’s more-direct support for the Sauds’ recent blockade against Qatar (which had recently quit the Sauds’ war against Shia). Perhaps also Trump’s sending far more American soldiers and weapons into Syria to overthrow the Shiite Bashar al-Assad there. But, above all, the Sauds would be seeking from Trump maximum actions to weaken or deactivate JASTA so as to continue the cover-up of who financed and organized the 9/11 attacks. And, what would be the pressure in order to achieve those ends? Impeachment of the President, if Trump fails to come up with these ultimate payments to the Sauds. And, who would be the best person to apply that pressure? Robert Mueller. George W. Bush himself recently went public urging America to replace Trump by his Vice President Mike Pence via impeachment, which is the objective for which Bob Mueller was appointed. The Bush family and the Saud family want to replace Donald Trump by Mike Pence.

If Mr. Mueller will succeed at this task, he’ll have a terrific retirement — that’s for sure.