MUELLER REPORT CONTAINS CLAIM RUSSIA TAPED BILL CLINTON, MONICA LEWINSKY HAVING PHONE SEX
Reference was redacted from public version of report
By Steven Nelson
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report mentions a claim that Russians recorded President Bill Clinton having phone sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky — but the reference was redacted from the version released to the public.
The redaction is likely to anger Republicans, because the allegation has been known since at least 2001 and the Mueller report’s reference to a claim that President Trump watched prostitutes urinating in a Moscow hotel room was not struck out.
Clinton allegedly was recorded by Russia in the 1990s, allowing Russia to learn of the affair before American officials. A reference to the Clinton intercept was redacted from the Mueller report to protect “personal privacy,” but sources told the Washington Examiner that the context makes clear what was blacked out.
According to the report, Center for the National Interest President Dimitri Simes sent Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner a 2016 email with recommended talking points to counter Hillary Clinton’s Russia attacks. The email referenced “a well-documented story of highly questionable connections” between Bill Clinton and Russia.
[Related: Monica Lewinsky: ‘If. f–king. only’ a four-page summary of the Starr Report was released]
At a meeting in New York, Simes told Kushner the details: Russia allegedly recorded President Clinton on the phone with Lewinsky, opening questions of foreign leverage over the ex-president-turned-potential first spouse.
“During the August 17 meeting, Simes provided Kushner the Clinton-related information that he had promised. Simes told Kushner that, [redacted],” the Mueller report says. “Simes claimed that he had received this information from former CIA and Reagan White House official Fritz Ermarth, who claimed to have learned it from U.S. intelligence sources, not from Russians.”
Ermarth, 78, a 25-year CIA veteran and chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 1988 to 1993, said he was concerned with the wording in the report. He said the report inaccurately suggests he mishandled classified information, when in fact he used public sourcing.
“The line in the Mueller report that says any of this was based on intelligence information is the product either of faulty remembering by Dimitri or a flawed inference … or a hostile fabrication by the Mueller people,” Ermarth said. “[The report wording] implies my misuse of intelligence or use of intelligence that is classified in this context. And that is completely false.”
Ermarth thinks he told Simes that the Clinton-Lewinsky phone call was intercepted while the president was traveling on Air Force One, but that detail is believed to not have been conveyed to Kushner or included in the report.
[Also read: Monica Lewinsky dishes details on infamous dress]
The former CIA officer, who was not interviewed by Mueller, said he discussed the intercept with Simes during a trip to Washington in either 2014 or 2015. The story’s omission from the Mueller report hints at a double standard for the Clintons, he said.
Mueller spokesman Peter Carr declined to comment, as did Simes. A White House spokesman and Kushner attorney Abbe Lowell did not respond to requests for comment.
The report was redacted by Justice Department leadership in cooperation with Mueller’s team. There were 855 redactions, according to the Smoking Gun. Only 7% of of those redactions were justified by “personal privacy,” according to an analysis by Vox. Most information was withheld because it involved grand jury deliberations or because it could harm an ongoing criminal case.
According to the report, Simes told investigators Kushner appeared to consider the phone-sex story “old news,” as news outlets had long ago reported that Russia had advanced knowledge about Lewinsky. Meanwhile, Kushner told Mueller’s team he did not receive information from Simes that could be “operationalized” and doubted new negative information could be unearthed on the Clintons.
Though the report was redacted to protect the former president’s privacy, it does reference an alleged sex tape featuring Trump watching prostitutes urinate in a Moscow hotel. The Mueller report says Russian businessman Giorgi Rtskhiladze texted former Trump attorney Michael Cohen that he “[s]topped flow of tapes from Russia.” Rtskhiladze told Mueller’s team that “he was told the tapes were fake, but he did not communicate that to Cohen.”
Nolte: Top 51 Fake News ‘Bombshells’ the Media Spread About RussiaGate Collusion Hoax Hall of Shame
By John Nolte
Here are the top 51 pieces of fake news the establishment media spread about the Russia Collusion Hoax over the past two years, and I describe this list as the Top 51 because there is a behemoth of an iceberg lurking below.
