The Trump thread: All things Donald

[Athos_131]

Congress requests former Fox News reporter’s notebooks regarding Trump’s hush money

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, on Wednesday requested former Fox News reporter Diana Falzone turn over all documents relating to her reporting on President Trump’s “debts and payments to silence women alleging extramarital affairs with him prior to the 2016 presidential election.”

The request comes a week after the New Yorker published an investigation on Fox News that disclosed Falzone had reported an article about Trump making payments to porn star Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 presidential election in order to keep her quiet about their alleged affair. According to the New Yorker, Fox killed the story because Rupert Murdoch, chairman of 21st Century Fox, wanted Trump to win the election.

Ken LaCorte, Falzone’s editor at Fox, published a response in Mediate disputing her version of events, saying the piece didn’t meet journalistic standards and was not killed because of any political agenda.

Falzone, who has since left Fox, sued the company for gender and disability discrimination in May 2017. However, as part of her settlement, she signed a nondisclosure agreement and has not been able to rebut LaCorte’s claims or any matter arising out of her time at Fox.

Cummings (D-Md.) has also requested that Falzone appear before the committee by March 21. Falzone’s lawyer Nancy Erika Smith, a partner at Smith Mullin in Montclair, N.J., says her client will comply. “When the New Yorker story came out, Ken LaCorte started lying about my client’s reporting and what happened,” she said. “It’s a relief to her as a journalist that the truth will come out.”

A Fox News representative could not be immediately reached for comment.

Congress’ request for a reporter’s notebooks adds a new wrinkle to the many ongoing investigations into Trump. It may also shed further light on the relationship between the president and Fox News.

This is “about obstructing justice and a news organization that’s become an arm of a campaign,” Smith said. “If Fox makes this an attack on journalism, that’s ridiculous. Real journalists don’t kill stories because of political preferences and certainly not two weeks before a presidential election.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Presidential obstruction of justice: The case of Donald J. Trump

When we released the first edition of this report in October 2017, the case that President Trump had obstructed justice was still in its relatively early stages. Even then, we concluded that there was substantial evidence that the president may have obstructed justice. Evidence supporting the elements of that offense—an obstructive act undertaken with corrupt intent and having the requisite connection to a grand jury or congressional proceeding—was available in public reports and testimony. In our view, the president’s then-known conduct, including his demand of loyalty from then-FBI Director Comey, his request that Comey “see [his] way clear” to letting National Security Advisor Michael Flynn go, his termination of Comey, and his other statements was similar to conduct that has previously supported federal obstruction charges and convictions.

Ten months later, as we release the updated second edition of the report, it has become apparent that the president’s pattern of potentially obstructive conduct is much more extensive than we knew. To take only a few examples, it has since been reported that President Trump: attempted to block Attorney General Sessions’ recusing himself from the Russia investigation despite the AG’s clear legal duty to do so; asked Sessions to reverse his recusal decision; demanded and obtained the resignation of Sessions for his failure to contain the Russia investigation (before ultimately rejecting it); twice ordered the firing of Special Counsel Robert Mueller; dictated a false account for a key witness, his son Donald Trump Jr., of the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign and Russian representatives; publicly attacked Special Counsel Mueller and key witnesses to the obstruction case; and has repeatedly disputed the underlying Russian attack and Vladimir Putin’s role in it despite possessing evidence to the contrary. We also know that White House Counsel Don McGahn and his lawyer at one point were reportedly so concerned that the president was going to blame McGahn that he provided extraordinary cooperation with the special counsel, including sitting for 30 hours of interviews in an apparent effort to exonerate himself.

We also now have a better understanding of the conduct possibly implicating the president or those associated with him that he may have been trying to cover up. We know that there were more than eighty contacts between Russia-linked individuals and associates of the Trump campaign and transition team. Since our last report, we learned that in April 2016, George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, met a Russian national who informed him that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton. We have learned that Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort and his Deputy, Rick Gates, were in regular contact with a Russian oligarch with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin throughout the Summer of 2016. And after the election, the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, his chief strategist Steve Bannon, and Flynn may have been involved in efforts to secure secret back channels to Russia. These and other new facts that provide crucial context to the obstruction case against the president, as well as analysis of their potential impact, have been added in the new edition.

If the facts before us at the time of the first edition of this report led us to the view that the president likely obstructed justice, the facts that have been reported since that time have made the case that President Trump obstructed justice significantly stronger. This is further evidenced by the weaknesses of the factual and legal defenses that have been advanced by the president and his team of lawyers. There is no doubt a difference between what is in the public record and what Special Counsel Mueller and his colleagues have uncovered in their investigation, and there remain factual disputes among key participants. Nevertheless, analyzing the current allegations against the president under the legal framework laid out in our original report even more strongly supports that the president obstructed justice under ordinary application of the relevant criminal law. It is no wonder the president’s lawyers reportedly do not want him to undergo live questioning about obstruction by Mueller.

The possibility of an indictment or impeachment of a president has also been discussed extensively in the months since our initial report. We have here expanded our refutation of several of the defenses that the president’s legal team has developed. We explain that the fact that a president may have exercised his constitutional authority, such as to remove subordinate officers, is no defense if those otherwise lawful actions were done with a corrupt intent to obstruct a criminal or congressional proceeding. The notion that a public official cannot be charged with obstructing justice for actions that are within his or her public authority finds no support in the annals of American law.

Past special prosecutors have deferred to Congress’ primary jurisdiction over matters involving the president and have referred such matters to the House Judiciary Committee. The investigations involving Presidents Nixon and Clinton serve as important precedent for this option, even accounting for the legal and factual distinctions between those cases and this one. Deference to Congress’ primary jurisdiction does not mean that the criminal justice system has no role to play in the obstruction case. Conspiracy charges against subordinate officers would be entirely appropriate if the facts bear out such a claim even if the case against the president has been referred to Congress. And should Congress not take up the obstruction case against the president after such a referral, the special counsel may also leave open the possibility of indicting the president at a later time.

We also explain our view that a sitting president does not enjoy immunity from prosecution, as some have claimed. If facing an indictment so burdens the president that he cannot fulfill the duties of his office, it is hardly self-evident that those obligations should trump the rule of law. Under our constitution, we elect a vice president whose principal responsibility is to assume the office of the president if the chief executive resigns or is incapacitated. Temporary or permanent incapacitation of a president by indictment is not the same as incapacitation of the office or of the executive branch. For those reasons, we believe that criminal indictment of a president is better viewed as an option of last resort rather than one that is foreclosed by any binding legal opinion.

Stepping back, it is telling that those defending the president are resorting to the narrowest of defenses—that even if the president obstructed justice, holding him accountable would be unconstitutional. In what is perhaps a reflection of the strength of the evidence that can now be marshaled against the president, his defenders have shifted the fight in large measure away from the merits of the obstruction case to a series of questionable defenses based upon the possible consequences of even a meritorious case. In many ways, the question has become less about whether there is a case that Donald J. Trump obstructed justice, and more about whether and in what form the rule of law will be followed.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/GS_82218_Obstruction_2nd-edition.pdf

#Resist

[Katiebee]

Once again, President Trump has demonstrated a lack of knowledge about the Constitution, specifically the 1st Amendment, and trod dangerously close to violating that Amendment by suggesting that the FCC investigate Saturday Night Live. That action would be a violation of the 1st Amendment, and shows that Trump is unfit to be POTUS.

[psiberzerker]

Speaking of Investigations...

I'm amazed he can tear himself away from his busy schedule of Golf, and watching Fox News to catch SNL.

[Athos_131]

Feds reportedly raided Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy’s office seeking documents related to Trump administration associates

GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy’s office in Los Angeles was raided last July by federal investigators looking for records detailing his dealings with “Trump administration associates” and and foreign officials, according to a new report Monday.

ProPublica, in its article about the raid, said that the sealed search warrant for Broidy’s office listed three potential crimes that authorities are investigating: conspiracy, money laundering, and covert lobbying on behalf of foreign officials.

The report said that federal agents were authorized in that warrant to use Broidy’s face and hands if needed to unlock phones that require either fingerprint or facial scans.

The California businessman until last year was deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee, and had served as finance vice chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and inaugural committee.

ProPublica reported that the search warrant indicates that investigators are eyeing Broidy’s alleged work on behalf of Jho Low, a fugitive Malaysian financier who is believed to have masterminded the looting of billions of dollars from the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB.

And the article said investigators also intended to seize records from Broidy related to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, as well as documents related to Chinese dissident businessman Guo Wengui.

The New York Times reported in November, along with the Washington Post, that Broidy matches the description of a person identified as Individual No. 1 in court filings by federal prosecutors as someone who took part in a lobbying effort to have the Trump administration terminate a probe into the alleged theft from 1MDB.

Lawyers for Broidy had no immediate comment when contacted by CNBC.

One of those lawyers, Chris Clark, last year told The Washington Post that, “Elliott Broidy has never agreed to work for, been retained by nor been compensated by any foreign government for any interaction with the United States Government, ever. Any implication to the contrary is a lie.”

Broidy pleaded guilty in 2009 to a felony, rewarding official misconduct, for having given almost $1 million in gifts to state officials as part of an effort to win $250 million in pension fund investments by New York State in his firm. That charge was later reduced to a misdemeanor Broidy cooperated with investigators.

He resigned as a top fundraiser at the RNC in April 2018 after revelations that he had, through a deal worked out by Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, agreed to pay a Playboy model to keep quiet about his extramarital affair with her.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Pentagon sends Congress list of military construction projects that could be delayed to free up money for wall

Acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan identified all of the projects that could possibly be affected by President Trump’s decision to use emergency authorities to take up to $3.6 billion in military construction funds for his border wall.

Shanahan had promised to deliver the list to lawmakers by the end of the day last Thursday during a tense hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Pentagon didn’t send the file to Capitol Hill until midday Monday, prompting anger from lawmakers who had been requesting it for weeks.

The $12.9 billion pool of initiatives includes military construction projects approved and appropriated by Congress but not yet contracted out by the Pentagon. Of those, projects that involve military housing or that carry award dates before Sept. 30, 2019, won’t be touched, the statement said.

Lt. Col. Joe Buccino, a spokesman for Shanahan, said in a statement that if Congress enacts next year’s budget on time and as requested by the administration, the construction projects will all proceed on schedule. But the president’s budget request has already run into opposition on Capitol Hill, and Democrats have rejected the idea of “backfilling” affected Pentagon accounts in the coming budget, meaning some of the projects could face delays as a result of the wall.

 Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the list includes projects that could be derailed or put on the chopping block as a result of Trump’s action. Reed urged fellow senators to take into consideration the projects in their home states when voting on whether to override Trump’s veto of a congressional resolution rejecting his national emergency.

“What President Trump is doing is a slap in the face to our military that makes our border and the country less secure,” Reed said. “He is planning to take funds from real, effective operational priorities and needed projects and divert them to his vanity wall.”

The projects on the list run the gamut, including a hangar for drones at Kunsan Air Base in South Korea and a wastewater treatment plant at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. They represent the full spectrum of construction initiatives that the Pentagon undertakes to maintain a vast network of bases and operations around the globe.

Many of the projects are updates to facilities that affect daily military life on bases — dining halls, schools, fire stations, medical facilities, roads and parking lots. Others are construction projects that directly impact military operations and training, such as firing ranges, aircraft maintenance hangars, flight simulation facilities and munitions depots.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who last week accused Shanahan of sandbagging senators by failing to make the list public for weeks, said Trump “is putting his border wall ahead of the safety of our troops.”

“The projects that could lose funding include military training centers in Virginia, a plant to prevent water contamination at Camp Lejeune and a cybersecurity facility in Georgia,” he said. “I hope my colleagues in Congress will take a serious look at the projects that support our military in their own states and then vote to override the president’s veto.”

 Whether any of the projects end up delayed depends in large part on negotiations between congressional lawmakers and the Trump administration over the coming year’s budget. The Trump administration is proposing to “back fill” the $3.6 billion it plans to take from the construction account for the wall, but Democrats have said they aren’t going to fund projects Congress has already funded. The Pentagon has said it won’t cancel any of the projects outright, but the initiatives won’t be able to proceed if they aren’t funded by Congress.

 Trump is planning to access the funds for the wall under Section 2808 of the U.S. code that governs the military. It allows the defense secretary, in the event of a national emergency requiring the use of the military, to undertake military construction projects “not otherwise authorized by law that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces.”

A number of lawsuits, including one by a coalition of 16 U.S. states and another by the American Civil Liberties Union, are challenging in court whether Trump is following the letter of that law.

Congress, meanwhile, voted to reject Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the southern border, but the Senate didn’t pass the resolution with a veto-proof margin. Trump vetoed the legislation late last week.

Trump is also planning to take up to $2.5 billion in counterdrug funds from the Pentagon, a move that doesn’t require the invocation of emergency authorities. Because the counterdrug account has less than $100 million remaining in it, the Pentagon will need to move money from elsewhere in its budget into the account to fund the wall. Where that money will come from isn’t fully clear — and the list sent Monday doesn’t address the matter.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

A Mar-a-Lago Weekend and an Act of God: Trump’s History With Deutsche Bank

As President Trump delivered his inaugural address in 2017, a slight woman with feathered gray hair sat listening, bundled in a hooded white parka in a fenced-off V.I.P. section. Her name was Rosemary T. Vrablic. She was a managing director at Deutsche Bank and one of the reasons Mr. Trump had just taken the oath of office.

It was a moment of celebration — and a moment of worry for Ms. Vrablic’s employer.

Mr. Trump and Deutsche Bank were deeply entwined, their symbiotic bond born of necessity and ambition on both sides: a real estate mogul made toxic by polarizing rhetoric and a pattern of defaults, and a bank with intractable financial problems and a history of misconduct.

The relationship had paid off. Mr. Trump used loans from Deutsche Bank to finance skyscrapers and other high-end properties, and repeatedly cited his relationship with the bank to deflect political attacks on his business acumen. Deutsche Bank used Mr. Trump’s projects to build its investment-banking business, reaped fees from the assets he put in its custody and leveraged his celebrity to lure clients.

Then Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, and the German bank shifted into damage-control mode, bracing for an onslaught of public scrutiny, according to several people involved in the internal response.

In the weeks before Ms. Vrablic attended his swearing-in, the bank commissioned reports to figure out how it had gotten in so deep with Mr. Trump. It issued an unusual edict to its Wall Street employees: Do not publicly utter the word “Trump.”

More than two years later, Mr. Trump’s financial ties with Deutsche Bank are the subject of investigations by two congressional committees and the New York attorney general. Investigators hope to use Deutsche Bank as a window into Mr. Trump’s personal and business finances.

Deutsche Bank officials have quietly argued to regulators, lawmakers and journalists that Mr. Trump was not a priority for the bank or its senior leaders and that the lending was the work of a single, obscure division. But interviews with more than 20 current and former Deutsche Bank executives and board members, most of them with direct knowledge of the Trump relationship, contradict the bank’s narrative.

Over nearly two decades, Deutsche Bank’s leaders repeatedly saw red flags surrounding Mr. Trump. There was a disastrous bond sale, a promised loan that relied on a banker’s forged signature, wild exaggerations of Mr. Trump’s wealth, even a claim of an act of God.

Editors’ Picks

Amy Schumer Doesn’t Care What You Think (That Much)

How Parents Are Robbing Their Children of Adulthood

‘One Day at a Time’ and Why Netflix Is Not Your Friend
But Deutsche Bank had a ravenous appetite for risk and limited concern about its clients’ reputations. Time after time, with the support of two different chief executives, the bank handed money — a total of well over $2 billion — to a man whom nearly all other banks had deemed untouchable.

Kerrie McHugh, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman, said: “We remain committed to cooperating with authorized investigations.”

The White House referred questions to the Trump Organization. A company spokeswoman, Amanda Miller, declined to comment.

‘A Great Son!’
In the late 1990s, Deutsche Bank, which is based in Germany, was trying to make a name for itself on Wall Street. Its investment-banking division went on a hiring binge.

The bank recruited a handful of Goldman Sachs traders to lead a push into commercial real estate. One was Justin Kennedy, the son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Another was Mike Offit, whose father was the writer Sidney Offit.

At Deutsche Bank, Mr. Offit’s mandate was to lend money to big real estate developers, package the loans into securities and sell the resulting bonds to investors. He said in an interview that one way to stand out in a crowded market was to make loans that his rivals considered too risky.

In 1998, a broker contacted him to see if he would consider lending to a Wall Street pariah: Mr. Trump, who was then a casino magnate whose bankruptcies had cost banks hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Offit took the meeting.

A few days later, Mr. Offit’s secretary called him. “Donald Trump is in the conference room,” she whispered. Mr. Offit said he rushed in, expecting to find an entourage. Mr. Trump was alone.

He was looking for a $125 million loan to pay for gut renovations of 40 Wall Street, his Art Deco tower in Lower Manhattan. Mr. Offit was impressed by the pitch, and the loan sailed through Deutsche Bank’s approval process.

Mr. Trump seemed giddy with gratitude, Mr. Offit recalled. He took Mr. Offit golfing. He flew him by helicopter to Atlantic City for boxing matches. He wrote a grateful note to Sidney Offit for having “a great son!”

Mr. Offit commissioned a detailed model of 40 Wall Street. A golden plaque on its pedestal bore the names and logos of Deutsche Bank and the Trump Organization. Mr. Offit gave one to Mr. Trump and kept another in his office.

Mr. Trump soon came looking for $300 million for the construction of a skyscraper across from the United Nations headquarters. The loan was approved. He wanted hundreds of millions more for his Trump Marina casino in Atlantic City. Mr. Offit pledged to line up cash for that, too.

Not long after, Edson Mitchell, a top bank executive, discovered that the signature of the credit officer who had approved the Trump Marina deal had been forged, Mr. Offit said. (Mr. Offit was never accused of forgery; the loan never went through.)

Mr. Offit was fired months later. He said it was because Mr. Mitchell claimed that he was reckless, a charge Mr. Offit disputed.

It was the first hiccup in the Trump relationship. It would not be the last.

The Mar-a-Lago Reward
Over the next few years, the commercial real estate group, with Mr. Kennedy now in a senior role, kept lending to Mr. Trump, including to buy the General Motors building in Manhattan. Occasionally, Justice Kennedy stopped by Deutsche Bank’s offices to say hello to the team, executives recalled.

At an annual pro-am golf tournament the bank hosted outside Boston in the early 2000s, Mr. Trump sat down for a recorded interview with the bank’s public relations staff, who asked about his experience with Deutsche Bank.

“It’s great,” Mr. Trump exclaimed, according to a person who witnessed the interview. “They’re really fast!”

In 2003, a Deutsche Bank team led by Richard Byrne — a former casino-industry analyst who had known Mr. Trump since the 1980s — was hired to sell bonds on behalf of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts. Bank officials escorted Mr. Trump to meet institutional investors in New York and Boston, according to an executive who attended.

The so-called roadshow seemed to go well. At every stop, Mr. Trump was greeted by large audiences of fund managers, executives and lower-level employees eager to see the famous mogul. The problem, as a Deutsche Bank executive would explain to Mr. Trump, was that few of them were willing to entrust money to him.

Mr. Trump requested an audience with the bank’s bond salesmen.

According to a Deutsche Bank executive who heard the remarks, Mr. Trump gave a pep talk. “Fellas, I know this isn’t the easiest thing you’ve had to sell,” the executive recalled Mr. Trump saying. “But if you get this done, you’ll all be my guests at Mar-a-Lago,” his private club in Palm Beach, Fla.

The sales team managed to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bonds. Mr. Trump was pleased with the results when a Deutsche Bank executive called, according to a person who heard the conversation.

“Don’t forget what you promised our guys,” the executive reminded him.

Mr. Trump said he did not remember and that he doubted the salesmen actually expected to be taken to Mar-a-Lago.

“That’s all they’ve talked about the past week,” the executive replied.

Mr. Trump ultimately flew about 15 salesmen to Florida on his Boeing 727. They spent a weekend golfing with Mr. Trump, two participants said.

A year later, in 2004, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts defaulted on the bonds. Deutsche Bank’s clients suffered steep losses. This arm of the investment-banking division stopped doing business with Mr. Trump.

An Act of God
Around that time, Mr. Trump returned to Deutsche Bank’s commercial real estate unit — which was housed in a separate part of the sprawling investment-banking division — for another loan. This one was to build a 92-story skyscraper in Chicago, the Trump International Hotel and Tower.

Josef Ackermann, the bank’s chief executive, had publicly promised soaring profits, and with many of the company’s businesses sputtering, the investment-banking group was under intense pressure to grow.

