My Mueller Reports
A decade of reporting on an American hero.
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Once upon a time, when you typed the words ‘Mueller + mob’ into Google search, a report I wrote for Millennial Politics was your first hit. I took great pride in the fact that an independent member of the media could box above her weight. That was 2018, before the site was taken down by lawfare, in retrospect, a bad omen for indie media.
But I saved the work, as I did all my early reporting, and because Robert Mueller passed away today, I thought I’d share some of the reports with you.
First, an excerpt from that mob story…
4 Times Robert Mueller Took On The Mob (And Won)
Senior political reporter Heidi Cuda reveals Robert Mueller ain’t new to this, as she investigates his four biggest mobster take-downs, published in Millennial Politics, 2018
1. John Gotti
Mueller, who was serving as U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, had to make the call on whether or not to take up known killer and second-in-command, Salvatore “The Bull” Gravano, on his offer to rat out Gotti.
Ultimately, a deal was struck and Sammy the Bull sang on his former boss, earning him a five-year sentence, and putting Gotti away for life. After earning the nickname the “Teflon Don” for multiple previous acquittals, Gotti’s incarceration forever diminished the power of the once-influential criminal organization. Gotti died in federal prison in 2002.
2. Manuel Noriega
Mueller, whose low-key gutsy style attracted powerbrokers in the Department of Justice, was personally tapped by George W. Bush’s attorney general Dick Thornburgh to help lead the prosecution of Noriega.
Mueller was working as the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts when he got the call and according to a Princeton alumni report, was on the next plane. On April 9, 1992, Noriega was convicted on eight counts of drug smuggling and racketeering. He received a 40-year sentence, reduced to 30 years, and served 17 years before being extradited to France for money laundering, signed on the order of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
3. La Cosa Nostra Round-up:
In 2011, the F.B.I. under Mueller, orchestrated the biggest blow to organized crime in history. On January 20, 2011, the F.B.I. arrested 127 mafia members and accomplices from seven crime families, among them: Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, Luchese, and multiple branches of the DeCavalcante family, in the largest single-day sting on record.Paul Manafort and Company:
In the words legal analyst Tracy Green, “Manafort is like a mafia guy, and he’s playing for keeps.” In our recent legal explainer on why Manafort blew up his plea deal, she said, he doesn’t “want to rat.”
Trump’s former campaign manager built his career on rehabbing dictators, from Russian-puppet Viktor Yanukovych who Manafort helped cop the presidency of the Ukraine, to the kleptocrat of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos.
Both were forced to flee their countries due to corruption and human rights violations and Manafort’s next alleged kleptocrat was his former employer, Trump, whose entire presidency* has lurked under a cloud of murk.
A Side By Side Comparison of Mueller and Trump
Back when I fought the war for truth on my Maewestside Tumblr account, I knew that Robert Mueller would be denigrated by the mobsters of Scamalot. So I thought it was important to offer a side by side comparison of Mueller and Trump, so anyone who wanted clarity could see for themselves.
On August 31, 2017, at 11:27 pm, I opened the post with an explainer that a friend of mine in the early Resistance, a trial lawyer, explained “that Trump behaved like a mob boss, and there would be no smoking gun. He didn’t use email, and the people around him would be the ones taking the fall for any illegal behavior. I also fell into a group of citizen activists and journalists who quickly upped my game by having me watch international documentaries detailing Trump’s relationship with the Russian mob, and I began to piece together the seriousness of Russia’s attack on our country. Around this time, Robert Mueller had left a multi-million dollar a year job to head the Trump-Russia investigation, and because Trump was expending so much energy on obstructing the truth, I thought it would be a good idea to do a side by side character study of the two men.” Here’s what I came up with…
YOUR DATA, THEIR GREED: Cyber Boxing in America... by heidi siegmund cuda, aka @maewestside, August 31, 2017
Our country’s immediate future comes down to the character of two men: Robert Mueller III vs the Real Fake President (RFP).
As efforts ramp up to discredit Mueller, the former director of the F.B.I. now appointed to investigate the Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and as those same efforts attempt to legitimize the RFP, I created this timeline so Americans can judge for themselves that thing that Eleanor Roosevelt taught us is so critical to a man’s true value: character.
ROBERT MUELLER III VS THE REAL FAKE PRESIDENT:
A TIMELINE OF CHARACTER
1944 — Robert Mueller III, born in Manhattan to Alice Truesdale and Robert Swan Mueller, a DuPont exec who was class president at Princeton before serving in the Navy during World War II.
1946 — Real Fake President (RFP) born in Queens to Mary Anne MacLeod and Fred Trump, a real estate developer sued for housing discrimination, investigated for profiteering and an illegal bailout of his son’s casino; and the subject of eviscerating song lyrics by Woody Guthrie, a former Brooklyn tenant.
1966 — Mueller graduates from Princeton, marries his teenage sweetheart Ann Cabell Standish, and would go on to earn a Master’s in International Relations from NYU (he resumes his education post-Vietnam at UVA).
