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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY TO VOLUME IRUSSIAN SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGNThe Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out the earliest Russian interference operations identified by the investigation—a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States. The IRA was based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and received funding from Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin and companies he controlled. Prigozhin is widely reported to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, [Redacted: Harm to Ongoing Matter]In mid-2014, the IRA sent employees to the United States on an intelligence-gathering mission with instructions [Redacted: Harm to Ongoing Matter]The IRA later used social media accounts and interest groups to sow discord in the U.S. political system through what it termed "information warfare." The campaign evolved from a generalized program designed in 2014 and 2015 to undermine the U.S. electoral system, to a targeted operation that by early 2016 favored candidate Trump and disparaged candidate Clinton. The IRA's operation also included the purchase of political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S. persons and entities, as well as the staging of political rallies inside the United States. To organize those rallies, IRA employees posed as U.S. grassroots entities and persons and made contact with Trump supporters and Trump Campaign officials in the United States. The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons conspired or coordinated with the IRA. Section II of this report details the Office's investigation of the Russian social media campaign.RUSSIAN HACKING OPERATIONSAt the same time that the IRA operation began to focus on supporting candidate Trump in early 2016, the Russian government employed a second form of interference: cyber intrusions (hacking) and releases of hacked materials damaging to the Clinton Campaign. The Russian intelligence service known as the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Army (GRU) carried out these operations.In March 2016, the GRU began hacking the email accounts of Clinton Campaign volunteers and employees, including campaign chairman John Podesta. In April 2016, the GRU hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The GRU stole hundreds of thousands of documents from the compromised email accounts and networks. Around the time that the DNC announced in mid-June 2016 the Russian government's role in hacking its network, the GRU began disseminating stolen materials through the fictitious online personas "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0." The GRU later released additional materials through the organization WikiLeaks.The presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump ("Trump Campaign" or "Campaign") showed interest in WikiLeaks's releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton. Beginning in June 2016, [Redacted: Harm to Ongoing Matter] forecast to senior Campaign officials that WikiLeaks would release information damaging to candidate Clinton. WikiLeaks's first release came in July 2016. Around the same time, candidate Trump announced that he hoped Russia would recover emails described as missing from a private server used by Clinton when she was Secretary of State (he later said that he was speaking sarcastically). [Redacted: Harm to Ongoing Matter] WikiLeaks began releasing Podesta’s stolen emails on October 7, 2016, less than one hour after a U.S. media outlet released video considered damaging to candidate Trump. Section III of this Report details the Office's investigation into the Russian hacking operations, as well as other efforts by Trump Campaign supporters to obtain Clinton-related emails.RUSSIAN CONTACTS WITH THE CAMPAIGNThe social media campaign and the GRU hacking operations coincided with a series of contacts between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government. The Office investigated whether those contacts reflected or resulted in the Campaign conspiring or coordinating with Russia in its election-interference activities. 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 investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.The Russian contacts consisted of business connections, offers of assistance to the Campaign, invitations for candidate Trump and Putin to meet in person, invitations for Campaign officials and representatives of the Russian government to meet, and policy positions seeking improved U.S.-Russian relations. Section IV of this Report details the contacts between Russia and the Trump Campaign during the campaign and transition periods, the most salient of which are summarized below in chronological order.2015. Some of the earliest contacts were made in connection with a Trump Organization real-estate project in Russia known as Trump Tower Moscow. Candidate Trump signed a Letter of Intent for Trump Tower Moscow by November 2015, and in January 2016 Trump Organization executive Michael Cohen emailed and spoke about the project with the office of Russian government press secretary Dmitry Peskov. The Trump Organization pursued the project through at least June 2016, including by considering travel to Russia by Cohen and candidate Trump.Spring 2016. Campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos made early contact with Joseph Mifsud, a London-based professor who had connections to Russia and traveled to Moscow in April 2016. Immediately upon his return to London from that trip, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that the Russian government had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. One week later, in the first week of May 2016, Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton. Throughout that period of time and for several months thereafter, Papadopoulos worked with Mifsud and two Russian nationals to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government. No