As Deutsche Bank considered making the loan, Mr. Trump wooed bankers with flights on his private plane, according to a person familiar with the pitch. In a Trump Tower meeting, he told Mr. Kennedy that his daughter Ivanka would be in charge of the Chicago project, a sign of the family’s commitment to its success.

But there were warning signs.

Mr. Trump told Deutsche Bank his net worth was about $3 billion, but when bank employees reviewed his finances, they concluded he was worth about $788 million, according to documents produced during a lawsuit Mr. Trump brought against the former New York Times journalist Timothy O’Brien. And a senior investment-banking executive said in an interview that he and others cautioned that Mr. Trump should be avoided because he had worked with people in the construction industry connected to organized crime.

Nonetheless, Deutsche Bank agreed in 2005 to lend Mr. Trump more than $500 million for the project. He personally guaranteed $40 million of it, meaning the bank could come after his personal assets if he defaulted.

By 2008, the riverside skyscraper, one of the tallest in America, was mostly built. But with the economy sagging, Mr. Trump struggled to sell hundreds of condominium units. The bulk of the loan was due that November.

Then the financial crisis hit, and Mr. Trump’s lawyers sensed an opportunity.

A provision in the loan let Mr. Trump partially off the hook in the event of a “force majeure,” essentially an act of God, like a natural disaster. The former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan had called the financial crisis a tsunami. And what was a tsunami if not a natural disaster?

One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Steven Schlesinger, told him the provision could be used against Deutsche Bank.

“It’s brilliant!” Mr. Schlesinger recalled Mr. Trump responding.

Days before the loan was due, Mr. Trump sued Deutsche Bank, citing the force majeure language and seeking $3 billion in damages. Deutsche Bank countersued and demanded payment of the $40 million that Mr. Trump had personally guaranteed.

With the suits in court, senior investment-banking executives severed ties with Mr. Trump.

Luring a Banker
Not long after Mr. Trump got the Chicago loan — but before it went south — Deutsche Bank was expanding its private-banking division, which served the superrich. Executives said they set out to hire Ms. Vrablic, whom they viewed as the best private banker in New York.

Traditionally, private bankers discreetly manage customers’ wealth and act as high-end concierges. Ms. Vrablic, who started her career as a bank teller and then worked at Citigroup and Bank of America, did that and more. She also arranged large real estate and commercial loans for her best clients.

To lure her, Deutsche Bank guaranteed that she would earn at least $3 million a year, unusually rich terms for a private banker, and would bypass a layer of management to report directly to Thomas Bowers, the head of the American wealth-management division, according to people familiar with her contract.

“Rosemary is widely recognized as one of the top private bankers to the U.S. ultra high-net-worth community,” Mr. Bowers said in a September 2006 news release. Deutsche Bank took out an ad in The Times to celebrate the arrival of her and a few colleagues.

Ms. Vrablic’s superiors encouraged her to make loans that rival banks dismissed as too large or complex. They saw it as a way to elbow into the hypercompetitive New York market.

‘There Is No Objection’
In 2010, Deutsche Bank and Mr. Trump settled their litigation over the Chicago loan. Mr. Trump agreed to repay most of what he owed by 2012, Mr. Schlesinger said.

One of Ms. Vrablic’s clients was Jared Kushner, who married Ivanka Trump in 2009. Mr. Kushner regarded Ms. Vrablic as the best banker he had ever worked with, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

Shortly after the Chicago lawsuit was settled, Mr. Kushner was told that Mr. Trump was looking for a loan and introduced him to Ms. Vrablic, according to people familiar with the relationship.

Mr. Trump flew Ms. Vrablic to Miami to show her a property he wanted to buy: the Doral Golf Resort and Spa. He needed more than $100 million for the 72-hole property.

Deutsche Bank dispatched a team to Trump Tower to inspect Mr. Trump’s personal and corporate financial records. The bankers determined he was overvaluing some of his real estate assets by as much as 70 percent, according to two former executives.

By then, though, Mr. Trump had become a reality-TV star, and he was swimming in cash from “The Apprentice.” Deutsche Bank officials also were impressed that Mr. Trump did not have much debt, according to people who reviewed his finances. Aside from his history of defaults, he was an attractive borrower.

Mr. Trump also expressed interest in another loan from the private-banking division: $48 million for the same Chicago property that had provoked the two-year court fight.

Mr. Trump told the bank he would use that loan to repay what he still owed the investment-banking division, the two former executives said. Even by Wall Street standards, borrowing money from one part of a bank to pay off a loan from another was an extraordinary act of financial chutzpah.

Ms. Vrablic and Mr. Bowers tentatively agreed to both loans.

Because these would be the private bank’s first transactions with Mr. Trump, they needed approval up the chain of command.

Investment-banking executives, including Anshu Jain, who would soon become Deutsche Bank’s co-chief executive, pushed back. Lending to Mr. Trump again would be foolish, they argued, and signal to clients that they could default and even sue the bank.

Executives in the private bank countered that the proposed loans had Mr. Trump’s personal guarantee and therefore were low risk. And the Chicago loan, they noted, would lead to the repayment of tens of millions of dollars that Mr. Trump still owed the investment-banking division.

A top executive with responsibility for the private bank discussed the loans with Mr. Ackermann, the chief executive, who supported them, according to two officials. A powerful committee in Frankfurt, which evaluated loans based on risks to the bank’s reputation, signed off.

“There is no objection from the bank to proceed with this client,” wrote Stuart Clarke, the chief operating officer for the Americas, in a Dec. 5, 2011, email, according to a recipient.

Deutsche Bank wired the money to Mr. Trump. The loans carried relatively low interest rates, executives said, but the business promised to be profitable: As part of the deal, Mr. Trump would hold millions of dollars in a personal account, generating fees for the bank.

“I have no recollection of having been asked to approve that private-banking loan,” Mr. Ackermann said in an interview. He added: “I would have approved it, if it came to me, if it was commercially sound.”

The C.E.O. Meets Trump
Ms. Vrablic’s relationship with the Trumps deepened.

Deutsche Bank lent money to Donald Trump Jr. for a South Carolina manufacturing venture that would soon go bankrupt. It provided a $15 million credit line to Mr. Kushner and his mother, according to financial documents reviewed by The Times. The bank previously had an informal ban on business with the Kushners because Jared’s father, Charles, was a felon.

In 2012, Jared Kushner recommended that the editor of The Mortgage Observer, one of the publications he owned, write a profile of Ms. Vrablic. The editor, Carl Gaines, knew Mr. Kushner was her client and objected, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

“Just go meet with her,” Mr. Kushner said. “You’ll figure something out.”

A gauzy profile of Ms. Vrablic was published in February 2013.

Shortly afterward, the private bank produced a promotional video featuring some of its marquee clients. The video was played at a retreat for Deutsche Bank’s senior leadership in Barcelona. In it, Ivanka Trump extolled the private bank’s work with her family and thanked their relationship manager, according to two people who saw the video.

In early 2014, Mr. Trump and his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, approached Ms. Vrablic about more potential loans.

The owner of the Buffalo Bills had died, and the N.F.L. franchise was up for sale. Mr. Trump was interested, and he needed to show the league he had the financial wherewithal to pull off a transaction that could top $1 billion.

Mr. Trump asked Ms. Vrablic if the bank would be willing to make a loan and handed over bare-bones financial statements that estimated his net worth at $8.7 billion.

Mr. Cohen testified to Congress last month that the documents exaggerated Mr. Trump’s wealth. Deutsche Bank executives had reached a similar conclusion. They nonetheless agreed to vouch for Mr. Trump’s bid, according to an executive involved.

Mr. Trump’s bid did not win, but another lending opportunity soon arose.

A federal agency had selected Mr. Trump to transform the Old Post Office Building in Washington into a luxury hotel. But his financial partner — the private equity firm Colony Capital, run by Thomas J. Barrack Jr. — pulled out. Mr. Trump needed nearly $200 million.

Because of his decades-long pattern of defaults and his increasingly polarizing political rhetoric — among other things, he had been spreading a lie about President Barack Obama being born overseas — Mr. Trump remained untouchable for most banks.

Ms. Vrablic was willing to help.

In a memo outlining the rationale for the Old Post Office loan, Ms. Vrablic said Mr. Trump was expected to add large sums to his brokerage account if he received the loan, according to an executive who read the document.

This time, there was less internal opposition. One reason: Mr. Jain — by then the bank’s co-chief executive — had a solid relationship with Ms. Vrablic. Mr. Jain accompanied her to meetings with high-profile clients, and he praised her work to colleagues, multiple executives said.

On a foggy Wednesday in February 2013, Ms. Vrablic and Mr. Jain went to Trump Tower to meet with Mr. Trump, according to two executives with knowledge of the meeting. Ms. Vrablic’s rapport with the client was immediately clear: Mr. Trump’s assistant greeted her as an old friend, and she seemed relaxed with Mr. Trump and his daughter, one executive said.

They discussed Mr. Trump’s finances over lunch, and Mr. Jain said he was surprised by his low level of debt, the executives said. After lunch, Ms. Vrablic told her colleagues that Mr. Jain had sounded upbeat about Mr. Trump’s finances.

A $170 million loan to pay for the overhaul of the Old Post Office went through in 2015, and Mr. Trump added more money to his brokerage account. (In May 2016, he reported up to $46 million of stocks and bonds in the account.)

On Aug. 6, 2015, Mr. Trump participated in the first Republican presidential debate. He clashed with the Fox News moderator, Megyn Kelly. He flew back to New York early the next morning. That evening, he called in to a CNN talk show and said of Ms. Kelly that there was “blood coming out of her wherever.”

In the intervening hours, Mr. Trump had used a black Sharpie to sign documents for another loan from Deutsche Bank: $19 million for the Doral resort. That brought to more than $300 million the total lent under Ms. Vrablic.

Shock and Anger
On the campaign trail, rivals assailed Mr. Trump’s financial history. In response, he pointed to Deutsche Bank-funded successes like the Old Post Office project, now a gleaming hotel a few blocks from the White House.

In early 2016, Mr. Trump asked Ms. Vrablic for one final loan, for his golf course in Turnberry, Scotland.

Ms. Vrablic said yes, but a fight soon erupted.

Jacques Brand, who was in charge of Deutsche Bank’s American businesses, angrily objected, partly because of Mr. Trump’s divisive rhetoric.

