Craig Murray's recent article at ZeroHedge was subheaded, "Mueller is either a fool or deeply corrupt.  I do not think he's a fool."

Murray makes many good points about the weakness and dishonesty of the evidence presented in Mueller's recent report that WikiLeaks 2016 presidential campaign–related publications were hacked and passed to them by Russian intelligence.  But, unfortunately, Murray also makes two mistakes.

First, Murray claims that some of the twelve Russians Mueller indicted on July 13, 2018 for hacking the DNC, "rather than simply being in absentia ... had representation in court to fight the charges.  Mueller had to back down and ask for an immediate adjournment as soon as the case opened, while he fought to limit disclosure."  But Murray is confusing Mueller's indictment of twelve Russians for hacking the DNC with his earlier February 2018 indictment of three Russian companies and thirteen individuals for election interference.  The first indictment, for which one defendant, Concord Management, did show up to contest the charges, causing Mueller to engage in delaying tactics, had nothing to do with hacking.  And, contrary to Murray's claim, none of the dozen Russians Mueller indicted five months later ever showed up in court.

The confusion between the two indictments is easy to clear up.  Unfortunately, Murray's other error was ubiquitous long before his article appeared.  In virtually any skeptical discussion of the alleged Russian DNC hack, you are almost guaranteed to hear someone say, as Murray did:

[F]ormer Technical Director of the NSA ... Bill Binney  states that the download rates for the "hack" ... are at a speed — 41 Megabytes per second — that could not even nearly be attained remotely at the location: thus the information must have been downloaded to a local device, eg a memory stick.

The link to an article by Bill Binney's organization, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), appears in Murray's original quote.  But if you click it, you'll see that the files for which Binney and company's analysis shows the  download speeds were too fast to have occurred over the internet were not released by WikiLeaks.  They were released by Guccifer 2.0, someone who, two days after the DNC's tech firm CrowdStrike announced that the DNC had been hacked, claimed responsibility, explicitly attempted to link himself to WikiLeaks, and left obvious clues that he was a Russian spy, like placing the name of the founder of the Soviet Secret Police in the metadata of the files he released, none of which contained any damaging information about Hillary Clinton despite his claims to be working against her.

The full story on Guccifer 2.0's emergence is long, and the fact that Mueller's report claims that he was a Russian spy working with WikiLeaks without mentioning any of the voluminous evidence that he couldn't possibly be is a damning indictment of Mueller's honesty. But Binney and company's analysis of the transfer speed for files released by Guccifer 2.0, contrary to the ubiquitous claim that Murray repeats, can't show anything about whether the DNC files were hacked. Indeed, as the person who originally analyzed Guccifer 2.0's files took pains to point out, an earlier transfer than the one that was too fast to have been done online can't even be ruled out. So, even with regard to Guccifer 2.0's releases, not much can be concluded by the information on their transfer speeds.

Anyone interested in a complete evisceration of Mueller's conclusions on the Russian provenance of the DNC and Clinton Campaign emails published by WikiLeaks in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election should check out Adam Carter's exhaustive review of the Mueller Report's misrepresentations and omissions.  But the oft-repeated claim that WikiLeaks' DNC publications were downloaded at a speed too fast to have been hacked is based on a confusion and has no merit whatsoever.  Its continued repetition only serves to undermine all the legitimate reasons for concluding, as Murray does, that Mueller is either a fool or a villain.

Michael Thau is a contributor at American Greatness and blogs at Aclearerpicture.net.