Attorney General William Barr released the Mueller report on Thursday, April 18.
Some of us have suspected that from the beginning that those who support the theory of the supposed Trump-Russia connection were offering a "nothing burger."
Vocal Democrats in Congress have made the report into a fetish. They will not turn loose. Neither will the anti-Trump media. They have staked their reputations on the Trump-Russia collusion. They use this alleged connection as a strategy for undermining his legitimacy. This has not worked. His public approval figures have remained stable.
The Democrats knew before its release what was not coming: a smoking gun. They had dreamed that there would be one. In this sense, they reveal a trait of most conspiracy theorists. The smoking gun is the conspiracy theorists' version of a medieval knight's missing holy grail.
Even before the report was released, the two sides started lining up over the expected redactions: pro and con. Within a few hours of its release, one media outlet counted 855 of them.
The Democrats are going to demand that there was something important in the redactions. The redactions will be seen as concealing crucial facts that would prove the collusion. Much will hinge on them if you are a Democrat.
This brings me to my main point. The release of more official documents never placates the vast majority of true believers who have already taken sides on an issue against the government's official story. They have made up their minds. To change now, they would have to admit defeat. They would have to admit that they were mistaken. They might even have to admit that they had been suckers. Nobody wants to do this.
I am not saying that there are never any missing documents. I am only saying that they will remain missing, assuming that they ever existed, which no one who knows for sure will say, and no one who doesn't know can prove.
STEP 1: ACTION
The government takes advantage of this. In major transition events, such as the assassination of JFK and the 9/11 attacks, the government rushes to judgment. That was the name of the first book calling into question the assassination theory of JFK. It was written by a lawyer, Mark Lane. He died in 2016. He never changed his mind, but he grew tired of the whole discussion. He stopped commenting on the assassination.
The faster that the government gets out the official story, the more likely it is going to be accepted by the majority of voters. Speed is everything. Action has to be fast.
On anything that is really important, the crucial documents are destroyed before the official inquiry begins. The idea that the government saves every piece of paper is naïve. Things do disappear. It is not difficult to make things disappear. Once they disappear, they are usually gone forever. Nobody makes photocopies of the stolen documents.
So, the second action is the rapid theft of crucial documents. If there really is a conspiracy, senior members are sophisticated enough to be able to get into government files and remove any incriminating documents.
This means that only second-tier documents remain in the official files. The reason why they are still in the files is that it doesn't pay to steal them. Also, they are buried so deep that nobody can find them.
The number of files is enormous. When the files have not been digitized, somebody has to go through the files by hand. Nobody is going to do this. Nobody has the time to do it. You have to go to Washington to do it. You have to know where it is. You have to know which box it is in. You have to pay the hotel bills to do the searching.
The third action is classifying everything in a file as "top secret."
Bureaucrats don't like extra work. So, they classify everything even mildly controversial as "top secret." They don't go through the files and read every piece of paper. They don't label only embarrassing or classified pieces of paper as "top secret." They may not know what is incriminating. They won't be able to connect the dots. It would take a careful researcher to connect the dots. So, the classification system is really the principle of bureaucratic inaction.
A researcher has to get through this "top secret" barrier to entry. This is not easy.
The bureaucrats take advantage of the needle in the haystack problem. They assume that nobody will know which document to ask for. The fact that the lawyers who were trying to get Nixon out of office knew exactly where on the tapes incriminating discussions took place was evidence at the time that there was a mole inside the White House. The lawyers on the outside were being tipped off by somebody on the inside. But only three people have commented on this, as far as I know: Susan Huck, who figured it out, Gary Allen, who quoted Susan Huck, and Gary North, who quoted Gary Allen. Reporters never paid any attention to this. Yet it should have been obvious. Reporters are just are not curious enough.
The best that you can hope as a researcher is to find traces of smoke. There is never a truly smoking gun. A smoking gun on the JFK assassination is 56 years old. The smoke has drifted away. There are so many other hints of what went on in 1963 that any new document is not going to unravel the case presented by any of the hundreds of theories about the assassination. One more piece of information is not going to change many opinions. Certainly, it will not lead to a revision of the government's original position. The government is sticking to its story. Its story is like all the other assassination stories: the lone nut. Anything else will be dismissed as a conspiracy theory, and the deeper the conspiracy, the less likely that the government will allow any consideration of it.
If there really was a conspiracy inside the government, such a revelation might bring down the conspirators inside the government. But any conspiracy so well concealed and so powerful as to administer an assassination really is the government. It runs the show. Politicians come and go, but the Deep State bureaucracy remains. Anyone who believes that a crucial document is going to escape the notice of such a conspiracy is somebody marked by irrepressible hope.
Look at this process from the government's point of view. Everybody knows that the government cannot do anything about a lone nut. But if a conspiracy assassinated a president or any other crucial figure, that indicates a horrendous government failure. The government's intelligence system was, once again, unintelligent. This assertion is unacceptable to the government.
It is not that bureaucrats are deliberately trying to hide something. You have to know something is there in order to hide it, and most bureaucrats don't know it's there. Only the people who were really in on a conspiracy would know it is there. Those people can arrange to have the document stolen. If they were high enough to assassinate Kennedy as part of a conspiracy, we can be near-certain that no revealing documents remain in the files.
Let me give you the smoking gun that proves this. Here is the oldest major conspiracy in American history: the assassination of Lincoln. This is from a University Press of Kentucky blog. It deals with the missing pages in Booth's diary, which was recovered at the scene of his death in the burning barn.
