Caught! Notes on Robert Mueller and the Demise of BuzzFeed

by Barbara Boyd

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Feb. 1—Washington has been awash in speculation as to why the supposedly taciturn Robert Mueller emerged from behind his supposed steel curtain of silence on January 18, to condemn a story in BuzzFeed as completely false. The fake news was that the Special Counsel had documentary evidence demonstrating that President Donald Trump instructed his ne’er-do-well former attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress. The entire news cycle from the time of the fake BuzzFeed story’s release on Thursday January 17, to Mueller’s knock-out punch on Friday night, featured Democratic members of Congress and Senators, Obama Administration intelligence officials, and their journalist groupies in the news media fulminating that this was it, impeachment was imminent, the President was toast.

BuzzFeed, the leak point for the crazed, fake, British intelligence Christopher Steele dirty dossier about Donald Trump, has had its gossip clickbait model modified in recent years to include a so-called “investigative” unit, led by Ben Smith, formerly the editor of Politico. In the weeks before the Mueller-Michael Cohen fiasco, this unit had been exposed as a favored instrument of the Integrity Initiative, a British military intelligence psy-op and propaganda deployment geared to convincing the people of the United States and Europe of the necessity for war with Russia. Their endeavors are funded by Facebook, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the U.S. State Department, in addition to the British government. Among the goals of this deployment is to ensure that Donald Trump never gets a second term, now an openly declared foreign policy of the British, per the December 2018 House of Lords Report, U.K. Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order. Since the Mueller-Cohen fiasco, BuzzFeed has laid off 15% of its staff and appears headed to its demise.

In thinking about this, it’s first necessary to dispense with the myth that Robert Mueller is taciturn about leaks. That is utter nonsense. Mueller is a veteran of political persecutions in which leaks are employed strategically to destroy a target and to influence the grand jury, before anyone is even indicted, and the jury thereafter. For example, in the LaRouche Boston prosecution that Mueller supervised, Mueller’s minions collaborated on a television special, on CBS’s “West 57th” prime-time weekly news broadcast, the night before jury selection was originally scheduled. The program alleged, through one of Mueller’s witnesses for the government in the trial, that the LaRouche defendants were responsible for assassinating Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in February 1986, an absolutely false and inflammatory claim that originated with the East German intelligence service, the Stasi. When the initial Boston jury selection date was postponed due to unrelated case developments, “West 57th” re-aired the segment, again on the eve of jury selection, scrubbing its originally scheduled show.

Veteran defense lawyer Sidney Powell confirmed on the “Mark Levin Show” January 27, that pre-trial destruction by press is a central element of Mueller’s arsenal, having experienced these tactics personally through Mueller’s chief henchman, Andrew Weissmann, in the Arthur Andersen-Enron cases.

In the same interview, Sidney Powell said the reason why Mueller refuted the BuzzFeed story was because BuzzFeed had left Mueller’s fingerprints all over the story. Mueller had to conduct a cover-up. Indeed, when BuzzFeed reporters Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier said that their story was based on two sources fully versed on what Mueller’s office had, they drastically limited the potential targets for any criminal leak investigation. Most leak investigations are plagued by the existence of a multiplicity of potential leak points.

A further complication for Mueller, also caused by Leopold and Cormier pointing so specifically to their sources, is found in the ongoing prosecution of Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards in the Southern District of New York. A complaint accuses this former employee of the Treasury Department of two counts of conspiracy to make unauthorized disclosures of “Suspicious Activity Reports” (SARs) related to Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, accused Russian “lobbyist” Maria Butina, the Russian Embassy in Washington, and a suspected Russian money-laundering entity. It is a felony to leak these IRS reports. All of the SARs allegedly leaked by Sours Edwards concern people Mueller is involved in prosecuting. One Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, is supposedly in ultimate charge of both the prosecutors in the Sours Edwards case, and Mueller. The leak point for Sours Edwards? BuzzFeed. The reporters who were leaked to? Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier.

So, one part of the Justice Department prosecutes a leak to Leopold and Cormier; the other leaks to Leopold and Cormier. A very, very, awkward and exposed position here for the man that some in Washington paint as the embodiment of rectitude, morality, and true justice.