Much belatedly and amazingly a mere hours before election day Buzzfeed News published a bombshell report late Monday night based on the DOJ newly declassifying previously secret portions of the Mueller report (following a successful FOIA lawsuit to obtain them). It’s yet more smoking gun evidence proving long after the fact that core aspects of now deflated ‘Russiagate’ that American media spent years devoting wall-to-wall coverage to were deliberate manufactured falsehoods (shocker!), specifically as regards claims of early collaboration and “collusion” between Trump staffers, WikiLeaks, and the Russian government.
Unfortunately, like with the latest news that put the final nail in the coffin of the Steele dossier hoax, this too will fast be memory-holed given it’s now election day. We learn 18-months after the initial report’s redacted release that despite putting one of the most hyped central allegations facing Trump’s team and his past campaign adviser Roger Stone under a microscope, Mueller’s team of hundreds of FBI agents simply “did not have sufficient evidence” and thus never pursued charges, as the Buzzfeed report begins:
Prosecutors investigated Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and Roger Stone for the hacking of Democratic National Committee servers as well as for possible campaign finance violations, but ultimately chose not to charge them, newly released portions of the Mueller Report reveal.
Although WikiLeaks published emails stolen from the DNC in July and October 2016 and Stone — a close associate to Donald Trump — appeared to know in advance the materials were coming, investigators “did not have sufficient evidence” to prove active participation in the hacks or knowledge that the electronic thefts were continuing. In addition, federal prosecutors could not establish that the hacked emails amounted to campaign contributions benefitting Trump’s election chances and furthermore felt their publication might have been protected by the First Amendment, making a successful prosecution tenuous.
