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As the Bee Gees wrote and sang fifty years ago, ‘its only words’ but as I’ve said a million times and as recently as last week, words have meaning beyond their meaning.

It’s all about context. 

Words are like bullets and carefully selected, crafted, arranged and deployed in the correct order can inflict maximum damage.

Take for example this slippery sequence by Robert Mueller in his statement on Wednesday:

“if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime”.

Notice how the phrases ‘did not commit a crime ‘ and ‘did commit a crime’ are casually just left hanging there? 

Why is that do you think?

They are designed to bamboozle, confuse and make your head spin and by dropping the words ‘commit a crime’, into the mix, designed to create a perception and raise the index of suspicion that something nefarious did indeed occur, when he knows it didn’t and has said so with greater clarity and economy of words in his official report. 

To put it another way, remember the phrase used in the debate over Iraq and WMD’s by Donald Rumsfeld  ‘The absence of evidence doesn’t mean the evidence is absent’?

Mueller is trying to create the impression that a crime has been committed but just hasn’t been able to identity either the crime or find any evidence to prove there was a crime committed. 

Mueller and his fellow travellers in the Democrats are simply in the Dusty Springfield zone of ‘Wishin’ and Hopin’. They so badly and so desperately want it all to be true.

It’s a classic case of the maxim of Lavrentie Beria, Stalin’s head of secret police, ‘show me the man and I’ll show you the crime’. That is, give me a name and I’ll fit him up with a crime regardless. 

Whatever happened to the simplicity of the phrase ‘we found no evidence’ as he used in the report?

The entire ten minute, dissembling, set piece on Wednesday, was designed to send a message and sow seeds of doubt among Democrats and give them the impetus to reinvigorate their plans for impeachment. 

It was also designed to get out ahead of the Democrat controlled congress and turn down their invitation to appear, before the invitation was officially issued. 

He wouldn’t be able to deal with the questions coming from the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee about why he didn’t pursue certain relevant and crucial avenues of enquiry and the entire raison d’être if his appointment as prosecutor and his modus operandi over many years would be exposed in five minutes.

It’s now up to the Republican controlled senate to haul him up and put him through the meat grinder of the senate judiciary committee.