Ms. Vrablic appealed the decision. Senior executives in Frankfurt, including Christian Sewing, who would become chief executive in 2018, were shocked that the private bank would consider lending Mr. Trump money during the campaign, bank officials said.

The bank’s reputational risk committee killed the transaction in March 2016.

That same month, as The Times was preparing an article about Mr. Trump’s excommunication from Wall Street, he cited his warm relationship with Deutsche Bank.

“They are totally happy with me,” he said to The Times. “Why don’t you call the head of Deutsche Bank? Her name is Rosemary Vrablic. She is the boss.”

Demagogy and Defaults
After Mr. Trump won the election, Deutsche Bank’s board of directors rushed to understand how the bank had become the biggest lender to the president-elect.

A report prepared by the board’s integrity committee concluded that executives in the private-banking division were so determined to win business from big-name clients that they had ignored Mr. Trump’s reputation for demagogy and defaults, according to a person who read the report.

The review also found that Deutsche Bank had produced a number of “exposure reports” that flagged the growing business with Mr. Trump, but that they had not been adequately reviewed by senior executives.

On Deutsche Bank’s trading floor, managers began warning employees not to use the word “Trump” in communications with people outside the bank. Salesmen who violated the edict were scolded by compliance officers who said the bank feared stoking public interest in its ties to the new president.

One reason: If Mr. Trump were to default on his loans, Deutsche Bank would have to choose between seizing his assets or cutting him a lucrative break — a situation the bank would rather resolve in private.

Two years after Mr. Trump was sworn in, Democrats took control of the House of Representatives. The chamber’s financial services and intelligence committees opened investigations into Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Mr. Trump. Those inquiries, as well as the New York attorney general’s investigation, come at a perilous time for Deutsche Bank, which is negotiating to merge with another large German lender.

Next month, Deutsche Bank is likely to start handing over extensive internal documents and communications about Mr. Trump to the congressional committees, according to people briefed on the process.

Ms. Vrablic, who is intensely private and rarely discusses her personal life with colleagues, declined to comment. People familiar with her thinking said she expected to be called to testify publicly on Capitol Hill.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Records show FBI was investigating Michael Cohen long before raid

The FBI was investigating President Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer for nearly a year before agents raided Michael Cohen’s home and office, documents released Tuesday show.

The search warrant, while heavily redacted, offered new details about the federal inquiry of Cohen’s business dealings and the FBI raids of his Manhattan home and office.

It shows the federal inquiry into Michael Cohen had been going on since July 2017 — far longer than had previously been known.

Lanny Davis, an attorney for Cohen, said the release of the search warrant “furthers his interest in continuing to cooperate and providing information and the truth about Donald Trump and the Trump organization to law enforcement and Congress.”

The FBI raided Cohen’s Manhattan home and office last April, marking the first public sign of a criminal investigation that has threatened Trump’s presidency and netted Cohen a three-year prison sentence for tax evasion and campaign-finance violations. The feds, who also scoured Cohen’s hotel room and safe deposit box, seized more than 4 million electronic and paper files in the searches, more than a dozen mobile devices and iPads, 20 external hard drives, flash drives and laptops.

Both Cohen and Trump cried foul over the raids, with Cohen’s attorney at the time calling them “completely inappropriate and unnecessary” and the president declaring on Twitter that “Attorney-client privilege is dead!”

A court-ordered review ultimately found only a fraction of the seized material to be privileged.

The raids on Cohen were triggered in part by a referral from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is separately looking into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Tuesday’s release of the search warrant came nearly six weeks after U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III partially granted a request by several media organizations, including the Associated Press, that the search warrant be made public due to the high public interest in the case.

The judge acknowledged prosecutors’ concerns that a wholesale release of the document “would jeopardize an ongoing investigation and prejudice the privacy rights of uncharged third parties,” a ruling that revealed prosecutors are still investigating Cohen’s illegal payments to two women to stay silent about alleged affairs with Trump.

The judge ordered prosecutors to redact Cohen’s personal information and details in the warrant that refer to ongoing investigations and several third parties who have cooperated with the inquiry. But he authorized the release of details in the warrant that relate to Cohen’s tax evasion and false statements to financial institutions charges, along with Cohen’s conduct that did not result in criminal charges.

“At this stage, wholesale disclosure of the materials would reveal the scope and direction of the government’s ongoing investigation,” Pauley wrote in a ruling last month.

Cohen pleaded guilty over the summer to failing to report more than $4 million in income to the IRS, making false statements to financial institutions and campaign-finance violations stemming from the hush-money payments he arranged for porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Cohen implicated Trump in his guilty plea, saying the president directed him to make the payments during his 2016 campaign.

#Resist

[watcher1]

Trump keeps up his attacks on John McCain. 

What ever happened to not speaking ill of the dead?  But to continually denigrate an American who spent years in a North Vietnamese prison as a POW just shows how immature Trump is. Though Republicans are criticizing his latest outburst, they are not calling out Trump. Best thing for the country right now is to take away Trump's access to his cellphone so he can longer tweet disparaging remarks about people, especially people who have contributed to their country a hell of a lot more then he has.

[psiberzerker]

He was too much of a coward to talk shit about him when he was alive, because he kept getting his ass handed to him.

[Athos_131]

Cesar Sayoc pleads guilty to mailing explosive devices to Trump critics

Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man accused of mailing explosive devices to more than a dozen politicians and media figures who have been critical of President Trump, pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court.

Sayoc, 57, was arrested and charged in October after a series of possible explosive devices were sent to former president Barack Obama, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the news network CNN, among others. Officials said he sent a total of 16 devices to 13 people across the country.

On Thursday, Sayoc appeared in a Manhattan court room and read from a brief written statement in a quiet, raspy voice. Naming recipients of the packages, Sayoc acknowledged that he had created the devices — using materials that included powder from fireworks — and sent them in the mail.

“I knew these actions were wrong. I’m extremely sorry,” Sayoc said. He briefly lost his composure at one point while speaking, prompting his attorneys to rub his back.

Responding to a question from U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff, Sayoc said: “I was aware of the risk that they would explode.”

Sayoc’s guilty plea had been anticipated since his court docket showed last week that a pretrial conference scheduled for Thursday had been changed to a “plea” hearing. He had previously pleaded not guilty.

An attorney for Sayoc did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Sayoc, who faces a maximum possible sentence of life in prison, is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 12.

The string of potentially explosive packages caused panic across the country as they were received or intercepted en route to current and former government officials as well as prominent political donors. The packages were addressed to two former presidents — Obama and Bill Clinton — along with sitting United States senators, the actor Robert De Niro and the billionaire activist George Soros, among others.

All of the targets had criticized Trump, who had apparently become the focus of Sayoc’s intense admiration.

People who knew Sayoc have described his peripatetic existence, saying that he lived for years out of his van while working as a DJ or bouncer at strip clubs. He was charged with a number of crimes over the years, including theft and battery; in one case, he was accused of invoking the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks while threatening the power company.

In court on Thursday, Sayoc responded to questions posed by the judge by saying he had dealt with alcohol issues in the past.

Sayoc’s van became a prominent symbol online after his arrest, adorned with images of Trump and criticisms of Trump’s foes, including several of the individuals who authorities said were targeted by the packages.

After Sayoc was arrested, Trump said he “did not see my face on the van” and acknowledged: “I heard he was a person who preferred me over others.”

Trump and his allies have repeatedly pushed back against the idea that his incendiary rhetoric could be linked to extremist violence, including most recently in the wake of the New Zealand mosque attacks. The suspected attacker there referred to immigrants as “invaders” in a manifesto, similar to the language authorities say a gunman used before opening fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Trump has also used the same wording, including not long after the New Zealand attack. Pressed on the criticisms, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, said Sunday that it was “absurd” to connect Trump’s statements with the New Zealand manifesto.

“There are folks who just don’t like the president, and everything that goes wrong, they’re going to look for a way to tie that to the president,” Mulvaney said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Federal officials called the wave of potential explosive devices sent out in October 2018 a “domestic terror attack” and accused Sayoc of endangering numerous lives. Prosecutors said Sayoc began searching for the homes of some people targeted as early as last July and continued into the fall. Authorities also continued to recover more devices after Sayoc was arrested.

The first package was found on Oct. 22, a Monday, and the investigation and anxiety only grew as more devices were identified in the days that followed. CNN’s New York offices were evacuated when a package addressed to John Brennan, the former CIA director, was found in the mail room, a situation that played out on live television. Packages were soon found in Florida, Delaware and California.

By that Friday, authorities closed in on Sayoc outside an auto supply store in Plantation, Fla., after finding what Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director, said was a fingerprint on one of the envelopes containing a device. Wray also said there were potential DNA matches connecting Sayoc to some of the devices.

While none of the devices detonated, Wray said they were “not hoax devices.” Authorities said all 16 were similar, describing them as “improvised explosive devices” containing pipe filled with explosive material, wiring and a small clock. Some, they added, also held shards of glass.

#Resist

[Katiebee]

trump-and-universities-in-fight-over-free-speech-federal-research-funding

The claim is that there is a rigid left wing/liberal slant. When the speaker is calling out to discriminate or attack others, then not allowing a platform for them is not left-wing/liberal, it is common sense. Unless you are a fascist asshole.

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

Yeah, I knew Ghengis. Great guy, really nice guy. Great with the ladies, all the ladies just loved him. So, I asked him, 'What's your secret with the ladies?" and then he tells me. "Well, you know they can't say no to me!"

[Athos_131]

What Mueller Leaves Behind

After one year, 10 months, and six days, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has submitted his final report to the attorney general, signaling the end of his investigation into a potential conspiracy between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Mueller’s pace has been breakneck, legal experts tell me—especially for a complicated criminal investigation that involves foreign nationals and the Kremlin, an adversarial government. The next-shortest special-counsel inquiry was the three-and-a-half-year investigation of the Plame affair, under President George W. Bush; the longest looked into the Iran-Contra scandal, under President Ronald Reagan, which lasted nearly seven years. Still, former FBI agents have expressed surprise that Mueller ended his probe without ever personally interviewing its central target: Donald Trump.

The content of the special counsel’s report is still unknown—Mueller delivered it to Attorney General William Barr on Friday, and now it’s up to Barr to write his own summary of the findings, which will then go to Congress.

