It’s the prosecutorial equivalent of Emily Litella’s “Never mind.”

From Insinuendo: Why the Mueller Report Doth Repeat So Much by Eric Felten. Perhaps there is a partisan point to Felten's piece but it is thoroughly entertaining and worthwhile from its study of the rhetoric of the Mueller Report.

In prep school, close reading of texts was all the rage. I saw the point . . . up to a point. Close reading in order to slow oneself down and capture the nuance and the subtleties of an argument makes good sense. Slow reading in order to capture the shape of an argument beyond just the words makes good sense. To see the rhetoric as well as the words.

But. A lot of the time it seemed to me that close reading was merely a mechanism for the reader to impose their own reading on the words, not to discern the writer's intent.

This distrust culminated in junior year of university. I had one more elective English class required for my overall degree but plenty of choices. Some reputed professor of literature from France was on sabbatical at my university. I signed up for the course and got in despite it being oversubscribed.

First class was orientation and yadda, yadda. OK. We left with an assignment to do a close reading of some poem.

The class discussion in the next class was enlightening. I don't recall the specifics. I vaguely recollect that the poet invoked the image of a wolf as a metaphor. The professor was acting as a facilitator of the class discussion. The interpretation hinged on two different understandings of the nature of a wolf. This from a class dominated by urbanites.

One interpretation could go towards the wolf as a timid verminous scavenger. One interpretation could go towards the wolf as a highly intelligent pack hunter.

The class, or the professor through his facilitation, started down the path of the wolf as a timid verminous scavenger.

I raised my hand and objected. I pointed out that while wolves do occasionally scavenge under the right circumstances, they are primarily intelligent pack hunters and that is their dominant literary representation.

The professor acknowledged the plausibility of that alternative interpretation but preferred the timid verminous scavenger version. He said something like "Well, perhaps X did not know that wolves are hunters."

Whatever the details were, it was clear that he had a preferred reading which was unconstrained by the hard work of researching and understanding what the poet intended. The poem could mean whatever the reader wanted it to mean.

Fair enough. But if we are with Alice in Wonderland where anything means whatever we want, then what need is there for overbearing professors who need no subject matter knowledge.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

Consequently, I dropped the class and found another to meet my requirement.

Felten gives the courtesy of believing that words do have meaning and that arguments are made to an end. And that rhetoric is a technique which can be understood and that a close reading reveals the rhetoric.

The first thing to note about the Mueller report 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. Mueller turns to a variety of strategies: hectoring repetition; the use of extraneous detail to add heft to flimsy assertion; and a resort to insinuation and innuendo to prejudice the reader against those who have escaped the dock.

Felten then goes on to demonstrate the power of close reading.

Ever since the debunking of Trump-Russia dirt paid for by the Democrats and compiled by the opposition firm Fusion GPS, government officials and conspiracists have insisted that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with launching the investigation. The story is that the FBI flew into action after learning that Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos had made an alarming statement to an Australian diplomat in a London bar, telling him about Russian intentions to interfere with the U.S. election.


George Papadopoulos: a Mueller redundancy.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File
From the first page of his report, the special counsel is eager to establish the narrative that that Papadopoulos, not Steele, sparked the initial investigation. Mueller writes that in May 2016 “Papadopoulos had suggested to a representative of [a] foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.”

But it’s not enough to say it once. Come page 6, Mueller writes, “Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton.”

Mueller repeats this claim nearly word for word again on pages 81, 89, and 93.

At least page 192 offers a hint of variation: The FBI “approached Papadopoulos for an interview” because of “his suggestion to a foreign government representative that Russia had indicated that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton.”


Shakespeare knew the power of repetition.
"Julius Caesar" trailer screenshot/Wikimedia
Such relentless repetition might be dismissed as lazy cut-and-paste writing. But repetition is an ancient and effective tool of rhetoric. The Greeks called it epimone; the Romans, commoratio. It can be used subtly and powerfully, as in “Brutus is an honorable man," or it can be employed in a clumsy effort to pound home a weak claim, as in “Papadopoulos suggested…that the Trump Campaign…”

What makes the claim weak?

The problem starts with “Papadopoulos suggested.” What exactly did he say? “Suggested” implies he expressed himself indirectly. The report’s use of that squishy verb all six times it refers to the conversation is an admission that Papadopoulos did not directly make the explosive claim that allegedly spurred the FBI into action.

The next part of the sentence is not only vague, but misleading – “Papadopoulos suggested … that the Trump campaign had received indications.”

This implies that information allegedly given to Papadopoulos – an adviser to the campaign – was shared with the entire campaign. This is especially misleading because the report later says it found no evidence that Papadopoulos told anyone else on the campaign about the emails.

And then there’s the descriptor “received indications,” which is even more amorphous than “suggested.” An “indication” could be anything from a light flashing Morse code to one of the grifters in “The Sting” putting a finger to the side of his nose. If Papadopoulos was told something, why not simply write he “was told”? The downside of the simple construction, from a prosecutor’s point of view, is that it lacks the implication that something furtive and sneaky is going on. “Receiving indications” by contrast, sounds suitably shady.

Fenter pays particular attention to the frequent reliance on insuendo as a rhetorical argument.

Another technique the Mueller report uses to paint a far darker picture than its evidence establishes – and to indirectly defend questionable decisions by the FBI -- is describing what would otherwise seem to be innocent actions with a raised eyebrow, implying some sort of ill-defined wrongdoing. The special counsel’s team prove themselves masters of that mix of insinuation and innuendo known as insinuendo.

Carter Page – the Naval Academy graduate whom the FBI spied on after it made dubious claims to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- is a particular target of this technique. Mueller urges readers to watch a speech Page delivered in Moscow in 2016, which the report describes: “In the speech, Page criticized the U.S. government's foreign policy toward Russia, stating that ‘Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.’”

It may be distasteful for an American to criticize his country on foreign soil, but it is hardly unusual and certainly not illegal. The report ratchets up the insinuendo when it reports that after Page delivered his speech at Moscow’s New Economic School, he and then-Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich “shook hands at the commencement ceremony.” All that and more, said with a stern and incriminating tone, and yet Mueller has to write a big however: “the investigation did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”

Had the special counsel been less begrudging he might have pointed out that Page was under comprehensive federal surveillance for a year or more. Notwithstanding thoroughgoing scrutiny – secret wiretaps, multiple FBI interrogations, grand jury testimony, questioning by Congress – Carter Page remains unindicted. Not that you would know it given the special counsel’s censorious style.

Of the great over reliance upon insuendo, Fenter remarks.

It’s the prosecutorial equivalent of Emily Litella’s “Never mind.”