‘This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.' - A Yellow Wall Nightmare

[psiberzerker]

Again, "Collusion" isn't a crime, it's an element of the crime of Conspiracy.  According to law, the 2 conspirators don't even have to know of each other's Existence to both work towards the same ends, and benefit from them.  We know that Trump knows Putin, and his people work with his people.  There's no reasonable doubt, nor deniability here, not after he requested on National Television for the Russians to interfere with the Election.  Ignorance of the Means to that end is as immaterial as ignorance of the law itself.  Just because they used that to hack Facebook, and Youtube instead of secure Emails does not make it any less a Conspiracy to commit espionage, and election fraud with a foreign power.



We don't need to prove Collusion.

[Athos_131]

Yes, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Sarah Sanders lied, according to the Mueller report. She’s calling it a ‘slip of the tongue.’

After two years of waiting, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report was released on Thursday. The document noted 10 times President Trump sought to influence the investigation, often by directing his aides to either lie or mislead.

Although Mueller concluded that the president’s efforts were “mostly unsuccessful” because “the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out his orders or accede to his requests,” one individual was singled out by Mueller for less-honorable conduct: White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who on at least three occasions perpetuated a false narrative.

During an interview Friday morning, ABC television host George Stephanopoulos pressed Sanders about two public statements — the first involving the firing of then FBI-director James B. Comey.

In May 2017, after Trump fired Comey, Sanders — then serving as deputy White House press secretary — told reporters that Trump and members of federal law enforcement no longer had confidence in him. She claimed to have heard from “countless” former and current FBI agents.

According to the report, “Sanders told this Office that her reference to hearing from ‘countless members of the FBI’ was a ‘slip of the tongue.’”

The report went on to say: “She also recalled that her statement in a separate press interview that rank-and-file FBI agents had lost confidence in Comey was a comment she made ‘in the heat of the moment;’ that was not founded on anything.” Sanders acknowledged to investigators that the comments were baseless.

What Sanders called a “slip of the tongue,” Stephanopoulos called a “deliberate false statement.”

“Why can’t you acknowledge that what you said then was not true?” he prodded her during the Friday segment.

[‘Your boss lied’: Sanders, Gidley face vastly different Mueller questions on CNN, Fox News]

Despite Mueller’s assertions, Sanders stood behind her statement.

“I said the ‘slip of the tongue’ was in using the word ‘countless,’” Sanders replied. “But there were a number of FBI, both former and current, that agreed with the president’s decision.”

Switching the focus, she told Stephanopoulos that Comey was a “disgraced leaker” and a “dirty cop.”

The host also pressed Sanders on her statements about the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, between Trump campaign officials, including Donald Trump Jr., and Russians who had offered derogatory information on Hillary Clinton.

To preempt a story the New York Times planned to publish, a month later Trump Jr. posted redacted images of the emails setting up the meeting on Twitter. In an initial statement, Trump Jr. claimed that “the meeting ‘primarily’ concerned ‘a program about the adoption of Russian children.’”

At the time, Sanders told the press that Trump “certainly didn’t dictate” the statement, but that “he weighed in, offered suggestions like any father would do.”

Although she had previously claimed that the president did not dictate the statement, Trump’s lawyers said he did.

According to Mueller, several months later Trump’s attorney told the special counsel’s office that “the President dictated a short but accurate response to the New York Times article on behalf of his son, Donald Trump, Jr.”

When questioned about the discrepancy Friday, Sanders backtracked and parsed her words. The president did not “dictate” the statement, she explained on air, but “weighed in” and “relayed information he wanted included.”

Then the press secretary returned to the regularly repeated refrain — this was a “two and a half year witch hunt that has hurt our country,” she said.

“There wasn’t collusion with Russia,” Sanders added.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Mueller forced prospective liars to choose: Break the law, face Trump’s wrath or clean up later

For months, President Trump’s lawyers fought special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team on its request for a sit-down interview with the president. However confident Trump might have been about his ability to bamboozle Mueller’s lawyers, his own attorneys understood that he would almost certainly perjure himself or be caught in a lie. (When he was deposed in 2007 as part of a lawsuit, Trump was caught in 30 different falsehoods.) The compromise: Trump would answer a set of questions posed by Mueller, once.

The result? Trump heavily relying on the old “I don’t recall” line, which he repeated in one form or another more than 30 times over the course of his 21 answers. There was no follow-up, and no subpoena to solicit more. In his final report on the investigation, Mueller describes the president’s answers as “inadequate.”

Trump was lucky. Many of those who worked for him were not able to negotiate a similar deal and instead sat down with seasoned investigators for live interviews with high stakes: Tell a provable lie and go to jail. But the alternative was also grim: Tell the truth and face Trump's fury.

In essence, there were three options for people who didn't want to tell Mueller the truth. They could lie, break the law and hope they weren't caught. They could tell the truth and risk angering Trump. Or they could tell the truth to Mueller and then try to walk back the lie later.

After a redacted version of Mueller's report came out, that's exactly what White House press secretary Sarah Sanders tried to do.

When Trump fired then-FBI director James B. Comey in May 2017, Sanders told reporters that “countless members of the FBI” supported the president's decision. In an interview, she claimed that members of the FBI had lost confidence in Comey's leadership. To Mueller, though, under oath, she admitted that the use of “countless” was a “slip of the tongue” and that there was no basis for her claims about rank-and-file agents losing confidence in Comey.

In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Thursday evening, she waved away those clarifications — after Hannity claimed that the majority of FBI agents he’d spoken with said they were “hurt by a few at the top” of the Bureau.

“I acknowledge that I had a slip of the tongue when I used the word ‘countless,’ ” Sanders said to Hannity. “But,” she continued, “it’s not untrue, and certainly you just echoed exactly the sentiment and the point that I was making, that a number of current and former FBI agents agreed with the president.”

Well, it is untrue. Having no basis for a claim or exaggerating a point is necessarily saying something untrue. On ABC News on Friday morning, George Stephanopoulos pressed Sanders substantially harder on the point. She said she made the comments about the FBI agents “in the heat of the moment” and fake-apologized for not being a “robot like the Democrat Party.”

While she was in the studio, Trump was tweeting.

“Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue,” he wrote. “Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed."

This is no doubt a reference to former White House counsel Donald McGahn. The Mueller report describes an exchange between Trump and McGahn in which the president tries to get McGahn to repudiate a story about Trump wanting to fire Mueller. Trump insists he didn’t say “fire”; McGahn appears to have responded by quoting Trump from contemporaneous notes that get to the point of an effort to remove Mueller. In response, Trump disparages McGahn for taking notes, saying that his former attorney Roy Cohn never took notes. (Cohn was eventually disbarred for unprofessional behavior.)

That predictable response from Trump, though, shows the tension for Trump staffers sitting with Mueller. The most powerful man in the world asks you to lie about his effort to fire the special counsel, and then the most powerful man in the world bashes you publicly when you don’t lie about how he wanted you to lie. More disparagement by the president of those who spoke to Mueller seems inevitable. Some, like Sanders, may try to revise their commentary now that they’re no longer under oath.

There are other reasons to attempt similar rehabilitation. Former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, for example, has been engaged in his own bit of post-lie cleanup. In October 2017, he admitted to having misled Mueller's investigators about when he came into contact with a Russia-linked professor named Joseph Mifsud and when Mifsud told him that Russia had incriminating emails on Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos eventually served time for those misrepresentations.

Since getting out of jail, though, he’s written a book in which he says that he didn’t lie to Mueller’s team. Lying suggests an intent to mislead, and Papadopoulos claims that, like Sanders, he simply misspoke. That assertion comes despite his telling a judge when he was being sentenced that his comments were wrong and criminal.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn similarly admitted to lying to investigators. While he hasn’t publicly suggested that his admission was forced or inaccurate, his son and other defenders have, vociferously. There was an argument in February of last year, for example, that a new court filing suggested that investigators had unethically forced Flynn to admit guilt. In short order, that theory was dismantled.

Mueller’s report outlines a number of other instances when people with whom his team was talking offered untrue information. Some are obvious: Former Trump deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates admitted to offering false statements over the course of the investigation, as did an attorney he and campaign chairman Paul Manafort had worked with before joining the campaign. Manafort himself was found to have lied to investigators by a federal judge after reaching a plea agreement with Mueller’s team. Lobbyist Sam Patten admitted to misleading investigators in a plea agreement he accepted in August. The Kremlin-linked attorney who met with Donald Trump Jr. and others at Trump Tower in June 2016 lied to a court about being linked to the Kremlin. Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen admitted to lying to Congress when approached by Mueller’s investigators. Trump’s former adviser Roger Stone faces multiple criminal charges of lying during the investigation.

Why all the lies? That remains largely unanswered in the Mueller report except for one presumed overarching explanation: They thought the risk of getting caught was lower than the repercussions of being honest.

The list above delineates the people who are shown or alleged to have chosen to break the law rather than offer up accurate information. They're not alone.

“Even when individuals testified or agreed to be interviewed,” the report states, “they sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete, leading to some of the false-statements charges described above.” The false or incomplete information led to some of the charges — suggesting that other false statements didn’t.

Those might be the luckiest people, those who Mueller’s team believes lied but who won’t face charges. One of them might be conservative writer Jerome Corsi, who was offered a plea agreement last year but turned it down. Corsi might also be one of the targets of the 12 still-secret criminal referrals that came from the Mueller probe.

No one, though, is as lucky as Trump. The report details scores of lies told by individuals who weren’t under oath, including those named above. Like Flynn, who lied to a number of people about his conversations with the Russian ambassador — lies that led to his being forced from his position.

It also outlines numerous times in which Trump said untrue things to colleagues and staff, something that could well have happened had he, too, sat with Mueller’s team for an interview.

But he didn’t.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The Daily 202: The Mueller report showcases eight Trump loyalists who resisted the president to protect themselves

THE BIG IDEA: It turns out the deep state wasn’t so deep. The resistance was coming from inside the White House.

President Trump repeatedly made his own top aides, appointees and advisers uncomfortable by making requests that they found unethical, legally questionable or otherwise inappropriate as he sought to gain some control over the federal investigation into himself and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

While neither accusing him of a crime nor exonerating him, the second volume of special counsel Bob Mueller’s 448-page report details 10 episodes in which there is at least some evidence that Trump sought to obstruct justice. In most of them, at least one person from the president’s inner circle resisted entreaties to do something they felt was wrong.

“The president's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” the Mueller report concludes.

In looking out for their own interests and reputations, Trump’s aides often protected the president from himself. Sometimes they said no and threatened to resign. Other times they said yes and just didn’t follow through, hoping the president would forget.

Mueller documents dozens of instances in which the president’s own people reined him in. If these officials had gone along with everything Trump had asked for, the evidence of obstruction would likely be much stronger, and calls for impeachment on the Hill today would almost certainly be louder.

-- Here are eight key figures who Mueller says resisted Trump at critical moments:

1) Jeff Sessions refused to unrecuse himself, even when Trump bullied him privately and publicly.

“Oh my God,” Trump said when Sessions informed him that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had just appointed Mueller as special counsel in May 2017, according to contemporaneous notes taken by Sessions’s then-chief of staff, Jody Hunt. “This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”

The president ripped into Sessions for his recusal, saying that he had let him down. “This is the worst thing that ever happened to me,” Trump said. “How could you let this happen, Jeff?”

“The President said the position of Attorney General was his most important appointment and that Sessions had ‘let [him] down,’ contrasting him to Eric Holder and Robert Kennedy,” the report says. “Sessions recalled that the President said to him, ‘you were supposed to protect me,’ or words to that effect.”

For months, Trump had tried to get Sessions to rethink his decision not to oversee the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The attorney general had played a leadership role in the president’s campaign and had been advised that the question of whether he needed to recuse himself wasn’t a close call. Sessions told prosecutors last year, while he was still attorney general, that Trump pulled him aside at Mar-a-Lago so they could speak alone and suggested that Sessions should "unrecuse.” A few months later, in the summer of 2017, he called Sessions at home and again asked him to reverse his recusal. Sessions would not do it. Months after that, in December 2017, Trump met with Sessions in the Oval Office and said that he would be a “hero” if he took back supervision of the Russia investigation.

With the president fuming at him, Sessions offered a letter of resignation to Trump in May 2017. He said he wanted to stay on but was willing to go. When then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon learned that the president was holding on to Sessions's resignation letter, the report says that they became concerned that it could be used to influence the Department of Justice.

“Priebus told Sessions it was not good for the President to have the letter because it would function as a kind of ‘shock collar’ that the President could use any time he wanted,” according to the report. “Priebus said the President had ‘DOJ by the throat.’ Priebus and Bannon told Sessions they would attempt to get the letter back from the President with a notation that he was not accepting Sessions's resignation.” Thirteen days after he handed the letter to Trump, they succeeded.

But Sessions carried a resignation letter in his pocket every time he went to the White House for a year afterward, according to Hunt.

2) White House counsel Don McGahn refused to have Mueller fired.

The Mueller report could also be called the McGahn report. The former White House counsel’s name appears 529 times, including in footnotes, on 66 separate pages. He clearly cooperated with prosecutors, and the portions of the report involving his interviews – given under oath – are gripping.

In June 2017, three days after The Washington Post revealed that the special counsel’s office was investigating whether the president had obstructed justice, Trump called McGahn at home and directed him to call Rosenstein and say that the special counsel had conflicts of interest and must be removed.