While aspects of the central pieces of Mueller’s investigation—conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and kompromat, the Russians’ practice of collecting damaging information about public figures to blackmail them with—have been revealed publicly through indictments and press-friendly witnesses, the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, and Mueller’s own legacy, still hang in the balance. Did Trump’s campaign knowingly work with Russia to undermine Hillary Clinton and win the election? And how much was Mueller actually able to uncover?

MORE STORIES
 
The Eerie Parallels Between Trump and the Watergate ‘Road Map’
NATASHA BERTRAND
 
Why Would Bill Barr Even Want to Be Attorney General?
DAVID A. GRAHAM
 
Waiting in Vain for the Mueller Report
DAVID A. GRAHAM
 
Robert Mueller Is Not Invincible
DAVID A. GRAHAM
Here are the threads Mueller has begun to publicly unravel—and the lingering mysteries that might fall to Congress to solve.

Conspiracy

To date, Mueller has leveled the conspiracy charges most relevant to the core of his probe—Russia’s election interference—at Russian nationals. In February 2018, his office indicted 13 Russians connected to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a troll farm based in St. Petersburg that flooded the internet with propaganda and divisive political content leading up to the election. Beginning in 2014, Mueller wrote, the defendants “knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other … to defraud the United States” by influencing U.S. political processes in an operation they dubbed “Project Lakhta.” Two of the defendants, Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva, actually traveled to the United States in the summer of 2014 to “gather intelligence” for the project, according to the indictment. The indictment did not make a judgment as to whether the results of the election were impacted, or whether collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia occurred.

Months later, and just days before Trump’s bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, Mueller pounced again: He indicted 12 Russian military-intelligence officers, alleging that they had hacked the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and top staffers for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. (The entire contents of the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email inbox, stolen by Russia in March 2016, were dumped by WikiLeaks just minutes after the Access Hollywood tape damaging to Trump was released by The Washington Post.)

Again, though, Mueller stopped short of alleging any kind of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. The closest he came was this sentence: “On or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office” (emphasis mine). By using the words for the first time, Mueller appeared to be emphasizing the fact that the hackers’ activity that day was unique—a significant detail, given another major event that took place on July 27, 2016: Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening,” speech, in which he implored Moscow to find Clinton’s emails.

The closest Mueller has publicly come so far to establishing a link between Trump’s campaign and the Russian hackers is through Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant whom Mueller charged in January with obstruction of justice, making false statements to Congress, and witness tampering. In a court filing last month, Mueller linked Stone directly to one of the Russian military-intelligence (GRU) officers, writing that the search warrants his team conducted against the GRU revealed that Guccifer 2.0, a fictitious online persona created by the Russians, “interacted directly with Stone concerning other stolen materials posted separately online.” Stone has said he had “a short and innocuous Direct Message Exchange with Guccifer 2.0” in August 2016, in which Guccifer offered to “help” him. The January indictment of Stone also offered the clearest link yet between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, and suggested that the campaign might have known about additional stolen emails before they were released.

Many questions are still unanswered. One of them is whether Stone and the Trump campaign coordinated WikiLeaks’ release of the stolen Podesta emails to distract from the Access Hollywood tape, which showed Trump making vulgar comments about women. The emails were dumped just minutes after the tape was released on October 7, 2016, and the Stone indictment reveals a tantalizing new detail: Shortly after the Podesta emails were released, a Trump-campaign associate texted Stone “Well done.”

Also unknown: the whereabouts of a Russia-linked professor from Malta who told the Trump-campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in April 2016—before the Russian hacks were made public—that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton in the “form of thousands of emails,” according to a criminal information filed by Mueller against Papadopoulos in October 2017. It is still not clear how the professor, Joseph Mifsud, seemed to know in advance that Russia sought to compromise Clinton’s candidacy, and he has virtually disappeared since his name was made public in 2017.

And what about the internal campaign polling data that Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort gave to the suspected Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik in August 2016? One of the top prosecutors on Mueller’s team, Andrew Weissmann, said in a closed-door hearing last month that this episode goes “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.” But it has yet to be resolved in either court filings or hearings in Manafort’s case—he was sentenced last week to serve about seven years in prison for tax and bank fraud and failing to register as a foreign agent for Ukraine.

The extent to which Manafort was using his high-level campaign role to curry favor with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska is also still unclear, as is the purpose of a meeting that another Russian oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, had with Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen before the inauguration. A meeting that Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016, in which Kushner proposed setting up a secret back-channel line of communication to Moscow using the Russian embassy, has also never been fully explained. Nor has Kushner’s meeting around the same time with Sergey Gorkov, the CEO of the Russian state-owned Vnesheconombank and a close friend of Putin’s. The meeting came as Kushner was trying to find investors for a Fifth Avenue office building in Manhattan. (Reuters reported in 2017 that the FBI was examining whether Gorkov suggested to Kushner that Russian banks could finance Trump associates’ business ventures if U.S. sanctions on Russia were lifted or relaxed.) The Kremlin and the White House have provided conflicting explanations for why Kushner met privately with Gorkov in the first place.

A 2017 meeting in the Seychelles involving the informal Trump-campaign adviser Erik Prince and another Russian banker also remains a mystery, as does a proposed peace plan for Ukraine that Cohen delivered to the White House in January 2017, which would involve lifting sanctions on Russia. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s motivations for lying to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak about sanctions—a felony to which he pleaded guilty in December 2017—are similarly unclear. (Flynn has been cooperating with Mueller for more than a year.) Just days after Trump took office, though, his administration looked into lifting the sanctions that former President Barack Obama had imposed on Russia over its meddling in the 2016 election, raising questions about whether some kind of quid pro quo had occurred.

And one of the biggest lingering mysteries of all: Why did a computer server for Alfa Bank, a private Russian bank led by oligarchs with close ties to Putin, convey a disproportionate interest in reaching a server used by the Trump Organization during the campaign? The server activity has been investigated in-depth by journalists and the FBI. But a conclusion has never been reached.

Obstruction of Justice

Much has been reported about the special counsel’s interest in whether Trump obstructed justice—a felony—when he asked former FBI Director James Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn in February 2017; fired Comey in May 2017; and, in July 2017, drafted a misleading statement about a meeting his campaign had with Russians at the height of the election. But Mueller has revealed virtually nothing about that line of inquiry in court filings, perhaps out of sensitivity to the Justice Department policy that forbids the indictment of a sitting president. Whether he addresses it in his final report is an open question.

Even so, we already know a lot about what Mueller has been interested in. According to The New York Times, Mueller has been examining how far Trump went to keep Flynn in his orbit and safe from prosecution after the White House learned that the FBI was examining Flynn’s phone calls with Kislyak during the transition period. Mueller has also been investigating Trump’s decision to fire Comey a few months after asking him, unsuccessfully, for both his loyalty and to let Flynn “go.” Mueller is also reportedly interested in why Trump was so angry with then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia probe, and wants to know more about Trump’s attempts to fire him after he was appointed—attempts that were reportedly thwarted by the president’s staff.

Despite Trump’s claim that Comey was fired because of how he handled the Clinton-email probe, Trump reportedly told Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that firing Comey, whom he described as a “nut job,” had eased the pressure of the ongoing Russia investigation. “I just fired the head of the FBI,” Trump told the Russians, according to a document summarizing the meeting that was read to the Times. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

After Comey’s firing, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into the president himself—an unprecedented move—to determine whether he was acting as a secret Russian agent. The obstruction inquiry was folded into that broader counterintelligence probe, according to the acting FBI director at the time, Andrew McCabe. Mueller took over the entire Russia investigation, including the counterintelligence probe into the president, days later. The question the FBI was trying to answer—whether Trump was acting at Russia’s behest rather than in U.S. interests—remains an open one.

And then there’s the infamous Trump Tower meeting with the Russians at the height of the election—and the misleading statement that followed. In July 2017, as Trump and his aides were flying back to the U.S. from a whirlwind trip to Poland and Germany, The New York Times published what seemed like a smoking gun: Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner had attended a meeting at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Clinton. When news of the meeting broke, Trump—who has insisted that he did not know about the meeting until it was reported in the Times—helped write a statement for his son that omitted any reference to compromising information about Clinton; it said the meeting was instead about Russia’s adoption policy, a topic the president had discussed the day before with Putin at the G20 Summit. Mueller has made that misleading statement a focus of his investigation, according to questions drafted by the president’s lawyers based on their conversations with Mueller’s team.

Kompromat

The House Intelligence Committee, led by Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, is now fixated on investigating one overarching question: Is the president currently compromised by Russia? Mueller has not publicly drawn any conclusions about how Trump’s business dealings or personal behavior might have made him vulnerable to blackmail before—and perhaps even during—his time in office. But in charges filed last year against Cohen, Mueller provided the public with evidence, for the first time, that could show that Trump was compromised by Russia while Putin was waging a direct attack on the 2016 election.

Cohen admitted in federal court in New York in November that he lied to Congress about how often he and Trump had spoken about building a Trump Tower in Moscow in 2016, and acknowledged that he had tried to organize a trip for Trump to Russia in 2016 to scope out the potential project after Trump clinched the Republican nomination. He lied both to minimize Trump’s link to the Moscow project and to limit “the ongoing Russia investigations,” according to Mueller’s team. Cohen, who sat for more than 70 hours of interviews with Mueller’s team last year after deciding to cooperate, also contacted the Kremlin “asking for assistance in connection with the Moscow Project” in January 2016, according to Mueller. Cohen was sentenced in December to serve three years in prison for tax and bank-fraud crimes and making false statements to Congress.

Trump had insisted both during and after the election that he had no business ties to Russia, and his alleged double-dealing could have allowed Russia to use the project—which Trump had been pursuing for decades— as leverage, intelligence experts told me. The project might also contextualize Trump’s consistent and inexplicable praise for Putin along the campaign trail. “This shows motive: Trump’s desire to pursue a major deal in Russia,” Jens David Ohlin, the vice dean of Cornell Law School, told me at the time. “It finally gives Mueller some direct evidence that Trump’s associates continued to pursue business opportunities in Russia during the campaign, which would explain why Trump was, and continues to be, so deferential to Russia in general and Putin in particular. The motive was financial.”

