RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/27/parsing-muellers

In the second part of this report, we saw that correcting the flagrant misrepresentations and filling in the strategic gaps in Robert Mueller’s July 13 indictment yields a tale that revolves around four important dates in the annals of 2016 presidential election skullduggery: one in March and three over a four-day period in June of that year.

• March 19: Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta is tricked into giving away the password to his main Gmail account. As a result, hostile actors gained possession of all of Podesta’s campaign emails; including one containing a  file of Trump opposition research.

• June 12: Julian Assange announces that his organization WikiLeaks gained possession of and will soon be releasing Clinton campaign emails.

• June 14: The Washington Post discloses the now infamous Russian hack of the DNC’s servers, announcing in both the headline and lead sentence the odd detail that the Russians stole a file of Trump opposition research.

• June 15: The mysterious Guccifer 2.0 emerges online just one day after the Post story, claiming to be the hacker described therein and releasing 230 pages of Trump opposition research as confirmation.

Mueller would have us believe that his indicted Russians created Guccifer 2.0 to deflect blame for the DNC hack away from themselves by having the online persona claim responsibility but deny being Russian. This plan seems, not to put too fine a point on it, kind of stupid. Since a Russian spy couldn’t be expected to admit his identity, it’s hard to imagine G2’s denials would have had any credibility. And, since G2’s taking credit for the hack would attract more attention to it, it seems just as likely as not that such a plan would have increased speculation that the Russians had hacked the DNC.

Sadly, we’ll never know for sure what the results of Mueller’s plan would have been since, despite his claims to the contrary, it manifestly was not G2’s plan.

Contra Mueller, G2 never made any serious effort to repudiate the widely held belief that he was with Russian intelligence until his final communication to the world—seven months after his debut—by which time all but a few skeptical researchers took it for granted that he was Russian. Furthermore, from the moment G2 appeared, he went out of his way to plant clues that he was with Russian intelligence; including, but by no means restricted to, ending the second sentence in his first communication to the world with a Russian emoticon and inserting the name of the founder of the Soviet Secret police, in the Russian alphabet no less, into files mere minutes before releasing them.

Mueller also accuses his 12 indicted Russians of using the G2 identity to pass documents to WikiLeaks. Yet Mueller somehow neglected to mention that G2 himself boasted of being a WikiLeaks source several times; starting, once again, with his very first blog post.

Mueller’s silence about G2’s multiple confessions to one of his indictment’s main allegations, though contemptible, is at least understandable. Publicly confessing to being a WikiLeaks source is, after all, the very last thing a Russian spy who secretly was one would do. Mueller couldn’t mention G2’s confessions for the same reason he couldn’t mention all the evidence G2 planted to give the impression that he was a Russian spy. Both are obviously self-refuting and, hence, make a mockery of Mueller’s allegations, which he made knowing he had no power to extradite any of the 12 indicted Russians and, hence, that none of his misrepresentations will be exposed in court.

The clues G2 left connecting himself to Russian espionage and his repeated shout-outs to Julian Assange are as flagrant and gratuitous as they are self-refuting. And, they are equally inexplicable unless the truth is the exact opposite of what Mueller alleges and G2 was created to poison Assange’s reputation by falsely making him out to be in league with Vladimir Putin.

But, the other two important items we’ve seen (and about which Mueller remains silent)—G2’s possessing the Trump opposition research file and Assange’s June 12 announcement that Clinton campaign emails were forthcoming—together shed a new and revealing light on the purpose behind that June 14 Washington Post story that first brought the now infamous Russian hack of the DNC to the world’s attention.

CrowdStrike Enacts a “Public Relations Strategy”
The Post got most of its story directly from the DNC’s tech firm, CrowdStrike. The firm’s founder and chief technology officer Dmitri Alperovitch and president Shawn Henry are quoted extensively. Before cashing in and joining CrowdStrike, Henry was the FBI’s head of cybersecurity, promoted to that position by none other than Robert Mueller. Alperovitch, though Russian by birth, is a member of the anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian Atlantic Council.