“McGahn did not carry out the direction, however, deciding that he would resign rather than trigger what he regarded as a potential Saturday Night Massacre,” the report says. “McGahn recalled that the President called him at home twice and on both occasions directed him to call Rosenstein and say that Mueller had conflicts that precluded him from serving as Special Counsel. … He and other advisors believed the asserted conflicts were ‘silly’ and ‘not real,’ and they had previously communicated that view to the President. McGahn also had made clear to the President that the White House Counsel's Office should not be involved in any effort to press the issue of conflicts. …

“McGahn was concerned about having any role in asking the Acting Attorney General to fire the Special Counsel because he had grown up in the Reagan era and wanted to be more like Judge Robert Bork and not ‘Saturday Night Massacre Bork,’” the report explains. “McGahn considered the President 's request to be an inflection point and he wanted to hit the brakes. … McGahn recalled feeling trapped because he did not plan to follow the President's directive but did not know what he would say the next time the President called.

“McGahn decided he had to resign. … He then drove to the office to pack his belongings and submit his resignation letter. … That evening, McGahn called both Priebus and Bannon and told them that he intended to resign. … Priebus recalled that McGahn said that the President had asked him to ‘do crazy shit’ … Priebus and Bannon both urged McGahn not to quit, and McGahn ultimately returned to work that Monday and remained in his position.”

Seven months later, in early 2018, the New York Times reported the contours of that incident, and the president reacted by directing White House officials to tell McGahn to dispute the story. McGahn refused. “The President then met with McGahn in the Oval Office and again pressured him to deny the reports,” the Mueller report recounts. “In the same meeting, the President also asked McGahn why he had told the Special Counsel about the President’s effort to remove the Special Counsel and why McGahn took notes of his conversations with the President. McGahn refused to back away from what he remembered happening and perceived the President to be testing his mettle.”

The president insisted he never told McGahn to “fire” Mueller, but McGahn said that his notes showed Trump had told him that “Mueller has to go.” Trump then berated McGahn for keeping a record of their discussions. “Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes,” Trump told McGahn, according to McGahn’s account.

McGahn responded that he was a “real lawyer.”

“I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn,” Trump replied. “He did not take notes.”

Cohn, a key early mentor for Trump, was Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel in the Senate. He was later disbarred for unethical conduct – just like Michael Cohen, who would be Trump’s lawyer a generation later. The whole episode underscored why it made sense for McGahn to keep a paper trail.

Weighing in on Twitter this morning from Mar-a-Lago, Trump appeared to allude to this donnybrook over notetaking as he criticized Mueller and former aides who cooperated with the special counsel:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1119207303700471809

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1119211274712375297

3) Rick Dearborn threw the president’s message for Sessions in the trash.

During a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office in June 2017, Trump dictated a message for his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to deliver to Sessions: Meet with the special counsel and get him to limit his jurisdiction to future election interference, rather than look backward on the 2016 election.

Lewandowski scheduled a meeting with Sessions to convey this message for the following evening at his office, but Sessions canceled because of a last-minute conflict. “Lewandowski wanted to pass the message to Sessions in person rather than over the phone. He did not want to meet at the Department of Justice because he did not want a public log of his visit and did not want Sessions to have an advantage over him by meeting on what Lewandowski described as Sessions's turf,” the report says. “Lewandowski stored the notes in a safe at his home, which he stated was his standard procedure with sensitive items.”

A month later, in a second private meeting, Trump asked what came of his message to Sessions. Lewandowski said he would circle back. Then Lewandowski approached Dearborn, who was at that time deputy White House chief of staff and had worked for Sessions in the Senate, to ask him to pass along the message.

“Lewandowski saw Dearborn in the anteroom outside the Oval Office and gave him a typewritten version of the message the President had dictated to be delivered to Sessions,” the report says. “The message ‘definitely raised an eyebrow’ for Dearborn, and he recalled not wanting to ask where it came from or think further about doing anything with it. Dearborn also said that being asked to serve as a messenger to Sessions made him uncomfortable. He recalled later telling Lewandowski that he had handled the situation, but he did not actually follow through with delivering the message to Sessions, and he did not keep a copy of the typewritten notes Lewandowski had given him.”

4) Rob Porter refused to call the No. 3 at the Justice Department.

“In early July 2017, the President asked Staff Secretary Rob Porter what he thought of Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand,” the report says. “Porter recalled that the President asked him if Brand was good, tough, and ‘on the team.’ The President also asked if Porter thought Brand was interested in being responsible for the Special Counsel's investigation and whether she would want to be Attorney General one day. Because Porter knew Brand, the President asked him to sound her out about taking responsibility for the investigation and being Attorney General. Contemporaneous notes taken by Porter show that the President told Porter to ‘Keep in touch with your friend,’ in reference to Brand.

“Later, the President asked Porter a few times in passing whether he had spoken to Brand, but Porter did not reach out to her because he was uncomfortable with the task,” the report continues. “In asking him to reach out to Brand, Porter understood the President to want to find someone to end the Russia investigation or fire the Special Counsel, although the President never said so explicitly. Porter did not contact Brand because he was sensitive to the implications of that action and did not want to be involved in a chain of events associated with an effort to end the investigation or fire the Special Counsel.”

Porter was pushed out of the White House in February 2018 when both of his ex-wives publicly accused him of physical abuse.

5) Chris Christie refused to contact Comey.

During a private lunch on Feb. 14, 2017, at the White House, Trump asked then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie – who had led his transition team until being fired shortly after the election – if he was still friendly with Comey, who was still FBI director.

“Christie said he was,” the report says. “The President told Christie to call Comey and tell him that the President ‘really likes him. Tell him he's part of the team.’ At the end of the lunch, the President repeated his request that Christie reach out to Comey. Christie had no intention of complying with the President's request that he contact Comey. He thought the President's request was ‘nonsensical’ and Christie did not want to put Comey in the position of having to receive such a phone call. Christie thought it would have been uncomfortable to pass on that message.”

6) Rosenstein refused to hold a news conference.

The night Trump fired Comey in May 2017, the White House Press Office called the Justice Department and said that it wanted to put out a statement saying it was the deputy attorney general’s idea to get rid of the FBI director. “Rosenstein told other DOJ officials that he would not participate in putting out a ‘false story,’” the report says. “The President then called Rosenstein directly and said he was watching Fox News, that the coverage had been great, and that he wanted Rosenstein to do a press conference. Rosenstein responded that this was not a good idea because, if the press asked him, he would tell the truth that Comey's firing was not his idea.”

That same night, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters, “It was all Rosenstein. No one from the White House. It was a DOJ decision.”

7) K.T. McFarland wouldn’t send a memo.

After Michael Flynn was pushed out as national security adviser in February 2017, Priebus and Bannon told his No. 2 that the president wanted her to resign, but they suggested that she could be made ambassador to Singapore instead.

“The next day, the President asked Priebus to have McFarland draft an internal email that would confirm that the President did not direct Flynn to call the Russian Ambassador about sanctions,” the report states. “Priebus called McFarland into his office to convey the President's request that she memorialize in writing that the President did not direct Flynn to talk to [Sergey] Kislyak. McFarland told Priebus she did not know whether the President had directed Flynn to talk to Kislyak about sanctions, and she declined to say yes or no to the request.”

McFarland then reached out to John Eisenberg in the White House Counsel’s Office to check about the propriety of the request. “Eisenberg advised McFarland not to write the requested letter,” the report states. “As documented by McFarland in a contemporaneous ‘Memorandum for the Record’ that she wrote because she was concerned by the President’s request: ‘Eisenberg thought the requested email and letter would be a bad idea – from my side because the email would be awkward. Why would I be emailing Priebus to make a statement for the record? But it would also be a bad idea for the President because it looked as if my ambassadorial appointment was in some way a quid pro quo.’ Later that evening, Priebus stopped by McFarland’s office and told her not to write the email and to forget he even mentioned it.”

The report notes that there’s “some evidence” that Trump knew about the existence and content of Flynn’s calls when they occurred, “but the evidence is inconclusive and could not be relied upon to establish the President’s knowledge.”

8 ) Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats wouldn’t put out a statement.  

Trump reached out to the former Indiana Republican senator, whom he had just appointed, after Comey disclosed in March 2017 that the FBI was investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, including any links or coordination with the Trump campaign. The president asked Coats whether he could say publicly that no link existed between Trump and Russia.

“Coats responded that [his department] has nothing to do with investigations and it was not his role to make a public statement on the Russia investigation,” the report says. “Coats told this Office that the President never asked him to speak to Comey about the FBI investigation. Some ODNI staffers, however, had a different recollection of how Coats described the meeting immediately after it occurred.”

The report outlines conflicting accounts of what happened next: “According to senior ODNI official Michael Dempsey, Coats said after the meeting that the President had brought up the Russia investigation and asked him to contact Comey to see if there was a way to get past the investigation, get it over with, end it, or words to that effect. Dempsey said that Coats described the President's comments as falling ‘somewhere between musing about hating the investigation’ and wanting Coats to ‘do something to stop it.’ Dempsey said Coats made it clear that he would not get involved with an ongoing FBI investigation.

“Edward Gistaro, another ODNI official, recalled that right after Coats's meeting with the President , on the walk from the Oval Office back to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Coats said that the President had kept him behind to ask him what he could do to ‘help with the investigation.’ Another ODNI staffer who had been waiting for Coats outside the Oval Office talked to Gistaro a few minutes later and recalled Gistaro reporting that Coats was upset because the President had asked him to contact Comey to convince him there was nothing to the Russia investigation. … Coats recalled the President bringing up the Russia investigation several times, and Coats said he finally told the President that Coats's job was to provide intelligence and not get involved in investigations.”

BILL BARR IS UNDER FIRE:

-- Fact Checker Sal Rizzo concludes that Barr’s statements are “incomplete or misleading” when compared with what's actually in the Mueller report.

-- The attorney general is also being criticized for parroting the president's favorite talking points during his news conference yesterday. Matt Zapotosky and Josh Dawsey report: Barr “declared five times that investigators had found no ‘collusion’ between the Trump campaign and Russia. Once, he even seemed to chide reporters for their ‘relentless speculation’ about President Trump’s possible personal wrongdoing — while declaring the president correct in his pushback. … The president reacted with glee on Twitter and privately told advisers that [Sessions], with whom he famously sparred, would not have done so well … But the roughly half-hour, televised event also cemented the view among wary Democrats and some in the legal community that Barr was more politically motivated and protective of Trump than they had realized.”

Barr revealed that he and Rosenstein disputed some of Mueller’s “legal theories,” saying the two of them stepped in to declare there’s no prosecutable obstruction case against Trump only after Mueller wouldn’t make the call.
Presidential candidate Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) called for Barr's resignation: “You can be the President’s defense attorney or America’s Attorney General, but you can’t be both,” he said.
But Barr has a constituency of one: White House officials said the AG's performance will likely insulate him from any Trump opprobrium over the next few days.
-- Even though Mueller cited instance after instance in which the president's actions could amount to obstruction of justice, the special counsel and his team decided not to accuse the president of a crime, in part because the veteran prosecutors didn’t believe they had the legal authority to do so. “Barr did not feel so inhibited and definitively declared that the president hadn’t obstructed justice,” Carol Leonnig, Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey report. “He went so far as to suggest during his news conference before the report was released that the president’s actions were understandable because he was upset that the investigation and the attention it received were undermining his presidency. ‘There is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,’ he told reporters. … David Alan Sklansky, a Stanford law professor and expert on prosecutorial restraint … argued that Barr has left the impression with the public that Mueller believed it was too difficult to reach a conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice when the report shows the special counsel’s office believed it was its job to investigate the issue and leave it to Congress to act.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Here’s what Trump and his associates said at the time. Now, read what the Mueller report tells us.

briefings earlier this year, he argued it was because reporters covered her “rudely and inaccurately.”

But special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report reveals the pressure faced by Sanders and others close to Trump: to seemingly invent explanations for questionable actions he has taken over the past two years. In several instances, Mueller’s 448-page report paints a picture of an unreliable White House — one that often went to great lengths to craft its own inaccurate narrative.

Trump’s reaction to the appointment of Mueller:
One such example came in May 2017, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Trump that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein had just appointed Mueller as special counsel.

According to Mueller’s report — which cites notes from Jody Hunt, Sessions’s chief of staff — Trump reacted by slumping back in his chair, exclaiming: “Oh my God, this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.” Trump further laid into Sessions for his recusal, indicating Sessions had let him down.

“Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency,” Trump said, according to Hunt’s notes. “It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.” The next morning, Trump tweeted, “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”

But as The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey tweeted Thursday, an account of the meeting from then-White House spokesman Sean Spicer paints a much different picture:

https://twitter.com/jdawsey1/status/1118906208965091328
In Mueller report, Trump says "this is the end of my presidency" and that "I'm f--ked" when learning Mueller had been appointed. That day, White House spokesman Sean Spicer and others said the president was calm and collected about it and was looking forward to vindication.


Dawsey’s reporting at the time quotes two people inside the room with Trump when he learned Mueller had been appointed. They said the president had a calm, levelheaded reaction to the news, with one person saying his attitude was “extremely measured.”

