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Mueller says BuzzFeed article "inaccurate"

jnug said:
Mueller is a Special Counsel while Starr was an Independent Counsel. They are not the same thing. They don't have the same authorities nor do they have the same elbow room.

We got rid of the Independent Counsel law at its sunset when "we" decided not to renew it. Frankly I have always thought that a bad idea. But you could make the case either way.
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The regulations give them almost identical authority, with the only exception being the three judge panel.
 
MovingPictures said:
The regulations give them almost identical authority, with the only exception being the three judge panel.
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That is a huge difference. The Special Counsel functions under the Justice Dept and the Independent Counsel does not or did not. It is a short little sentence with a great deal of practical impact.
 
Airyaman said:
I am willing to believe the story is complete bull**** or mostly true. I have no idea.

However, I disagree that this would have been something urgent to reveal to Congress. What danger is there in this whole scenario? Is national security at risk in this? No.
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When a prosecutor has anybody dead to rights on any crime, they don't wait months and months to go after them. Very rarely is there some important reason why they would fail to act - even if they believe more serious crimes occurred in the bigger picture.
 
jnug said:
That is a huge difference. The Special Counsel functions under the Justice Dept and the Independent Counsel does not or did not. It is a short little sentence with a great deal of practical impact.
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Both the SC and the IC worked under the AG, and if you read the regulations they have almost the same authority.

And who gives a ****? It had nothing to do with my point - I was actually agreeing with your side.
 
MovingPictures said:
When a prosecutor has anybody dead to rights on any crime, they don't wait months and months to go after them. Very rarely is there some important reason why they would fail to act - even if they believe more serious crimes occurred in the bigger picture.
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If a prosecutor has someone dead to rights on a crime, but also sees a plethora of other crimes, do they go after the first crime they found and call it a wrap?
 
MovingPictures said:
When a prosecutor has anybody dead to rights on any crime, they don't wait months and months to go after them. Very rarely is there some important reason why they would fail to act - even if they believe more serious crimes occurred in the bigger picture.
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From a prosecutor's perspective "go after" means indict and prosecute, not report it to Congress. An Independent Counsel has more "independent" freedom to report to Congress if he chooses and if it has an impact on his prosecutions, that is a value judgement he might make. A Special Counsel simply does not have that freedom and will protect his indictments and prosecutions at all costs regardless of what Congress thinks or wants and when they want it.

Congress has room to investigate and that is exactly what they should do.
 
Re: Mueller's office disputes Buzzfeed story on Michael Cohen

Grokmaster said:
That didn't take as long as I thought it would...I figured it would come out when the ADMITTED, CONVICTED LIAR, COHEN, was in front of Congress.

EVEN THE WITCH HUNT CONCEDES THAT COHEN IS LYING.


Just like Stormy/Mouthenatti/Manafort/ Papadopolous/ Carter Page...etc., etc.. AD NAUSEUM.


Another DESPERATE "GET TRUMP" Left Frnzy...down in FLAMES.

Mueller's office disputes Buzzfeed story on Michael Cohen


WASHINGTON, Jan 18 (Reuters) - U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office issued a statement late on Friday taking issue with a report in Buzzfeed that President Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen said Trump told him to lie to Congress.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/muellers-office-disputes-buzzfeed-story-004908616.html
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Ahhh Buzzfeed and the left guilty of fake news.... once again. Doesn't matter though, it's not about the truth, it's about the power.... whatever it takes.
 
MovingPictures said:
This is the part where we stop digging.

The report is obviously false in its central allegations, or else the SC wouldn't have felt the need to correct it.
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This. The SCO, which almost never comments about stories in the news media, felt the need to issue a rare public statement. As far as I am concerned, the story is dead to me until Mueller publicly reports otherwise.
 
Airyaman said:
Report: Victim was shot with a Ruger 9MM.

Police: Not accurate, it was a Walther 9MM.

Report must be fake news!
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That's exactly what this is. There is something in the report that is inaccurate, part of the Mueller probe, and highly confidential/worse than what was reported.
 
MovingPictures said:
Both the SC and the IC worked under the AG, and if you read the regulations they have almost the same authority.

And who gives a ****? It had nothing to do with my point - I was actually agreeing with your side.
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Probably the biggest practical dif between the two is that The Independent Counsel was an independent prosecutor—distinct from the Attorney General of the United States Department of Justice—who provided reports to the United States Congress under 28 U.S.C. § 595.

The Special Counsel CANNOT report directly to the Congress much less on some timeline that is at his discretion. Hence he ends up most concerned about protecting his indictments and his prosecutions at all costs.

