(OK, this diary really long—about 18 paragraphs long. People who do not want to read about how Robert Mueller might want to back up his evidence--and why he should do it--can feel free to skip this diary. This whole diary is theoretical. I have talked to no one about this, and I have given no one any specific instructions about anything contained herein.)
There is actually a reasonable chance that soon after the elections on November 6, 2018, President Donald Trump will fire one or more of the following people: Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller along with, perhaps, any an all of Mueller’s staff. That is not what you should fear. Odds are really good that the Democrats will take back the U.S. House of Representatives on November 6, 2018, and they will then have subpoena power. They can then even hire their own investigators. The House leaders can even hire Sessions, Rosenstein, Mueller, and all his merry men as U.S. House investigators if they want.
No, what you should fear is if Donald Trump fires people and then has people in the FBI seize the evidence that Robert Mueller and his team have been gathering. Trump could then theoretically have FBI employees do whatever Trump wants to have done with that evidence—such as shred any paper evidence, run giant magnets over computer drives with existing evidence, and shred any DVDs and CDs with existing evidence. If Trump manages to have people gather Robert Mueller’s evidence and then destroy it, we cannot be sure what will and will not be lost forever. Therefore, between now and November 6th, Robert Mueller’s number one job is to make sure that as much of his data is backed up as possible, and he should have a whole lot of copies made.
OK, at this point you might be about to start thinking that I have gone crazy—that I have lost my mind. That is OK. I went to college and studied to be a computer programmer/analyst. I have worked with systems of backups, and backups of those backups, and I know how to set up a vast multi-location backup system. I also know how devastating it can be to lose critical data.
Ideally, what Robert Mueller should do is immediately recruit say a dozen Information Technology (IT) guys from the FBI IT Department and have them buy, for example, a whole lot of 8 terabyte portable hard drives, let’s say 100 of them, and have these dozen IT guys make a whole bunch of copies of absolutely every important bit of Team Mueller’s evidence on these drives—absolutely everything that might possibly be important. Anything that is not digital, the dirty dozen IT guys can digitally scan it, or whatever needs to be done to make it digital, and put it on those drives. Not enough room? The IT guys can buy bigger drives and buy more drives. They need to do what needs to be done to back all of this evidence up. If possible, Mueller should then give at least one complete copy of all of the evidence to each of the investigators on his team.
“What?”, you say. “That is crazy!”
OK, well think about this. If Trump really wants to get rid of Mueller’s investigation, either he is going to figure out, or someone is going to tell him, that it is not just the people that he has to get rid of--he also needs to get rid of the evidence. So, Trump will get rid of top people at the DOJ and the FBI, and then he will have some FBI Trump loyalists destroy all of the evidence that Mueller has spent months gathering. If they do not destroy the evidence, when the Democrats take over in January, the Democrats will demand and/or subpoena all of Mueller’s evidence, and then the Democrats will start the investigation from exactly where it was stopped. Which means that Trump’s brilliant idea of firing Sessions, Rosenstein, and Mueller will end up being a pretty meaningless act. So, Trump will make sure that Trump loyalists destroy all the evidence that Mueller and his team gathered. Then, SOMEONE is going to ask, “What if Mueller made copies?”
Were Any Copies Made?
So Trump will have his new AG issue some orders saying that any and all evidence collected by Mueller’s team is the property of the FBI and Mueller and his team must return any copies that they have on pain of imprisonment. This is why Mueller needs lots of copies, ideally so that he can pile up a mountain of portable drives with evidence, and then perhaps everyone will forget to keep track of how many drives each Mueller employee takes. Mueller might forget to check each portable hard drive out to each person He also might forget to register the serial numbers of each portable drive to each person. Instead, any drives that are registered might just be registered to something general like "Mueller's Team". Mueller may also forget to keep an exact record of how many drives were bought, and he might even forget to have anyone write down any of the serial numbers at all. Hey, he's only human. Also, Mueller might Just have the IT guys make a pile of 8 Terabyte Portable Hard Drives on some shelves and just let people take what they want.
So, maybe Investigator Joe Blow takes 3 Portable Hard Drives home, and Investigator Bobby Smith takes 2 Portable Hard Drives home. Who knows who took what or how many? Ideally, each employee takes at least 2 portable hard drives home with them, each with a complete copy of the evidence, one to bury like a pirate in a hole in the woods (don’t forget to wrap it nicely in a trash bag) in the dark of night that no one knows about, and one to “return” to the DOJ if necessary--if the DOJ asks people to return any copies--and you know that the DOJ will ask for all copies to be returned, do you not?