Trump’s Attempt to fire the special counsel:
On Jan. 25, 2018, the New York Times reported that in June 2017 Trump told White House counsel Donald McGahn he wanted to fire Mueller, claiming the special counsel had several conflicts of interest. However, Trump ultimately backed down from this request when McGahn threatened to quit, according to the Times.

On Jan. 26, 2018, Trump brushed the report off as “fake news. . . . A typical New York Times fake story,” the Times reported.

But the same day, according to the Mueller report, Trump’s personal counsel reached out to McGahn’s attorney, requesting he “put out a statement denying that he had been asked to fire the Special Counsel and that he threatened to quit in protest” — an order McGahn defied.

“McGahn’s attorney informed the President’s personal counsel that the Times story was accurate,” the Mueller report reads. “Accordingly, McGahn’s attorney said, although the article was inaccurate in some other respects, McGahn could not comply with the president’s request to dispute the story.”

Trump’s termination of James B. Comey:
The White House’s official position on why Trump fired then-FBI Director James B. Comey in 2017 shifted numerous times throughout the news cycle. On the day the news broke, the White House said in a statement that Comey was removed on the “recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.”

According to Mueller’s report, however, “the President had decided to fire Comey before hearing from the Department of Justice.”

Moreover, Sanders said in a news conference at the time that the “rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director” — drawing skepticism from a reporter who asserted the opposite: that the “vast majority” of FBI agents actually supported Comey.

“Look, we’ve heard from countless members of the FBI that say very different things,” Sanders responded, according to Mueller’s report.

But, as the report later explains, her claims were completely unfounded.

“Sanders told this Office that her reference to hearing from ‘countless members of the FBI’ was a ‘slip of the tongue,’” the report reads. “She also recalled that her statement in a separate press interview that rank-and-file FBI agents had lost confidence in Comey was a comment she made ‘in the heat of the moment’ that was not founded on anything.”

Trump’s business connections with Russia:
Mueller’s report also discusses a July 2016 news conference during which Trump responded to questions about his possible connections to Moscow by “denying any business involvement in Russia” — “even though the Trump Organization had pursued a business project in Russia as late as June 2016.”

“During the press conference, Trump repeated “I have nothing to do with Russia” five times. He stated that “the closest [he] came to Russia” was that Russians may have purchased a home or condos from him. He said that after he held the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013 he had been interested in working with Russian companies that “wanted to put a lot of money into developments in Russia” but “it never worked out.”

The Mueller Report

But Trump’s assertion during the 2016 event that he had “nothing to do with Russia” is directly disputed in his written responses to the special counsel’s questions. In one response, he admitted to signing a nonbinding letter of intent for a deal in 2015.

“As I recall, neither I nor the Trump Organization had any projects or proposed projects in Russia during the campaign other than the Letter of Intent,” Trump wrote.

The report adds: “The Trump Organization, however, had been pursuing a building project in Moscow — the Trump Tower Moscow project from approximately September 2015 through June 2016, and the candidate was regularly updated on developments, including possible trips by Michael Cohen to Moscow to promote the deal and by Trump himself to finalize it.”

Carter Page’s role in the campaign
The special counsel’s report sheds light on Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign.

In 2016, according to the special counsel, a Trump campaign spokesman told Yahoo! News that Carter Page had “no role” in the campaign after he’d traveled to Moscow that summer and met with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. This trip drew media attention, prompting the campaign to label Page as an “informal foreign policy adviser” who “did not speak for Mr. Trump or the campaign.”

He was officially removed from the campaign on Sept, 24, 2016, according to the report, but in an email the next day, Hope Hicks, communications director for the Trump campaign, instructed Kellyanne Conway and Stephen K. Bannon to answer inquiries about Page with the following: "[H]e was announced as an informal adviser in March. Since then he has had no role or official contact with the campaign. We have no knowledge of activities past or present and he now officially has been removed from all lists etc.”

But in the months following March, according to the report, Page “continued providing policy-related work product to Campaign officials."

“For example, in April 2016, Page provided feedback on an outline for a foreign policy speech that the candidate gave at the Mayflower Hotel. In May 2016, Page prepared an outline of an energy policy speech for the Campaign and then traveled to Bismarck, North Dakota, to watch the candidate deliver the speech,” the report read. “Chief policy adviser Sam Clovis expressed appreciation for Page’s work and praised his work to other Campaign officials.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump uses profanity to complain about the Mueller report

President Trump sought Friday to discredit portions of the special counsel’s report in which others described behavior that could be seen as obstruction of justice, calling their assertions “total bullshit.”

Less than 24 hours ago, Trump and his allies took a victory lap after the 448-page redacted report was made public, saying that the findings fully exonerate him. But in morning tweets, Trump complained about the report’s finding, arguing that because he chose not to testify during the probe, he never got to tell his side of the story.

Robert S. Mueller III tried to get the president to sit for an interview for more than a year, but Trump and his attorneys resisted.

“Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue,” Trump wrote. “Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed. Because I never agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the ‘Report’ about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad).”

He continued: “This was an Illegally Started Hoax that never should have happened, a . . .”

He didn’t finish his thought.

President Trump sought Friday to discredit portions of the special counsel’s report in which others described behavior that could be seen as obstruction of justice, calling their assertions “total bullshit.”

Less than 24 hours ago, Trump and his allies took a victory lap after the 448-page redacted report was made public, saying that the findings fully exonerate him. But in morning tweets, Trump complained about the report’s finding, arguing that because he chose not to testify during the probe, he never got to tell his side of the story.

Robert S. Mueller III tried to get the president to sit for an interview for more than a year, but Trump and his attorneys resisted.

“Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue,” Trump wrote. “Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed. Because I never agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the ‘Report’ about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad).”

He continued: “This was an Illegally Started Hoax that never should have happened, a . . .”

He didn’t finish his thought.

I'm confused, I thought he claimed the report exonerated him.

Now it's bullshit?

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump Ordered Aides to Search for Clinton Emails, While the Russians Already Were Looking

WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump ordered the man who would later serve briefly as his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, to find thousands of missing emails from Hillary Clinton’s computer server at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, the special counsel’s report revealed on Thursday.

The episode is among the closest that investigators came to uncovering an instance in which Mr. Trump himself appeared to use whatever means necessary to locate the messages, though it stops short of saying he encouraged a breach of his opponent’s computers, networks or email accounts. Mr. Trump had insisted at the time that he was only joking when he encouraged Russian hackers to find and disclose 30,000 deleted emails from Mrs. Clinton’s servers.

Behind the scenes, Mr. Trump was serious, according to the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. It said that Mr. Flynn, by then a retired three-star Army intelligence officer, told the investigators “that Trump made this request repeatedly, and Flynn subsequently contacted multiple people in an effort to obtain the emails.”

As it turned out, Russia’s military intelligence unit and supporters of Mr. Trump’s campaign had — apparently independently — sought the email trove, convinced that it contained embarrassing material that could prove decisive on Election Day.

Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state had been the focus of a lengthy investigation by the F.B.I., and Mr. Trump, calling his campaign opponent “Crooked Hillary,” was eager to turn attention to her actions.

Moscow’s most intense efforts came just five hours after Mr. Trump first signaled his desire by declaring in Florida in July 2016, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” Skilled Russian attackers working for two different military units of Russia’s G.R.U. intelligence agency — one called Unit 26165, another Unit 74455 — went to work on exactly that task. Mr. Mueller’s investigators never cracked the mystery of how they knew, within hours, which servers and accounts to try to breach.

They failed. But Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign manager, Rick Gates, was so certain that the emails would soon be on the way that by late summer 2016, he was “planning a press strategy, a communications campaign and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks.”

The picture of those and other hacking efforts that emerged from Mr. Mueller’s report is, not surprisingly, a complex mix of political desires in Moscow and New York, and a complex series of computer breaches that, at times, the Russians carried out with remarkable precision. Mr. Mueller concluded that “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” and for nearly 200 pages it lays out details of that effort.

Because there will never be the equivalent of a 9/11 Commission report on perhaps the most famous and consequential state-sponsored attempt to hack an election, the report will stand as the final word on what happened, even if it does not address how to prevent future breaches.

Meanwhile, a candidate who understood very little about how computers and networks operate was clamoring for the leak of data from Mrs. Clinton’s private server, the special counsel’s investigation found.

Mr. Mueller found no evidence that Russians and the Trump campaign worked together, and that while the Russians easily infiltrated the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, they appeared to have a difficult time doing so with Mrs. Clinton’s own personal server.

The account of those efforts may be the closest the nation comes to understanding the details of the largest cyberoperation ever initiated against an American election.

Mr. Mueller found that Russian military intelligence units and Mr. Trump’s campaign found themselves working opposite ends of a mutually beneficial, but uncoordinated, effort. “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” the report concludes, there was no finding that any “member of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”

When Mr. Flynn received the request from Mr. Trump, he contacted Barbara Ledeen, a former Senate staff member close to the retired general, and Peter Smith, an investment adviser. The investigators concluded that as early as December 2015, long before the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee became known, Ms. Ledeen had sent a 25-page proposal to Mr. Smith about how to obtain what she believed were “classified emails” that had already been “purloined by our enemies.” The exchange was included in emails the special counsel obtained during the investigation.

Ms. Ledeen urged a search of public sources, in hopes that some of the Clinton emails had been leaked by foreign intelligence services that she believed had perhaps already extracted them from Mrs. Clinton’s server in Chappaqua, N.Y. If that failed, she wanted to make contact with “various foreign services” to see if any of them had cracked the server.

After initially turning down the idea, Mr. Smith eventually had a change of heart, the report states, after Mr. Trump’s requests in July 2016. Ms. Ledeen later contended she had found a trove of the emails on what she termed the “dark web” — referring to parts of the web that are not searchable, and that are often used for criminal activity. But it turned out that the trove was “not authentic,” the report says, prompting a more fevered search. Mr. Smith wrote in one message that “all 33k deleted emails” would be released by Nov. 1 on WikiLeaks, a week before the election. They never appeared.

Mr. Trump continued to insist that Russia was unlikely to have been responsible for any of the hacking activity around the 2016 campaign. After meeting President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for the first time in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, Mr. Trump called a reporter and noted that Mr. Putin had denied being behind the breaches, quoting him as saying, “If we did, we wouldn’t have gotten caught, because we’re professionals.’’

Mr. Trump said he believed that explanation, “because they are some of the best in the world.” Mr. Mueller’s report concluded that they were good but ultimately failed to cover their tracks.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

What Mueller Found on Russia and on Obstruction: A First Analysis

“Really the best day since he got elected,” said Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor, about a day on which 400 pages dropped into the public’s lap describing relentless presidential misconduct and serial engagements between his campaign and a foreign actor. The weeks-long lag between Attorney General William Barr’s announcement of Robert Mueller’s top-line findings and the release of the Mueller report itself created space for an alternate reality in which the document released today might give rise to such a statement. But the cries of vindication do not survive even the most cursory examination of the document itself.

No, Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, and no, he did not conclude that President Trump had obstructed justice. But Mueller emphatically did not find that there had been “no collusion” either. Indeed, he described in page after damning page a dramatic pattern of Russian outreach to figures close to the president, including to Trump’s campaign and his business; Mueller described receptivity to this outreach on the part of those figures; he described a positive eagerness on the part of the Trump campaign to benefit from illegal Russian activity and that of its cutouts; he described serial lies about it all. And he described as well a pattern of behavior on the part of the president in his interactions with law enforcement that is simply incompatible with the president’s duty to “take care” that the laws are “faithfully executed”—a pattern Mueller explicitly declined to conclude did not obstruct justice.

The Mueller report is a document this country will be absorbing for months to come. Below is a first crack at analyzing the features that are most salient to us.

The report answers a great many questions, resolving a raft of concerning issues that had cried out for public resolution. Some of these questions it resolves in Trump’s favor, thereby reducing the long list of concerns that reasonable people will harbor about the president. But by creating a rigorous factual record concerning both Russian intervention in 2016 and presidential obstruction of the effort to investigate that intervention, the report poses other questions acutely. Most importantly, it poses the question of whether this conduct is acceptable—not whether it’s lawful or prosecutable or whether the evidence is admissible, but whether as a nation we choose to accept it, and if not, what means we exercise to reject it. Mueller is not a political figure, but the record he has created puts these fundamentally political questions squarely before us.

Before turning to what’s in the Mueller report, let’s pause a moment to note something that’s not in it: classified information. The document contains no so-called “portion marking,” which denotes classified material. While it describes sensitive intelligence matters, it does so in an unclassified manner. What’s more, it is almost entirely devoid of discussion of the counterintelligence equities at issue in the Russia matter. This is a prosecutor’s report, focused entirely on application of fact to criminal laws and to assessment of whether legal standards were met. Whether this absence is because the counterintelligence elements of the investigation were handled in some other format or because they were entirely sublimated to the criminal investigation is unclear. But this is a document summarizing a criminal probe and the thinking of the prosecutors who ran it—not a document describing the management of threats to the country.

Like the report itself, we begin with Mueller’s resolution of matters related to Russia.