meeting took place.Summer 2016. Russian outreach to the Trump Campaign continued into the summer of 2016, as candidate Trump was becoming the presumptive Republican nominee for President. On June 9, 2016, for example, a Russian lawyer met with senior Trump Campaign officials Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and campaign chairman Paul Manafort to deliver what the email proposing the meeting had described as "official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary." The materials were offered to Trump Jr. as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." The written communications setting up the meeting showed that the Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist candidate Trump's electoral prospects, but the Russian lawyer's presentation did not provide such information.Days after the June 9 meeting, on June 14, 2016, a cybersecurity firm and the DNC announced that Russian government hackers had infiltrated the DNC and obtained access to opposition research on candidate Trump, among other documents.In July 2016, Campaign foreign policy advisor Carter Page traveled in his personal capacity to Moscow and gave the keynote address at the New Economic School. Page had lived and worked in Russia between 2003 and 2007. After returning to the United States, Page became acquainted with at least two Russian intelligence officers, one of whom was later charged in 2015 with conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of Russia. Page's July 2016 trip to Moscow and his advocacy for pro-Russian foreign policy drew media attention. The Campaign then distanced itself from Page and, by late September 2016, removed him from the Campaign.July 2016 was also the month WikiLeaks first released emails stolen by the GRU from the DNC. On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks posted thousands of internal DNC documents revealing information about the Clinton Campaign. Within days, there was public reporting that U.S. intelligence agencies had "high confidence" that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the DNC. And within a week of the release, a foreign government informed the FBI about its May 2016 interaction with Papadopoulos and his statement that the Russian government could assist the Trump Campaign. On July 31, 2016, based on the foreign government reporting, the FBI opened an investigation into potential coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign.Separately, on August 2, 2016, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met in New York City with his long-time business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence. Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel's Office was a "backdoor" way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine; both men believed the plan would require candidate Trump's assent to succeed (were he to be elected President). They also discussed the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort's strategy for winning Democratic votes in Midwestern states. Months before that meeting, Manafort had caused internal polling data to be shared with Kilimnik, and the sharing continued for some period of time after their August meeting.Fall 2016. On October 7, 2016, the media released video of candidate Trump speaking in graphic terms about women years earlier, which was considered damaging to his candidacy. Less than an hour later, WikiLeaks made its second release: thousands of John Podesta's emails that had been stolen by the GRU in late March 2016. The FBI and other U.S. government institutions were at the time continuing their investigation of suspected Russian government efforts to interfere in the presidential election. That same day, October 7, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint public statement "that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations." Those "thefts" and the "disclosures" of the hacked materials through online platforms such as WikiLeaks, the statement continued, "are intended to interfere with the US election process."Post-2016 Election. Immediately after the November 8 election, Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new administration. The most senior levels of the Russian government encouraged these efforts. The Russian Embassy made contact hours after the election to congratulate the President-Elect and to arrange a call with President Putin. Several Russian businessmen picked up the effort from there.Kirill Dmitriev, the chief executive officer of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, was among the Russians who tried to make contact with the incoming administration. In early December, a business associate steered Dmitriev to Erik Prince, a supporter of the Trump Campaign and an associate of senior Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Dmitriev and Prince later met face-to-face in January 2017 in the Seychelles and discussed U.S.-Russia relations. During the same period, another business associate introduced Dmitriev to a friend of Jared Kushner who had not served on the Campaign or the Transition Team. Dmitriev and Kushner's friend collaborated on a short written reconciliation plan for the United States and Russia, which Dmitriev implied had been cleared through Putin. The friend gave that proposal to Kushner before the inauguration, and Kushner later gave copies to Bannon and incoming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.On December 29, 2016, then-President Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for having interfered in the election. Incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn called Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and asked Russia not to escalate the situation in response to the sanctions. The following day, Putin announced that Russia would not take retaliatory measures in response to the sanctions at that time. Hours later, President-Elect Trump tweeted, "Great move on delay (by V. Putin)." The next day, on December 31, 