Heck, maybe each Investigator takes home five drives and buries them all. Who knows? Who kept track?
“The Muller IT dirty dozen computer guys just bought a bunch of drives and piled them up. We do not know how many drives each Investigator took home with them. We just handed them out like pencils.”
Now, the DOJ Trump loyalists are probably going to ask each Mueller team member, “How many drives did you take home?” At this point, when asked, someone could, completely accidentally mind you, forget how many drives he or she brought home. It could be Mueller, it could be someone else. It could be everyone. Hey, they are only human, right?
Go ahead. Say I’m crazy. Say my steps are extreme. I would rather have Mueller do this--and have it be unnecessary--than have him not do it and have all of that evidence disappear. Mueller’s IT guys could easily buy 100 large capacity portable hard drives for less than $30,000.00. That is less than HUD Director Ben Carson spent on his new dining set.
Which do you think is more important, Mueller’s investigation, or Carson’s new dining set? How much do you think the Democrats in the House will have to spend if Mueller and his Investigators have to start from scratch after losing all of their evidence? I am betting that it would cost taxpayers at least an extra $10 million. $30,000 for portable hard drives seems rather cheap by comparison.
Wrapping Things Up
Decades ago, I went to college at a community college in Arizona, which at the time was this gigantic community college. This college taught classes all over the city. I took a System’s Analysis class from the guy who ran the IT department for the whole college. This included his maintaining the computers that kept the records of people’s classes and corresponding grades. He told the class that the college had backups of the data of people’s classes and matching grades at 12 different locations throughout the city because they were so important.
You see, without perfect and exact copies of the classes people took and their corresponding grades, the college could get sued if someone did not get credit for a course they took, or someone might not be able to graduate when they should be able to graduate. It was much cheaper to keep 12 duplicate drives than to face even one lawsuit. Several times a year, an IT person would bring the duplicate drives to the main campus computer, one by one, so that only 2 of them were ever at the same location at the same time (in case of fire or flood), and then this IT person would update the duplicate drive from the main computer.
That is being prepared. That is vigorously protecting critical data. The IT Director did all this, and he did not even have to worry about President Donald Trump and his FBI minions. Mueller and his team should consider doing something similar, just in case. I am talking lots of backups, spread around in lots of places, just in case—and convenient cases of amnesia might be interesting too.
Imagine how pissed Trump would be if he thought all copies of the evidence had been destroyed, but yet, one complete copy remained—or ten copies remained. Imagine the cheers from across the country if this happened.
Now you know why it is so important that Mueller back things up. By the way, Jill Wine-Banks, the Watergate Special Prosecutor who appears on MSNBC all the time, said on the air that she and the other prosecutors used to take Watergate evidence home with them at night, just in case. After the Saturday Night Massacre, they did not know what was going to happen. If Mueller did do lots of complete backups, and it allowed Mueller not to lose any evidence, would you call him crazy? I would call him a hero--and we might someday call Donald Trump, “Inmate Number 1234567”.
Maybe Mueller has thought of all of this already. If he did, great. If so, it means Mueller probably has some mighty juicy stuff that he really wants to protect, and It means that Donald Trump is probably going to end up with serious problems. In that case, I will just sit back and watch. And if someday you hear a crazy story about how Mueller fooled Donald Trump with a whole lot of portable hard drives, remember, you heard here on DailyKos first.
Questions? Comments? Bouquets? Brickbats?
Happy Halloween! :)
THE END
Answers to ideas brought up in the comments area:
Thank you to everyone who commented on my diary. From the comments, I have learned what areas of my diary may not have been especially clear or straightforward enough. Rather than have to give the same responses repeatedly in the comments, I figured that I would address points here and then ask people in the comments to look here.
The purpose of this diary was not just to say that Mueller should make backups of his evidence. That is what the title of the diary says, but there is a limit to what I can put in the title. I am sure Mueller has made backups of his evidence. The point of the diary is that not only does he need to backups, but that if he does not want his evidence to be destroyed, he may need to distribute that evidence in a certain way. Specifically, here is an outline of the points:
I. Mueller needs to make sure many complete backups are made.
2. Mueller needs these backups to be portable.
3. Mueller needs to distribute these backups to many people.
4. Mueller may need to have a way that no one initially knows how many backups each person has or even how many portable drives were purchased.