Results of the Russia Investigation

Consistent with the special counsel’s mandate, the first volume of the Mueller report focuses on “the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.” Toward this end, its first two substantive sections go into depth on Russia’s “active measures” social media campaign, as well as the “hacking and dumping” operations through which it accessed and disseminated private emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and others. Both provide a fascinating account of Russian influence operations, but neither adds much to the indictments that the Mueller team has previously filed against involved persons. Instead, the important element of Volume 1 is the discussion of “Russian government links to and contacts with the Trump campaign”—or the possibility of what some might describe as “collusion.”

As the report is careful to explain, “collusion” is neither a criminal offense nor a legal term of art with a clear definition, despite its frequent use in discussions of the special counsel’s mandate. Mueller and his team instead examined the relationships between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government through the far narrower lens of criminal conspiracy. To establish a criminal conspiracy, a prosecutor must show, among other elements, that two or more persons agreed to either violate a federal criminal law or defraud the United States. This “meeting of the minds” is ultimately the piece the Mueller team felt it could not prove, leading it not to pursue any conspiracy charges against members of the Trump campaign, even as it pursued them against Russian agents.

This conclusion is far from the full vindication that chants of “no collusion” imply, a fact driven home by the detailed factual record the Mueller report puts forward. In some cases, there was indeed a meeting of the minds between Trump campaign officials and Russia, just not in pursuit of a criminal objective. In others, members of the Trump campaign acted criminally—as evidenced by the guilty pleas and indictments that the Mueller team secured—but did so on their own. At times, these efforts even worked toward the same objective as the Russian government, but on seemingly parallel tracks as opposed to in coordination. None of this amounted to a criminal conspiracy that the Mueller team believed it could prove beyond a reasonable doubt. But the dense network of interactions, missed opportunities, and shared objectives between the Trump campaign and the Russian government remains profoundly disturbing.

This report shows that the Trump campaign was reasonably aware of the Russian efforts, at least on the hacking side. They were aware the Russians sought to help them win. They welcomed that assistance. Instead of warning the American public, they devised a public relations and campaign strategy that sought to capitalize on Russia’s illicit assistance. In other words, the Russians and the Trump campaign shared a common goal, and each side worked to achieve that goal with basic knowledge of the other side’s intention. They just didn’t agree to work toward that goal together.

Importantly, the report includes several areas in which the Mueller report really does meaningfully exonerate the Trump campaign.

First, while the report notes that some Trump campaign members shared tweets from Internet Research Agency (IRA)-controlled accounts and even agreed to assist in promoting IRA-devised rallies, the special counsel investigation did not conclude that any official of the Trump campaign was aware the solicitations were coming from foreign persons. Being duped is not the same as committing a crime, and Mueller conclusively puts to rest the question of whether the Trump campaign was somehow aiding the Russian social media operation.

Second, the Mueller report answers lingering questions about a number of previously reported events about which people harbored reasonable suspicions. The Mueller team examined the reported contacts between campaign members, including Jared Kushner and Jeff Sessions, with Sergey Kislyak at the Mayflower Hotel in April 2016 and found that the conversations were brief and nonsubstantive, and took place in public. Similarly, Mueller examined contacts between then-Senator Sessions and Kislyak at Sessions’s Senate office in September 2016 and determined that the two did not discuss anything related to the election. That is consistent with Sessions’s account of the matter and effectively clears him on the question; nothing untoward seems to have occured.

Additionally, the special counsel’s office describes a set of interactions between campaign members—in particular, Kushner—and the head of a D.C.-based think tank, the Center for the National Interest (CNI). The investigation found no evidence that CNI facilitated back channels between the campaign and the Russian government.

Finally, the special counsel’s report puts to rest suggestions that the Republican National Convention platform on Ukraine was altered at the direction of Trump or Russia. While Trump advisor J.D. Gordon did champion an effort on behalf of the campaign to soften a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform on supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression, the report makes clear that Gordon was not directed to seek the change by Trump. He did so after deciding that the change would better align the platform with Trump’s stated policy.

So that’s all good news for Trump. Reporting on these matters had accurately described these events as having occurred, but the Mueller report should end speculation that they were evidence of collusion or anything untoward.

The rest of the report is far less rosey for Trump World.

While the report does not find criminal conspiracy between Trump associates and Russia, it describes a set of contacts that may not involve chargeable criminality but might reasonably be described as “collusion.” In some of these cases, there was a clear “meeting of the minds”—or an effort to establish one—between members of the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian government, but the object of that agreement was not a federal crime. If these episodes fall short of a criminal conspiracy, they nonetheless reveal an alarming reality.

The report details numerous contacts during the presidential campaign, some of which are well known—for example, the cases of George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, two low-level recruits to the Trump campaign’s foreign policy team who became the focus of efforts by Russian agents to cultivate a relationship. A higher profile case is that of Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. The report describes Manafort’s extensive ties to Russia in detail, ties he cultivated through his prior work for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and the former Russian-backed government in Ukraine. Throughout his time with the Trump campaign—Manafort resigned in August 2016 but continued to advise the Trump campaign through at least November—Manafort maintained consistent contact with his “longtime” associate Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian who, according to the report, “the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence.” Kilimnik attempted to have Manafort pass along a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to be friendly to Russian interests, though the Mueller team was unable to identify evidence that Manafort did so. Manafort in turn instructed his deputy Rick Gates to provide Kilimnik with polling data and other information regarding the Trump campaign’s electoral strategy, which he understood would be passed on to Deripaska and others.

A particularly troubling example is the protracted negotiation over the Trump Tower Moscow project, in which President Trump was personally involved. In September 2015, the Trump Organization, acting through attorney Michael Cohen, restarted negotiations over a possible Trump Tower project in Moscow that had fallen through several years prior. Trump himself signed a letter of intent for the project in October 2015, on the same day as the third Republican primary debate. One of Cohen’s interlocutors on the deal, businessman Felix Sater, repeatedly raised the possibility of using the deal to enhance Trump’s electoral prospects. In January 2016, Cohen reached out to Russian officials in an attempt to contact Russian President Vladimir Putin and secure support for the project, which ultimately resulted in an invitation for Cohen to visit Moscow to discuss it. Cohen also raised the prospect of Trump himself visiting Russia to discuss the deal, once in late 2015 and again in spring 2016—a possibility that Cohen indicated Trump was open to if it would facilitate the deal. Neither trip came together. Cohen ultimately pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about how long into 2016 the Trump Tower Moscow project was negotiated and Trump’s personal knowledge of it.

There are other examples too. The Mueller report lays out in detail a sustained effort to obtain a set of emails that figures associated with the campaign believed hackers might have obtained from Hillary Clinton’s private server before she deleted them. The trouble is that it appears the emails didn’t exist. It has previously been reported that now-deceased Trump supporter Peter Smith went to extreme lengths to try and track down Clinton’s 30,000 deleted emails. According to the Mueller report, after candidate Trump stated in July 2016 that he hoped Russia would “find the 30,000 emails,” future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn reached out to multiple people to try and obtain those emails. One of the individuals he reached out to was Smith. Smith later circulated a document that claimed his “Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative” was “‘in coordination’ with the Trump Campaign” specifically naming Flynn, Sam Clovis, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. While the investigation found that Smith communicated with both Flynn and Clovis, it found no evidence that any of the four individuals listed “initiated or directed Smith’s efforts.” So essentially, a bunch of people in Trump’s orbit tried very hard to obtain stolen emails but came up empty. Mueller decided that chasing this particular ghost did not constitute criminal conduct.

There are also a series of events for which the special counsel’s office appeared to have seriously considered the possibility of bringing charges but ultimately determined that not all of the elements were met or that the evidence was otherwise insufficient.

Most seriously, the special counsel’s office examined possible criminal charges related to the June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting in significant depth. The report’s account of the meeting between senior representatives of the Trump campaign and Russian attorney Natalya Veselnitskaya and other Russian government-linked individuals largely tracks with widely reported accounts. The meeting was proposed to Donald Trump Jr. in an email from Robert Goldstone, who said that the “Crown prosecutor of Russia ... offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. responded that “if it’s what you say I love it” and arranged the meeting through a series of emails and telephone calls. Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner attended. The meeting lasted approximately 20 minutes and left the campaign officials frustrated because the Russians were not able to offer any concrete information and instead talked about adoptions and the Russian Magnitsky Act. The report indicates that Mueller could not establish that Donald Trump knew in advance about the meeting, and Trump’s submitted written answers say he has no recollection of learning of the meeting at the time.

Mueller ultimately concluded there was not sufficient evidence to pursue campaign finance charges against campaign officials regarding the Trump Tower meeting. He cites the government’s “substantial burden of proof on issues of intent,” raising questions about whether the participants knew the activity was illegal at the time, as is required by the statute, and then explores whether Veselnitskaya’s offer of “dirt” on Hillary Clinton qualifies as a “contribution or donation of money or other thing of value” under campaign finance laws. While the report recognizes that opposition research could be considered a “thing of value,” no judicial decision has considered this issue. Rather than tackle that issue himself, Mueller declined to pursue criminal campaign finance charges.

At least one other section of the report clearly alludes to potential criminal conduct, but it is so redacted (presumably because of the ongoing Roger Stone indictment) that it is hard to say why the activities did not rise to the level of criminality. The report spends more than 20 pages detailing how the Russian intelligence services hacked the Clinton campaign, the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and then coordinated with WikiLeaks to release the hacked information in ways that would hurt Clinton and help Trump. The Russian military intelligence agency (the GRU) had initially set up its own websites, including DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, but later transferred many of the documents they stole from the DNC and campaign Chairman John Podesta to WikiLeaks “in order to expand its interference” in the 2016 election. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks implied publicly that Seth Rich, a former DNC staff member who was killed in July 2016, was the source of the material in order to divert suspicion away from the GRU as the source of the material. But the involvement of the Trump campaign in the dissemination of the stolen material is largely redacted. It’s clear that Manafort, Gates, Jerome Corsi, Ted Malloch, and at least one other person—presumably Stone, whose name does not appear in the redacted version of the report—were involved in some way. The document also seems to make an ominous reference to a phone call while Trump and Gates were driving to LaGuardia, after which Trump told Gates that “more releases of damaging information would be coming”—but the details of the call are redacted. The ongoing case against Stone for lying to Congress about his involvement with WikiLeaks is likely the source for much of the “Harm to Ongoing Matter” redactions in this section.

Despite the overwhelming number of contacts and ties, Mueller concludes this section by noting that the investigation did not “yield evidence sufficient to sustain any charge that any individual affiliated with the Trump Campaign acted as an agent of -the government of Russia- within the meaning of FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act)."

In light of the hundred pages the redacted Mueller report spends recounting the contacts between Russian government-linked individuals and entities, it is worth taking a moment to recall the frequency and certitude with which President Trump and members of his campaign told the American people that there had been no contact with Russians during the campaign:

Paul Manafort on ABC’s This Week, in response to a question of whether there were any ties between Trump, Manafort, or the campaign and Putin and his regime: “No, there are not. That’s absurd. And you know, there’s no basis to it.”

Donald Trump Jr. told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the Clinton campaign’s suggestion that Russia was helping Trump was “disgusting” and “phony,” noting, “Well, it just goes to show you their exact moral compass. I mean, they will say anything to be able to win this. I mean, this is time and time again, lie after lie.”

Kellyanne Conway, asked whether anyone involved in the Trump campaign had any contact with Russians trying to meddle with the election, responded, “Absolutely not. And I discussed that with the president-elect just last night. Those conversations never happened. I hear people saying it like it’s a fact on television. That is just not only inaccurate and false, but it’s dangerous.”

Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Fox News Sunday, in response to a question of whether there was there any contact in any way between Trump or his associates and the Kremlin or cutouts: “Of course not. Why would there be any contacts between the campaign?”

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign, stating, “This is a nonstory because to the best of our knowledge, no contacts took place, so it’s hard to make a comment on something that never happened.”

Asked at a press conference whether he could say definitively that nobody on his campaign had any contacts with the Russians during the campaign, Trump himself said, “No. Nobody that I know of. Nobody … I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge no person that I deal with does.”

All of these statements were false, and they are only a few of the many examples of campaign officials making such comments.

Those contacts did not end with Trump’s election to the presidency. The Mueller report devotes a substantial number of pages to chronicling Russia’s post-election efforts to make contact with the Trump administration, through both official and unofficial channels.

Some of the contacts are not necessarily untoward. Russia’s official outreach efforts began at 3:00 am following the election, when a Russian Embassy official reached out to Trump campaign press secretary Hope Hicks with a message of congratulations from Putin. This ultimately led to the first Trump-Putin call just days later, on Nov. 14, 2016. A message of congratulations and a phone call with a foreign head of state aren’t especially surprising or even necessarily inappropriate.


However, shortly thereafter, Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak reached out to Jared Kushner to arrange an additional meeting, which took place on Nov. 30 at Trump Tower in New York. At that meeting, which Michael Flynn also attended, Kushner reportedly requested a good point of contact through which they could directly reach Putin. He also raised the possibility of receiving a briefing from Russian generals through a secure communications line at the Russian Embassy, though Kislyak rejected the idea. Kushner subsequently handed off further meetings with Kislyak to a subordinate—but did take a meeting with Sergey Gorkov, the head of the sanctioned Russian government-owned bank Vnesheconombank (VEB). The report notes conflicting accounts over the purpose of the meeting, with Kushner claiming it was diplomatic while VEB claimed it was related to possible business with the private company of which Kushner was CEO, Kushner Companies.