2016, Kislyak called Flynn and told him the request had been received at the highest levels and Russia had chosen not to retaliate as a result of Flynn's request.On January 6, 2017, members of the intelligence community briefed President-Elect Trump on a joint assessment—drafted and coordinated among the Central Intelligence Agency, FBI, and National Security Agency—that concluded with high confidence that Russia had intervened in the election through a variety of means to assist Trump's candidacy and harm Clinton's. A declassified version of the assessment was publicly released that same day.Between mid-January 2017 and early February 2017, three congressional committees—the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), and the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC)—announced that they would conduct inquiries, or had already been conducting inquiries, into Russian interference in the election. Then-FBI Director James Comey later confirmed to Congress the existence of the FBI's investigation into Russian interference that had begun before the election. On March 20, 2017, in open-session testimony before HPSCI, Comey stated:I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts. . . . As with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.The investigation continued under then-Director Comey for the next seven weeks until May 9, 2017, when President Trump fired Comey as FBI Director—an action which is analyzed in Volume II of the report.On May 17, 2017, Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed the Special Counsel and authorized him to conduct the investigation that Comey had confirmed in his congressional testimony, as well as matters arising directly from the investigation, and any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a), which generally covers efforts to interfere with or obstruct the investigation.President Trump reacted negatively to the Special Counsel's appointment. He told advisors that it was the end of his presidency, sought to have Attorney General Jefferson (Jeff) Sessions unrecuse from the Russia investigation and to have the Special Counsel removed, and engaged in efforts to curtail the Special Counsel's investigation and prevent the disclosure of evidence to it, including through public and private contacts with potential witnesses. Those and related actions are described and analyzed in Volume II of the report.***THE SPECIAL COUNSEL'S CHARGING DECISIONSIn reaching the charging decisions described in Volume I of the report, the Office determined whether the conduct it found amounted to a violation of federal criminal law chargeable under the Principles of Federal Prosecution. See Justice Manual § 9-27.000 et seq. (2018). The standard set forth in the Justice Manual is whether the conduct constitutes a crime; if so, whether admissible evidence would probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction; and whether prosecution would serve a substantial federal interest that could not be adequately served by prosecution elsewhere or through non-criminal alternatives. See Justice Manual § 9-27.220.Section V of the report provides detailed explanations of the Office's charging decisions, which contain three main components.First, the Office determined that Russia's two principal interference operations in the 2016 U.S. presidential election—the social media campaign and the hacking-and-dumping operations—violated U.S. criminal law. Many of the individuals and entities involved in the social media campaign have been charged with participating in a conspiracy to defraud the United States by undermining through deceptive acts the work of federal agencies charged with regulating foreign influence in U.S. elections, as well as related counts of identity theft. See United States v. Internet Research Agency, et al., No. 18-cr-32 (D.D.C.). Separately, Russian intelligence officers who carried out the hacking into Democratic Party computers and the personal email accounts of individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign conspired to violate, among other federal laws, the federal computer-intrusion statute, and they have been so charged. See United States v. Netyksho, et al., No. 18-cr-215 (D.D.C.). [Redacted: Harm to Ongoing Matter, Personal Privacy]Second, while the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges. Among other things, the evidence was not sufficient to charge any Campaign official as an unregistered agent of the Russian government or other Russian principal. And our evidence about the June 9, 2016 meeting and WikiLeaks's releases of hacked materials was not sufficient to charge a criminal campaign-finance violation. Further, the evidence was not sufficient to charge that any member of the Trump Campaign conspired with representatives of the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election.Third, the investigation established that several individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign lied to the Office, and to Congress, about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals and related matters. Those lies materially impaired the investigation of Russian election interference. The Office charged some of those lies as violations of the federal false statements statute. Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying about his interactions with Russian Ambassador Kislyak during the transition period. George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor during the campaign period, pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about, inter alia, the nature and timing of his interactions with Joseph Mifsud, the professor who told Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on candidate Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Former Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to making false statements to Congress about the Trump Moscow project. [Redacted: Harm to Ongoing Matter] And in February 2019, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that Manafort lied to the Office and the grand jury concerning his interactions and communications with Konstantin Kilimnik about Trump Campaign polling data and a peace plan for Ukraine.