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The redacted version ofRobert Mueller’s reportabout his investigation into PresidentDonald Trumpand Russia was released on Thursday morning — and, across 448 pages, thespecial counsellaid out in detail the work that led him to a complicated truth as best as his team came to understand it.
No, “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Nonetheless, the report documents “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign” and describes their passively symbiotic relationship ahead of the 2016 presidential election in stark terms.
“[T]he investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” the report states, in part.
Still, the scenes that Mueller recounts recall Nixonian presidential intrusions and, extraordinarily, the refusal of Trump aides to carry out some of his wishes for fear of the political cost — essentially a staff saving Trump from himself.
He reacted with visible dismay to Mueller’s appointment, in May 2017, according to the report.
When Trump was told, he “slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m f—–,’ ” the report states.
The White House cooperated extensively with Mueller, and Trump answered some written questions about Russia but he declined to be interviewed and Mueller did not force him, though his team believed they had legal authority to do so. (Mueller’s team felt it would not be worth the delay and they already had substantial evidence needed to understand what happened.)
The first of the report’s two volumes, some 200 pages, exhaustively details Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election in order to boost Trump’s candidacy and the available contacts between Trump and his associates and Russian nationals, including those in the government.
Despite some earlier skepticism of the extent of the redactions in the public Mueller report, most of it is completely un-redacted.
In the lead-up to the election and after, the president and his team repeatedly downplayed, dismissed or lied about their connections to Russia.
Mueller’s report documents how, over time, Trump campaign and administration officials began to act more cautiously regarding Russia — aware of the increased public and media scrutiny, in part because of Trump’s professed affection for Putin.
The Mueller report’s first volume, covering the Trump-Russia links, includes several previously known attempts between Trump and Russian intermediaries to establish a relationship between their camps but does not confirm any criminal conspiracy, which Mueller’s team used to interpret all such behavior.
Again and again, according to Mueller’s report, Russian efforts to interface or work with President Trump and his team were either ignored, rebuffed or stalled for lack of an immediate incentive.
This appears to have been the case in the notorious June 2016 meeting between a former Russian prosecutor and several high-level Trump campaign officials, including son Donald Trump Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
(Some of the Trump-Russia contacts remain mysterious, such as why Paul Manafort, then the Trump campaign head, was sharing polling data with a former associate tied to Russia and Ukraine.)
Mueller’s report is more conclusive on another high-profile relationship: between Trump officials and WikiLeaks, especially regarding the release of the stolen Democratic material.
“The Trump Campaign showed interest in WikiLeaks’s releases of hacked materials throughout the summer and fall of 2016,” according to Mueller’s report and it later states as fact that there was “advance notice of WikiLeaks’s release of hacked information.”
Much of this section of the report is redacted because it is connected to grand jury proceedings or an “ongoing matter.” But it describes one scene in the summer of 2016 when Trump and a top campaign official were heading to the airport and Trump told the official after a phone call “that more releases of damaging information would be coming.”
Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser who was arrested earlier this year and accused of obstructing Mueller’s investigation, remained in touch with the campaign in 2016.
Given the redactions, the public version of Mueller’s report does not provide a full picture of the relationship between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.
Nonetheless Attorney General Barr, speaking to reporters on Thursday before the report’s release, took care to note that Mueller “investigated whether any member or affiliate of the Trump campaign encouraged or otherwise played a role in” the dissemination of stolen Democratic material.
Tellingly, he said Mueller “did not find that any person associated with the Trump campaign illegally participated in the dissemination of the materials.”
The second volume of Mueller’s report — another some 200 pages — analyzes in similar granular detail the various efforts the president undertook to derail, curb or end Mueller’s investigation and whether any of those actions amounted to criminal obstruction of justice.
Much of the second volume is dense legal analysis which, according to Mueller’s report, precluded his team from making a decision about whether the president committed a crime.
The Mueller report lays out the various acts and accompanying evidence of potentially obstructive behavior. For example, the president tried to have Mueller removed as special counsel, tried to have his attorney general resume supervision of the probe and made statements to various other officials aimed at influencing the course of the investigation — including telling James Comey, then the FBI director, that he hoped Comey could drop his investigation of Trump’s former national security adviser.
Mueller’s report repeatedly underlines that his team did not make a judgement about the president’s guilt — or innocence.
And without explicitly saying so, the report repeatedly points toward Congress as the ultimate authority in settling such matters.
According to the report: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.”
In a section detailing the president’s proposed defenses of his behavior, Mueller’s team argues that “the Constitution does not categorically and permanently immunize a President for obstructing justice through the use of his Article II powers.”
According to this view, even though much of the president’s scrutinized behavior was based on his Constitutional powers, it does not permit him license to govern at will.
“The proper supervision of criminal law does not demand freedom for the President to act with the intention of shielding himself from criminal punishment, avoiding financial liability, or preventing personal embarrassment,” the report states. “To the contrary, a statute that prohibits official action undertaken for such personal purposes furthers, rather than hinders, the impartial and evenhanded administration of the law.”
After Mueller submitted his report to the attorney general, Barr and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, found that there was insufficient evidence to prove obstruction against the president.
Trump Responds
In a statement on Thursday, Trump’s lawyers described the Mueller investigation as “a total victory for the President,”according to CNBC reporter Eamon Javers.
“The report underscores what we have argued from the very beginning – there was no collusion – there was no obstruction,” the Trump legal team said.
Speaking at an event later Thursday, the president joked that he was “having a good day. … It’s called no collusion, no obstruction.”
“This should never happen to another president again, this hoax. It should never happen to another president again,” Trump said, echoing his longstanding accusation that the special counsel’s investigation was a politically motivated “witch hunt.”
In a characteristic boast on Twitter Thursday,Trump posted a memewith the text “No collusion. No obstruction. …. Game Over,” with the later phrase in theGame of Thronesfont. (HBO was not pleased.)
Mueller was authorized from the start to pursue matters that arose from his initial investigation of the president and Russia, and the most significant prosecutions from his work were largely unrelated to the 2016 campaign itself.
Michael Flynn, the disgraced general and former Trump national security adviser, admitted lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Russian ambassador after Trump was elected andManafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, will spend years in prison for financial crimes and conspiracy.
source: people.com