Since the release of the Mueller Report last week, which — despite two years, $30 million, and a team of rabidly partisan left-wing investigators — found exactly zero crimes of Russia collusion or obstruction associated with President Trump and his campaign, one of the most bizarre results has been watching the media pat themselves on the back for the stories they believe they got correct.
Imagine that. Imagine your industry is so broken and corrupt that all you have left is to point to what you believe you did right. This is like watching an airline pilot brag about the times he didn’t crash, a district attorney point to the people he prosecuted who were not innocent — or in the words of comedian Chris Rock, a parent boast about taking care of his kids.
You’re supposed to take care of your kids!
And the media are supposed to get stories correct.
But here is the media forced to brag on when they didn’t crash the plane, when they did take care of the kids, which tells you something is horribly, terribly, ridiculously wrong.
Hey, here are some examples of when we didn’t mislead the country with disinformation!
Check out this one below. Here you have a reporter forced to focus on the “highlights” of her outlet’s reporting because the Washington Post got so much wrong she was able to quickly cobble together a list of those times the Post did not mislead its readers:
While a list of what the media might have gotten correct is fairly easy to put together, no one will ever be able to grasp the tsunami of fake news Americans were buried under for over two years.
The list below of 51 might sound like a lot, but it is a drop in the ocean when you recall the thousands and thousands of hours CNN, MSNBC, Meet the Press, This Week, PBS NewsHour, State of the Union, Good Morning America, Reliable Sources, and the Today Show devoted to anchors and pundits pushing the hoax that Trump colluded with Russia.
Not to mention, millions and millions of establishment media tweets and Facebook posts.
Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Shepard Smith, Andrew Napolitano, Joe Scarborough, Chris Hayes, Chuck Todd, Joy Reid, Chris Matthews, Jake Tapper, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, Brian Stelter, Erin Burnett, et al., are alone responsible for thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of lies and conspiracy-mongering.
This list of 51 doesn’t count the half-million — half-MILLION — Russia collusion stories published over the past two years, almost all of which were premised on the idea that Trump did, indeed, collude with a foreign power to steal the 2016 presidential election.
This list cannot begin to count the countless times these 51 fake stories were repeated as fact throughout other news outlets, social media, and thousands upon thousands of cumulative broadcast hours.
What’s more, this list of 51 can’t begin to count the countless examples of fake news launched against Trump that have nothing to do with Russia — desperate and deliberate lies involving fish food and ice cream scoops…
Before we begin, credit where it’s due. This list would not have been possible without the lists already compiled by Sharyl Attkisson, Glenn Greenwald, and Sohrab Ahmari.
Michael Cohen went to Prague.
Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie, and Mueller has emails proving it.
Paul Manafort passed polling information to Kremlin.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein forced out.
Federal investigators wiretapped Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, have recordings of Trump.
Phony Russia dossier was initially funded by Republican group.
Donald Trump directed Flynn to make contact with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign
Russian social media company provided documents to Senate about communications with Trump official.
- CNN:
Donald Trump Jr. conspired with WikiLeaks.
Robert Mueller subpoenaed Trump’s Deutsche Bank records.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked with Russia intelligence-connected official as late as December 2017.
Trump Deputy National Security adviser K.T. McFarland lied about another official’s contacts with Russians.
- CNN:
Trump’s campaign was never wiretapped.
Manafort notes from Russian meeting refer to political contributions.
Seventeen intelligence agencies concur Russia hacked the 2016 presidential race.
- CNN:
Congress investigating Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.
Former FBI Director James Comey says Attorney General Jeff Sessions told him not to call Russia probe an investigation but “a matter.”
- CNN:
James Comey will testify he never told Trump he was not under investigation.
Putin admits he has compromising information about Trump.
Trump fired Comey after Comey asked for additional resources for the Russia investigation.
Numerous contacts between Trump campaign staff and “senior Russian intelligence officials.”
Among others, a Trump family member will be indicted on February 8.
Paul Manafort visited WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on three occasions.
Trump campaign changed GOP platform on Ukraine.
Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Michael Cohen really did visit Prague.
- CNN:
Trump is lying when he calls Russia dossier “phony.”
RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and C-SPAN “confirmed” it had been hacked.
Russia’s hacked the election systems of 21 American states.
Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont.
“More than 200 websites” were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season.”