***The Office investigated several other events that have been publicly reported to involve potential Russia-related contacts. For example, the investigation established that interaction between Russian Ambassador Kislyak and Trump Campaign officials both at the candidate's April 2016 foreign policy speech in Washington, D.C., and during the week of the Republican National Convention were brief, public, and non-substantive. And the investigation did not establish that one Campaign official's efforts to dilute a portion of the Republican Party platform on providing assistance to Ukraine were undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia. The investigation also did not establish that a meeting between Kislyak and Sessions in September 2016 at Sessions's Senate office included any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.The investigation did not always yield admissible information or testimony, or a complete picture of the activities undertaken by subjects of the investigation. Some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination and were not, in the Office's judgment, appropriate candidates for grants of immunity. The Office limited its pursuit of other witnesses and information—such as information known to attorneys or individuals claiming to be members of the media—in light of internal Department of Justice policies. See, e.g., Justice Manual §§ 9-13.400, 13.410. Some of the information obtained via court process, moreover, was presumptively covered by legal privilege and was screened from investigators by a filter (or "taint") team. Even when individuals testified or agreed to be interviewed, they sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete, leading to some of the false-statements charges described above. And the Office faced practical limits on its ability to access relevant evidence as well-numerous witnesses and subjects lived abroad, and documents were held outside the United States.Further, the Office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated—including some associated with the Trump Campaign—deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records. In such cases, the Office was not able to corroborate witness statements through comparison to contemporaneous communications or fully question witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with other known facts.Accordingly, while this report embodies factual and legal determinations that the Office believes to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible, given these identified gaps, the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY TO VOLUME IIOur obstruction-of-justice inquiry focused on a series of actions by the President that related to the Russian-interference investigations, including the President's conduct towards the law enforcement officials overseeing the investigations and the witnesses to relevant events.FACTUAL RESULTS OF THE OBSTRUCTION INVESTIGATIONThe key issues and events we examined include the following:The Campaign's response to reports about Russian support for Trump. During the 2016 presidential campaign, questions arose about the Russian government's apparent support for candidate Trump. After WikiLeaks released politically damaging Democratic Party emails that were reported to have been hacked by Russia, Trump publicly expressed skepticism that Russia was responsible for the hacks at the same time that he and other Campaign officials privately sought information [Redacted: Harm to Ongoing Matter] about any further planned WikiLeaks releases. Trump also denied having any business in or connections to Russia, even though as late as June 2016 the Trump Organization had been pursuing a licensing deal for a skyscraper to be built in Russia called Trump Tower Moscow. After the election, the President expressed concerns to advisors that reports of Russia's election interference might lead the public to question the legitimacy of his election.Conduct involving FBI Director Comey and Michael Flynn. In mid-January 2017, incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn falsely denied to the Vice President, other administration officials, and FBI agents that he had talked to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about Russia's response to U.S. sanctions on Russia for its election interference. On January 27, the day after the President was told that Flynn had lied to the Vice President and had made similar statements to the FBI, the President invited FBI Director Comey to a private dinner at the White House and told Comey that he needed loyalty. On February 14, the day after the President requested Flynn's resignation, the President told an outside advisor, "Now that we fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over." The advisor disagreed and said the investigations would continue.Later that afternoon, the President cleared the Oval Office to have a one-on-one meeting with Comey. Referring to the FBI's investigation of Flynn, the President said, "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go." Shortly after requesting Flynn's resignation and speaking privately to Comey, the President sought to have Deputy National Security Advisor K.T. McFarland draft an internal letter stating that the President had not directed Flynn to discuss sanctions with Kislyak. McFarland declined because she did not know whether that was true, and a White House Counsel's Office attorney thought that the request would look like a quid pro quo for an ambassadorship she had been offered.The President's reaction to the continuing Russia investigation. In February 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions began to assess whether he had to recuse himself from campaign-related investigations because of his role in the Trump Campaign. In early March, the President told White House