US Politics: Mueller Report Insinuations

Insinuendo: Why the Mueller Report Repeats So Much

7-1-19, * -- The Mueller report should have been a knockout blow to anti-Trump forces who invested their hopes in the special counsel. With Robert Mueller’s finding that the Trump campaign did not conspire with Russia to steal the 2016 election and that there was no clear path to indicting the president for obstruction; the enterprise should have shuddered to a stop. It didn’t.

Those who were at first dumbfounded by the special counsel’s report have since found reasons to be buoyed by it – by its grudging tone, its sly assertions resembling proof, and its insistence that not being found guilty should not be confused with innocence. If you had to pick a single sentence that captures the style and substance of Mueller’s tome, you’d find it on page 2:
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“A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.”

Ever since the debunking of Trump-Russia dirt [Steele’s so called ‘dossier’**] paid for by the Democrats and compiled by the opposition firm Fusion GPS, government officials and conspiracists have insisted that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with launching the investigation. The story is that the FBI flew into action after learning that Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos had made an alarming statement to an Australian diplomat in a London bar, telling him about Russian intentions to interfere with the U.S. election.

A closer reading of the 448-page Mueller Report reveals that the special counsel used a number of rhetorical devices to couch evidence and craft a narrative so the document - that ultimately clears the president - can also be read as an indictment as follows:

1. The report is very contentious; it's not a set of findings so much as an assertion of what the findings might have been if only there had been more evidence. It’s like a closing argument in a criminal case already dismissed for lack of evidence, but the prosecutor is determined to redeem what he can.
2. A variety of strategies a were used:
   1. Use of extraneous detail to add heft to flimsy assertions
   2. Use of insinuation and innuendo to prejudice the reader against the innocent accused.
   3. The descriptor “received indications,” which is even more amorphous than “suggested.”  An “indication” could be anything from a light flashing Morse code to one of the grifters in “The Sting” putting a finger to the side of his nose.
   4. Repetition and redundancy: George Papadopoulos - from page 1 the special counsel is eager to establish the narrative that that Papadopoulos, not Steele, sparked the initial investigation. [..] repeated on page 6, Mueller writes, “Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton.” And nearly word for word is repeated again on pages 81, 89, 93 and veiled on page 192.
   5. Insinuation and innuendo, spinuendo known as insinuendo: describing what would otherwise seem to be innocent actions with a raised eyebrow, implying some sort of ill-defined wrongdoing. Carter Page – the Naval Academy graduate whom the FBI spied on after it made dubious claims to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance [FISA] Court -- is a particular target using this technique.

Once upon a time, professors frowned on prose cluttered with extraneous detail.  Some 120 years ago, John Franklin Genung wrote a widely used primer, “The Working Principles of Rhetoric.” He labeled as “the untutored” writers “to whom wasted time in fixing some date or circumstance that is of no consequence; who take as much pains with utterly irrelevant details as with essential.”
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John Franklin Genung would not have smiled on the Mueller team’s efforts. 

Democrat members of the House have secured Mueller’s agreement to testify [July 17, 2019] we shall see what new techniques he comes up with to imply President Trump is guilty of 'something!'

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*Excerpted and adapted full original report by Eric Felten, RealClearInvestigations here 
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/06/28/insinuendo_why_the_muller_report_doth_repeat_so_much_.html
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**Transcript of the 35 page, 2016, ‘Dossier’ here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984-Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.html