As has been discussed ad nauseam in the media the Special Counsel cannot report directly to the Congress. He MUST submit a report if he is going to submit one to the AG and the AG then decides what the Justice Dept will report. The AG can submit a rather different report than what the Special Counsel submits to him if he chooses to do so. That distinction is what has got so many hoping that:
A) Mueller does submit a report (he does not actually have to submit more than a running history of his prosecution to the AG which is really not what we are all hoping to see)
B) that the AG does not write his own report based on the Special Counsel's report with much lost in that process based on what the AG decides he wants to submit. The AG is well within his rights not to submit anything if he does not want to and what he does submit is entirely at his discretion. Hence, we are all very interested in who Barr is an what he might decide to do when the time comes.

Myself, I have no idea what to think about Barr as it relates to the Mueller investigation. Barr is no hack and would be preferred to Whitaker in all cases relative to the Special Counsel. Other than that, I did not come away from his Senate hearings with a real feel one way or the other. Barr "sounded" good. But that might not mean very much.
 
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DiAnna said:
This. The SCO, which almost never comments about stories in the news media, felt the need to issue a rare public statement. As far as I am concerned, the story is dead to me until Mueller publicly reports otherwise.
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I think this is more about Mueller protecting certain elements of the probe and/or people around said probe, b/c he knows the types of things Trump and/or Russians working for Trump could do to them.

As soon as I saw that the sources were FBI agents, I was on alert.
 
NeverTrumpGOP said:
I think this is more about Mueller protecting certain elements of the probe and/or people around said probe, b/c he knows the types of things Trump and/or Russians working for Trump could do to them.

As soon as I saw that the sources were FBI agents, I was on alert.
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Nevertheless, the SCO's statement is good enough for me at this point. I won't continue to discuss, speculate, or otherwise give credence to the Buzzfeed story unless and until positive proof is presented either by a thorough congressional investigation, or the SCO Report itself.

CNN, to its credit, has repeatedly stated that "CNN cannot independently confirm the contents of the Buzzfeed story" every time it was discussed. Good for them.
 
Myriad folks have noted that the story was uncharacteristic given that Mueller's office has refrained from disclosing so much as what its prosecutors had for lunch on a given day.

Feeding the "story" to Buzzfeed sounds like something Trump'd do/orchestrate and we know he's done it in the past. It's certainly not beneath him to plant a story that's fake, and then deny it in order to boost his apparent credibility. More recently, he used such a strategy regarding his own candidacy for POTUS.

It wouldn't be hard for Trump (his factotums) to pull off such a stunt with outfits unlike The WaPo, the NYT, and others that cleave to the highest standards of journalism.
Buzzfeed also shares its standards re: the use of anonymous sources; however, if one reads Buzzfeed's story about Trump directing Cohen to lie to Congress, one'll see Buzzfeed didn't adhere to its own standard that calls for "staffers should spell out why their source is anonymous and include an explanatory line in the story that the reader will understand."

It's worth noting that not one highly regarded news organization was able to confirm Buzzfeed's story; consequently, we all day hear "if the story is true" caveats from everyone who remarked on it.


As for the special counsel office's statement, well, it's not an unqualified repudiation of the Buzzfeed story. Rather, it's a very carefully statement that tells us that something about Buzzfeed's characterization of the matter is inaccurate.

What Carr said re: Buzzfeed's reporting re: Mueller's office (that office being the only one on which Carr can speak with portfolio)?

BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.
​

What Buzzfeed reported:

The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.
​

Careful readers recognize that Buzzfeed's reporting has a lot of assertions in it; thus the reporting as a whole is becomes inaccurate when any one of them is errant. How much of its reporting is accurate? Well, that's the proverbial "$64K question."

At the end of the day:

  • Trump's lack of integrity and dishonesty are legendary. Were he not such a profligate liar and dissembler, were he and the people around him scrupulous, none of this, not even the Russia investigation, would be extant.
  • There are people in the US government -- DoJ personnel, Trump, and Trump WH personnel -- and former Trump campaign personnel who know the truth. Not one of them has been forthcoming with the details of Trump and his campaign's comportment and cognition.
    • DoJ people won't say because there's an ongoing investigation; moreover, parts of it pertain to national security/counterintelligence matters.
    • Trump won't say because he abjures and abhors the existential truth about himself.
    • Former campaign personnel won't say because they fear any number of things.
    • WH personnel won't say because, if for no other reason, they've signed non-disclosure agreements.
 
Moderator's Warning:
Merged multiple threads. The first is the OP.
 
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