The Shaky Standing of Mueller's Footnotes

To get insight into Mueller’s method and intent – his penchant for building edifices of insinuation on the smallest of citations - it is worth unpacking one of the shortest footnotes in his report. Footnote 1024 on page 150 of the report’s first volume simply reads: “Nader 1/22/18 302 at 3.” It is a reference to the FBI’s memo – known as a 302 – of its January 2018 interview with George Nader, identified in the Mueller report as “Advisor to the United Arab Emirates’s Crown Prince.” Nader had spoken with a Russian who was attending the 2016 World Chess Championship in New York and who had expressed an interest in meeting Trump. Nader also told the FBI that an unnamed chess federation official had “recalled hearing” from an unknown attendee that Trump “had stopped by the tournament.”

The footnote tells us just how thin the sourcing was for this fantastical scenario. And it tells us just how little in the way of plausible proof the Mueller team needed to go off on an investigative tangent. The special counsel even used one of his precious few written questions for the president (question V. a. to be exact) to ask whether Trump had been invited “to attend the World Chess Championship gala on November 10, 2016” and whether he had attended “any part of the event[P3] .” Trump responded that he had learned in “the course of preparing to respond to these questions” that early in 2016 the chess federation had inquired, fruitlessly, about using Trump Tower for the championship match. But in any case, Trump said in his written testimony that he “did not attend the event.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/07/23/the_mueller_reports_footnotes_to_contradictory_119658.html