Weapons of Mass Destruction Related Program Activities Redux

Remember weapons of mass destruction related program activities?
The Mueller Report is cut from the same cloth:

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.

Instead, 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: “A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.”

Democratic members of the House have secured Mueller’s agreement to testify. They will encourage him to offer a sort of informal indictment of the president, something to justify impeachment. Something that can be winkled out of the Mueller report.

All of which calls for a closer reading of the 448-page document. What becomes clear is that the special counsel used a number of rhetorical devices to couch evidence and craft a narrative so that a document that ultimately clears the president can also be read as an indictment.

The first thing to note about the Mueller report is just how contentious it is. It isn’t a set of findings so much as an assertion of what the findings might have been if only there had been more evidence. It is like a closing argument in a criminal case already dismissed for lack of evidence but in which the prosecutor is determined to redeem what he can of his case. Mueller turns to a variety of strategies: hectoring repetition; the use of extraneous detail to add heft to flimsy assertion; and a resort to insinuation and innuendo to prejudice the reader against those who have escaped the dock.

Real Clear Investigations

Insinuendo: Why the Mueller Report Doth Repeat So Much