Russia is the main suspect in the sonic attacks that sickened 26 U.S. diplomats.
Trump created a secret Internet server to covertly communicate with a Russian bank.
- CNN:
Donald Trump knew in advance of the Trump Tower meeting.
- CNN:
Mueller Report will show Trump “has helped” Putin “destabilize” the United States.
- NBC:
Russia supports Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI).
-
- CNN:
Sessions failed to disclose meetings he had with the Russian ambassador.
“There’s actually lots of evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.”
Trump revealed classified information to Russians.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said Russia paid Trump.
Mueller can show Trump campaign “had a connection to Russian intelligence.”
“Rudy Giuliani just told America that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia.”
Evidence suggests Trump could be a Russian “asset.”
- NBC:
Russians began hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails on the day Donald Trump joked about it in July 2016.
Russia spy visited Trump’s Oval Office.
- CNN:
Phony Russia dossier has been “corroborated.”
- NPR:
Donald Trump Jr. lied under oath about Trump Tower deal in Moscow.
Russia successfully hacked voting systems in a number of states.
- CNN:
Trump is “bonkers” for claiming Hillary Clinton behind Russia dossier.
- CNN:
“Every intelligence expert, both under the Obama administration and under the Trump administration,” agrees with the assessment that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
- BBC:
Ukrainian president “authorized” an illegal payment of $400,000 to Michael Cohen for additional face time during a June 2017 meeting with President Trump.
Twitterati pounce on MSNBC for sending reporter to pester Mueller near church on Easter Sunday
Russiagate-obsessed news network MSNBC sent one of its journalists to talk to the one person in a position to feed the dying hopes that the now-public Mueller report still holds the key to ousting President Donald Trump.
MSNBC’s Mike Viqueira ambushed Robert Mueller as he and his wife were leaving St. John’s Episcopal Church in downtown Washington after an Easter service. In what he probably believed to be an act of adversarial journalism, Viqueira pelted the special counsel with questions to which every Russiagater hopes to hear the right answers.
“Will you testify before the Congress, sir? If it were anybody but the president, would Mr Trump be indicted, sir? Sir, why didn’t you make a recommendation to the Congress one way or the other? Did the attorney general accurately characterize your positions on conspiracy and obstruction, sir?”
Mueller responded with “no comment.” But Viqueira simply wouldn’t take that for an answer. Speaking to anchor Alex Witt in the studio about the encounter, he later joked that Mueller was “tight-lipped” with him.
Many commenters on Twitter didn’t find it as amusing as he did though. “Bad form to harass him on Easter Sunday guys!” one person said. “MSNBC stalked and harassed [Mueller],” another commenter remarked. The general message to the network seems to be: Leave the man alone, he deserves a break after digging into Trump for two years.
US politicians and media personalities, who were hoping that Mueller’s report would be the downfall of Donald Trump’s presidency, are grasping at straws after the 400-page document stated that Trump’s campaign didn’t collude with Russia and refrained from saying if it was involved in any obstruction of justice. AG William Barr decided negatively on the latter, since there was no underlying crime to cover up in the first place.
Now the people who were feeding their audience the collusion narrative for over two years are resorting to new tactics, like accusing Barr of maliciously misleading the public to protect the president, implying that the redacted parts of the publicly available report are still hiding some smoking gun, or claiming that the Mueller investigation was too narrow to begin with.
HOUSE JUDICIARY CHAIR SUBPOENAS AG BARR FOR UNREDACTED MUELLER REPORT
Rep. Nadler escalates Russia witch hunt after it fails
House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler has subpoenaed the Justice Department for a full, unredacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, as well as its underlying evidence.
“My Committee needs and is entitled to the full version of the report and the underlying evidence consistent with past practice,” Nadler said in a statement released Friday. “Even the redacted version of the report outlines serious instances of wrongdoing by President Trump and some of his closest associates.”
Nadler’s subpoena demands the material by May 1.
Mueller’s report cleared President Trump of any collusion or conspiracy with Russia to swing the 2016 election, and found no legal basis to charge the president with obstruction of justice, but stopped short of“exonerating” him.
Rather, Mueller left it up to Congress to decide whether or not to “apply obstruction laws,” a decision that Nadler has embraced.
