Thread by @JewhadiTM

Mueller Tied to Double Deception: First in Court, Then Before Congress realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/…

Republican lawmakers allege Special Counsel Robert Mueller may have perjured himself before Congress in his sworn testimony last month with an untruthful answer about why he held an earlier press briefing.

Recently released court docs suggest Mueller may have made his surprise appearance on May 29 as damage control after a federal judge threatened to hold his team in criminal contempt over misleading language in his final report about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Under oath, Mueller denied the judge’s action had anything to do with his holding the press conference.

In the hastily arranged 9-min. press conference, Mueller announced that he was ending his investigation -- which was not news -- and concluded it without taking any questions.

He made a point, however, to stress that the Russians he had indicted were “private” entities and "presumed innocent."

What Mueller didn’t tell the country was that the day before, his case against two Russian internet “trolling” firms had taken a sudden turn for the worse.

It was a key part of his narrative that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win.

On May 28, U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich called attorneys prosecuting the case into her courtroom for a closed hearing.

It is now known that Friedrich agreed with one defendant’s claims that Mueller overstated the evidence when he implied in his report that the trolls were controlled by the Russian gov’t and that social media ops they conducted during the 2016 campaign were directed by Moscow.

Concerned that Mueller’s words could prejudice a jury and jeopardize the defendants' right to a fair trial, Friedrich ordered the special prosecutor to stop making such claims and “to minimize the prejudice moving forward” — or face sanction.

“The government shall refrain from making or authorizing any public statement that links the alleged conspiracy in the indictment to the Russian government... Willful failure to do so in the future will result in the initiation of contempt proceedings.”

The judge explained that Mueller’s report improperly referred to the defendants’ “social media operations” as one of “two principal interference operations in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections” carried out by the Russian government.

She also pointed out that he also referred to their Internet trolling as “active measures” — a term of art that typically includes operations conducted by Russian intelligence to influence international affairs.

She said this was a departure from the government’s original February 2018 indictment, which “does not link the defendants to the Russian government" and “alleges only private conduct by private actors."

Friedrich further directed the prosecution to make clear that its allegations are simply that and “remain unproven.” She also admonished Mueller’s team from expressing "an opinion on the defendant’s guilt or innocence."

The next day, May 29, Mueller's statement at the Department of Justice press podium apparently mollified the judge. In a recently unsealed July 1 opinion, Friedrich wrote that Mueller had “demonstrated” the government had complied with her order with his statements to the media.

“In delivering his remarks," she said, "the special counsel carefully distinguished between the efforts by 'Russian intel officers...' and efforts detailed ‘in a separate indictment’ by ‘a private Russian entity engaged in a social media op...’

In other words, Mueller's hastily assembled appearance in the press briefing room helped head off a public rebuke by the judge hearing one of the signature indictments of Mueller’s 22-month investigation.

When Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee on July 24, Tom McClintock asked him about his puzzling press conf, pressing him on whether the real reason he called it was to “retroactively” soften allegations he made in his report to comply with Friedrich's demands.

In spite of documentary evidence suggesting otherwise, Mueller flatly stated that the court order had nothing to do with his calling the news conference, implying that the timing was just a coincidence.