In a Buzzfeed puff piece on CrowdStrike’s response to the alleged DNC hack, both CrowdStrike and the DNC admit that the June 14 Washington Post story was part of a “public relations strategy” on CrowdStrike’s part designed to “control the message.” Like Mueller, Buzzfeed didn’t seem to think that Assange’s threat to release Clinton campaign emails just two days before CrowdStrike’s public relations strategy commenced warranted mentioning. Perhaps because, once mentioned, it becomes hard not to suspect that the strategy CrowdStrike in fact enacted—announcing that Russian spies had stolen a file Clinton’s campaign knew would turn up in John Podesta’s stolen emails—was designed to taint Assange’s likely release of those emails by creating the narrative that he acquired them thanks to Russian espionage.

If not for G2’s timely intervention, however, the evidence implicating Russian intelligence in the Washington Post story only would have become public after WikiLeaks released Podesta’s emails on October 7. The Post story makes no mention whatsoever of either Assange or Wikileaks. So, until the world learned WikiLeaks released an archive containing a Trump opposition research file, there would be nothing connecting Assange to the June 14 Washington Post story alleging that the Russians had stolen just such a file and, hence, nothing connecting him to Russian espionage.

So, if not for G2 stepping in the next day, any disturbing revelations in Podesta’s emails concerning Hillary Clinton would have begun disseminating before people could be brought to notice that a file of Trump opposition research was among the 16,000 attached documents, reminded of a June 14 Washington Post story alleging that those dastardly Russians had stolen just such a file, and convinced to ignore the damaging information as, thus, coming from a despicable and unreliable source.

Without G2, for example, John Podesta could not have responded immediately to Assange’s release of his emails, as he did, with a tweet designed to brand their theft and release a nefarious Russian plot to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency.

“While I’m in pretty good company with Gen. Powell & Amb. Marshall [both of whose emails were released by DCLeaks, not WikiLeaks] I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump.”

Nor could Hilary Clinton herself so easily have done the same, albeit with even less subtlety, 12 days later in her final debate with Trump, when she was first confronted with disturbing revelations gleaned from Assange’s release of Podesta’s emails. She said:

But you are very clearly quoting from WikiLeaks. What is really important about WikiLeaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans. They have hacked American websites, American accounts of private people, of institutions. Then they have given that information to WikiLeaks for the purpose of putting it on the internet. This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government. Clearly from Putin himself in an effort, as 17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election. So, I actually think the most important question of this evening, Chris, is finally, will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this, and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in this election.

Clinton and her surrogates appear to have been lucky that G2 did decide to step in; increasing speculation Russian intelligence had hacked the DNC but, most importantly, forging the crucial link between Putin and Assange immediately, so that voters could be primed to ignore anything damaging about Clinton that WikiLeaks might release in advance.

Indeed, G2’s emerging one day after CrowdStrike planted the Post story amounts to such a perfect one-two combination that it’s hard not to suspect that CrowdStrike was counting on G2’s June 15 debut. Once Mueller’s lies and the crucial details he omits are exposed, it’s much more plausible that, rather than being created by Russian spies, G2 instead was created by the DNC’s tech firm CrowdStrike as a means of connecting Assange to the tale of Russian cyber skullduggery they released through the Post and, thus, discredit WikiLeaks’ likely release of Podesta’s emails.

In fact, we’ve already seen one reason to think G2 must be in league with Clinton’s campaign: somehow he acquired a 230-page file of Trump opposition research that, apart from evidence of Russian involvement planted minutes before its release, is identical to just such a file from John Podesta’s emails.

So from where did he get it?