“It now falls to Congress to determine the full scope of that alleged misconduct and to decide what steps we must take going forward,” his statement continued. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, the New York Democrat said that impeachment proceedings are “one possibility.”
“We will proceed with our enquiries,” he said, adding that Mueller’s report “was probably written with the intent of providing Congress with a road map.”
Mueller’s roughly 400 page report is littered with more than 800 redactions, from a name here and there to entire pages of text. Theses redactions were made for four reasons: to protect “investigative techniques,” to avoid releasing classified grand jury information, to avoid compromising ongoing investigations, and to avoid infringing on the privacy of “peripheral third parties.”
It is unclear whether a completely unredacted report can be released, and whether such a report could possibly implicate Trump in anything illegal. Trump himself has claimed complete vindication, and Republicans have dragged Democrats for attempting to keep the ‘Russiagate’ investigation alive.
“Democrats want to keep searching for imaginary evidence that supports their claims, but it is simply not there,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “It’s time to move on.”
MSM defends ‘extremely accurate’ Russiagate coverage despite Mueller report
Even with the ‘Russian collusion’ narrative buried by the Mueller report, some mainstream journalists have come out to claim their anti-Trump coverage was backed up by the report. Were they reading a different report?
The Mueller report, CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz said on Thursday, “really corroborated a lot of the good journalism that was done” during the last two years.
“One of my main conclusions from the #MuellerReport so far is that the vast majority of *reporting* on Trump and Russia was extremely accurate,” GQ magazine’s Julia Ioffe chimed in.
Prokupecz is not entirely wrong. Both CNN and Mueller’s team shared an obsession with chronicling every last inconsequential encounter between anyone connected to candidate Trump and anyone remotely connected to Russia, no matter how peripheral. From handshakes at the Republican National Convention to missed calls and unanswered emails, Mueller’s report is completely absent of bombshells, but heavy on humdrum contacts.
When it came to examining these tidbits, however, they were often completely wrong.
Both Mueller and the media focused heavily on the infamous Trump Tower meeting, during which Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with a Russian delegation to discuss US/Russian relations, and potentially damaging information to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The meeting was, as Kushner told Manafort, a “waste of time,” and no information was provided.
Not to CNN, who reported the “collusion bombshell” that President Trump knew about the meeting in advance, accompanying the headline with the lede: “holy crap.” Of course, the source for the article was none other than former Trump lawyer and convicted perjurer Michael Cohen, but that didn’t stop CNN from suggesting that Cohen’s word could “be the biggest step to date in proving real collusion,” and finishing with the poetic and barf-inducing: “Where have you gone Robert Mueller? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”
Well, Mueller was investigating, and found “no documentary evidence” that Trump knew about the meeting or its “Russian connection.” Sorry CNN.
And it wasn’t just Trump tower. CNN claimed that Trump Jr. was given “advanced access” to the WikiLeaks archive of leaked Democratic Party emails in 2016. Mueller’s report proved this to be false, and even at the time CNN issued a retraction. A year later, three CNN employees resigned over a false story about an alleged investigation into “a Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.”
CNN was far from the only outlet to cry collusion where Mueller found none. Buzzfeed famously broke the scoop earlier this year that Trump had directly instructed Cohen to lie to Congress about shelved plans to build a Trump Tower property in Moscow. Buzzfeed’s lie was so egregious that Mueller himself spoke out and denied it, three months before the report landed.
As the media peddled conspiracy after conspiracy about Trump and Russia, Mueller’s team combed through federal statutes, looking for a way to make something stick. They ultimately failed to “establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
CNN had circled the wagons ever since Attorney General William Barr released a summary of the report’s main findings late last month, with host Jake Tapper claiming “I don’t know anybody that got anything wrong” in the network’s two years of puffing from the collusion crack pipe.
“We never stated that there was conspiracy/collusion,” Tapper tweeted at the time. “Yes some others did.”
CNN certainly dropped enough “collusion bombshells,” and regularly featured guests who swore up and down that collusion had taken place. Tapper himself seemed happy to send his Twitter followers to articles claiming the same, including one from the Washington Post entitled “bungled collusion is still collusion.”
