The following is from RealClearInvestigations
The Mueller report should have been a knockout blow to anti-Trump forces who invested their hopes in the special counsel. Instead, Democrats have acted as if Mueller had reached the opposite conclusion and called him to testify before Congress later this month to bolster this case for impeachment. What gives?
As Eric Felten reports for RealClearInvestigations, the answer can be found in a close reading of the 448-page document. It reveals how the special counsel and his team used a number of rhetorical devices to couch evidence and shape a narrative so that a document that ultimately clears the president can also be read as an indictment of him.
“The first thing to note about the Mueller report,” Felten writes, “is just how contentious it is. It isn’t a set of findings so much as an assertion of what the findings might have been if only there had been more evidence. It is like a closing argument in a criminal case already dismissed for lack of evidence but in which the prosecutor is determined to redeem what he can of his case.”
As Felten demonstrates with specific examples, Mueller’s strategies include:
• Hectoring repetition that can make weak claims sound strong;
• The use of extraneous detail to add heft to flimsy assertions;
• The exclusion of other details that might weaken his case – including the fact that a man he casts as a Russian agent was a U.S. intelligence asset;
• A resort to insinuendo – a mix insinuation and innuendo – to prejudice the reader against those who have escaped the dock.
These literary devices, Felten writes, help explain why those who were at first dumbfounded by the special counsel’s report finding no conspiracy with Russia, and no clear case for obstruction against the president, have since found reasons to be buoyed by it – by its grudging tone, its sly assertions resembling proof, and its insistence that not being found guilty should not be confused with innocence.
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Walter Gilpin says
July 8, 2019 at 10:18 am2 1/2 years, $ 20,000,000, predominately left wing liberals with clear ties to the Clinton campaign including donations to her run for the presidency AND Weissman – the demon in “Licensed to Lie” (Sydney Powell). Liberal Congress “people” have exorbitant, unquenchable appetite to waste taxpayers money and to continue to claim Trump campaign “colluded” with the Russians. Schiff is a joke and embarrassment. Cummings a co-conspirator. Congressional liberal Congress representatives should, and in my opinion will suffer scathing defeat in 2020. Thanks Sharyl for your extraordinary work.
Al Christie says
July 8, 2019 at 10:25 amWriting a 448 page rambling and confusing report was just a way of obfuscating the fact that even a raft of the sharpest anti-trump democrat attorneys hired by a deep state republican special prosecutor couldn’t find anything against their president other than a few tweets they didn’t like.
Bob Kaluza says
July 8, 2019 at 10:44 amIsn’t this the new normal in the USA? If you win an election you must also win in the courts — a newly elected candidate must have lots of extra campaign cash for the attorneys!
Terry Ott says
July 8, 2019 at 9:07 pmI will not yet commit to voting for Trump (vs abstaining or doing a write-in) for there are things about him that I find offputting and troubling, or worse. But if this ridiculous side show keeps on a’going, I might just vote for the guy as a protest against the Trump derangement crowd in Congress and much of the media personalities.. One thing’s for darn sure, and I wouldn’t have said this a couple of years ago, I will not vote for any member of the Democratic party. What a collection of loathsome creatures they are showing themselves to be. I would not be party to entrusting them with anything related to the national interest or, for that matter, the Constitution of the US.
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