A dossier written by the former British spy Christopher Steele in 2016, which outlined the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia during the election, raised another possibility: that Trump engaged in lewd behavior during a trip to Moscow in 2013, which was recorded and is now being held over his head. According to the dossier, the Kremlin tried to exploit “Trump's personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable 'kompromat' (compromising material) on him.” Cohen told lawmakers last month that he had “no reason to believe” such a recording exists, and Trump has denied doing anything obscene while in Russia. His longtime bodyguard Keith Schiller reportedly told the House Intelligence Committee in a closed-door interview in 2017 that someone in Russia offered to send five prostitutes to Trump's Moscow hotel room in 2013, but that Schiller declined the offer on Trump’s behalf.

Mueller’s report is expected to address only criminal activity, so he might not be able to explain whether Trump has been compromised. But the president’s deference to Putin has largely continued throughout his time in office. In July 2018, for example, when the pair met for a bilateral summit in Helsinki, Trump stunned the world when he sided with Putin over the U.S. intelligence community on questions about Russia’s hacking of the 2016 election and other bad behavior. “He tells me he didn’t do it,” Trump said of Putin, referring to the election interference. “I will tell you this, I don’t know why he would do it,” Trump said. The president has also been very secretive about his private conversations with Putin, to the point where he reportedly took his interpreter’s notes from a meeting he had with Putin in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017 and tore them up. Trump also wouldn’t allow any of his aides into his private meeting with Putin in Helsinki.

Trump’s bank of choice for decades, Deutsche Bank, is another area where Democrats say Mueller should be looking to find evidence that Trump might be compromised—the German bank was involved in a massive Russian money-laundering scandal and has loaned to Trump when no one else would. The House Intelligence and Financial Services Committees have already begun talks with the bank, which said in a statement that it plans to assist the lawmakers “in their official oversight functions.”

“If the special counsel hasn’t subpoenaed Deutsche Bank, he can’t be doing much of a money-laundering investigation,” Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, said last month. “So, that’s what concerns me—that that red line has been enforced, whether by the deputy attorney general or by some other party at the Justice Department. But that leaves the country exposed.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Very Quick Thoughts on the End of the Mueller Investigation

Attorney General William Barr now has the Mueller Report, and the world looks a heck of a lot like it did yesterday, when Barr did not have the Mueller Report. At least, it appears to. The major difference is that the mystery before us has slightly changed form. Before today, we asked what Mueller was going to do, what indictments he was going to bring, and what allegations he was going to make. Today, we ask a subtly different question: What is it that he has written? What allegations has he made? And why has he decided not to make those allegations in the form of additional cases?

We don’t, at this stage, know anything about what information the Mueller Report contains. We don’t know what form the document takes. We don’t even know how many pages comprise it. We don’t know when we will learn what Mueller has found. Speculating about these questions is not useful. A huge amount depends here on how Mueller imagines his role—and on how Barr imagines his.

But there are certain things we do know: We know, for example, that Mueller was able to finish his investigation on his own terms. We know this because Barr said so in his letter to Congress Friday evening. The special counsel regulations, writes Barr, “require that I provide [Congress] with ‘a description and explanation of incidents (if any) in which the Attorney General’” countermanded an investigative step of the special counsel. “There were no such instances during the Special Counsel’s investigation.” This is reassuring. From it, we can at least tentatively conclude that the Mueller report—whatever is in it—reflects Mueller’s best assessment of the evidence, following his having taken every investigative step he felt necessary and appropriate to reach that assessment.

We also know that Mueller is not going to indict more people. Though what precisely this means is unclear, it means at a minimum that we should not expect the major collusion indictment that ties together the earlier Russian hacking allegations and social media indictment with conduct by figures in the Trump campaign. It also means that whatever Mueller found on the obstruction prong of the investigation, it’s not resulting in criminal charges either.

The president should wait before popping the champagne corks over this and tweeting in triumph. Yes, in the best-case scenario for the president, Mueller is not proceeding further because he lacks the evidence to do so. But even this possibility contains multitudes: everything from what the president calls “NO COLLUSION!” to evidence that falls just short of adequate to prove criminal conduct to a reasonable jury beyond a reasonable doubt—evidence that could still prove devastating if the conduct at issue becomes public.

There are other possibilities as well. It’s possible, for example, that Mueller is not proceeding against certain defendants other than the president because he has referred them to other prosecutorial offices; some of these referrals are already public, and it’s reasonable to expect there may be other referrals too. In this iteration, what is ending here is not the investigation, merely the portion of the investigation Mueller chose to retain for himself. It’s possible also that Mueller is finished because he has determined that while the evidence would support a prosecution of the president, he is bound by the Justice Department’s long-standing position that the president is not amenable to criminal process. On the obstruction front, he may well have concluded that, while the president acted to obstruct the investigation, he cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the president’s obstructive acts were not exercises of Trump’s Article II powers. It’s also possible that Mueller has strong prudential reasons for not proceeding with otherwise viable cases.

My gut instinct is that it is some combination of these factors that explains the end of the probe. Without knowing the reasons the investigation is finished, it is impossible to know how to assess its end—and nobody should try.

Finally, we also know other one big thing: There is a report—some kind of, as Barr describes it, quoting the relevant regulation, “‘confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions’ he has reached.” About this document we admittedly know little. Barr said in his letter that he is reviewing the document and “may be in a position to advise [Congress] of the Special Counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.” How capacious this initial accounting will be is known only to Barr himself. But Barr has also promised to make as much of Mueller’s findings public as he can consistent with the law—a promise he reiterated in his letter Friday evening. So it’s reasonable to expect, though not to be complacent in the expectation, that over time, the underlying factual findings and legal analysis will emerge.

All of which, as I say, shifts the conversation from what Mueller will do to what he has written in explaining what he has done—and what he has not done. Vindication for the president will take place only when we learn that the facts contained in the report exculpate him. The end of the Mueller probe could well prove tomorrow to be merely the creation of a factual record for the next act of this drama.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

How to Understand the End of the Mueller Investigation (Hint: You Can’t Yet)

I have a confession: I don’t understand the reaction to the news of the Mueller investigation’s end. I don’t understand the evident glee among some of the president’s defenders. I don’t understand the gloom among some of the president’s critics. I don’t understand either why people seem surprised at news that has been foreshadowed for months in a sequence of stories by good reporters in a variety of different reputable news outlets.

The news we have learned so far about the investigation’s end is broadly consistent with everything we previously knew. It is consistent with Robert Mueller having conducted a vigorous probe. It is consistent with his having prosecuted a raft of suspects both for Russian interference in the 2016 election campaign and—on the U.S. side—for lying about interactions with Russian officials and cutouts. It is consistent with Mueller’s having investigated and prosecuted various possible obstructions of the probe. And it is consistent with his having largely finished his work and written a report detailing his findings, having also investigated a variety of matters that did not pan out into additional criminal charges.

Certainly, the end of the investigation is good news for those people who thought they might be facing indictment at its hands. And yes, many people have invested a great deal of political hope in the Mueller investigation.

But the measure of the investigation’s success or failure was never to be whether it brought down Donald Trump. It was not whether it indicted Trump’s children. And it was emphatically not whether it vindicated any individual person’s assumptions about what must have happened—including, by the way, my own.

The measure of success for the Mueller investigation was always whether the matters handed to it were investigated thoroughly and completely and prosecuted fairly and justly, and whether the counterintelligence concerns that gave rise to the probe were addressed seriously. The end of the investigation is thus, first and foremost, an occasion for relief that this has apparently taken place to the satisfaction of one Robert Swann Mueller, III. This is no small democratic accomplishment, and it was not a foregone conclusion in an environment in which the president has repeatedly sought to smear and frustrate the investigation—and even sought to remove Mueller from its helm.

I say all this without knowing whether, when Attorney General Bill Barr announces Mueller’s “principal findings” this weekend, they will prove to be helpful or harmful to President Trump, much less whether the report that underlies that announcement will help or hurt the president.

The fact that the investigation was able to take place is an enormous win, one for which we should all be grateful. And if its net results are the indictments and pleas Mueller has already garnered and some claim of vindication by everyone else, including the president, color me a satisfied taxpayer.

And having said that, let me go on to say that I have no idea what to expect from here, and I’m honestly not sure why anyone else is eager to go out on a limb—any limb—as to who the winners and losers in the investigation’s end are likely to be.

When a high-profile criminal investigation ends, a certain set of understandings normally guides what conclusions observers can and cannot responsibly draw about those who have escaped uncharged. These understandings work because they flow from a common set of assumptions about why the investigation has ended.

To be specific, we generally do not construe the failure of an indictment to materialize as evidence of innocence on the part of an investigative subject, the standards of criminal prosecution being high both in terms of the quality and the quantity of evidence. That said, we generally do interpret what is called a declination as suggesting that prosecutors lacked adequate admissible evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

When a high-profile examination of a political scandal winds down without charges, therefore, we generally assume that the investigation is ending because of some deficiency in the evidence that makes proceeding with a prosecution unsound. And we consequently treat the end of the investigation as a moment at which the judgment of history and politics and morality naturally separate themselves from the judgment of the criminal law.

There are, of course, cases in which criminal probes end not merely because the facts are insufficient to indict or convict the subject but because the facts as found prove the subject’s innocence in some material respect—in other words, because the investigation has not merely not implicated the subject but actually cleared her. These cases do happen, and they are dramatic when they do. But the “clearing” of the subject is not what the end of a criminal probe normally means.

The end of a criminal investigation is thus a funny moment. While the subject will generally claim vindication, it actually does not mean that you cannot judge her conduct morally. It does not mean that she cannot be held accountable in myriad non-criminal fashions. She can be ridiculed. You can campaign against her on the basis of the unindicted conduct. You can write histories of the scandal that denounce her behavior. You might even be able to sue her successfully. The end of the investigation only means that the state will not punish her using the specific instrumentality of the criminal law. It means only that the we won’t “lock her up.”

Those are the rules in a normal criminal investigation, and they may well apply here to everyone who is not the president.

But the end of the Mueller investigation adds a number of layers of complexity to this already textured analytical framework—particularly as to Trump himself. For starters, it’s not entirely clear what exactly is ending with the close of the Mueller investigation. We know that Mueller submitted his report to Barr and that he reportedly won’t be seeking additional indictments. Because the May 2017 letter from Rosenstein to Mueller defining Mueller’s charter specified that he could investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and any matters that arose . . . directly from [that] investigation,” we can infer that indictments will not issue over, say, the Trump Tower meeting or the promise of “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. We can assume that the investigation of these matters is over.

