Muller team phone wipes appear to be deliberate but could be reversed

J.E. Dyer:

Records responsive to a FOIA request were posted by the Department of Justice this week, and they show that 14 members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel team “wiped” data from their government-issued smartphones after the DOJ inspector general requested the phones from them for review. wiped by Mueller team 

The special counsel geniuses used several methods, including entering the wrong passcode 10 times to automatically trigger a data wipe.  Some individuals set phones in airplane mode with incorrect passwords or no passwords provided, making the data inaccessible when the phone was turned over.

The latter situation might prompt a law enforcement request to the phone vendor to unlock the data.  Although this wasn’t a criminal proceeding – but rather an IG investigation – the data at issue constitute something the agency is entitled to recover.  It’s a set of federal records, and the agency is the contract customer.

But since it wasn’t a criminal proceeding, obstruction of justice doesn’t come into play.  The behavior in question is obvious and deplorable, but unless the individuals are referred for charges in some related way, going after them in court for wiping data from their phones isn’t an option.  (In any case, you’d have to prove they did it deliberately, to make records destruction the criminal charge).

Notably, however, Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s longtime lieutenant and “pit bull,” was one of the 14 wipers.

So was Brandon Van Grack, one of the prosecutors on the Michael Flynn case, whose compliance with Brady records disclosure was “called into question” separately by DOJ records unsealed in late April 2020.

The scope of responsibilities for both Weissmann and Van Grack, and probably some others on the Mueller team, could ultimately facilitate charges and conviction if wiping their phone data can be credibly linked to misconduct in the Mueller-directed criminal cases.

But the question is whether that link could, in fact, be established.  Prosecutors would need a view of the data wiped from those phones.

The members of the special counsel team evidently had that in mind in their mass wiping operation.  As Sundance observes at Conservative Treehouse, “Wiping your phone to hide damaging information only works if the other phone you are communicating with wipes the same data.  Guess what happened?  Yup, exactly that.”  (Sundance also has an excellent graphic depicting all 14 of the Ingenious Wipers, which you should go take a look at.)

So, wiped from both ends.  Thorough.

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It looks like they have something to hide.  After all, they were participating in a plot against the President.  When it became clear early on that there was no evidence of Russian collusion by the President or his campaign, they set out to attack them with process crimes and unrelated matters in hopes of trapping the President with an obstruction of justice charge to be used by Democrats in Congress as the basis for removing the President.  In others words, it looks like they were participating in a coup attempt.