G2 says he hacked it from the DNC and passed it to WikiLeaks. But that file doesn’t appear in Assange’s July 22 release of DNC material. Moreover, besides appearing instead in his October 7 release of Podesta’s emails, the DNC has even admitted that the file is from Podesta’s Gmail account rather than the DNC servers. Another four documents G2 released along with the Trump opposition file also turned up, minus the obviously planted evidence of Russian involvement, in Assange’s release of Podesta’s emails. But, like the Trump opposition research file, none turned up in WikiLeaks’ earlier release from the DNC even though that’s supposed to be the one G2 passed to Assange according to both Mueller and G2.

Mueller would probably prefer we not notice that he and G2 are on the same side here. Both allege that WikiLeaks acquired the DNC material they released on July 22 from G2, which the latter hacked from the DNC servers. But, besides the fact that broadcasting his guilt is the last thing a real Russian spy would have done, G2’s self-refuting confession is also the only evidence that he really did hack the DNC; indeed, it’s the only evidence, apart from CrowdStrike’s saying so, that the DNC was hacked. And though Mueller again keeps us in the dark, others have pointed out that G2’s explanation of how he did it can’t be true.

In an interview with Vice, G2 claims he exploited a vulnerability in fundraising software the DNC was using from a company called “NGP VAN.” But the NGP VAN software the DNC was using doesn’t get installed on their clients’ computers; instead, clients log on to NGP VAN servers and use the software remotely. So, even if the vulnerabilities G2 mentions existed, they wouldn’t have provided any means for hacking the DNC or any other of NGP VAN’s clients. All they could leverage is an illicit entry into NGP VAN’s servers.

Even putting aside G2’s bogus story of how he hacked the DNC, we know that he somehow managed to obtain several files from Podesta’s emails which, contrary to his and Mueller’s story, weren’t among the files Assange released from the DNC. One of those files, the Trump opposition research, was also mentioned by CrowdStrike in the Washington Post story that precipitated G2’s debut. Moreover, the fact that G2 was plainly trying to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign by discrediting Julian Assange makes it overwhelmingly unlikely that G2 acquired files from John Podesta’s Gmail account illicitly.

Once the facts Mueller dissembles about or conveniently conceals are brought to light, it’s hard to come up with a coherent story that explains G2’s behavior and how he obtained files from John Podesta’s emails without supposing that he was created by CrowdStrike as the second move in a strategy which, by their own admission, began in the Washington Post article just the day before. The Post story established publicly that Russians had hacked the DNC and provided G2 with an identity card to establish his bona fides as the hacker. It set things up so he could come in the next day and poison Assange’s reputation by doing something no actual Russian spy working for Assange would do—announce to the world that he had passed the hacked files to WikiLeaks.

And regardless whether G2 was working with CrowdStrike, once Mueller’s lies and omissions are corrected, it’s impossible to tell a coherent story in which G2’s raison d’être doesn’t involve tarnishing Julian Assange’s reputation by creating false connections to Vladimir Putin.

But a third unindicted figure who also nonetheless looms large in Mueller’s narrative completes the picture and sheds light on Mueller’s motives for engaging in these flagrant deceptions: Donald Trump, whom we are supposed to believe Putin’s and Assange’s plot was designed illicitly to make president of the United States.

The Fake Conspiracy’s Third Real Victim
G2 wasn’t any more circumspect about his secret mission to help Trump than he was about his secret boss Putin or secret co-conspirator Assange. To take but one example, G2 responded to a question from BBC News about whether he supported Assange, which made no reference to Trump whatsoever, by, as you can at this point probably guess, crudely giving his whole game away:

together with assange we’ll make america great again : D : D : D

But while the facts Mueller conceals make it clear that G2 was created to forge the narrative that Assange and Putin were in league to help Trump, none of the efforts we’ve seen so far involved implicating Trump in the fake conspiracy.

So far, the president merely has been presented as an uninvolved beneficiary of Putin and Assange’s dastardly scheme, rather than as a collaborator.