But we also know that a number of loose ends remain unresolved. Cases remain pending; grand jury matters remain ongoing; and one subject was offered a plea agreement, declined it, leaked the documents provided to him by the special counsel, and yet remains uncharged; defendants who have pleaded guilty are still cooperating. Moreover, other investigations remain open and active, investigations which spun off of the Mueller probe. Some of these lines of investigative and prosecutorial work have been spun out publicly—for example, the Michael Cohen investigation in the Southern District of New York. Others may have been spun out in a non-public fashion.

More importantly, we actually don’t know why the probe has ended. And as to President Trump, this point is critical.

As a general matter, declinations fall into three broad categories: factual declinations, legal declinations, and prudential declinations. These overlap to some degree, and the distinctions here are thus somewhat artificial—though I hope still useful. A declination for factual reasons could be based on a finding of actual innocence—as discussed above—or a finding that the evidence, though compelling, is not adequate for prosecution. How much of a vindication or how politically damaging such a declination is depends entirely on the factual findings, about which we know nothing.

A declination for legal reasons is also preponderantly likely here, irrespective of the facts, at least as regards Trump himself. Indeed, we always knew that the investigation would not result in Trump’s indictment while he remained in office; that was never in doubt. For all the feverish discussion of the question of whether a president can or cannot be indicted, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has a longstanding opinion on the matter that binds Mueller. There was never any chance that Mueller would defy this opinion. And there was thus never any chance either that Mueller would indict Trump while he remained in office. The result is that at least as regards the president himself, we cannot presume—as we normally would presume—that the investigation’s end means that the evidence is insufficient to bring charges. It might well mean that, and nobody should be surprised if it does. But it needn’t mean that.

There are other possibilities too. What if Mueller developed compelling evidence of presidential misconduct but that evidence does not map cleanly onto known criminal statutes? This could be the case on the collusion prong of the investigation, because knowingly and gleefully benefiting from a foreign power’s theft and disclosure of a political opponent’s emails isn’t, without more, a crime. And it could also be the case with respect to the obstruction component of the investigation, because the president has plausible arguments with respect to many of his obstructive acts that they are within his Article II powers.

There are also prudential factors that can lead to declinations—for example, the unwillingness to declassify material to bring a case. I have no reason to believe such factors are at work here. My point is simply that to say that Mueller is not recommending further charges does not tell you all that much unless you know why he’s not recommending further charges. Yes, it is possible that Mueller has concluded that the president is innocent, that there was “NO COLLUSION” and that there’s nothing to see here and we should all move on. But it’s also possible that he has concluded that the president is guilty as sin but he can’t prove this without outing a particular intelligence channel that NSA senior leadership would lie down in traffic to prevent him from discussing in court—and that even if he could blow that capability, the president can’t be indicted anyway and would have a good argument that his conduct was lawful. These scenarios are both consistent with Friday’s news.

What’s more, not all of the fundamental questions—and not necessarily the most important questions—at issue in this investigation were criminal questions to begin with. L’Affaire Russe began with a series of counterintelligence questions, after all, questions that interact with criminal matters but are not coextensive with them; these questions involved whether individuals associated with Trump’s campaign were being targeted by Russian intelligence, and they matured eventually to questions of whether the president himself sought to shut down the Russia investigation to the benefit of a foreign power.

Nor are the questions related to the acceptability of the president’s conduct the same as the questions of the indictability of that conduct. Moral acceptability is not a matter for a criminal prosecutor to determine, except insofar as Congress writes its standards into the criminal code. Beyond that, with respect to elected officials, it is a matter of political judgment—that is, what we as a society choose to accept from our officeholders both as an electorate and through our representatives in the impeachment process.

Relatedly, there are the fundamental narrative questions here: What happened? Who did what? And what does Congress want to do about it legislatively, if anything? A criminal investigation is not about telling a story, much less is it about providing a record for legislation.

This is why it was so wrong to make the Mueller investigation the end all and be all of accountability for L’Affaire Russe in the first place. It is why Susan Hennessey and I argued repeatedly that Congress had an independent duty to investigate the whole panoply of issues and not simply leave the matter to investigation by the executive branch. As the two of us put it back in February of 2017, long before Mueller was even appointed:

While the subject matter overlaps, the executive branch and the legislative branch are conducting different investigations for different purposes. Namely, the executive branch is conducting a set of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence investigations that may (or may not) have criminal investigative elements. Its goal is not to answer public questions about what happened or what may still be happening.

By contrast, Congress is charged with ascertaining information related to legislative purposes—including the imposition of sanctions in response to the activity of a hostile foreign power, the discharging of its oversight function with regard to fraud, abuse, or corruption in the executive branch, and legislative measures that might be necessary to protect the American electoral system. It also has a duty to publicly address major questions the political system is struggling with now in a fashion the public can absorb and process: What is the President’s relationship with Russia? And is there reason to be concerned about it?

Because a criminal investigation is not designed to answer these questions comprehensively, its end cannot put them to rest.

What a criminal investigation can do, and what it may have done here, is to provide a text that offers a factual record which might be redeployed for purposes of answering non-criminal questions in addition to the criminal ones for which that record was created. This is the importance of the so-called Mueller report, which Barr described Friday as “a ‘confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions’ he has reached, as required by 28 C.F.R. § 600.8(c).”

Mueller’s report is likely geared not toward telling a story or answering non-criminal questions but toward fulfilling the purpose of the regulation—that is, explaining his prosecutorial decisions. Unless Mueller understands his role especially grandly, the report is likely not designed to fill the oversight shoes of Congress or to assist the legislature’s role in the impeachment process. Yet unless the report is particularly spare in factual detail, that will not stop politicians and commentators from redeploying it for all of sorts of other purposes. 

This business of redeploying criminal investigative work product for purposes of history, for purposes of non-criminal accountability, for purposes of the public’s knowing the “truth” is dicey stuff. I wrote a book once about just how dicey it is and the perils of relying on prosecutors to play non-prosecutorial roles.

But here’s the thing: Having vested in an executive branch official the principal authority to investigate the president—having done so knowing that this official cannot indict the president, and thus knowing also that all he can do is “report” about him—the report becomes everything. It becomes the only mechanism by which you can figure out why the investigation is over. It becomes the central vehicle for the redeployment of the criminal probe for all of the other democratic purposes we have invested in that probe. At least as regards the president himself, one cannot then read much into the end of the investigation without reference to the text of the report. The report is the investigation and the investigation is the report.

If the Mueller report declares that there was, as a factual matter, no cause for concern about the relationship between President Trump and the Russian Federation, I will accept that finding. If it declares that the evidence of an untoward relationship between Trump world and Russia is insufficient to justify criminal prosecution, I will accept that finding. If Mueller concludes that the president’s interactions with law enforcement were all within his Article II powers, I will confine my future criticisms of Trump on this score to the normative acceptability of his conduct and accept the judgment that the criminal law has nothing to say about such presidential behavior. But to accept these conclusions, one needs to be in the same position that one is in at the end of a normal high-profile investigation. That is, one needs to know within a certain broad set of parameters not merely that the investigation has concluded but why.

We don’t know that yet. Until we do, the end of the Mueller investigation means very little—a great deal less than many people seem to imagine.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

What to Make of Bill Barr’s Letter

Leave it to President Trump to describe as “Total EXONERATION” a document that specifically quotes Special Counsel Robert Mueller as saying that one of his principal findings “does not exonerate” the president.

The brief letter sent by Attorney General William Barr to congressional leaders on Sunday afternoon summarizing Mueller’s findings is a complicated document. In key respects, it contains very good news for President Trump about a scandal that has dogged his presidency since before he even took office. The determination of just how good the news is—whether it amounts to the exoneration Trump claims on these points or whether we’re dealing with conduct just shy of prosecutable—will have to await the text of Mueller’s report itself. But for those who quite reasonably demanded a serious investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and of cooperation and coordination with it on the part of the Trump campaign, it has to be significant that Mueller, after the better part of two years of investigating, has not found that anyone associated with the Trump campaign knowingly conspired with Russia’s efforts.

In other respects, however, Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report is ominous for the president. While Mueller did not find that Trump obstructed his investigation, he also made a point of not reaching the opposite conclusion: that Trump didn’t obstruct the investigation. Indeed, he appears to have created a substantial record of the president’s troubling interactions with law enforcement for adjudication in noncriminal proceedings—which is to say in congressional hearings that are surely the next step.

What makes the document more complicated still is the fact that it offers only a skeletal description of Mueller’s report. It only purports to convey Mueller’s top-line findings and does not include any of the evidence or legal analysis that underlies those findings. It doesn’t tell any of the stories that the Mueller report will tell. It only distills and announces two high-altitude legal conclusions from those stories. Assuming that Barr is characterizing Mueller’s findings reasonably, that leaves a whole raft of questions unanswered about what those stories will be—and what their impact will be.

Barr’s letter is divided into two main sections, corresponding to what the attorney general characterizes as the two components of the report itself. The first concerns “collusion”—as it has come to be called, though the letter never uses that term—between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Barr’s account of Mueller’s finding is not quite the “No Collusion!” that the president has so often crowed. Barr does not indicate affirmatively that Mueller found that collusion didn’t happen. The report, rather, makes clear that Mueller did not find evidence of conspiracy to the rigorous standards of the criminal law. That important difference aside, this finding seems altogether salutary for Trump.

Barr describes Mueller’s report as outlining the “Russian effort to influence the election” and documenting “crimes committed by persons associated with the Russian government or in connection with those efforts.” He notes that one of the special counsel’s primary considerations in investigating Russian interference was “whether any Americans—including individuals associated with the Trump campaign—joined the Russian conspiracies to influence the election, which would be a federal crime.”

Mueller’s top-line finding with regard to Russian interference, as Barr quotes it, is that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” In a footnote, Barr specifies that the Mueller report defined “‘coordination’ as an ‘agreement—tacit or express–between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.’”

Barr reports that the special counsel “determined that there were two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election”—both of which were the subjects of bombshell indictments. The first involved the Internet Research Agency’s disinformation campaign, which was designed, as Barr says, “to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with the election.” Barr goes on to say that “the Special Counsel did not find that any U.S. person or Trump campaign official or associate conspired or knowingly coordinated” with the IRA’s campaign. (Richard Pinedo, a California resident, pleaded guilty to identity fraud in connection with the IRA’s efforts, but there is no indication that he knew he was assisting Russian nationals at the time.)