Flynn, meanwhile, continued to engage with Kislyak. In December 2016, he contacted Kislyak as part of an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Russia to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on Israel to cease settlement activities that the Obama administration refused to oppose. A few days later, Flynn—apparently acting on his own initiative, though the report notes that President-elect Trump and others may have been made aware that the call was happening—also spoke to Kislyak to discourage an escalatory response to the Obama administration’s imposition of economic sanctions over Russian election interference, the tack that Putin ultimately pursued. Flynn ultimately pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI regarding both interactions, as well as to false statements on a FARA filing regarding his prior work on behalf of Turkey.

At the same time, several self-described Russian oligarchs actively reached out to establish their own contacts with the Trump administration, in part in response to discussions with Putin. Two such oligarchs—Petr Aven and Kirill Dmitriev—worked through business associates in unsuccessful attempts to arrange a meeting with Kushner, though Dmitriev was able to successfully pass a paper on U.S.-Russian relations to him. Through another associate, George Nader, Dmitriev also made contact with Erik Prince, a financial supporter and close associate of the Trump campaign, though he had no official position. The three met in Seychelles in January 2017, but redactions in the Mueller report leave substantial ambiguity regarding the subject matter of their discussions. Prince claims that he reported on his meeting with Dmitriev to Trump campaign official Steve Bannon, but Bannon disputes this—a discrepancy, the report notes, that investigators were unable to resolve.

In the end, there was clearly criminality here: criminality on the Russian side and criminality on the U.S. side in lying about interactions with Russian actors. And there was also activity that was plainly innocent. Between those two extremes, there was also a large quantity of engagement that was apparently not chargeably criminal but that did involve covert attempts to engage with a hostile foreign government for the benefit of Trump’s campaign and business.

Whether one calls it collusion or calls it something else, it isn’t pretty.

Findings on Obstruction of Justice

The second volume of the report, focusing on obstruction of justice, begins with an explanation of one of the most confusing aspects of the report: Mueller’s decision not to make a determination one way or the other as to whether to prosecute or decline to prosecute the president of the United States for obstruction of justice. As Barr indicated, this is a fundamental deviation from the traditional role of the prosecutor. But the opening pages give important context for this choice by the special counsel’s office.

The introductory section is structured around the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) guidance against indicting a sitting president—despite Barr’s suggestion to the contrary at a press conference just prior to the report’s release. Mueller’s analysis focuses on three main points. First, he accepts that the OLC opinion is binding on the special counsel’s office. He also writes that “a federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would place burdens on the President’s capacity to govern and potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct.” On this latter point, he cites the OLC opinion’s reasoning that a criminal prosecution of a sitting president would encroach on Congress’s constitutional duty to serve as the check on an unfit executive through impeachment proceedings. In other words, though subtly, Mueller is pretty clearly deferring—at least in part—to Congress: His office chose not to evaluate whether to bring charges against the president, he suggests, both because indictment of the president while he remains in office is off limits to him and because the decision regarding how to handle such conduct by a sitting president is, in any event, more properly left to the legislature.

At the same time, Mueller notes the OLC opinion’s conclusion that a criminal investigation of a president during his term is permissible and that the president may be prosecuted after leaving office. The special counsel’s office thus “conducted a thorough factual investigation in order to preserve the evidence when memories were fresh and documentary materials were available,” the report states, implying that this material will now be in the hands of any future Justice Department should it choose to bring charges against Trump when he leaves office.

Mueller also points to the Justice Manual, which holds that prosecutors should only assess whether a person’s conduct “constitutes a federal offense”: Given that the president cannot be indicted while in office and would not immediately have the opportunity to clear his name through a “speedy and public trial,” the manual counsels against making that initial assessment.

All this leads to Mueller’s key conclusion, quoted only in part in Barr’s initial letter: “if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. … Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” This reasoning makes clear the disconnect between Mueller’s approach to the obstruction investigation and that of Barr, who independently chose to evaluate the evidence against Trump and determine that it was not sufficient to establish an obstruction offense.

This is not, in short, a circumstance in which Mueller summed up all the evidence for obstruction and all the evidence against it and just couldn’t make up his mind—or decided to defer to the attorney general for judgment. Mueller’s decision not to reach a traditional prosecutorial judgment in no sense indicates that the evidence of possible obstruction by the president was weak—“No Collusion, No Obstruction,” as the president tweeted. To the contrary, the more time one spends with the obstruction section of the report, the more it suggests that the Mueller team believed the evidence of obstruction to be very strong.

The special counsel describes some overarching factual issues and general conclusions that affect his entire obstruction discussion. The report notes that this case is “atypical compared to the heartland obstruction-of-justice prosecutions brought by the Department of Justice” for several reasons. First, “the conduct involved actions by the President” and any factual analysis of Trump’s conduct “would have to take into account both that the President’s acts were facially lawful and that his position as head of the Executive Branch provides him with unique and powerful means of influencing official proceedings, subordinate officers, and potential witnesses.” Second, as discussed in the first half of the report, “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference,” but “does point to a range of other possible personal motives animating the President’s conduct,” including “concerns that continued investigation would call into question the legitimacy of his election and potential uncertainty about whether certain events ... could be seen as criminal activity by the President, his campaign, or his family.” And third, “many of the President’s acts directed at witnesses, including discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons, occurred in public view.” Though it’s unusual for obstructive acts to be public-facing, “if the likely effect of [Trump’s] acts is to intimidate witnesses or alter their testimony, the justice system’s integrity is equally threatened.”

Additionally, the special counsel writes that “it is important to view the President’s pattern of conduct as a whole” because it “sheds light on the nature of the President’s acts and the inferences that can be drawn about his intent.” The investigation “found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” but that were “mostly unsuccessful … because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” The team viewed the obstruction investigation as looking at two distinct phases: before Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, when Trump “deemed it critically important to make public that he was not under investigation”; and after he “became aware that investigators were conducting an obstruction-of-justice inquiry into his own conduct.” During this latter period, Trump “launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President” and, “in private, … engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.” In the special counsel’s view, “judgments about the nature of the President’s motives during each phase would be informed by the totality of the evidence.”

The report identifies and analyzes 10 episodes of concern in the obstruction investigation:

conduct involving then-FBI Director Comey and Michael Flynn;
the president’s reaction to the continuing Russia investigation;
the president’s termination of Comey;
the appointment of a special counsel and efforts to remove him;
efforts to curtail the special counsel’s investigation;
efforts to prevent public disclosure of evidence;
further efforts to have the attorney general take control of the investigation;
efforts to have White House Counsel Don McGahn deny that the president had ordered him to have the special counsel removed;
conduct toward Flynn, Manafort, and a redacted individual (likely Roger Stone); and
conduct involving Michael Cohen.
Each episode includes a detailed set of factual findings and then analyzes how the evidence maps onto the criminal charge of obstruction, which requires (1) an obstructive act; (2) a nexus with an official proceeding; and (3) a corrupt intent. We have summarized all of the episodes and Mueller’s analysis of them under the obstruction statutes here.

For present purposes, the critical point is that in six of these episodes, the special counsel’s office suggests that all of the elements of obstruction are satisfied: Trump’s conduct regarding the investigation into Michael Flynn, his firing of Comey, his efforts to remove Mueller and then to curtail Mueller’s investigation, his campaign to have Sessions take back control over the investigation and an order he gave to White House Counsel Don McGahn to both lie to the press about Trump’s past attempt to fire Mueller and create a false record “for our files.” In the cases of Comey’s firing, Trump’s effort to fire Mueller and then push McGahn to lie about it, and Trump’s effort to curtail the scope of the investigation, Mueller describes “substantial” evidence that Trump intended to obstruct justice. Only in one instance—concerning Trump’s effort to prevent the release of emails regarding the Trump Tower meeting—does the special counsel seem to feel that none of the three elements of the obstruction offense were met. It is not entirely clear how Mueller would apply his overarching factual considerations, discussed above, to the specific cases, but he does seem to be saying that the evidence of obstruction in a number of these incidents is strong.

In addition to spelling out damaging accounts of Trump’s conduct in great detail, the report also contains a lengthy section addressing the legal arguments made in his defense. The report describes letters sent by Trump’s personal counsel to Mueller’s team detailing both statutory and constitutional defenses regarding 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2), the general obstruction of justice statute. On the statutory matter, Mueller’s team responds to the suggestion that the statute should be interpreted narrowly, to cover only “acts that would impair the integrity and availability of evidence”; Mueller, rather, adheres to the Justice Department’s view that § 1512(c)(2) “states a broad, independent, and unqualified prohibition on obstruction of justice.”

More interesting is the report’s constitutional analysis: Pursuant to a separation of powers analysis and contra the president’s lawyers and Barr’s own memo on the subject, Mueller takes the view that presidential actions taken under Article II authority can constitute obstructions of justice.

The argument is complex, but it is notable that Mueller emphasizes the role of the president’s obligations under the Take Care Clause as effectively harmonizing the corrupt intent requirement under the obstruction statutes with Article II: “the concept of ‘faithful execution’ connotes the use of power in the interest of the public, not in the office holder’s personal interest.” This suggests that “corrupt” activities are incompatible with good-faith adherence to the duties of the presidency such that prohibiting them cannot violate Article II. One interesting, if subtle, implication here is that a violation of the obstruction statute by the president thus necessarily violates the Take Care Clause—which links criminality under the statute to impeachability.

Barr’s Bad Day

The devastating nature of the report makes the performance of the attorney general in characterizing it at his press conference prior to its release a particularly inappropriate spectacle.

Not content to release a document that he had—contrary to many people’s expectations—not redacted beyond readability, he characterized it in a fashion that sounded remarkably like the president’s own spin. “The bottom line,” Barr concluded, in a statement that seemed designed to vindicate the Trump campaign’s claims of innocence, “After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the Special Counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes.”

Barr had to elide a lot of Mueller’s actual findings in order to describe them this way. In addressing the Trump campaign’s possible involvement in the dissemination of hacked DNC materials through WikiLeaks, the attorney general concluded that the report found that no one associated with the Trump campaign had “illegally participated” in the dissemination, while noting that doing so would be criminal only if those involved in publishing them also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy. Similarly, in discussing contacts between the Trump campaign and those connected with the Russian government, Barr observed only that Mueller “did not find any conspiracy to violate U.S. law,” without characterizing the actual interactions that the investigation uncovered. Instead, Barr focused on the narrow question of whether the Mueller investigation found that there was a criminal conspiracy.

Barr then moved on to whether President Trump had obstructed justice in his removal of former FBI Director James Comey and other interactions with law enforcement. Without elaborating, he noted areas of disagreement with the legal framework that Mueller presented in his report, but claimed that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein nonetheless applied it in concluding that “the evidence developed by the Special Counsel is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

Later, in response to a question, Barr emphasized that Mueller had avoided reaching a conclusion as to whether or not Trump had committed an obstruction crime on the basis of OLC’s view that a sitting president was not subject to indictment. Yet it’s hard to square this account with Mueller’s own description of his reasoning, which we described above. Barr went on an extended riff on his assessment of Trump’s state of mind in evaluating the potential obstructions described in the report, noting that “the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks.” Suffice it to say these factors loom larger in Barr’s assessment of the evidence than they do in Mueller’s account.

On their face, Barr’s remarks were not a neutral recitation of the report’s principal conclusions. Instead, by drawing broad conclusions from narrow legal analysis, the attorney general provided the president’s supporters with an abundance of sound bites and talking points for the weeks to come. Trump could not have asked for a friendlier summary of a deeply unfriendly document.

Barr, however, did himself no service, despite having done a reasonable job shepherding the report itself to public release. A great many people will be more skeptical of his future actions as a result of his words.

The Political Reaction

“I’m having a good day,” said Trump in his first remarks following the report. “No collusion, no obstruction.” Trump’s victory lap actually began hours earlier in a series of triumphant tweets. The president’s most ardent congressional defenders have repeated the line.

Senate Republicans have been more muted. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he looked forward to reading the documents. Senate intelligence committee Chairman Richard Burr praised Barr’s commitment to publicly releasing the report and said he was carefully reviewing the material.

Meanwhile, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Mueller’s report painted “a disturbing picture of a president who has been weaving a web of deceit, lies and improper behavior and acting as if the law doesn’t apply to him.” The majority of their statement, however, was devoted to criticizing Barr, who they allege has “misled the public.” “It is imperative,” they said, “that the rest of the report and the underlying documents be made available to Congress and that Special Counsel Mueller testify before both chambers as soon as possible.”

For his part, House judiciary committee chairman Jerry Nadler agreed that Congress needs access to the unredacted report and underlying evidence. Nadler’s reaction to the redacted report’s content, however, were unequivocal: “Even in its incomplete form, the Mueller report outlines disturbing evidence that President Trump engaged in obstruction of justice and other misconduct.” In noting Mueller’s decision not to exonerate the president, he added, “the responsibility now falls to Congress to hold the President accountable for his actions.” He said impeachment was “one possibility” but that it was “too early” to make that decision.

But impeachment is still a hot potato on Capitol Hill. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said, “Based on what we have seen to date,” impeachment is “not worthwhile at this point.” He added, “there is an election in eighteen months and the American people will make a judgment.” (Hoyer later walked back his statement, saying “all options ought to remain on the table.”)