To answer that, prosecutors made an effort to convert the dastardly duo into a contemptible trio via Trump’s long-time friend and confidante, Roger Stone. Though Stone isn’t mentioned by name, a private conversation between G2 and Stone—which is also in the public record—does make its way into Mueller’s indictment:

The Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, also communicated with U.S. persons about the release of stolen documents. On or about August 15, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, wrote to a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, “thank u for writing back . . . do u find anyt[h]ing interesting in the docs i posted?”  On or about August 17, 2016, the Conspirators added, “please tell me if i can help u anyhow . . . it would be a great pleasure to me.” On or about September 9, 2016, the Conspirators, again posing as Guccifer 2.0, referred to a stolen DCCC document posted online and asked the person, “what do u think of the info on the turnout model for the democrats entire presidential campaign.” The person responded, “[p]retty standard.”

Even on Mueller’s reckoning Stone’s remarks to G2 are entirely innocent. But, the details of the conversation, which Stone published in March 2017, make Stone look even less guilty, if that’s possible. Roger Stone is only responsible for 24 words in the 173-word exchange; 11 of them congratulating G2 on his Twitter suspension being rescinded and 11 more ignoring G2’s questions and, instead, asking him to retweet Stone’s latest article in what looks like a cut and paste bit of promotion that he probably sends to everyone. Stone’s remaining two words, “pretty standard,” besides being quoted by Mueller, is the conversation’s final remark and the only time Stone responded to G2’s repeated attempts to get him to engage.

And “pretty standard” understates the rank insignificance of the documents Mueller and G2 allege the latter stole; though they are a fair representation of how generally pathetic his releases were for someone alleged to be trying to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The documents are from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. They concern congressional races, have no bearing on Hillary Clinton or her quest for the presidency, and contain the less than earth-shattering news that the DCCC thought identifying voters in the Democrat’s base who mightn’t be inclined to vote and getting them to do so would be a good idea.

Apart from details, that’s all there is to the alleged stolen document that G2 brought to Roger Stone’s attention. Stone called it “pretty standard,” but he would have been justified in calling it “utterly worthless.”

The Deep State and the Corporate Press: Stronger Together
None of this, of course, stopped the corporate press from dutifully insinuating that Mueller’s indictment implied something untoward occurred between Stone and some of Vladimir Putin’s henchmen. The jackals had caught the scent of the tiny drop of blood Mueller’s swipe at Stone drew and, within hours of the indictment’s release, the big corporate media outfits all published stories ominously reporting that Trump’s old friend Roger Stone was mentioned therein consorting with Russian spies.

The Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Charges against Russian intelligence officers intensify spotlight on Trump adviser Roger Stone.”

The same day, CNN published a story with the headline, “Roger Stone’s messages suggest he is unnamed person in new Russia indictment.”

The New York Times somehow resisted the urge to defame Stone in a headline, but nonetheless made sure their readers knew he was involved somehow:

[T]he indictment states that the hackers were communicating with “a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign.” Two government officials identified the person as Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump and the subject of close scrutiny by the F.B.I. and Mr. Mueller’s team.

Citing government officials to confirm that Mueller was referring to Stone is odd since Stone posted the relevant exchange with G2 on his website in March 2017. But why take 10 minutes to discover that when your readership is gullible enough to accept the word of anonymous government sources without noticing that secret leakers are always serving some even more secret agenda.

With the same appalling lack of concern about what the public record might show, within 48 hours of the indictment’s release ABC, CBS, Fox News and a host of other outlets all published variations on Vanity Fair’s headline: “Roger Stone Admits He’s ‘Probably’ The Unnamed Person in Mueller’s Indictment.”

