The new documents show that Mueller was intent on establishing the grounds for a prosecution of Assange, with the precise allegations and charges a secondary matter entirely subordinate to the overarching goal of imprisoning the WikiLeaks founder. Rather, Stone was sent to prison for falsely claiming under oath that he had ever had any relationship with WikiLeaks or Assange. But it was not for involvement in any conspiracy. After the Mueller report was finalised, Stone was successfully prosecuted. The centrality of Stone to the attempts to concoct charges against Assange underscores the frame-up character of the entire operation. “uccess would also depend upon evidence of WikiLeaks’s and Stone’s knowledge of ongoing or contemplated future computer intrusions-the proof that is currently lacking,” it stated. The report concluded that an attempted prosecution would fail. Mueller was left to claim that the only possible evidence of a conspiracy was contained in encrypted messages that he and the intelligence agencies had presumably never seen! This is truly clutching at straws and desperately attempting to save face. “The lack of visibility into the contents of these communications would hinder the Office’s ability to prove that WikiLeaks was aware of and intended to join the criminal venture comprised of the GRU hackers,” the report stated. To justify the fact that all of the resources of the American state were insufficient to manufacture evidence of the theory that it had promoted for years, the Mueller report pathetically claimed that one of the problems was that WikiLeaks’ communications with the GRU were encrypted.
“The most fundamental hurdles” to such a prosecution, it stated, “are factual ones.” There was not “admissible evidence” to establish a conspiracy involving Russian intelligence, WikiLeaks and Trump campaign insider Roger Stone. Significantly, even though it is based on the discredited Russiagate framework, the newly-released material from the report concluded that there was no basis for laying conspiracy charges against Assange. It lent weight to the claims of WikiLeaks collaborator and former British diplomat, Craig Murray, who has stated that he has personal knowledge of the source of the DNC documents, and that they were provided by “disgruntled insiders.” This aligned with Assange’s repeated insistence that Russia was not the source of the material. In other words, there may not have been any successful hack, Russian or otherwise. In May, it was revealed that CrowdStrike, a cyber security company handpicked by the Democratic Party to examine the DNC servers had been unable to find evidence that documents had ever been exfiltrated from them. This was premised on the assertion that the internal Democratic National Committee (DNC) communications and emails of Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, were hacked by the GRU Russian military intelligence agency before being published by WikiLeaks. The new pages reveal that one of the focuses of the Mueller investigation was laying the groundwork for criminal charges against Assange and WikiLeaks under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This is in line with the character of the report as a whole, which was unable to substantiate any of the “Russian interference” in the 2016 US election that the Mueller investigation had been tasked with identifying. The documents disclose that despite a two-year investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller came up with nothing to prove the collusion between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence that had been trumpeted by the intelligence agencies, the Democratic Party and the corporate media. The contents of the new material shows why the Justice Department was so intent on keeping it hidden. In September, a US judge ruled that the government had violated the law by withholding sections of the report without legitimate cause, labelling some of the redactions as “self-serving.”
The Justice Department has sought to block the full release of the report since it was brought down in March, 2019, including through the use of extensive redactions. The 13 new pages of the 448-page Mueller report were released on Monday as the result of a successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Buzzfeed News. (Credit: Screenshot CNN online broadcast) The network had a strap beneath him reading “Political disruption” throughout most of the interview. Assange interviewed by CNN in August, 2016.