Fallout by John Solomon

Author:John Solomon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Bombardier Books
Published: 2020-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

URANIUM ONE, SPYGATE, AND IMPEACHMENT

What They Portend

for the Future

Robert Mueller had been at the witness table several long hours when Congressman Will Hurd finally chimed in. Now in his midseventies, Mueller, the Justice Department special counsel who oversaw the Trump-Russia probe was not quite the same crisp-speaking Marine whom Americans had come to know as their FBI director during the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks through his retirement in 2013.1

But his experience still loomed as an asset, especially when it came to the art of refusing to bite on politically loaded questions. He had just finished a five-minute, rapid-fire round of questions from Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) that clearly had frustrated the Democrat’s effort to pin him down on questions about former Trump fixer Michael Cohen.2

Mueller’s answers were classic dodges. “I can’t adopt your characterization,” he answered Castro at one moment. The next, he added: “I can’t speak to that.” A few seconds later he threw in “I’m not certain I could go that far,” and finished with, “I defer to you on that….I can’t get into details….I can’t speak to that.” Castro yielded back his time, unsatisfied by his effort to get Mueller to bite on his preferred story line.3

Hurd, a Republican from Texas, was up next. A former CIA officer, he shared a common intelligence community experience with the former FBI director. But the odds that he would fare better than Castro in extracting new information from Mueller seemed equally long.4

Over the first few hours of the nationally televised hearing, the prosecutor had tenaciously stuck to the text of his four-hundred-plus page report, which had concluded a few months earlier that the Trump campaign had not demonstrably colluded with Vladimir Putin to hijack the 2016 election.5

Hurd was a few seconds into his Q and A when he sprang a question that uncharacteristically got Mueller to stray outside the confines of his report.

Hurd knew that Mueller had not addressed in his final report anything about the widely reported rumor that Trump’s campaign may have used a computer server inside the Alfa Bank of Russia to secretly communicate with Team Putin during the 2016 election.6

It was an odd omission given how much attention that allegation had been given in the court of public opinion over three years, contributing to the relentless media narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.

The tale appeared to start in the summer of 2016 with a computer blogger who went by the name “Tea Leaves” and an Indiana University computer sciences professor (and Hillary Clinton supporter) named L. Jean Camp. The data they published supposedly demonstrated mysterious computer pings between the Trump Tower in New York and Alfa Bank in Moscow.7

By early fall, FBI General Counsel James Baker had brought similar allegations into the bureau’s counterintelligence team, courtesy of a data dump he got from a lawyer who represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC).8 (No political motive there!)

About the same time, Christopher Steele, the former MI6 operative working as a Hillary Clinton opposition researcher for

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