Counsel Donald McGahn to stop Sessions from recusing. And after Sessions announced his recusal on March 2, the President expressed anger at the decision and told advisors that he should have an Attorney General who would protect him. That weekend, the President took Sessions aside at an event and urged him to "unrecuse." Later in March, Comey publicly disclosed at a congressional hearing that the FBI was investigating "the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election," including any links or coordination between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign. In the following days, the President reached out to the Director of National Intelligence and the leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) to ask them what they could do to publicly dispel the suggestion that the President had any connection to the Russian election-interference effort. The President also twice called Comey directly, notwithstanding guidance from McGahn to avoid direct contacts with the Department of Justice. Comey had previously assured the President that the FBI was not investigating him personally, and the President asked Comey to "lift the cloud" of the Russia investigation by saying that publicly.The President's termination of Comey. On May 3, 2017, Comey testified in a congressional hearing, but declined to answer questions about whether the President was personally under investigation. Within days, the President decided to terminate Comey. The President insisted that the termination letter, which was written for public release, state that Comey had informed the President that he was not under investigation. The day of the firing, the White House maintained that Comey's termination resulted from independent recommendations from the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General that Comey should be discharged for mishandling the Hillary Clinton email investigation. But the President had decided to fire Comey before hearing from the Department of Justice. The day after firing Comey, the President told Russian officials that he had "faced great pressure because of Russia," which had been "taken off' by Comey's firing. The next day, the President acknowledged in a television interview that he was going to fire Comey regardless of the Department of Justice's recommendation and that when he "decided to just do it," he was thinking that "this thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story." In response to a question about whether he was angry with Comey about the Russia investigation, the President said, "As far as I'm concerned, I want that thing to be absolutely done properly," adding that firing Comey "might even lengthen out the investigation."The appointment of a Special Counsel and efforts to remove him. On May 17, 2017, the Acting Attorney General for the Russia investigation appointed a Special Counsel to conduct the investigation and related matters. The President reacted to news that a Special Counsel had been appointed by telling advisors that it was "the end of his presidency" and demanding that Sessions resign. Sessions submitted his resignation, but the President ultimately did not accept it. The President told aides that the Special Counsel had conflicts of interest and suggested that the Special Counsel therefore could not serve. The President's advisors told him the asserted conflicts were meritless and had already been considered by the Department of Justice.On June 14, 2017, the media reported that the Special Counsel's Office was investigating whether the President had obstructed justice. Press reports called this "a major turning point" in the investigation: while Comey had told the President he was not under investigation, following Comey's firing, the President now was under investigation. The President reacted to this news with a series of tweets criticizing the Department of Justice and the Special Counsel's investigation. On June 17, 2017, the President called McGahn at home and directed him to call the Acting Attorney General 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.Efforts to curtail the Special Counsel's investigation. Two days after directing McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed, the President made another attempt to affect the course of the Russia investigation. On June 19, 2017, the President met one-on-one in the Oval Office with his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, a trusted advisor outside the government, and dictated a message for Lewandowski to deliver to Sessions. The message said that Sessions should publicly announce that, notwithstanding his recusal from the Russia investigation, the investigation was "very unfair" to the President, the President had done nothing wrong, and Sessions planned to meet with the Special Counsel and "let [him] move forward with investigating election meddling for future elections." Lewandowski said he understood what the President wanted Sessions to do.One month later, in another private meeting with Lewandowski on July 19, 2017, the President asked about the status of his message for Sessions to limit the Special Counsel investigation to future election interference. Lewandowski told the President that the message would be delivered soon. Hours after that meeting, the President publicly criticized Sessions in an interview with the New York Times, and then issued a series of tweets making it clear that Sessions's job was in jeopardy. Lewandowski did not want to deliver the President's message personally, so he asked senior White House official Rick Dearborn to deliver it to Sessions. Dearborn was uncomfortable with the task and did not follow through.Efforts to prevent public disclosure of evidence. In the summer of 2017, the President learned that media outlets were asking questions about the June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between senior campaign officials, including Donald Trump Jr., and a Russian lawyer who was said to be offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." On