1968 — Mueller enlists in the Marine Corps to serve in the Vietnam War, where despite receiving a gunshot wound, returns to duty to lead his platoon. He receives a dozen medals of valor, including a Purple Heart. 1968 RFP graduates from University of Pennsylvania and goes to work in the family business. He avoids military service during Vietnam War with five deferrals, one for bone spurs in his heel.
1973 -1993 — Earning a law degree from UVA, Mueller embarks on a career where he excels to become a top white collar crime litigator in both public and private sectors, specializing in international money laundering and public corruption; serving in the United States Attorney’s office and the United States Justice Department, where he oversaw the prosecution of Manuel Noriega and the Gambino Crime Family boss John Gotti.
1972-1992 RFP marries Czech model Ivana Zelnickova; opens a tower in his name in 1983, publishes books, board games; in 1987, he’s turned down by Australia to build Sydney’s first casino due to alleged mob connections; and by 1990, is $900 million in debt; in 1992, three casinos go bankrupt and he and Ivana divorce.
1995-1999 Mueller returns to public service as senior litigator in the homicide section of the District of Columbia and in 1998 is named the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California.
1995-1999 RFP goes public with more casinos and hotels, buys the Miss Universe Organization and in 1999, forms a model management company and divorces second wife; in 1997, tells Howard Stern he was a “brave soldier” for avoiding STDs in the late ‘90s, a period he describes as his “personal Vietnam.”
2001-2013 — Mueller becomes the sixth Director of the FBI, serving under both President Bush and President Obama, who asked him to stay on another two years past his ten-year term making him the longest serving FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover.
2004-2015 — RFP becomes a Reality TV Star; opens a “university” (shut down amid lawsuits of it being a scam, prompting the first multimillion dollar settlement of his real fake presidency); marries the Slovene in 2005; becomes a spokesman for a multilevel marketing company accused by multiple states and countries for operating as an illegal pyramid scheme.
2016 — Mueller wins the 2016 Thayer Award for Public Service from the United States Military Academy.
2016 — RFP accepts the Republican nomination for President and is elected after a campaign rife with misogyny, bigotry and catchphrases that 62 million Americans thought were funny, despite losing the popular vote by about 3 million votes; investigative reporters work 24/7 proving RFP involved with an international crime syndicate that enabled cybertreason but depending on where you get your news, you might not have heard about it. Or you might not care.
2017 — Mueller appointed Special Counsel for Russian Interference in the United States Elections of 2016, leading the investigation into Russian meddling in the election and ties to the RFP campaign; he’s joined by a team of the nation’s top experts in fraud, cyber crime, white collar crimes, public corruption and money laundering.
2017 — RFP has weak turnout for the inaugural carny (cuz bots are fake), which was overshadowed by the Women’s March, and he struggles to keep press secretaries, cabinet members and advisors as #meinshitshow ratings wobble in the coveted 18 to 49 demo. Despite efforts to distract with fear mongering and fake patriotism, people are seeing the truth.
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So there you have it. A tale of Two Americans. One is a man with a long history of integrity; the other a cunning carny, who in a previous era would have been charged with treason the first time he invited a foreign enemy to hack one of America’s leaders, a woman he cheated out of the presidency.
No amount of infoslime thrown at Robert Mueller will distract from the fact that America is still capable of seeing the truth once the ratings dip, and truth becomes the only thing left to sell.
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Author Heidi Siegmund Cuda recently won a Director’s Award from the Orcas Island Film Festival…
You can find my early reporting on Mueller’s work in my ebook, It’s Komprocated. I was just flipping through its pages, and it’s a bittersweet symphony.
For those of you who never read it, it’s worth going back and reading his Iron Triangles speech, which I include in my book.
The speech was titled “The Evolving Organized Crime Threat,” and it took place on January 27, 2011, to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York. I can recite this passage from memory:
“Rather than running discrete operations, on their own turf, they are running multi-national, multi-billion dollar schemes from start to finish. We are investigating groups in Asia, Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East. And we are seeing cross-pollination between groups that historically have not worked together. Criminals who may never meet, but who share one thing in common: greed. They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military... They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds...They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers.
They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”
Ya.
For those who never read my Mueller Report thread, you can still find it in my pinned tweet — a relic from an era that still delivers a powerful truth for those who bothered to read it.
It was my first thread, back before reporters like me became ghosts in the machine.
I always think of Craig Unger’s words, how it should have been a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation.
“One of the real problems here, I think, has been these investigations by the FBI have been all criminal investigations - they should have been counterintelligence investigations,” he said, in an early episode of RadPod. “Is it okay for the president of the United States to have made a fortune laundering money for the Russian mafia? Shouldn’t that be a scandal? Doesn’t that compromise you? And it certainly does in terms of national security. And that’s what counterintelligence is about, and the FBI failed miserably.”
Truth.
Robert Mueller, however, did his job. The evidence is in my pinned tweet. Maybe now that he has passed away, people will read his report.
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