UPDATED: Mueller To Testify Now That ICA Is In Play
Robert Mueller has agreed to testify before a “joint panel” of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, on July 17th. As CTH points out, this will be carefully rehearsed theater. What's it about? Adam Schiff gives it away in a tweet. We've all been hearing for the past two weeks that Barr and Durham are focusing on the ICA, the intelligence "assessment" that has controlled the Russia Hoax overall narrative. It's as phony as the Steele "dossier", but its evidence free "finding" that Putin "attacked our democracy to help Trump win" has been the Good News and the Creed of the Russia Hoaxers. Schiff tweets:
Robert Mueller has agreed to testify before Congress pursuant to subpoena.
Russia attacked our democracy to help Trump win. Trump welcomed and used that help. As Mueller said, that should concern every American.
And now, every American will get to hear directly from Mueller.
Sheer desperation. Mueller's appearance will be staged to defend the ICA narrative of the Russia Hoax, to stave off the looming disaster just a bit longer. But this isn't going to stop Barr and Durham. Mueller better mind how he goes.
UPDATE 1: You never know what might come up in Mueller's testimony, so this may be a good spot to recommend Jeff Carlson's new blog, Tracing the Origins of Congressional Democrats’ ‘Obstruction’ Strategy . Back in December, 2018, in A Message Of Hope , I made a big deal about Bill Barr's 19 page legal memo to Rod Rosenstein, which Barr wrote in June of 2018. The title of that memo was "Mueller's Theory Of Obstruction."
Carlson goes into detail regarding the development of the Democrat obstruction strategy, drawing on Mueller's (actually Weissmann's) theory, but his closing section is titled "William Barr’s Foresight". His point is simply that, at a time when nobody else--including Trump's lawyers--saw where Mueller was headed--Bill Barr did. This was a major reason that Barr took the AG gig when he could have been retired in comfort. Count on it--Barr is all over this. But look for the Dems to play that theory up. They don't need a straight opinion from Mueller to try to use the theory.
UPDATE 2: We all have a list of questions we'd like to see put to Mueller, but President Trump reopened what would be a fascinating line of inquiry in an interview with Maria Bartiromo (via Zerohedge ). To put what follows in perspective, recall that Strzok and Page were dismissed from Team Mueller--and ultimately from the FBI--for cause for matters having to do with their emails and texts:
President Trump on Wednesday claimed that special counsel Robert Mueller 'illegally terminated' texts between ... Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
...

[Trump] was likely referring to a December report by the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) which found that after [Strzok] was fired from the Mueller probe, the special counsel's office allowed Strzok's phone to be wiped clean by the FBI before it was reassigned to another agent.
It strains credulity to imagine that the special counsel's office would 'accidentally' allow Strzok's iPhone to be reformatted after he was fired for exchanging biased text messages on it.

Jordan Schachtel
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@JordanSchachtel
So Mueller's team wiped ALL of the data off of Peter Strzok's iPhone after determining "it contained no substantive text messages." Given what we know about Strzok, this smells like quite the coverup. Time for Congress to step in?https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2018/i-2018-003523.pdf …
11:16 AM - Dec 13, 2018
Page's phone was similarly scrubbed.
Jordan Schachtel
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@JordanSchachtel
Replying to @JordanSchachtel
I'm sure you're all super shocked to find out that Lisa Page's phone was also scrubbed
12:56 PM - Dec 13, 2018
[Description of the content of their communications]
No wonder Strzok's iPhone was allowed to be scrubbed!