Countless more articles appeared in the days following the indictment insinuating that Donald Trump’s old pal Roger Stone had suspicious contact with a Russian spy. Some selectively quoted from the indictment to achieve the effect; many didn’t even bother. But not one of the journalists involved took the trouble to look at the 173-word exchange and report that it was so patently innocuous that Stone can barely be said to have participated at all and that the document G2 unsuccessfully tried to get Stone to engage with him about bore no relation to the presidential election and consisted in the most insipid possible political observations dressed up in technical jargon.

Perhaps the corporate press was taking time off from the project of speaking truth to power they are always congratulating themselves for engaging in and tried to give burying truth for power a go instead. If so, it’s a task for which they are much better suited as is demonstrated in their continued coverage of Roger Stone’s escalating travails.

In the days after the media coverage shamelessly slandering Stone, reports began circulating that suggest his appearance in Mueller’s indictment wasn’t merely meant to show that G2 tried to make contact with someone connected to Trump’s campaign but, instead, was meant to elicit the media’s reprehensible slandering of Stone. Five days after the indictment appeared, on June 18, CNN ran the headline, “Special counsel still investigating Roger Stone.”

According to CNN, some attorneys representing a former friend of Stone met with prosecutors from Mueller’s office before the same judge who ordered some associates of Paul Manafort’s to testify before he was indicted.

The 252-word story makes no mention of anything Stone might actually have done till the closing sentence, “Stone has previously said his contact with the hackers posing as Guccifer 2.0 was ‘benign.’” Though no indication is given anywhere in the piece that Stone’s contact with G2 was the subject of the meeting it describes. In fact, that final sentence is the only time the article even mentioned anything G2-related! As we’ve seen, it would have taken very little time to verify that Stone spoke truthfully when he described his exchange with G2 as benign and, in any event, there isn’t any reason to think the exchange had anything to do with the meeting which was the article’s ostensible subject.

Just two weeks ago, on August 13, more evidence appeared that the reference to Roger Stone in Mueller’s indictment was the first step in justifying the independent counsel’s imminent persecution of Roger Stone, when Mother Jones ran the headline: “Mueller Is Examining Roger Stone’s Emails.”

According to the once-radical Mother Jones, which now finds itself a mouthpiece for the deep state, Stone claims that an acquaintance delivered a message from Assange about the timing of a WikiLeaks release, whereas the acquaintance claims he only pointed Stone toward public statements Assange made. At some point, the dispute turned rancorous and, according to Mother Jones, “two people familiar with the matter” say “the investigators are interested in the extent to which [Stone’s fellow disputant] perceived Stone’s statements [made in the course of their dispute] as threats.”

So the relevant emails, aside from having nothing to do with Trump, don’t implicate Stone in any campaign-related wrongdoings. And Mueller is looking into whether Stone’s disputant felt threatened, which is about as far removed from anything campaign-related as possible. Still, that didn’t stop Mother Jones from pointing out, apropos of nothing, that Stone has acknowledged contacts with Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks:

In a July 13 statement, Stone said his contact with Guccifer 2.0 was “benign” and “provides no evidence of collaboration or collusion with Gufficer [sic] 2.0 or anyone else in the alleged hacking of the DNC emails.”

We’ve already seen that Stone’s “acknowledged contacts” with G2 were so benign that mentioning them without categorically saying so amounts to slanderous insinuation. And Stone’s other “acknowledged contacts” with WikiLeaks mentioned by Mother Jones consists in nothing more than his claim that his acquaintance passed a message from Assange to him. And the whole point of the Mother Jones story is that a dispute arose because Stone’s acquaintance claims no such message was passed and, hence, that Stone didn’t have even the mediated one-off “contact” with Wikileaks he claims. If journalists gave out awards for brazen misrepresentations, Mother Jones’ claim that Stone has “acknowledged contacts with Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks” would certainly be a contender.

So one purpose Mueller’s indictment appears to have achieved is creating the entirely unsubstantiated and scurrilous narrative that an old friend of Donald Trump’s likely had unsavory dealings with a Russian spy. And, it now looks like Mueller is about to put the screws on Roger Stone as he’s done to Paul Manafort.