Mystery surrounds Booth’s diary. The little book was taken off Booth’s body by Colonel Everton Conger. He took it to Washington and gave it to Lafayette C. Baker, chief of the War Department’s National Detective Police. Baker in turn gave it to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Despite its obvious interest to the case, the book was not produced as evidence in the 1865 Conspiracy Trial.In 1867 the diary was re-discovered in a forgotten War Department file with more than a dozen pages missing. Conspiracy theorists became convinced that the missing pages contained the key to who really was behind Lincoln’s assassination, and several fingers pointed toward Stanton. Support for this theory came about in 1975 when Joseph Lynch, a rare books dealer, claimed to have found the missing pages through one of Stanton’s descendants.
Despite the apparent authenticity of Lynch’s claim, his story contained a few missing pages of its own. Over the years there has been endless speculation on those missing pages including rumors that they had surfaced. Nevertheless, they remain officially missing.
Missing documents stay missing.
But what about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)? You can write to an agency and ask for a photocopy. Then the agency begins to stall.
If you ever get it, it may be redacted beyond recognition.
STEP 2: INACTION
Bureaucrats stall. They are skilled at this. They spend most of their careers stalling.
James Bovard is one of the great sleuths at digging up concealed documents in federal government files. He has been doing this for at least 30 years. He is a master at it. But he admits that a dredged-up document really doesn't change much. If he gets a document, it may be redacted. Or maybe he just doesn't get the requested document. Recently, he wrote about this myth: "The truth will out." No, it won't, he says. Maybe little truths, but not big ones.
I’ve been an investigative journalist for more than 35 years. I have fought many federal agencies to get the facts of what they are doing. Sometimes I get some dirt, sometimes I get a smoking gun — or a few whiffs — but most government coverups succeed.I have been using the federal Freedom of Information Act since the early 1980s. This law is supposed to make Americans think the government is transparent — federal agencies are bound by law to reply within 20 business days to requests for documents and other information.
Some years ago, I sent out a bunch of FOIA requests to federal agencies to see what they had in their files about me. The FBI replied that they had nothing — even though FBI chief Louis Freeh publicly condemned my articles on Ruby Ridge. No records? The FBI told a lot of lies about the Randy Weaver case — enough to con much of the media — but they got whupped by a brave Idaho jury. There are some federal agencies that routinely and wrongfully deny FOIA requests, presuming that people are not seriously seeking information until they sue the agency in federal court.
I wrote a lot about trade policy in the 1990s and clashed at times with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. I filed a FOIA to get their files on me, including the uproar after I rattled them by acquiring a secret copy of the U.S. tariff code that they had denied existed. Their response came back — “We have no records on Kevin Bovard.” This was not even “close enough for government work,” but it was typical of the charades of disclosure practiced by many agencies.
I have been slamming the Transportation Security Administration for 15 years, so I sent them a FOIA request for their records on me. The TSA chief had publicly condemned an article I wrote in 2014 but their response to my request contained no information on that. Was I supposed to believe that TSA boss John Pistole had typed his retort in an online portal that the newspaper provided, leaving no internal trace?
After a tussle with the TSA at Reagan National Airport back in March, I filed a FOIA request for the videos of that encounter. I have received nothing on that incident and remain sitting on the edge of my chair waiting. Admittedly, I did already whack the TSA on that ruckus in the Los Angeles Times. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reprinted that article with the headline “TSA: the world’s most incompetent agency” — I wonder if that will show up the next time I file a FOIA request with TSA.
This is how the system works. Bureaucracies can successfully stall most of the time. The longer they stall, the more time that the official stories remain part of the historiographical landscape. The textbook accounts rely on the official stories. Textbooks are rarely revised on the issue of major assassinations.
STEP 3: REDACTION
Discovered documents are redacted before they are released. Names are crossed out.
This creates interest. People on one side insist that it's a cover-up. People on the other side insist that it's a matter of law, or it's a matter protecting privacy, or something. It doesn't matter what. Something. "Move along. There's nothing to see here." And there probably isn't.
The redactions are mostly wild goose chases. Conspiracy theorists will go nuts trying to figure out whose name is being concealed. They will spend more energy and time and money trying to find out. The fact of the matter is this: the really crucial documents were stolen years ago. You're not going to find anything.
The NSA may have digital files filled with such material, but the NSA is not about to cooperate with Congress. Those files are closed. They can be used for blackmail. Probably, they are just needles in gigantic digital haystacks. Somebody would have to go looking for them. Nobody inside the NSA has any incentive to do this. Outside the NSA, nobody knows how to get inside the NSA.
STEP 4: RETRACTION
Surely, you jest.
CONCLUSION
The best that most revisionist historians can hope for is to call attention to obvious discrepancies and outright lies in the official government story. This is always helpful. It throws suspicion on the government. Anytime you can throw legitimate suspicion on the federal government, you should do so, but only if you have a lot of spare time on your hands. You're not going to change many people's opinions about the story.
It does not matter politically what is or is not in the Mueller report. Nancy Pelosi is not going to change her mind, and defenders of Donald Trump are not going to change their minds.
Basically, the media are supplying condiments for the nothing burger. Some prefer katsup (pronounced "catch up," which is what most of the media are playing on this report). Others prefer mustard. The real click bait is Tabasco. But the meat is missing. It really is a nothing burger.
We need Clara Peller. She asked the right question.
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