Now, several weeks and a full report later, the business end of that crack pipe is still hot to the touch. After a panel discussion attacking Attorney General Barr for his “excessive” pronouncement that there was “no collusion,” CNN’s chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin drew his own conclusion, tweeting that Trump’s frustration with the investigation against him was somehow “evidence of guilt.”’
Never change, CNN.
Trump Derangement Syndrome: Journalist Tweets 451 Times to Desperately Explain Away Mueller Report
And the left says President Trump has a Twitter problem.
By
Newsweek columnist Seth Abramson wrote over 450 tweets in a desperate attempt to frame the redacted Mueller Report as a net negative for President Donald J. Trump, even though it exonerates the president by proving there was no collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice.
In a Twitter thread that saw new followup tweets published every few minutes for over 24 hours, Abramson desperately attempted to reframe the Mueller Report as bad news for President Trump.
Abramson started his thread with an optimistic tone on April 17, the day before the Mueller Report was released to the public in its redacted form. The thread started with an article written by Abramson for the far-left Newsweek, which seems to have been created for the purpose of minimizing the importance of the Mueller Report.
(MUELLER REPORT LIVE THREAD) This thread chronicles—in real time—the release of the Mueller Report, with news and a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…—
Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) April 17, 2019
Yesterday morning, Abramson began live tweeting Attorney General Bill Barr’s press conference in which he discussed the Mueller Report.
Already, Abramson seemed to enter a sort of panic, condemning Barr as a spokesman for President Trump.
Abramson also, again, attempted to minimize the impact of the Mueller Report in the minds of his Twitter followers by stating that “we won’t even get a *certain* answer on whether there was a criminal conspiracy” orchestrated by President Trump.
After the Mueller Report was released to the public, Abramson immediately began finding flaws, and honing in on the small parts of the report that, using second hand hearsay, painted President Trump in a negative light.
He also moved the goalpost. Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not find sufficient evidence to prove President Trump broke the law, which Abramson says must surely mean there was some evidence, even though as a lawyer, Abramson surely must know this is not how the law works. If there is insufficient evidence to prove a crime, then the suspect must be assumed innocent.
This was only tweet 115 of over 450. Abramson’s mental state would seem to deteriorate as the day went on, and he continued tweeting every few minutes in desperate attempts to find damaging parts of the Mueller report, and excuse its total exoneration of President Trump.
By tweet 273, Abramson said it was time to consider impeaching the president.
By tweet 315, Abramson held the position that impeaching President Trump should not depend on any criminality. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” does not count for presidents, according to the far left journalist, and Twitter obsessed man.
By tweet 360, Abramson was back to denigrating the Attorney General, and claiming that he is a partisan actor working for President Trump.
Hilariously, Abramson also attempted to get his followers to retweet the original tweet from the thread, so new readers may sit and read the hundreds of ramblings.
Ironically, when this journalist attempted to do exactly this, Twitter became so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content that it was unable to load more than 200 or so tweets before freezing.
Around 400 tweets in, Abramson began to respond to criticism to his mad Twitter rant. At this point he would go on for three more hours, finishing at roughly 1 a.m.
Unless he decides to tweet more today, which seems entirely possible considering the insane number of tweets published.
Abramson wrote “I don’t *care” when it comes to how observers may respond to his massive Twitter storm, “because when American national security is at stake, you don’t *worry* about embarrassment.”
By tweet 433, Abramson had more or less turned against Mueller, seeming to suggest that he should have pressed the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., to testify against other targets of Mueller’s investigation.
Finally ending his mad Twitter tirade, Abramson made a claim completely contrary to the findings of the Mueller report: He believes that collusion did, in fact, occur.
This would seem shocking coming from a man who just live tweeted his experience reading the report cover to cover, except for the fact that he seems to have drifted further and further from reality as he wrote the 451 tweets.
This type of anti-fact behavior would seem to be the ultimate expression of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Abramson now believes that Barr is a bad actor, as is Mueller. He believes that just because Mueller could not find evidence, does not mean evidence does not exist. Even though Mueller could not find evidence to justify an indictment for obstruction of justice, that does not mean President Trump did not obstruct justice.
At this point, those like Abramson are living in their own reality, created entirely to protect them from the fact that they were completely and totally wrong.
It is, essentially, baseless justification to continue hating a duly elected president.
Tom's Blog 