It remains to be seen how far Mueller’s attempt to destroy Roger Stone will go. Among the many awful truths we’ve learned in the last few years is that the crème de la crème of federal law enforcement are mostly “investigators” in name only. They seem to have only one blunt and ugly routine in their repertoire, which bears no relation to a patient, thoughtful, and fair inquiry.

First, use the limitless powers of the surveillance state to find something (no matter how trivial or unrelated to the alleged crime being investigated) on someone (no matter how low level or peripheral to the persons being investigated); then, threaten the poor schmuck with merciless prosecution and concomitant millions of dollars in legal fees if he doesn’t cooperate and find some way to implicate someone else. The process is repeated until the prosecutor’s bloodlust is satiated.

Our top-notch “investigators” seem only to know the techniques of petty thugs, voyeurism, and blackmail. And that appears to be what Stone is in for: with scurrilously false intimations of collusion with Russian spies thrown in to taint both Trump and Stone in the minds of the substantial portion of the public who won’t notice that the actual charges have nothing to do with G2, let alone that he manifestly isn’t a Russian spy and that Stone barely spoke more than two words to him, unless CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the rest of the corporate press tells them to.

Mueller’s Motive
Roger Stone’s ordeal with Mueller appears to be just beginning, but we’ve already seen two other attempts apparently unrelated to G2 to falsely implicate Trump in a plot with Putin to tamper with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

On April 26, 2016, roughly five weeks after the Clinton campaign became aware that Podesta’s emails were stolen, mysterious Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud told Trump foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of  “thousands of emails.” Papadopoulos relayed this remark to an Australian diplomat, who relayed it to the U.S. London embassy. From there, the remark was passed to the FBI, which triggered its investigation into Russian collusion on July 31, 2016.

The Steele dossier, which justified the FISA warrant authorizing the surveillance on Trump campaign aid Carter Page, was also conceived, though not yet born, in April, after the Clinton campaign learned of Podesta’s stolen emails. That’s when their law firm Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS, the company that produced the Steele dossier alleging all kinds of unsubstantiated dirt on Donald Trump.

The complex intrigue that went into these efforts to create evidence that Trump colluded with Russia is hard to understand. Risking these baroque machinations could have only been justified if the conspirators were certain that Hillary Clinton’s impending presidency would immunize them from detection. But if they thought Trump’s defeat was so inevitable, why would they go to these bizarre lengths to create evidence that he colluded with Putin?

The Russian collusion narrative makes more sense as an attempt to draw Trump into a pre-existing fake conspiracy that was necessary to taint Julian Assange with connections to Russian espionage to discredit his likely release of Podesta’s pilfered emails. As shown in my article “Julian Assange, CrowdStrike, and the Russian Hack that Wasn’t,” Assange very likely only failed to completely destroy Clinton’s candidacy because CrowdStrike had the Russian narrative prepared in advance to discredit his release of Podesta’s emails, stopping the many revelations that would have destroyed her already precarious reputation with the far left democratic base from reaching them.

While there’s little doubt about what now ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok meant when he texted about having an “insurance policy” in the unlikely event (in his mind) that Trump won, his remark doesn’t settle whether creating the insurance policy arose as an effort to implicate Trump or, instead, began as way to reinforce and bring Trump further into the fake conspiracy between Putin and Assange antecedently concocted to discredit the damaging information in Podesta’s pilfered emails out of fear that Assange was referring to them when he made his June 12 announcement. And Peter Strzok, in any event, is a lowly minion who wouldn’t have a clue about the larger concerns motivating the byzantine plots hatched by his betters.

Even if the project of tarring Assange with fake links to Putin was entirely separate from the attempts to do the same to Trump, whatever reason Mueller has for pursuing his witch-hunt is also reason enough to cover up the evidence that makes it obvious that G2’s aim was framing Julian Assange as an agent of Vladimir Putin.