several occasions, the President directed aides not to publicly disclose the emails setting up the June 9 meeting, suggesting that the emails would not leak and that the number of lawyers with access to them should be limited. Before the emails became public, the President edited a press statement for Trump Jr. by deleting a line that acknowledged that the meeting was with "an individual who [Trump Jr.] was told might have information helpful to the campaign" and instead said only that the meeting was about adoptions of Russian children. When the press asked questions about the President's involvement in Trump Jr.'s statement, the President's personal lawyer repeatedly denied the President had played any role.Further efforts to have the Attorney General take control of the investigation. In early summer 2017, the President called Sessions at home and again asked him to reverse his recusal from the Russia investigation. Sessions did not reverse his recusal. In October 20 17, the President met privately with Sessions in the Oval Office and asked him to "take [a] look" at investigating Clinton. In December 2017, shortly after Flynn pleaded guilty pursuant to a cooperation agreement, the President met with Sessions in the Oval Office and suggested, according to notes taken by a senior advisor, that if Sessions unrecused and took back supervision of the Russia investigation, he would be a "hero." The President told Sessions, "I'm not going to do anything or direct you to do anything. I just want to be treated fairly." In response, Sessions volunteered that he had never seen anything "improper" on the campaign and told the President there was a "whole new leadership team" in place. He did not unrecuse.Efforts to have McGahn deny that the President had ordered him to have the Special Counsel removed. In early 2018, the press reported that the President had directed McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed in June 2017 and that McGahn had threatened to resign rather than carry out the order. The President reacted to the news stories by directing White House officials to tell McGahn to dispute the story and create a record stating he had not been ordered to have the Special Counsel removed. McGahn told those officials that the media reports were accurate in stating that the President had directed McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed. The President then met with McGahn in the Oval Office and again pressured him to deny the reports. Tn 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.Conduct towards Flynn, Manafort, [Redacted: Harm to Ongoing Matter]. After Flynn withdrew from a joint defense agreement with the President and began cooperating with the government, the President's personal counsel left a message for Flynn's attorneys reminding them of the President's warm feelings towards Flynn, which he said "still remains," and asking for a "heads up" if Flynn knew "information that implicates the President." When Flynn's counsel reiterated that Flynn could no longer share information pursuant to a joint defense agreement, the President's personal counsel said he would make sure that the President knew that Flynn's actions reflected " hostility" towards the President. During Manafort's prosecution and when the jury in his criminal trial was deliberating, the President praised Manafort in public, said that Manafort was being treated unfairly, and declined to rule out a pardon. After Manafort was convicted, the President called Manafort “a brave man” for refusing to “break” and said that “flipping” “almost ought to be outlawed.” [Redacted: Harm to Ongoing Matter]Conduct involving Michael Cohen. The President's conduct towards Michael Cohen, a former Trump Organization executive, changed from praise for Cohen when he falsely minimized the President's involvement in the Trump Tower Moscow project, to castigation of Cohen when he became a cooperating witness. From September 2015 to June 2016, Cohen had pursued the Trump Tower Moscow project on behalf of the Trump Organization and had briefed candidate Trump on the project numerous times, including discussing whether Trump should travel to Russia to advance the deal. In 2017, Cohen provided false testimony to Congress about the project, including stating that he had only briefed Trump on the project three times and never discussed travel to Russia with him, in an effort to adhere to a "party line" that Cohen said was developed to minimize the President's connections to Russia. While preparing for his congressional testimony, Cohen had extensive discussions with the President's personal counsel, who, according to Cohen, said that Cohen should "stay on message" and not contradict the President. After the FBI searched Cohen's home and office in April 2018, the President publicly asserted that Cohen would not "flip," contacted him directly to tell him to "stay strong," and privately passed messages of support to him. Cohen also discussed pardons with the President's personal counsel and believed that if he stayed on message he would be taken care of. But after Cohen began cooperating with the government in the summer of 2018, the President publicly criticized him, called him a "rat," and suggested that his family members had committed crimes.Overarching factual issues. We did not make a traditional prosecution decision about these facts, but the evidence we obtained supports several general statements about the President's conduct.Several features of the conduct we investigated distinguish it from typical obstruction-of-justice cases. First, the investigation concerned the President, and some of his actions, such as firing the FBI director, involved facially lawful acts within his Article II authority, which raises constitutional issues discussed below. At the same time, the President's position as the head of the Executive Branch provided him with unique and powerful means of influencing official proceedings, subordinate officers, and potential witnesses—all of which