The Big Picture - 
By Glynn Wilson –

Here we are on Easter weekend, a time of year when the power of myth at its height in our society. Many good Christian capitalists will attend church services this Sunday even though they rarely darken the door of a so-called house of god at any other time of year.

Regular readers will recognize that I have long been fascinated with this power of myth, which came to us in a book by Joseph Campbell, although most people found out about it because of a series of interviews on PBS by Bill Moyers, which is still considered one of the most popular series in the history of public television.

I even use Campbell’s theory of the monomyth in my own memoir, Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again.

Saturday night, after returning to Mobile after spending the afternoon in Fairhope for an Earth Day celebration, I was flipping channels on free broadcast television and noticed that the Sinclair Broadcasting-owned ABC affiliate station was re-running Cecil B. DeMille’s epic 1956 film The Ten Commandments. This is Hollywood’s most ridiculous ode to this powerful myth, along with another epic film produced by Dino De Laurentiis and directed by John Huston, The Bible: In the Beginning….

Along with many scientists, I have long pondered the conundrum of how to counter the power of this myth for the sake of human advancement and survival. So far no one has come up with a more compelling narrative for how the world and life came about, so we are still stuck with that myth 2,000 years after it was created by way more primitive men than us.

Clearly there is something about how the human brain evolved that makes it hard to reset the story of what people believe. With a computer you can simply clear the memory cache and hit restart. The brain seems to have a memory cache that is nearly impossible to clear.

Take the myth of the fearless federal prosecutor who always gets his man.

As I have already written this week: Redacted Mueller Report Lets Trump Off the Hook for Conspiracy to Collude With Russia, Leaves a Determination on Obstruction of Justice Up to Congress

But many Democrats refuse to believe it. The myth that Republican Special Counsel Robert Mueller was going to save the country from this corrupt president has grown so strong over the past year and a half that people are not ready to accept it. They would rather believe that Mueller is the good cop and it’s Trump’s new Attorney General Bill Barr who is the bad cop.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr Holds Press Conference on Mueller Report

But wait. Many Democrats in the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Barr, including Alabama’s New Democrat in the Senate Doug Jones, based on the myth surrounding Barr’s legal and political career was that he was a “straight shooter” who would “do the right thing.”

“After thorough consideration, I have concluded that Mr. Barr is qualified for the position of attorney general and his record strongly suggests he will exercise independent judgment and uphold the best interests of the Department of Justice. Should the Judiciary Committee move forward with his nomination, I will vote to confirm Mr. Barr as Attorney General of the United States,” Senator Jones said in a statement issued just minutes before the (Senate Judiciary) committee voted to confirm Barr.

The myth of Mueller as the hero who would save us from Trump was built up by story after story in the mainstream media, by hours and hours of favorable commentary by the pundits on cable TV, by his treatment on late night comedy shows like “Saturday Night Live” on NBC and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on CBS.

After weeks of screaming for the “full Mueller report,” many Democrats seem unable to believe what they see before their very own eyes.

Mueller failed to get his man!

At the Earth Day celebration in Fairhope, I ran into a retired FBI agent and tried out my new analysis on him. He tended to agree with me. So let me make the case again this way.

It’s true that the report contains much damning information on Trump, his campaign team, White House staff and family. The problem is at every turn, the declination decisions came to the conclusion that the evidence was “insufficient” to charge individuals for crimes.

If I was the special prosecutor, I would have shown this information from the report and the supporting video to the grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia and let them decide, with the obvious briefing that this is how Trump communicates, by innuendo in speeches and Twitter tweets. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen confirmed this in his revised testimony before Congress after he pleaded guilty to lying.

You don’t need some secret, wire tapped telephone conversation of Trump talking to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He said it in public for all to see. Then the Russian hacking and spying started up within 5 hours after he said it, according to reporting we have known about for months. It’s right there in Mueller’s investigative report. How much evidence does it take?

From the section of the report on 1. Summer and Fall 2016 Operations Targeting Democrat-Linked Victims:

On July 27, 2016, Unit 26165 targeted email accounts connected to candidate Clinton’s personal office [redacted]. Earlier that day, candidate Trump made public statements that included the following: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing…..”

The “30,000 emails” were apparently a reference to emails described in media accounts as having been stored on a personal server that candidate Clinton had used while serving as Secretary of State.

Within approximately five hours of Trump’s statement, GRU officers targeted for the first time Clinton’s personal office. After candidate Trump’s remarks, Unit 26165 created and sent malicious links targeting 15 email accounts at the domain [redacted] including an email account belonging to Clinton aide [redacted]. The investigation did not find evidence of earlier GRU attempts to compromise accounts hosted on this domain. It is unclear how the GRU was able to identify these email accounts, which were not public.

