First of all, it's clear that Mueller had extensive power to invest to investigate the Russian collusion narrative. He had the power to interview witnesses and send them to jail if they lied. Some were sent to jail for lying, but none were caught lying about Russian collusion. Mueller also had access to the extensive electronic surveillance records of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. These presumably processed much of the "proof" that Russia tried to hack our election in favor of Trump. (Though most this proof is classified and hasn't been made public.)
While there is evidence that every instance of Russia/Putin cited in the Mueller Report was initiated by western intelligence, I believe the case of Joseph Mifsud is sufficient to prove that the Mueller Report was based upon a false premise and was unwilling to acknowledge the truth. Please see my post, Joseph Mifsud, Western Intelligence Asset.
Other reputed collusion with Russian agents have been discredited, in my view, including Steele, Kislyak, Kilimnik, Oknyansky, Sater, and Veselnitskaya.
Other parts of the story are shaky too, in my opinion. For example the highly placed source who U.S. intelligence reported had access to Putin and pass on the information that he was personally directing the anti-Hillary / pro-Trump seems to have turned up in a mansion in Arlington, Virginia living under his own name, Oleg Smolenkov. But wouldn't Putin have prevented him from leaving Russia, and/or tried hurt him if was really a traitor close to Putin whose name has been all over the U.S. news media?
Julian Assange was supposed at the center of the release of Democratic emails, yet Mueller's team never interviewed him.
The alleged Facebook emails directed by the Kremlin via the Internet Research Agency in Moscow were ridiculous on their face: Facebook Said 80,000 Russian Posts Were Buried in 33 Trillion Facebook Offerings Over Two-Year Period Further Undermining NYT’s Case:
The newspaper failed to tell their readers that Facebook account holders in the United States had been “served” 33 trillion Facebook posts during that same period — 413 million times more than the 80,000 posts from the Russian company.
What Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 31, 2017 is a far cry from what the Times claims. “Our best estimate is that approximately 126 million people may have been served one of these [IRA-generated] stories at some time during the two year period,” Stretch said.
Stretch was expressing a theoretical possibility rather than an established fact. He said an estimated 126 million Facebook members might have gotten at least one story from the IRA –- not over the ten week election period, but over 194 weeks during the two years 2015 through 2017—including a full year after the election.
Facebook didn’t even claim most of those 80,000 IRA posts were election–related. It offered no data on what proportion of the feeds to those 29 million people were.
In addition, Facebook’s Vice President for News Feed, Adam Moseri, acknowledged in 2016 that FB subscribers actually read only about 10 percent of the stories Facebook puts in their News Feed every day. The means that very few of the IRA stories that actually make it into a subscriber’s news feed on any given day are actually read.
And now, according to the further research, the odds that Americans saw any of these IRA ads—let alone were influenced by them—are even more astronomical. In his Oct. 2017 testimony, Stretch said that from 2015 to 2017, “Americans using Facebook were exposed to, or ‘served,’ a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds.”
To put the 33 trillion figure over two years in perspective, the 80,000 Russian-origin Facebook posts represented just .0000000024 of total Facebook content in that time.
Shane and Mazzetti did not report the 33 trillion number even though The New York Times’ own coverage of that 2017 Stretch testimony explicitly stated, “Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users’ News Feeds everyday.”
The Times‘ touting of the bogus 126 million out 137 million voters, while not reporting the 33 trillion figure, should vie in the annals of journalism as one of the most spectacularly misleading uses of statistics of all time.The reported Russian bot posting included such as items as a muscle-bound Bernie Sanders in a Speedo? A picture of Jesus arm-wrestling with a pro-Hillary Satan? The report notes that only 8.4 percent of IRA tweets were election-related. If so, what does Mueller think the other 91.6 percent were about? Could it be that IRA was not an intelligence agency after all, but, as it’s been argued, a “clickbait” operation aimed at drumming up business?
13 Russians and three companies accused of running a US-aimed social media campaign out of the St. Petersburg–based Internet Research Agency (IRA). By now the details are well known: About $100,000 was spent on Facebook ads, more than half of that after the November 2016 vote. The bulk of the remaining $46,000 in ads ran during the primaries. The majority of the ads did not even reference the election and got little traction.
Everybody knows that the U.S., Russia, China and other countries spy on one another, so I'm sure that there's some of that. But none of the key accusations of collusion hold up.
And on and on. I'm exhausted, but there's so much more of this Trump-Russia conspiracy theory that doesn't add up. For a more coherent explanation, from my perspective, please see my post, What Was Russiagate All About?
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