is relevant to a potential obstruction-of-justice analysis. Second, unlike cases in which a subject engages in obstruction of justice to cover up a crime, the evidence we obtained did not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference. Although the obstruction statutes do not require proof of such a crime, the absence of that evidence affects the analysis of the President's intent and requires consideration of other possible motives for his conduct. Third, many of the President's acts directed at witnesses, including discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons, took place in public view. That circumstance is unusual, but no principle of law excludes public acts from the reach of the obstruction laws. If the likely effect of public acts is to influence witnesses or alter their testimony, the harm to the justice system's integrity is the same. Although the series of events we investigated involved discrete acts, the overall pattern of the President's conduct towards the investigations can shed light on the nature of the President's acts and the inferences that can be drawn about his intent. In particular, the actions we investigated can be divided into two phases, reflecting a possible shift in the President's motives. The first phase covered the period from the President's first interactions with Comey through the President's firing of Comey. During that time, the President had been repeatedly told he was not personally under investigation. Soon after the firing of Comey and the appointment of the Special Counsel, however, the President became aware that his own conduct was being investigated in an obstruction-of-justice inquiry. At that point, the President engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation. Judgments about the nature of the President's motives during each phase would be informed by the totality of the evidence.STATUTORY AND CONSTITUTIONAL DEFENSESThe President's counsel raised statutory and constitutional defenses to a possible obstruction-of-justice analysis of the conduct we investigated. We concluded that none of those legal defenses provided a basis for declining to investigate the facts.Statutory defenses. Consistent with precedent and the Department of Justice's general approach to interpreting obstruction statutes, we concluded that several statutes could apply here. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 1503, 1505, 1512(b)(3), 1512(c)(2). Section 1512(c)(2) is an omnibus obstruction-of-justice provision that covers a range of obstructive acts directed at pending or contemplated official proceedings. No principle of statutory construction justifies narrowing the provision to cover only conduct that impairs the integrity or availability of evidence. Sections 1503 and 1505 also offer broad protection against obstructive acts directed at pending grand jury, judicial, administrative, and congressional proceedings, and they are supplemented by a provisionin Section 1512(b) aimed specifically at conduct intended to prevent or hinder the communication to law enforcement of information related to a federal crime.Constitutional defenses. As for constitutional defenses arising from the President's status as the head of the Executive Branch, we recognized that the Department of Justice and the courts have not definitively resolved these issues. We therefore examined those issues through the framework established by Supreme Court precedent governing separation-of-powers issues. The Department of Justice and the President's personal counsel have recognized that the President is subject to statutes that prohibit obstruction of justice by bribing a witness or suborning perjury because that conduct does not implicate his constitutional authority. With respect to whether the President can be found to have obstructed justice by exercising his powers under Article II of the Constitution, we concluded that Congress has authority to prohibit a President's corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice.Under applicable Supreme Court precedent, the Constitution does not categorically and permanently immunize a President for obstructing justice through the use of his Article II powers. The separation-of-powers doctrine authorizes Congress to protect official proceedings, including those of courts and grand juries, from corrupt, obstructive acts regardless of their source. We also concluded that any inroad on presidential authority that would occur from prohibiting corrupt acts does not undermine the President's ability to fulfill his constitutional mission. The term "corruptly" sets a demanding standard. It requires a concrete showing that a person acted with an intent to obtain an improper advantage for himself or someone else, inconsistent with official duty and the rights of others. A preclusion of "corrupt" official action does not diminish the President's ability to exercise Article Il powers. For example, the proper supervision of criminal law does not demand freedom for the President to act with a corrupt intention of shielding himself from criminal punishment, avoiding financial liability, or preventing personal embarrassment. To the contrary, a statute that prohibits official action undertaken for such corrupt purposes furthers, rather than hinders, the impartial and evenhanded administration of the law. It also aligns with the President's constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws. Finally, we concluded that in the rare case in which a criminal investigation of the President's conduct is justified, inquiries to determine whether the President acted for a corrupt motive should not impermissibly chill his performance of his constitutionally assigned duties. The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President's corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.CONCLUSIONBecause we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President's conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President's actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