If the obvious lies behind the allegations that Assange was in league with Putin are exposed, whether or not they are connected, the obvious lies behind the allegations that Trump was in league with Putin would likely follow; once you let people notice that the emperor has no clothes, it’s tough to suppress awareness that he’s not wearing any shoes either. But it’s very possible that the fake narratives linking Trump to Putin grew out of the earlier one linking Assange to the deep state and corporate press’s favorite bogeyman. And, if the two efforts are all of a piece, the lies behind Mueller’s July 13 indictment exposed herein are just part and parcel of the general lie Mueller engages in every second he continues persecuting the victims rather than investigating the perpetrators of the Russia collusion hoax.

Framing Julian Assange might, however, by itself be enough motivation for the grotesque lies we’ve seen at the heart of Mueller’s July 13 indictment. Assange has, after all, repeatedly made a fool of our intelligence agencies and he’s been holed up for 6 years in Ecuador’s London embassy to escape their tender mercies. Without Assange, we’d likely know nothing about the overlapping deep state conspiracies to undermine the results of the 2016 election and, seemingly, to move America closer to war with Russia. And, apart from President Trump, Assange’s continued free existence may constitute the single biggest threat to the deep state/big tech/global media hegemony we seem to be slipping under.

Julian Assange is also the one person in the world who can set the record straight on who hacked the documents he released from the DNC on July 22; which might explain why one of James Comey’s final acts as head of the FBI was killing a deal to give Assange immunity so he could testify and end our two-year national nightmare. A nightmare which, by virtually everyone’s reckoning, involves crimes that dwarf Watergate; the only disagreement being whether Donald Trump is victim or perpetrator, which is why Russia-gate has yielded bitter divisiveness not seen since the Civil War.

In the months preceding Mueller’s indictment, Ecuador signaled a decrease in hospitality towards Assange by cutting off his internet. A few weeks after Mueller’s July 13 indictment, rumors mounted that Ecuadorian officials were negotiating his expulsion into the arms of British authorities; who, sadly, seemed to have no compunction about trying to break inmates who threaten state-approved ideologies, when they don’t wind up simply dying under mysterious circumstances.

So even independently of any motive Mueller might have had to make sure the truth about the phony Putin-Assange-Trump axis of evil was covered up, it’s very possible that his indictment represents the last move in a strategy designed securely to frame Julian Assange as an agent of Russian espionage. As with Roger Stone, in virtually every article on Mueller’s indictment you’ll find, the mainstream press uncritically parrots the unsavory connections Mueller alleges Assange has to Putin with not so much as a glance at G2’s many publicly available statements covered in this series that make utter rubbish of Mueller’s allegations.

If we can forgive Nazi scientists so they can help build us rockets surely, we can forgive Julian Assange for engaging in behavior that would be lauded if he were in the pay of some media corporations rather than their declared enemy. The desired aim is, after all, revealing the truth about circumstances which have so bitterly poisoned both domestic and international relations for two years and show no sign of letting up. Even putting aside that Assange has already been effectively imprisoned for over six years, he hasn’t done anything worse than James Clapper, who perjured himself before Congress lying about the very domestic spying programs that Assange’s work has brought to our attention. At this writing he remains free, using his security clearance to rake in big bucks undermining Donald Trump’s presidency on corporate news.

Assange is the one person who can clear away all the fog that’s caused so much turmoil both at home and abroad. Anyone genuinely interested in ending the bitter division America’s suffered the last two years ought to be willing to count Assange’s six years trapped in London’s Ecuadorian embassy without sunlight as enough punishment. One meeting between Julian Assange and Donald Trump would instantly disperse the ugly miasma that’s wreaked so much havoc on our nation and world. Everyone would finally know for sure which parties colluded to sabotage the 2016 presidential election.

And we could finally start the job, much too long delayed by everyone’s reckoning, of locking them up for a very long time.