Political judgment is precisely what the circumstances require. Whether that judgment takes the form of an impeachment inquiry, an election campaign or both is a question with which the political system will wrestle over the coming months. But no longer can the country escape the question of the acceptability of the president’s conduct by saying that it is under investigation, that we will wait until the facts come out or that we won’t proceed on the basis of anonymous sources in news stories.

Mueller has put on the record a remarkable litany of opprobrious behaviors by the president and the people around him. He has also determined for a variety of different reasons—legal, factual and prudential—not to proceed criminally against any more subjects. That leaves the judgment of those behaviors in other hands.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Appendix: Instances of Obstruction in the Mueller Report

This is an appendix to Lawfare's initial analysis of the Mueller report, listing instances of obstruction as described in the report.

The first episode of possible obstruction of justice the report discusses is Trump’s conduct involving his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and FBI Director James Comey. Mueller’s team describes Flynn’s efforts, following the Obama administration’s imposition of sanctions on the Russians for their activities during the 2016 election, to make contact with the Russian government, let them know that the Trump administration wanted better relations, and encourage them not to retaliate. Flynn later lied about his communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, first to incoming Vice President Mike Pence and Sean Spicer, and subsequently to the FBI when agents questioned him in late January 2017. This conduct formed the basis of Flynn’s indictment on 18 U.S.C. § 1001 charges. In early January 2017, Trump was briefed on the intelligence community’s high-confidence conclusions that the Russians interfered in the election. Comey also privately briefed Trump on “sensitive material” in the Steele Dossier, including the “unverified allegation that the Russians had compromising tapes of the President involving conduct when he was a private citizen during a 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe Pageant.”

The report includes in a footnote the following detail: “On October 30, 2016, Michael Cohen received a text from Russian businessman Giorgi Rtskhiladze that said, ‘Stopped flow of tapes from Russia but not sure if there's anything else. Just so you know ....’ 10/30/16 Text Message, Rtskhiladze to Cohen. Rtskhiladze said ‘tapes’ referred to compromising tapes of Trump rumored to be held by persons associated with the Russian real estate conglomerate Crocus Group, which had helped host the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Russia.” Trump also asked a number of intelligence community leaders whether they could make public statements refuting the allegations in the Steele reports.

After senior leaders at the Department of Justice notified the White House Counsel’s office that Flynn had lied about his discussions with Kislyak, Trump invited Comey to dinner at the White House. Despite being warned by Chief of Staff Reince Priebus not to discuss Russia matters, Trump brought up the Steele report and whether the FBI could investigate to prove the allegations contained in it were false. He also stated that he expected Comey’s loyalty. Flynn ultimately resigned in mid-February, and Trump met alone with Comey one more time to ask him to encourage him to “see his way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” When challenged by the media about the White House’s account of why Flynn was fired, Trump continued to deny any Russian contacts and pressed for then-Deputy National Security Adviser KT McFarland to write an internal memo stating that Trump did not direct Flynn to contact Kislyak about the sanctions.

Analyzing this conduct through the lens of criminal obstruction, Mueller’s team writes that substantial evidence corroborated Comey’s account of Trump telling him to let the Flynn investigation go, and that they were able to establish that Trump connected the Flynn investigation to the FBI’s broader Russia investigation. Trump told Chris Christie that he thought that terminating Flynn would end “the whole Russia thing.”

Next, the special counsel describes Trump’s reaction to Attorney General Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation and Comey’s confirmation in congressional testimony of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference. Trump tried to stop Sessions from recusing, putting pressure on him both personally and through other White House personnel, and then after the fact tried to convince him to “unrecuse.” Following Comey’s testimony before the House intelligence committee about the Russia investigation, Trump was, the report says, “beside himself” and “getting hotter and hotter.” In response, Trump again reached out to intelligence community leaders, including Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers, to ask them to publicly push back on any suggestion that the president was involved in the Russian election-interference effort. In addition, “on at least two occasions, the President began Presidential Daily Briefings by stating that there was no collusion with Russia and he hoped a press statement to that effect could be issued.” Trump also called Comey directly on two occasions, despite being warned by McGahn not to speak directly to Comey to prevent the perception of interference, to ask him to publicly state that the president was not under investigation.

Analyzing the facts, Mueller’s team concludes that Trump was angry about Sessions’s decision to recuse and wanted an attorney general who would protect him from investigation. He did not want the cloud of the investigation hanging over him and detracting from “what he had accomplished.” His requests to intelligence community leaders to clear his name were not, however, interpreted as directives and were not acted upon.

Third, the report explores the events leading up to and surround Comey’s firing in May 2017. Trump wanted Comey to make public in his Senate Judiciary Committee testimony on May 3 that the president was not under investigation, and when Comey did not do that, Trump unilaterally decided to fire him. Trump told aides on May 5 that he intended to fire Comey and drafted a termination letter stating that Comey had informed Trump on three occasions that he was not under investigation. Only after making this decision did Trump discuss his intent with Justice Department officials and have Sessions and Rosenstein provide separate memoranda justifying Comey’s firing on other grounds. The White House used Rosenstein’s memo as the public justification and obscured the original letter and Trump’s true motivation. White House Counsel notes from that time say that the intent was for Trump’s original letter never to see light of day. Defending the decision to fire Comey, then-Deputy Press Secretary Huckabee Sanders said in a press conference that the White House had received positive feedback from FBI personnel about the decision and that Comey had lost the confidence of the rank-and-file. In her communications with the special counsel during the investigation, Sanders acknowledged that there was actually no basis for these statements.

In addition, after firing Comey, Trump also told the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off .... I’m not under investigation.” Trump subsequently did a television interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in which he said he had planned to fire Comey regardless of what Sessions and Rosenstein recommended, and that he did so because he did not like the Russia investigation and thought it was “an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”

Matching up this conduct with the obstruction charge, the special counsel writes that “firing Comey would qualify as an obstructive act if it had the natural and probable effect of interfering with or impeding the investigation-for example, if the termination would have the effect of delaying or disrupting the investigation or providing the President with the opportunity to appoint a director who would take a different approach to the investigation that the President perceived as more protective of his personal interests.” The team concludes that “substantial evidence indicates that the catalyst for the President’s decision to fire Comey was Comey’s unwillingness to publicly state that the President was not personally under investigation, despite the President’s repeated requests that Comey make such an announcement. ... The President’s other stated rationales for why he fired Comey are not similarly supported by the evidence.” The report notes that “the evidence does not establish that the termination of Comey was designed to cover up a conspiracy between the Trump Campaign and Russia. ... But the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns.”

The report next turns to Trump’s efforts to have Mueller removed as the special counsel, on the basis of claims of a conflict of interest which Trump’s advisers told him were “ridiculous.” Upon learning of Mueller’s appointment, “the President slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked.’ The President became angry and lambasted the Attorney General for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, ‘How could you let this happen, Jeff?’” Sessions submitted a resignation letter to Trump at one point, but Trump did not accept it. On several occasions, Trump tried to get Don McGahn to talk to Rosenstein about Mueller’s conflicts and have Mueller removed, one time, to McGahn’s memory, saying “Mueller has to go.” Chris Christie also recalls Trump calling to ask what Christie thought about firing Mueller, and Christie advised him against it. Neither McGahn nor Rosenstein acted on the president’s requests to fire the special counsel.

The special counsel writes that the weight of the evidence suggests that the president went further than simply trying to bring Mueller’s alleged conflicts to Department of Justice’s attention but, rather, instructed McGahn to have Rosenstein remove the special counsel. The evidence “shows that the President was not just seeking an examination of whether conflicts existed but instead was looking to use asserted conflicts as a way to terminate the Special Counsel.” This interpretation is supported by the fact that Trump continued to push McGahn to act on his behalf, rather than going through his personal counsel, as McGahn had indicated he should. Additionally, “substantial evidence indicates that the President’s attempts to remove the Special Counsel were linked to the Special Counsel’s oversight of investigations that involved the President’s conduct-- and, most immediately, to reports that the President was being investigated for potential obstruction of justice.”

Once the special counsel’s office began its work, Trump also tried a number of tactics to curtail the investigation. Mueller describes Trump’s conversations with former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski about the investigation and Sessions’s recusal. Trump directed Lewandowski—Lewandowski took detailed contemporaneous notes—to tell Sessions to deliver a speech saying Trump had done nothing wrong and that the special counsel’s investigation would be limited only to future election interference. Lewandowski discussed this with White House official Rick Dearborn, but neither relayed the message to Sessions. Trump also directed Reince Priebus to get Sessions to resign. Both Priebus and Don McGahn spoke with their personal attorneys about Trump’s directive and decided not to push Sessions to resign.

Assessing this conduct, the special counsel writes that “the President wanted Sessions to disregard his recusal from the investigation, which had followed from a formal DOJ ethics review, and have Sessions declare that he knew for a fact that there were no Russians involved with the campaign. The President further directed that Sessions should explain that the President should not be subject to an investigation because he hasn't done anything wrong” (internal quotation marks omitted). The special counsel concludes that “substantial evidence indicates that the President’s effort to have Sessions limit the scope of the Special Counsel’s investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President's and his campaign’s conduct.”

The special counsel next describes Trump’s efforts to prevent public disclosure of the Trump Tower meeting. According to Trump’s written answers to Mueller’s questions, he had no recollection of learning about the meeting at the time or any time before the election. Mueller writes that Trump’s lawyers first became aware of the email chain with Donald Trump, Jr. regarding the meeting in June 2017, following a document request to the Trump campaign from the Senate intelligence committee. Trump repeatedly rebuffed efforts by both Kushner and Hope Hicks, then the White House director of strategic communications, to be told details about the emails. Hicks, who thought the emails looked “really bad,” wanted to provide information to the press before the emails leaked on their own, but Trump rebuffed those efforts. When Trump learned that the New York Times was writing a story on the emails in July 2017, he directed Hicks not to respond to the paper’s inquiries—a directive Hicks found strange, because the president usually considered being unresponsive to the press to be the “ultimate sin.” After Trump directed Hicks to tell the press that the meeting had been about adoptions, she workshopped a statement with Trump Jr. on his behalf.

In Mueller’s view, these actions are “directed at the press” and would only constitute obstruction if Trump had “sought to withhold information from or mislead congressional investigators or the Special Counsel.” The evidence does not establish this, nor does it establish intent to do so. For similar reasons, the evidence does not establish a nexus to an ongoing proceeding—though a nexus would exist to the grand jury investigation supervised by Mueller had the president sought to mislead Mueller or Congress rather than the press.

Mueller then examines Trump’s efforts from the summer of 2017 to 2018 to have Sessions take over control of the Mueller investigation. After Mueller was appointed, the report states, Trump called Sessions at home in an effort to convince him to reverse his recusal from the Russia investigation and prosecute Hillary Clinton. Then, in July 2017, Trump asked White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter whether then-Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand was “on the team” and would be interested in becoming attorney general and supervising the Mueller investigation. Though Trump requested that Porter see if Brand would be interested, Porter told Mueller that did not do so, because he was uncomfortable with the request and understood it as an effort to end the Mueller investigation. Porter likewise recounts a meeting in which Trump asked Sessions to investigate Clinton—and then tweeted angrily when Sessions failed to do so—and another in which Trump again asked Sessions to reverse his recusal. Speaking to Porter months later, Trump compared Sessions disfavorably to “the great attorneys he had in the pass with successful win records, such as Roy Cohn.”

Trump’s actions toward Sessions “could qualify as obstructive acts” in that Trump sought to place Sessions in charge of the investigation in order for him to impede it, Mueller writes. There was a nexus to an official proceeding, insofar as the grand jury investigation was public knowledge at the time of Trump’s actions. And “there is evidence that at least one purpose of the President’s conduct … was to have Sessions assume control over the Russia investigation and supervise it in a way that would restrict its scope.”

The next incident examined by Mueller is Trump’s orders to McGahn to deny that Trump told McGahn to fire Mueller. After news reports surfaced in January 2018 that Trump had asked McGahn to dismiss Mueller in June 2017, Trump and his personal lawyers repeatedly pushed McGahn to deny the story, though McGahn refused. According to Porter, Trump directed Porter to “create a record” internally that Trump had not told him to fire Mueller, saying, “If he doesn’t write a letter, then maybe I’ll have to fire him.” After McGahn refused, Trump then met with him and told him to “correct” the story. The two debated what Trump’s original instructions had been: On McGahn’s account, Trump had told him, “Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the special counsel,” but Trump claimed he had only asked McGahn to raise the conflicts issue with Rosenstein and leave it to the deputy attorney general. He again asked McGahn to deny the story and McGahn again declined. Mueller writes that Trump also asked McGahn why he had told the special counsel’s office about Trump’s effort to have Mueller removed, asking, “What about those notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.” When McGahn said he took notes because he was a “real lawyer,” Trump responded by stating that Roy Cohn had not taken notes. Trump’s personal lawyer called McGahn’s lawyer after the meeting and said that the president was “fine” with McGahn.

Analyzing Trump’s conduct, Mueller notes that “there is some evidence” that the president genuinely believed press reports were wrong and that he had not told McGahn to ask Rosenstein remove Mueller from his role, pointing to the specifics of his debate with McGahn over the wording he had used. However, Mueller then describes a much larger body of evidence suggesting that Trump knew he was asking McGahn to lie. Regarding the nexus, Mueller argues that Trump’s effort to make McGahn write a false letter “for our records” suggests the president “likely contemplated the ongoing investigation” and the possibility of future testimony by McGahn. “Substantial evidence” indicates that the president acted as such to influence the investigation.

