Technical Analysis of the Mueller Report: Triple Negatives

By technical analysis, I just mean that I do search on certain words and see if they appear.

Here is the first search.  How many times does the Mueller Report contain 3 or negatives in one sentence?  I also include negative words like false, deny, etc.  A double negatives undoes the negative and a triple negative reinstates it.  Anytime there are lots of negative words it is harder to parse because you want to make sure it is not a triple negative.  I find about 10 occurrences.

1. A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.

2. Cohen was concerned that Russian officials were not actually involved or were not interested in meeting with him (as Sater had alleged), and so he decided not to go to the Forum.

3. As noted above , the woman he [Papadopoulos] met was not Putin's niece, he had not met the Russian Ambassador in London, and the Ambassador did not also serve as Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister

4. According to McGahn , Boente responded that he did not want to issue a statement about the President not being under investigation because of the potential political ramifications and did not want to order Corney to do it because that action could prompt the appointment of a Special Counsel.

5. He did not want to meet at the Department of Justice because he did not want a public log of his visit and did not want Sessions to have an advantage over him by meeting on what Lewandowski described as Sessions's turf.

6. That evidence indicates that by the time of the Oval Office meeting the President was aware that McGahn did not think the story was false and did not want to issue a statement or create a written record denying facts that McGahn believed to be true .

7. According to Cohen, the President's personal counsel-who did not have first-hand knowledge of the project responded by saying that there was no need to muddy the water, that it was unnecessary to include those details because the project did not take place, and that Cohen should keep his statement short and tight, not elaborate, stay on message, and not contradict the President.

8. See Pittston Coal Group v. Sebben, 488 U.S. 105, 115 (1988) ("[l]t is not the law that a statute can have no effects which are not explicitly mentioned in its legislative history. "); see also Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro, 138 S. Ct. 1134, 1143 (20 18) ("Even if Congress did not foresee all of the applications of the statute, that is no reason not to give the statutory text a fair reading.").

9. The "separation of powers does not mean ," however, "that the branches 'ought to have no partial agency in, or no control over the acts of each other."'

10. Just as the Speech or Debate Clause , U.S. CONST.ART. I, § 6, cl. I, absolutely protects legislative acts, but not a legislator 's "taking or agreeing to take money for a promise to act in a certain way ... for it is taking the bribe , not performance of the illicit compact , that is a criminal act," United States v. Brewster, 408 U .S. 501, 526 (1972) ( emphasis omitted) , the promise of a pardon to corruptly influence testimony would not be a constitutionally immunized act.

11. Accordingly, the Office concluded that the evidence was insufficient to prove that Sessions was willfully untruthful in his answers and thus insufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction for perjury or false statements.

Yates said that the public statements made by the Vice President denying that Flynn and Kislyak discussed sanctions were not true and put Flynn in a potentially compromised position because the Russians would know he had lied.