The attorney general then provides a brief, high-level summary of Mueller’s indictment of members of Russian military intelligence: “Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks.” Those activities, says Barr, led the special counsel to bring criminal charges against “a number of Russian military officers for conspiring to hack into computers in the United States for purposes of influencing the election.” Barr again emphasizes that “the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspirated or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

It may or may not be significant that Barr does not here make references to U.S. persons not affiliated with the Trump campaign, as he did when describing the special counsel’s investigation of the IRA’s efforts. Nor does he address the possibility of conspiracy or coordination with the “various intermediaries” to which he previously referred.

More importantly, Barr also leaves unanswered whether Russia’s “multiple offers” of assistance to the Trump campaign refer only to events Mueller has already chronicled (including Joseph Mifsud’s efforts to reach out to George Papadopoulos and attempts by Russian nationals to reach out to Michael Cohen in late 2015), if the report will also include events previously reported in the press (such as the Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign associates including Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort and Russian government associates offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton), or whether it will offer an even more substantial history of efforts on the part of the Russian government to engage and aid the Trump campaign.

The conclusion on the Russian conspiracy prong stands for one proposition unambiguously: The special counsel’s office did not believe that it could reasonably prove in court that any Trump campaign member or affiliate committed a crime in assisting the Russian government with its efforts. That’s a significant thing. It means there is no smoking gun, that there’s no other big shoe to drop that establishes criminality. It means that, after as thorough an investigation as the United States government is capable of conducting, prosecutors couldn’t find any actual agreement—“tacit or express”—on the part of anyone associated with the Trump campaign to work with the Russians to undermine the U.S. election. Every American should be cheered by that conclusion; the ramifications of any alternative are difficult to contemplate.

There’s also an important message for Congress in here. If as thorough and comprehensive a federal investigation as this one has failed to establish conclusive evidence of “collusion” as Mueller defines it—either because there was no actual collusion or for some other reasons—it is highly unlikely that a congressional investigation is going to strike paydirt on this point. Congress might reach different conclusions regarding the significance of evidence Mueller’s team identified, but it probably isn’t going to sound depths that Mueller didn’t plumb. The working presumption should be that the Mueller report contains the complete factual record, at least on the points he purports to address.

Put simply, the criminal investigation didn’t find any crimes on the U.S. side, though it found plenty on the Russian side. It doesn’t means one cannot conclude, based on the factual record, that people behaved recklessly, unpatriotically or stupidly. But it does mean that the criminal investigation is over. That’s good news, in general, and it’s good news for President Trump.

Depending on what’s actually in Mueller’s report, the news could get better still for the president. This section of Barr’s summary, after all, is broadly consistent with the Trump campaign’s having had very little to do with Russia’s conduct. While the summary says that there were “multiple offers from Russia-affiliated individuals,” its language is consistent with no one in the campaign having taken the Russians up on it—beyond the public hints and the untoward meetings and communications that are already part of the public record, that is. Yes, the contacts were suspicious, even quite inappropriate, and some people did commit crimes in lying about them both during the campaign and during the transition. But this section of the summary is consistent with a report that says that Mueller looked everywhere yet couldn’t find any knowing engagement on the part of Trump’s campaign with Russia’s interference in the election.

But Barr’s summary would also be broadly consistent with many other possible reports. It would be consistent with, for example, a report that finds lots of “evidence of collusion” that for one reason or another falls short of criminal conduct. It would be consistent with a report that describes conduct that falls short of the criminal standard by the barest of technicalities. It would be consistent with a report that finds that individuals associated with the president’s campaign were aware of the Russian efforts to interfere in the election, welcomed such assistance, and did not in any way warn the American public about it—but who did not take the requisite step of entering into any criminal agreement to assist the effort either. It would also be consistent with a report that suggested that Trump’s principal engagement with the Russians was not over hacked emails at all, but instead about the tower he was negotiating to build in Moscow even as the campaign was going on.

Our point here is not that that report suggests any of these things or that if one squints at Barr’s summary long enough, it is actually bad for the president. It isn’t. The point, rather, is that there is a huge range of conduct and findings that would be consistent with this top-line summary. How good the outcome is for the president—and to what extent it puts L’Affaire Russe to rest—depends on what the underlying facts look like.

The second section of the letter is both more complicated and less salutary for the president—and, again, readers must await the underlying document for a full accounting. In sharp contrast to the president’s tweet, Barr quotes Mueller as writing: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” As Barr puts it, Mueller actually “did not draw a conclusion” at all as to whether Trump committed obstruction of justice in his interactions with the investigation. He refrained in view of the “‘difficult issues’ of law and fact” involved in that determination.

Mueller, writes Barr, did not make a “traditional prosecutorial judgment” on the subject. Instead, for each act with a potentially obstructive nexus, “the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction.”

This is, as a preliminary matter, a striking decision on Mueller’s part. It almost certainly flows from the difficult questions that arise when one tries to imagine how one would apply the obstruction of justice statutes to presidential acts that are, on their face, authorized by Article II of the Constitution—questions we have addressed at great length on this site.

In laying out this summary, Barr’s letter reveals several new facts about Mueller’s obstruction probe. First, it notes that Mueller’s report covers several actions by Trump that could raise obstruction concerns, “most of which have been the subject of public reporting.” This confirms what has long been suspected: that Mueller believed that at least some of the president’s publicly reported actions—likely including some of his public actions—could raise obstruction problems. It also suggests that there are potentially obstructive acts that have not yet been reported. Barr’s letter thus leaves the distinct sense that Mueller’s detailed accounting of the president’s potential acts of obstruction is significant, regardless of Barr’s own judgment as to the criminality of any of those acts.

It also makes clear that the Mueller report creates an extensive record on the obstruction question. And that may well be the point. After all, what is the point of a prosecutor’s amassing a factual record and then refusing, as Mueller apparently has refused, to evaluate it in a traditional prosecutorial framework? The answer the letter suggests but does not state is that the Mueller report has teed up the question of presidential obstruction for evaluation by a different actor—to wit, by Congress—on a decidedly noncriminal basis. Mueller, being barred from indicting the president, has done the investigation, has apparently declined even to evaluate the matter as a prosecutor, and has laid out all of the facts and the arguments for and against treating the president’s behavior as criminal. It is now for other actors to decide whether the conduct Mueller describes is acceptable in a president.  

While Mueller left the question of criminality unaddressed, Barr himself did not. Barr opines that Mueller’s “decision to describe the facts of his obstruction inquiry without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime”—though it is not clear why Barr felt this to be the case. Barr includes his own determination, along with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s, that Mueller’s evidence “is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

In justifying this view, Barr notes Mueller’s determination that “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian electoral interference” and argues that the lack of evidence of an underlying crime, though not dispositive, “bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction.” The report does not identify any actions that, in Barr’s and Rosenstein’s view, “constitute obstructive conduct, had a nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding, and were done with corrupt intent,” each of which must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in order to establish the crime of obstruction of justice under Justice Department guidelines.

Notably, Barr says that his and Rosenstein’s assessment was made independently of constitutional questions about the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president. Though Barr does not make reference to any concerns over the interaction between presidential authority and possible obstruction offenses, it is worth keeping in mind his memorandum on the subject from June 2018, in which he argued that conduct authorized by Article II definitionally cannot constitute obstruction.

Finally, Barr indicates that more material from Mueller’s report is forthcoming, writing that his office is at work identifying information protected by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e)—which protects material obtained before a grand jury from public disclosure—and “information that could impact other ongoing matters.” After that, Barr writes, he “will be in a position to move forward expeditiously in determining what can be released.”

So the good news is that there is more information on the way—though it is unclear how much more or when it will appear. Democratic members of Congress, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, are already calling for the report to be released in its entirety. Pelosi and Schumer released a joint statement indicating skepticism of what they call “Mr. Barr’s public record of bias against the Special Counsel’s inquiry,” and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler indicated that his committee will call on Barr to testify. Chairman of the Senate intelligence committee Richard Burr, for his part, thanked the attorney general for his letter and called for the release of “as much of the report as possible.”

The White House has, predictably, taken the opportunity to gloat: Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, echoing the president, declared Barr’s letter to be a “total and complete exoneration of the President.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blandly announced his hope that “the Special Counsel’s report will help inform and improve our efforts to protect our democracy.” Donald Trump Jr. chose to blast what he called “Collusion Truthers.”

Whether this proves the beginning of the end of L’Affaire Russe or the prelude to a series of additional disclosures about activity on the part of the Trump campaign and the president himself that are disturbing but happen to fall just short of criminal activity, it is important not to lose sight of the significance of the investigation having been completed. That Mueller was able to complete his probe into a sitting president without having his investigation blocked—despite ongoing presidential braying against the probe and menacing of the Justice Department’s leadership—is no small thing.

That Mueller was able to write his report, to document his findings in a fashion that can allow for transparency and, if necessary, accountability, is of immense value. The question of what to do with the record Mueller has compiled will ultimately fall to Congress.

#Resist

[joan1984]

  Congratulations, President Donald J. Trump. Thank you for not interfering in the Special Counsel's matter, and the fact is No Collusion With Russia, by You or your Campaign, was found worthy of further action or review, as you predicted.

  Your family members were not charged, no Campaign Laws were broken by you or your Campaign of any consequence, and the "illegal taketown" attempt was thwarted, found unnecessary, and unwarranted. Those who broke laws in the process of the attempt to dismiss the 2016 election results, will find their lives as the focus of investigation, as we go forward.

  This was always a political hit job, and that hit job continues, as enemies within continue their quests, and they will get their due comeuppance soonest, I trust. Please continue to perform, and keep your promises.

  Keep America Great, 2020.

[Athos_131]

 Congratulations, President Donald J. Trump. Thank you for not interfering in the Special Counsel's matter, and the fact is No Collusion With Russia, by You or your Campaign, was found worthy of further action or review, as you predicted.

  Your family members were not charged, no Campaign Laws were broken by you or your Campaign of any consequence, and the "illegal taketown" attempt was thwarted, found unnecessary, and unwarranted. Those who broke laws in the process of the attempt to dismiss the 2016 election results, will find their lives as the focus of investigation, as we go forward.

  This was always a political hit job, and that hit job continues, as enemies within continue their quests, and they will get their due comeuppance soonest, I trust. Please continue to perform, and keep your promises.

  Keep America Great, 2020.

Reading and the comprehension of things is difficult for you isn't it?

Or it's just the fact you can't stop lying and obfuscating.

That's not what was said.

#Resist