Keith Olbermann Took a Big Dump on the Robert Mueller Investigation

Keith Olbermann took former FBI director Robert Mueller to task in his “Worst Person” segment this evening. Parsing through the lawyerly text, Olbermann called the “independent” NFL investigator out for his failure to reach profound conclusions or call for accountability, and wording about scanning through “available” information that implied the possibility that stones went unturned.

Mueller was also chided for taking employees’ word that they had not seen or received the elevator tape — an aggregate claim that would mean an AP report was maliciously fabricated by either a journalist or law enforcement source — at face value without meaningful skepticism. If proof that the AP report was accurate emerges at a later date, Mueller’s credibility will take a massive hit.

Nevertheless, as SI’s Michael Rosenberg points out, the Mueller Report did catch Roger Goodell in an explicit lie:

On Sept. 8, the league released a statement saying it had not seen the video of Ray Rice knocking out his fiancée, and insisted, “We requested from law enforcement any and all information about the incident, including the video from inside the elevator.”

Yet Mueller writes, “League investigators did not contact any of the police officers who investigated the incident, the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office, or the Revel [casino] to attempt to obtain or view the in-elevator video or to obtain other information. No one from the League asked Rice or his lawyer whether they would make available for viewing the in-elevator video they received as part of criminal discovery in early April. And, after the initial contacts with the Ravens in the immediate aftermath of the incident, League investigators did not follow up with the Ravens to determine whether the team had additional information.”

Consequently, when John Mara and Dan Rooney, who oversaw the investigation, release a joint statement saying that Roger Goodell was “forthright in the statements he made to the owners about this matter,” it makes you wonder just how forthright they’re being with the public.