Mueller then examines Trump’s conduct toward Flynn, Manafort and an individual whose name has been redacted but from context seems to be Roger Stone. After Flynn left the White House, Trump was flattering toward him in public and repeatedly had aides pass messages to him indicating support. However, after Flynn withdrew from his joint defense agreement with Trump in November 2017, Trump’s personal lawyers informed Flynn’s lawyers that they would interpret the withdrawal as an expression of “hostility” toward their client—a statement Flynn’s counsel understood as an effort to make Flynn reconsider. In Manafort’s case, Manafort reportedly told Rick Gates that Trump’s counsel had made clear Trump would “take care” of Gates and Manafort if they did not cooperate. When Gates asked Manafort if pardons had been discussed, Manafort said the word had not been used. Finally, though the last section is redacted, it seems to concern Roger Stone: The report cites a comment made by Trump in an interview with the New York Post and records him as discussing “Manafort, Corsi -redacted-” In the full interview, Trump refers to “Manafort, Corsi and Roger Stone.”

Mueller writes that a nexus to an official proceeding existed in all three cases. No further analysis is available regarding the redacted name. Regarding Flynn, Mueller states that while the exchange between Flynn’s counsel and Trump’s counsel “could have had the potential to affect Flynn’s decision to cooperate,” issues of attorney-client privilege meant that “we could not determine” whether Trump was involved in or knew about that exchange—which contributes to Mueller’s finding that evidence of Trump’s intent on the matter was “inconclusive.” Regarding Manafort, Mueller considers both Trump’s public statements of sympathy toward Manafort and comments suggesting the possibility of a pardon as evidence of an obstructive act, both in affecting Manafort’s decision regarding whether to cooperate and potentially influencing the trial jury in Manafort’s case. While evidence indicates that Trump intended to encourage Manafort against cooperation, however, Mueller writes that his intent is less clear as to influencing the jury trial.

Finally, the report considers Trump’s conduct regarding his former attorney Michael Cohen. Cohen began to be asked by reporters in January 2017 about the Trump Tower Moscow deal, and falsely told them that it ended in January 2016 in an effort to “stay on message”; Cohen “discussed the talking points with Trump but that he did not explicitly tell Trump he thought they were untrue because Trump already knew they were untrue.” Cohen entered into a joint defense agreement with the president, and at one point was told by Trump’s personal counsel that Cohen would be protected unless he “went rogue.”

In 2017, Cohen testified before the House and Senate intelligence committees that the Trump Tower Moscow Project had ended by 2016, when in reality the project continued until June 2016. Trump’s counsel had reviewed Cohen’s drafts of his statement, and when Cohen told Trump’s personal lawyer that the statement left out information on additional communications with Russia, the counsel told him not to elaborate and to keep his statement short. Although the president never directed Cohen to lie to Congress, Cohen said, “Trump already knew (the talking points) were untrue.”

The report also chronicles how throughout the investigation into payments to Stormy Daniels, Trump told Cohen to “hang in there” and “stay strong.” At least three other people linked to Trump told Cohen that Trump was “supporting” him, and Cohen had an exchange with Trump’s personal attorney that he understood to indicate that “he would be taken care of by the president, either through a pardon or through the investigation being shut down.”

Regarding Cohen’s statement to Congress, Mueller writes that there is evidence that Trump was aware of Cohen’s false testimony but that “the evidence available to us does not establish” that Trump “directed or aided” that false testimony. The report states that “the evidence … could support an inference” that Trump intended to keep Cohen from cooperating and then to dissuade him from providing information once he began cooperating. All Trump’s conduct occurred during multiple investigations into Cohen, providing the nexus.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump blames McGahn after Mueller paints damning portrait with notes from White House aides

President Trump seethed Friday over the special counsel’s damning portrayal of his protracted campaign to thwart the Russia investigation and directed much of his ire at former White House counsel Donald McGahn, whose ubiquity in the report’s footnotes laid bare his extensive cooperation in chronicling the president’s actions.

Some of the report’s most derogatory scenes were attributed not only to the recollections of McGahn and other witnesses, but also to the contemporaneous notes kept by several senior administration officials — the kind of paper trail that Trump has long sought to avoid leaving.

Many White House aides use pen and paper both as a defensive mechanism — such as when then-chief of staff John Kelly documented Trump’s move to grant security clearances to his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner — and as a means of creating the first draft of a page-turning presidency.

But the fact that some of those notes became primary source material for Mueller to paint a vivid portrait of Trump’s deception and malfeasance angered the president, who was stewing over the media coverage as he decamped to Florida for the holiday weekend, according to people familiar with his thinking.

“Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue,” the president tweeted Friday morning from his Mar-a-Lago Club. “Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed.”

Trump went on to claim that some of the statements made about him in the Mueller report were “total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad).”

Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani said that since charges were not brought against Trump for obstruction of justice, Mueller should not have so thoroughly detailed the acts that were under examination, such as the president’s attempts to remove the special counsel and curtail the probe.

“The narrative is written as if it’s all true and somebody proved it. Nobody proved it,” Giuliani said in an interview Friday. “I’m frustrated by the report because in some ways I’d love to have a trial and prove that it’s not true.”

Giuliani singled out McGahn, noting that Trump waived executive privilege to allow him to describe episodes to Mueller.

“If McGahn thought any of those things were crimes, why did he stay there?” Giuliani asked. “They’re trying to make it out as if there’s something illegal about what happened with McGahn. The guy is a very good lawyer. If he believed that there was something illegal, he wouldn’t have stayed in his job.”

According to the account McGahn provided investigators, Trump directed him to call Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who supervised the Russia probe, and tell him to remove Mueller as special counsel. McGahn refused and prepared to resign but was convinced by colleagues to remain as White House counsel.

McGahn was unavailable for comment Friday. One of his friends, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, said McGahn was focused on his work at the Jones Day law firm and is trying to lay low, hopeful of avoiding a dispute with Trump.

Trump had a tempestuous working relationship with McGahn, who departed the White House last fall, but a White House official who is friendly with McGahn said the president’s fury was driven in part by news coverage and therefore unlikely to last long. Several Trump advisers said they believed McGahn was being unfairly targeted inside the West Wing because of past tensions with Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

“If anything, Don saved this presidency from the president,” one adviser said, requesting anonymity to speak candidly. “If Don had actually gone through with what the president wanted, you would have had a constitutional crisis. The president’s ego is hurt, but he’s still here.”

Despite Trump’s angry tweets Friday morning about the Mueller report, the president was in a good mood as he dined on the Mar-a-Lago patio after landing in Palm Beach on Thursday night. On Friday, he played golf with conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who strongly defended the president on the air Thursday.

“My friends, I’m telling you, this report is made to order for the Democrat Party to ignore what is the only important thing about this: No collusion, no obstruction, period,” Limbaugh told his listeners.

After huddling with his lawyers, including White House attorney Emmet Flood, Trump complained that the second volume of the Mueller report, which focuses on obstruction of justice, is a political document intended to make him look bad, according to a senior White House official.

Former Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller argued that the report’s revelations “are not necessarily vote determinative issues. Any of this type of West Wing inside baseball drama, or somewhat contrived stories, nobody in the real world actually votes on that. Nobody in the real world is reading all 450 pages of that.”

More than a dozen aides provided notes to the special counsel, with “notes” mentioned in the Mueller report at least 160 times. As evidence for the obstruction of justice inquiry, Mueller relied heavily on notes recorded by McGahn’s chief of staff, Anne Donaldson, as well as those taken by former White House staff secretary Rob Porter and Sessions chief of staff Jody Hunt, according to the report’s citations.

The report also cited interviews with McGahn, Porter, former chief of staff Reince Priebus, former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and former communications director Hope Hicks, among others.

Once Trump and his lawyers decided to cooperate with the special counsel investigation, many administration officials voluntarily sat for interviews with Mueller’s team and shared their emails, notes and other records. Several witnesses said Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer who handled the Russia probe during its first year, instructed them to cooperate with Mueller and they would have told Trump or his lawyers what they were prepared to say or what notes they were going to provide if asked.

Now, some of them said they are worried Trump may try to retaliate against them, as the president has in the past when he believes aides cooperated with some book authors.

Before becoming president, Trump left the impression with his employees that he did not want them to take too many notes, for fear of a paper trail that could haunt them down the road. Sam Nunberg, one of Trump’s former political advisers, recalled him saying, “I can’t believe what people put in emails.”

In the White House, many aides take notes — sometimes to memorialize strange moments or orders Trump gave that made them uncomfortable, and sometimes simply to remember one’s marching orders or what was agreed to during a meeting.

Trump sometimes warily views note-taking in the Oval Office. He rarely takes copious notes himself, aides said, but occasionally scribbles on the side of papers. During a briefing on cybersecurity hacks, for instance, Trump bragged to officials that he never used email and said companies would be better off without using technology that harbors such records.

Trump’s nervousness over there being a record of his private comments is evident in the requirement that guests at his fundraisers must put their phones in their bags because, as he put it at a recent Texas fundraiser, he sometimes makes problematic comments.

Trump is quoted in the Mueller report admonishing McGahn for taking notes; he replied that he kept a record of conversations because he was a “real lawyer.”

Yet Trump understands the power of a written record.

In another scene from Mueller’s report, Trump instructs former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to “write this down” when he asked Lewandowski to help secure the resignation of Jeff Sessions as attorney general.

Mueller also reveals that Trump asked deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland to draft an internal letter stating that he had not directed national security adviser Michael Flynn to discuss sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. McFarland declined, according to Mueller’s report, because she did not know whether that was true.

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

Nothing to see here:



Just one of the best smug faces in the biz.

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

A Darker Portrait Emerges of Trump’s Attacks on the Justice Department

WASHINGTON — Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, praised President Trump last spring for backing the rule of law and commended the Constitution and American culture for protecting lawfulness. “I don’t think there’s any threat to the rule of law in America today,” he said at a celebration of the concept.

Mr. Rosenstein left unmentioned that he and other senior leaders at the department and the F.B.I. were enduring Mr. Trump’s sustained attacks on law enforcement in both public and private. The president had demanded Mr. Rosenstein falsely claim responsibility for dismissing the bureau’s director and had toyed with firing the attorney general, prompting Mr. Rosenstein and the Justice Department’s No. 3 official to vow to quit if the termination happened.

The long-awaited report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, released on Thursday painted a portrait of law enforcement leaders more fiercely under siege than previously known. They struggled to navigate Mr. Trump’s apparent disregard for their mission through a mix of threats to resign, quiet defiance and capitulation to some presidential demands. While their willingness to stay quiet might have protected their institutions, it also helped empower Mr. Trump to continue his attacks.

Mr. Trump made good on some threats, forcing out Attorney General Jeff Sessions the day after the midterm elections in November. The third-ranking Justice Department official, Rachel Brand, left three months before Mr. Rosenstein’s speech to become Walmart’s top lawyer. Mr. Rosenstein, who had an inside look at the investigation as its overseer and at Mr. Trump’s behavior as a top political appointee, is himself set to depart.

“The bad news is that the attacks were relentless, but the good news is that the department has a thin political layer and a strong tradition of professionalism,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former chief of staff to the F.B.I. director fired by Mr. Trump, James B. Comey. “But to see it and to read about the president’s behavior is deeply disturbing.”

The president sought to undermine the Justice Department’s leaders and thwart the Russia investigation from his first days in office.

He demanded that Mr. Comey publicly say that he was not under investigation, and he asked Dana J. Boente, who was briefly the acting attorney general before Mr. Sessions was confirmed in February 2017, to let him know whether the F.B.I. was investigating the White House, according to the special counsel’s report.

His attacks on law enforcement were most vividly embodied in his treatment of Mr. Sessions, who was himself investigated by the F.B.I. over whether he lied about contacts he had with Russian officials during the election, the report said.

Mr. Sessions, a top 2016 Trump campaign supporter, recused himself early into his tenure from election-related investigations, drawing Mr. Trump’s ire. After the special counsel was appointed in May 2017, the president demanded Mr. Sessions’s resignation, saying he wanted an attorney general who would harness the Justice Department’s power to protect the presidency.

Mr. Sessions submitted his resignation, touching off a scramble among White House aides to keep the president from accepting it. While he let Mr. Sessions keep his job, Mr. Trump pocketed his resignation letter and set off fears within the White House that he would wield it to get what he wanted from law enforcement officials.

Reince Priebus, the former White House chief of staff, told Mr. Sessions that the president could use the letter as a kind of “shock collar,” according to the report, and he told Mr. Trump that he had “D.O.J. by the throat.” It took Mr. Priebus two weeks to get the president to hand over the letter.

Seeking a loyal attorney general, Mr. Trump asked a White House aide about Ms. Brand, a George W. Bush administration veteran. Was she “on the team,” and could he gauge her appetite for overseeing the Mueller inquiry or even becoming the attorney general?

But the aide never reached out to Ms. Brand “because he was sensitive to the implications of that action and did not want to be involved in a chain of events associated with an effort to end the investigation or fire the special counsel,” according to the report.