5. Mueller may need the situation to exist that no one can figure out through research how many backups each person has or how many drives were purchased.
6. The people who have the backups may need to bury them remotely or in some way make it so that they cannot be found by FBI officials.
7. Someone may need to lie about how many copies he has, or conveniently forget about how many copies he has in order for the DOJ not to destroy the evidence. This could put one or more persons in possible legal jeopardy.
If this was just a case of Mueller needing to make backups, I could have written this diary in one sentence. However, Mueller needs to do more than just make backups. He needs a way to keep FBI officials from getting their grubby mitts on the backups after people not completely loyal to Donald Trump are fired. He also needs to keep the people who have these backups out of legal jeopardy.
Regarding point number one above--let's say, for the sake of discussion, that currently, Mueller has 12 complete backups of all of his data. He has 3 copies of the data at an FBI facility in Washingon DC, 2 copies in FBI NYC. 1 copy in Quantico, VA, and he has 1 copy each on 6 different cloud accounts from 6 different cloud providers. Let’s say that all 6 of these cloud accounts are paid for by the FBI.
OK, so we magically transport forward in time to November 7th. Donald Trump fires Sessions, Rosenstein, Mueller, and his entire team. All of this evidence is now controlled by the FBI. Trump finds someone in the FBI loyal to Trump, puts him in charge, and has him destroy all of the copies. Who is going to stop him? It is not enough for Mueller to make backups. Mueller needs backups that are out of reach of the DOJ and the FBI because once Sessions and everyone else are fired, if all of the evidence is controlled by the FBI, none of the people fired will have any legal access to it, and it all can be destroyed.
Regarding the other points-- if Mueller allows his team to start taking copies of evidence home with them, he starts possibly putting them into legal jeopardy. Are FBI agents allowed to have complete copies of all evidence home with them? Do they have to log that somewhere when they do? If they have to log it somewhere, cannot the FBI just ask for the evidence back and throw them in jail if they do not bring it back? If Mueller’s Investigators do not write down in a log exactly what evidence they took home with them, have they broken any laws?
Mueller is a straight shooter. He has no legal jeopardy and exposes no one to legal jeopardy for making a million backups within the confines of FBI facilities. Will a law-abiding straight shooter like Mueller even run the risk of exposing his people and himself to legal jeopardy by allowing them to make copies of evidence without recoding exactly what each person has at the FBI? If he does not write down what each person has, what rules or laws will he be violating? If he does write it down, cannot the FBI just ask for it back, making the point of making the copies...pointless? And if people do not return the evidence upon demand, are they not in legal jeopardy?
However, if people take copies home, and no one knows how many copies they have, and these copies are buried somewhere that no one knows, then when asked about the copies, a person could simply forget that they really have 3 copies instead of 2. In this case, no one can prove that they are lying if no one recorded how many drives in total were bought and if no one recorded how many drives that this person took home. This is not just about backing things up. It is about keeping evidence out of the hands of a Trump controlled FBI and DOJ bent on destroying every copy of evidence and bent on jailing people who do not comply. Doing this may involve breaking some FBI rules and possibly venturing into areas that might not be legal. I just do not know if Mueller will go that far. However, if he does not, a lot of the evidence could be destroyed.
Regarding evidence already transferred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in NYC, that might be a way to keep some of the evidence from being destroyed. However, I doubt that all of Mueller's evidence was transferred to them. I suspect that only the evidence relative to the cases they were working on would be transferred to the U.S. Attorneys in NYC. We can hope that it was all transferred to them, but we cannot be sure.
We are in new territory here. While Nixon caused the Saturday Night Massacre, he did not continue on. On the other hand, I doubt that Trump is capable of stopping at firing just a few people. I think Trump would rather burn the entire FBI to the ground than spend one day in jail. I do not want all of Mueller’s work to go to waste, and if all Mueller has is a huge backup system where the vast majority of evidence resides in places on which the FBI can get their hands, I worry that the evidence will vanish. However, the more Mueller removes evidence outside the confines of government, the more he puts himself and others in possible legal jeopardy. In this diary, I tried to offer a theoretical solution that would allow that evidence to be out of DOJ and FBI hands yet still keep people out of jail. However, I have no idea of the legalities involved.
Perhaps Mueller has taken actions to compensate for all of this, but maybe the whole idea is too murky for him. He is, after all, a pretty law-abiding guy.