Unit 26165 officers also hacked into a DNC account hosted on a cloud-computing service [redacted]. On September 20, 2016, the GRU began to generate copies of the DNC data using [redacted] function designed to allow users to produce backups of databases (referred to [redacted] as “snapshots”). The GRU then stole those snapshots by moving them to [redacted] account that they controlled; from there, the copies were moved to GRU-controlled computers. The GRU stole approximately 300 gigabytes of data from the DNC cloud-based account.

Supporting video:

Instead, in the section on Prosecution and Declination Decisions:

… the Office’s investigation uncovered evidence of numerous links (i.e., contacts) between Trump Campaign officials and individuals having or claiming to have ties to the Russian government. The Office evaluated the contacts under several sets of federal laws, including conspiracy laws and statutes governing foreign agents who operate in the United States. After considering the available evidence, the Office did not pursue charges under these statutes against any of the individuals … the Office did not charge any Campaign associate or other U.S. person with conspiracy to defraud the United States based on the Russia-related contacts … The investigation did not … yield evidence sufficient to sustain any charge that any individual affiliated with the Trump Campaign acted as an agent of a foreign principal …

There are significant blacked out redactions in these sections of the report, however, so this is not the end of the story. Congress must now conduct its own investigations and try to get to the bottom of this.

But it is still impossible to conclude that Mueller got his man in this investigation and report.

White Water

For comparison’s sake, see what Independent Counsel Ken Starr did in reporting his investigation of President Bill Clinton.

In the lead to his report, not buried in the end, Starr claimed Clinton performed actions that were “inconsistent with the president’s constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws” and outlined a case for impeaching him on 11 possible grounds, including perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and abuse of power.

In the introduction of his report, Starr claimed Clinton had lied under oath during a sworn deposition on January 17, 1998, while he was a “defendant in a sexual harassment lawsuit” and “to a grand jury.”

He additionally alleged in the report that Clinton had “attempted to influence the testimony of a grand jury witness who had direct knowledge of facts that would reveal the falsity of his deposition testimony; attempted to obstruct justice by facilitating a witness’ plan to refuse to comply with a subpoena; attempted to obstruct justice by encouraging a witness to file an affidavit that the president knew would be false … ; lied to potential grand jury witnesses, knowing that then they would repeat those lies before the grand jury; and engaged in a pattern on conduct that was inconsistent with his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws.”

Starr included a detailed timeline of (Monica) Lewinsky’s various sexual encounters with Clinton during her White House internship.

He concluded the report with a section entitled “Grounds,” where he provided supporting evidence to each of the 11 grounds for potential impeachment of Clinton—including physical evidence such as the DNA test results of a semen stain on a dress owned by Lewinsky which matched Clinton’s blood sample.

Starr also alleged that Clinton had conversations with witnesses during his investigation which he ascribed as “witness-tampering and obstruction of justice by hiding evidence and giving misleading accounts to lawyers for Paula Jones.”

Congress did bring up and vote on Articles of Impeachment against Clinton in the House, and there was a trial in the Senate. It ended in his acquittal and he was not removed from office, but the vote was largely along party lines.

Watergate

In another case, the Watergate Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox never finished his investigation on President Richard Nixon and turned in a report, since Nixon first fired him and then resigned in disgrace knowing impeachment was coming. But Cox had established various so-called “task forces” to handle parts of the investigation, including a “dirty tricks” task force, and one for readying perjury indictments. A few individuals were charged, convicted and spent time in prison.

Similarly Mueller has charged a number of individuals with crimes, and a few have pleaded guilty and some will spend time in jail.

Everyone Who’s Been Charged in Investigations Related to the 2016 Election and How They Are Connected to the President

Trump Collusion

But he did not get his main man, the president of the United States. He didn’t recommend an indictment or impeachment.

Even though on two occasions in the report Mueller’s team cites the pertinent laws and policies and state that “no person in this country is so high that he is above the law,” in the end, the report punted a decision on whether this president is above the law — to a partisan and divided Congress and court of public opinion.

“If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” the report concludes, seemingly leaving the door open for Congress to consider that. But in the report itself, he says, “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.”

Maybe they should have shown it to a grand jury and let them make the judgment. If one of the goals was to restore trust in the American justice system, the FBI and the courts, I’m afraid this report falls short. This is not Bill Barr’s fault. This is the Mueller report.

As far as I’m concerned, anyway, he fell off his big white horse and lost his cowboy hat.

Any Democrats who are still supporting him as a mythical hero are still in the denial stage. Maybe they will come around in the days ahead.

Or, maybe they like living life based on false myths.

I’m sworn to stand by the truth no matter where it leads. A real news reporter does not just write platitudes everyone of his readers will agree with 100 percent of the time. If you came here looking for a tribal blog that supports your mythical views, you came to the wrong place.

We operate under a different, more valuable and workable narrative about how life came into being and may sustain itself under a system based on “Truth, Justice and the American way,” the pursuit of democracy, equality and justice for all.