When Mr. Trump pushed Mr. Priebus to secure Mr. Sessions’s resignation, Mr. Priebus warned the president that both Mr. Rosenstein and Ms. Brand would also resign, a scenario certain to plunge the Justice Department into crisis.

The president agreed to hold off on firing Mr. Sessions for a day, to prevent the Sunday morning television news shows from focusing on it, and eventually dropped his plan to oust him. Instead, he stepped up his public criticisms. The attacks became so pointed, harsh and relentless that Mr. Sessions prepared another resignation letter and carried it with him whenever he went to the White House, according to the report.

“Attorney General Sessions carrying a resignation letter with him each time he had a meeting at the White House is a vivid reflection of the dysfunctional and unprecedented approach this president has taken towards the Department of Justice and federal law enforcement,” said Matthew S. Axelrod, a partner at Linklaters and a former Justice Department official and prosecutor under Mr. Bush and President Barack Obama.

Mr. Sessions resisted multiple entreaties to reverse his recusal so he could oversee and curtail the Mueller inquiry; by the time the criminal investigation of him ended in March 2018, he could do little to get back in the president’s graces.

Mr. Rosenstein, whose office received briefings every other week on the progress of the investigation, would have glimpsed the gravity of the situation as the special counsel interviewed witnesses.

He was also in the unusual position of being a witness himself in the investigation that he oversaw. Critics have said that role should have prompted Mr. Rosenstein to recuse himself from the inquiry, but top ethics lawyers at the Justice Department cleared him to oversee the special counsel, a department spokeswoman said. She added that the special counsel’s office never asked about or questioned that decision.

After Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey as the director of the F.B.I., setting off a storm of criticism, he asked Mr. Rosenstein to give a news conference and say that the firing had been his idea.

Mr. Rosenstein warned the president that the news conference was a bad idea “because if the press asked him, he would tell the truth,” Mr. Mueller’s investigators wrote. Mr. Sessions told White House lawyers that Mr. Rosenstein was upset about being used as a pretext for the ouster, and both officials told Donald F. McGahn II, then the White House counsel, that Mr. Trump was spinning a false narrative about Mr. Rosenstein’s role in the termination.

Mr. Rosenstein proved to be deeply rattled during the chaotic days after Mr. Comey’s firing. He discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump as president and suggested that he secretly record Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, according to people briefed on the events. Mr. Rosenstein has denied their accounts.

When those revelations surfaced in news reports more than a year later, in September 2018, Mr. Rosenstein braced himself to be fired. But after meeting with Mr. Trump and his aides, Mr. Rosenstein held on to his job and oversaw the Mueller investigation through the end.

In February, he once again complimented Mr. Trump in a speech about the rule of law.

“I’m very confident that when we look back in the long run on this era of the Department of Justice,” he said, “the president will deserve credit for the folks that he appointed to run the department.”

Attorney General William P. Barr, who took office that month, appears to be trying to reset the relationship between the White House and the Justice Department. He has helped further the president’s agenda on health care and immigration, and he has vowed to investigate whether the Russia investigation was tainted by what he called unlawful “spying.”

He also worked to offset the Mueller report’s damning portrait of Mr. Trump. On Thursday, just before the report’s release, Mr. Barr held a news conference in which he offered a striking defense of Mr. Trump, highlighting facts to help build a case for exoneration and avoiding assertions that were more damaging for the president.

“There was relentless speculation in the news media about the president’s personal culpability,” Mr. Barr told reporters. “Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was in fact no collusion.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Mueller Report Shows Depth of Connections Between Trump Campaign and Russians



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[Athos_131]

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[Athos_131]

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[Athos_131]

Mueller Witnesses Who Once Served in White House Now Fear Trump’s Ire

WASHINGTON — President Trump and his lawyers decided from the start to fully cooperate with the special counsel’s investigation, gambling in 2017 that they could hasten its end if they gave prosecutors unfettered access to White House aides and other Trump associates.

Instead, the 448-page report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, released on Thursday revealed that investigators used dozens of hours of witness accounts from Mr. Trump’s advisers to paint a detailed and damaging portrait of his efforts to interfere with the investigation.

Now some of the witnesses named in the report, who have departed the White House but rely on access to Mr. Trump for their livelihoods, fear his ire. Some have begun calling current and former administration officials and others in the president’s orbit to seek clues about Mr. Trump’s state of mind, according to four special counsel witnesses who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

One called friends and colleagues in the days before the report was released to see whether he could have the Justice Department redact his name from Mr. Mueller’s report, according to two people told of the matter. The idea went nowhere.

In the time it takes to post a tweet critical or dismissive of former aides, the president can jeopardize their status as Trump insiders and galvanize his supporters and surrogates in the news media to line up against anyone who cooperated with the special counsel’s inquiry.

In Washington, lobbying firms and corporations seeking inroads to the administration and advice on how to navigate an unpredictable president who makes policy on Twitter have sought out those who worked for him.

The former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, now a consultant, has fashioned himself as someone who understands Mr. Trump. The former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II is a partner at the law firm Jones Day, which represents Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has written two books that relied heavily on his access to the president.

And even if the witnesses escape Mr. Trump’s wrath for now, they could find themselves in the cross hairs later if they are called to testify on Capitol Hill as Democrats scrutinize the president. The Mueller report provided a road map for congressional Democrats, whose leaders came under increased pressure on Friday to begin impeachment proceedings when Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called for moving toward Mr. Trump’s ouster, the first major presidential candidate to do so.

Mr. Mueller’s report laid bare how heavily investigators relied on the people closest to the president. Mr. Priebus, who is cited over 60 times in its pages, believed that Mr. Trump wanted him to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions and install a loyalist to oversee the Russia investigation. Mr. Lewandowski described how Mr. Trump also urged him to pressure Mr. Sessions to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.

Handwritten notes by another White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, appear in a key part of the account of potential presidential obstruction of justice, describing an unsuccessful effort by Mr. Trump to persuade Mr. McGahn to dispute statements he made to investigators.

As those unflattering details made their way from the report into accounts by the news media, the first wave of public attacks from Mr. Trump and his legal team bubbled up. Mr. Trump tweeted on Friday that “statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue.”

“Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed,” Mr. Trump said. He did not identify the witnesses he was referring to, but the report said the president had complained to Mr. McGahn for taking notes.

Mr. Trump has privately complained to aides since the report was released about the cooperation of several people, zeroing in on Mr. McGahn, whose interviews were cited 157 times by investigators, more than any of the other roughly 500 witnesses.

The president stewed about the Mueller report to one adviser after another on Friday at his golf course in Florida, dismissing the findings and making clear he was keeping track of who in his orbit had participated in the investigation, according to a person who spoke with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump had not read the document himself, according to people close to him. That means that the fates of the witnesses will depend in the coming days on how they are portrayed on television and on how friends and advisers tell Mr. Trump, who was spending the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., about the report.

The president has long complained about Mr. McGahn, a longtime Washington lawyer who served as the Trump campaign’s top lawyer and who frequently clashed with Mr. Trump during his two years as White House counsel. Inside the White House, he took the lead on one of Mr. Trump’s most significant accomplishments — stacking the federal courts with conservative judges — but fell out of favor with the president by taking no action to protect him from the Justice Department’s scrutiny.

As the investigation wore on, the president told one aide that Mr. McGahn “leaked to the media to make himself look good” and called him a “lying bastard,” investigators wrote.

Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani attacked Mr. McGahn and the recollections he shared with prosecutors, denying that the president told Mr. McGahn to fire Mr. Mueller. Mr. Trump was simply venting his frustrations about the investigation, Mr. Giuliani argued.

“All you are getting is one version of events, and the real version of events may be very different,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview.

“I don’t want to go so far as saying he’s lying,” Mr. Giuliani said of Mr. McGahn. “He’s mistaken. He may have a bad recollection.”

Mr. McGahn’s lawyer, William A. Burck, said his client’s account in the report was accurate. “It’s a mystery why Rudy Giuliani feels the need to relitigate incidents the attorney general and deputy attorney general have concluded were not obstruction,” Mr. Burck said in a statement. “Don, nonetheless, appreciates that the president gave him the opportunity to serve as White House counsel and assist him with his signature accomplishments.”

Some of the witnesses and their lawyers responded to Mr. Trump’s anger at the report by noting that it was his decision to cooperate with Mr. Mueller’s investigators. Three former White House aides who were witnesses in the investigation said Mr. Trump and one of his lawyers decided in 2017 not to assert executive privilege and also encouraged aides to cooperate with the special counsel.

Mr. Trump and Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer who encouraged participation, set in motion a course where witnesses had to be forthcoming with investigators or risk charges of perjury. Now, they said, Mr. Trump is faulting them when he could have asserted privilege over his conversations with aides and tried to prevent investigators from learning about them.

The idea that Mr. McGahn is the target of the president’s wrath is complicated by the fact that Mr. McGahn tried to stop the White House from such extensive cooperation. But at the time the president decided to cooperate, Mr. McGahn had fallen out of favor with Mr. Trump, largely because he had refused to fire Mr. Mueller and the president blamed him, in part, for the special counsel’s appointment.

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[Athos_131]

Trump asked his lawyer to cross legal lines. The Mueller report shows how he pushed back.

More than 700 days since special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was selected for the job, the long-awaited moment arrived on Thursday: Attorney General William P. Barr released the Mueller report.

As expected, the 448-page, redacted report laid out in granular detail 10 actions by President Trump that were examined by the special counsel’s office as possible obstruction of justice.

The report landed with a few surprises. Chief among them was that Trump on multiple occasions did try to influence the investigation. His attempts, however, were “mostly unsuccessful” because “the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

The White House’s revolving door has left some members of Trump’s inner circle investigated, indicted and worse off than they were before. But not former White House counsel Donald McGahn, who left the administration in October but was front and center in thwarting some of Trump’s efforts.

Here are several notable Trump requests and McGahn appearances in the Mueller report, which left Trump “seething" Friday and directing “much of his ire” at the former White House counsel, The Post reported.

Request 1: Convince Sessions not to recuse himself.
The Justice Department began assessing whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions should recuse himself from the Russia investigation in late February 2017.

According to the Mueller report, when Trump learned Sessions was considering it, he called McGahn and urged him “to tell [Sessions] not to recuse himself.”

McGahn testified that he did contact Sessions, per the president’s request, and relayed that Trump was unhappy about the possibility. Sessions said he planned to follow the ethics officials’ final recommendation for recusal.

“They said that since I had involvement with the campaign, I should not be involved in any campaign investigation,” Sessions said at the time, adding that he agreed with the assessment.

McGahn returned to Trump, who, according to the report, was irate. The president said that the recusal was “unfair” and that it was “interfering with his ability to govern and undermining his authority with foreign leaders.”

Throughout the day, McGahn spoke to Sessions, his personal lawyer, chief of staff and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) but was unable to persuade him to change his mind. Sessions said that his decision to recuse was not discretionary.

That afternoon, on May 2, 2017, Sessions announced his recusal, explaining “the decision to recuse was not a close call” under the law.

Trump called McGahn, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon to the Oval Office the next day.

McGahn recalled Trump began the meeting “expressing anger” and saying, “I don’t have a lawyer.” Trump went on to suggest that “[Roy] Cohn would fight for the President whereas McGahn would not.”

Request 2: Remove special counsel Mueller.
Mueller’s appointment on May 17, 2017, prompted Trump to say that “it was the end of his presidency,” according to the report.

McGahn testified that the president had asked him to “do crazy shit,” like directing him in June to have Mueller removed. Trump, he said, ordered him to tell then-acting attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein not only that there was a conflict, but also that “Mueller has to go.”

(After Mueller was cleared to conduct the investigation, McGahn told Trump that “he would not call Rosenstein and that he would suggest that the President not make such a call either,” according to the lawyer’s notes.)

Trump spoke to McGahn about “knocking out Mueller” on at least two occasions, making it unlikely that he misheard or misinterpreted the president, Mueller wrote in the report.

[Report shows how Mueller team struggled on obstruction issue]

In June 2017, The Washington Post reported that an obstruction investigation into Trump’s action was underway. Trump called McGahn and asked him to act immediately: “You gotta do this. You gotta call Rod,” he recounted.

McGahn hung up and decided to resign, according to the report, because he “did not want to participate in events that he described as akin to the Saturday Night Massacre.”

McGahn “called his lawyer, drove to the White House, packed up his office, prepared to submit a resignation letter with his chief of staff.” He informed Priebus and Bannon that he was resigning. At their insistence, McGahn returned to work that Monday, but Trump did not raise the issue with him again.

Request 3: Deny reports of requests to fire the special counsel.
In January 2018, the New York Times reported that Trump had asked McGahn to have Mueller fired. The president’s personal lawyer requested that McGahn release a statement claiming the story was inaccurate.

McGahn refused several times.

In one Oval Office meeting, Trump challenged his note-taking practices; according to the report, Trump was angry that McGahn had told federal investigators he directed McGahn to have Mueller removed.

McGahn recounted Trump telling him: “Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.”

According to the Mueller report, McGahn said “real lawyers” keep notes, then explained that creating a record was “not a bad thing.”

The president responded, “I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.”

The Post reported Friday that “the fact that some of those notes became primary source material for Mueller to paint a vivid portrait of Trump’s deception and malfeasance angered the president.”

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