For the past month, President Trump has been riding a wave of public support, according to Rasmussen’s Daily Presidential Tracking Poll. Over 50 percent of Americans have indicated that they approve of Trump’s job performance in ten out of the thirteen days in April Rasmussen has thus far polled.
Rasmussen’s latest poll shows that 52 percent of likely U.S. voters have noticed at least some of the president’s many accomplishments, and like what they see.
That could all change on Thursday after the Mueller report is released if it distorts facts to make Trump look as guilty as possible, as many Republicans fear.
According to Paul Sperry of Real Clear Investigations, “Democrats are convinced that it will show examples of “collusion” between Trump and Russia, even if there was no evidence of a criminal conspiracy.”
Seeking to manage public perceptions about the Mueller report as much as Democrats are, Republicans say their counterparts are bent on cherry-picking its details to make it still look as if President Trump coordinated with Russia, part of their effort to keep the collusion narrative alive heading into the 2020 presidential election. They fear Mueller will make it easy for them to continue spinning that tale.
It’s a realistic fear. According to Sperry, Republican investigators on Capitol Hill have looked at the same evidence as Mueller’s team, and have noticed the mostly Democratic prosecutors have a habit of spinning the evidence against Trump Campaign advisers to suggest collusion where there wasn’t any.
They say that the special counsel and prosecutors misled the court and the media by, among other things, editing the contents of emails to cast a sinister shadow on otherwise innocuous communications among Trump advisers and by omitting exculpatory information.
In one egregious example, they cited the October 2017 false-statement charges against former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos. In the filing, Team Mueller included a footnote that stated emails obtained by the special counsel showed that a Trump “campaign official suggested ‘low level’ staff should go to Russia.”
In reality, the emails (which had been provided to the special counsel by the Trump campaign) showed that the campaign wanted someone “low level” to decline these types of invitations.
In a recent letter to Attorney General William Barr, Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) revealed that they sent a secret letter to Mueller in November of 2017, expressing concern over such distortions. Grassley and Graham wrote that “selective references in charging documents” were leading “some media outlets to misinterpret the nature of the internal campaign dialogue.”
The committee has reviewed the same emails referenced in the charging document, the fuller context of which paint a different picture of senior campaign officials’ responses to requests for meetings with foreign nations. Those emails have not been publicly released. The November 16 letter has not been made public because it contains the additional context in question.
Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee on Fox News also recently questioned some of the indictments that were made by the Mueller team, noting that they “read like spy novels.”
“That was done on purpose,” he told host Maria Bartiromo, “to create a narrative to make the American people think, as they were indicting these people, that somehow this had to do with collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
Mark Wauck, a veteran FBI agent and lawyer, told Sperry that “establishment guy” Mueller’s objective in accepting the special counsel job was to protect the FBI and DOJ from what he viewed as a hostile takeover by the Trump administration.
“Why did Mueller take the job? Not simply to protect the FBI but the entire intelligence community that he was part of,” Wauck said. “It’s hard to overestimate his interest in protecting DOJ from a Trump takeover.”
“To do that,” he added, “it would be helpful to not necessarily prove ‘collusion’ but show at least a colorable case that the IC could claim a reasonable belief in collusion.”
Mueller’s “hiring of extreme partisans suggest that the view of Trump was of an existential threat [to the IC] that had to be, at a minimum, neutered but hopefully dumped.”
To that end, some suggest Mueller had a more Machiavellian plan: swaying the 2018 congressional elections to change the House majority and trigger impeachment hearings.
Former federal prosecutor and commentator Andrew McCarthy pointed out that Mueller knew he had no collusion case more than a year before the midterm elections, yet kept teasing collusion in court filings throughout the 2018 campaign.
“When Mueller closed his investigation, he almost certainly knew for about a year and a half that there was no collusion case,” McCarthy said, adding that, among other things, Mueller let the surveillance warrant on Carter Page lapse in early fall of 2017.
“Did prolonging his investigation influence the 2018 election results?” Sperry asks.
Exit polling indicates that it did. Nearly half–49 percent–of voters said they believed the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government during the 2016 election.
Mueller’s highly motivated team of partisan Democrats wasted nearly two years and at least $34 million trying to nail Trump. They watched as the anti-Trump MSM wrote one bogus story after another encouraging Trump-Russia hysteria throughout the country. They financially ruined multiple Trump’s campaign officials who did nothing wrong, and they refused to exonerate Trump before the 2018 mid terms, even though they knew at least a year before then that he didn’t collude with the Russians.
With a track record like that, is there any reason to believe they won’t spin their report to do the maximum amount of damage to the president out of malice, an attempt to protect FBI and DOJ malefactors, and to justify their own corrupt role in this obscene farce?