In what will stand as among the most definitive public accounts of the Kremlin’s attack on the American political system, the report of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation laid out in precise, chronological detail how “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”The Russians’ goal, Mueller emphasized at several points, was to assist Donald Trump’s run for the White House and to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. And the Republican candidate took notice, looking for ways to turn leaks of stolen emails to his advantage and even telling campaign associates to find people who might get their hands on Clinton’s personal emails.“The Trump Campaign showed interest in WikiLeaks’ releases of hacked materials throughout the summer and fall of 2016,” Mueller’s investigators wrote. The anti-secrecy website became the major outlet for Russia’s pilfered material, and Trump campaign staffers were engaged in discussions about pending leaks and how to capitalize on them, Mueller found.Investigators did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians. But both sides used similar tactics. Through social media and selective leaking, the Russians stoked deep societal divisions and aroused Americans’ suspicions of politicians and the integrity of the electoral process, Mueller found.[Read the Mueller report: The full redacted version, annotated]Trump, too, tried to divide voters, exacerbating political fault lines, and he insisted that something was rotten in the way the country elects its president, calling the process a “rigged” system.Mueller’s findings build on a set of indictments he issued last year against Russians who allegedly participated in the active-measures campaign.The level of detail in those charges was achieved through highly sensitive intelligence sources, current and former officials have said. The final report is no different and contains several blacked-out passages marked “investigative technique,” indicating that U.S. officials are not prepared to tell the world — and the Russians — how they know what they know about the Kremlin’s actions.Two operations lay at the heart of Russia’s unprecedented interference, Mueller found: a social media campaign “designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States” and a hacking effort led by a Russian intelligence agency, which stole emails from the Democratic National Committee and a key Clinton campaign aide and released them to disparage the Democratic candidate.The email “hacking-and-dumping operations,” as Mueller’s investigators called them, were epitomized by disclosures by WikiLeaks, which in July 2016 posted messages stolen from the DNC and then in October trickled out emails taken from the account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman.Trump campaign staffers and supporters discussed pending releases of emails by WikiLeaks on several occasions, the report shows. Many passages are blacked out because, Mueller noted, they could harm an ongoing matter.That could be a reference to the prosecution of Roger Stone, the longtime Trump aide whose claims to be in touch with WikiLeaks during the campaign drew scrutiny.By the late summer of 2016, after the first WikiLeaks release, the campaign “was planning a press strategy, a communications campaign, and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks,” Mueller found.The report cites a conversation between Trump and then-deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates during a car ride to LaGuardia Airport. The section is redacted, but the visible part reads, “shortly after the call candidate Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.” Where Trump was getting that information is unclear, but his interest was obvious.Mueller also found that Trump repeatedly requested that his aides find people who could gain access Clinton’s private emails.Trump had fixated on Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state, saying it revealed a lack of judgment and disregard for secrecy rules that bordered on criminal negligence. “Lock her up!” Trump supporters shouted when he spoke about the server on the campaign trail.At a July campaign stop, Trump expressed his hope that Russia would find some 30,000 emails that Clinton had said she deleted because they were of a personal nature and not related to government affairs. After that, “Trump asked individuals affiliated with his Campaign to find the deleted Clinton emails,” Mueller’s team found.Trump made the request repeatedly, former national security adviser Michael Flynn told Mueller’s investigators. Eventually, Flynn contacted two GOP operatives who were running their own hunts for Clinton’s emails. One of them kept Flynn and another senior campaign official, Sam Clovis, aware of the project, which ultimately did not produce any purloined messages.“Gates recalled candidate Trump being generally frustrated that the Clinton emails had not been found,” Mueller wrote.Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI and cooperated with Mueller’s probe. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States. He also cooperated with the investigation.Mueller also took note of direct communications that people in the Trump campaign had with WikiLeaks that suggested the group wanted to work on behalf of the Republican candidate.On Sept. 20, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. emailed senior campaign staffers saying, “Guys I got a weird Twitter DM [direct message] from wikileaks.” He said the group asked him about an unlaunched anti-Trump “conspiracy” site. “Seems like it’s really wikileaks asking me,” he said. The email had not been previously reported.The next day, after the site had launched, Trump Jr. sent a direct message to WikiLeaks: “Off the record, I don’t know who that is but I’ll ask around. Thanks.”On Oct. 3, WikiLeaks sent another message to Trump Jr., asking “you guys” to help disseminate a link alleging candidate Clinton had advocated using a drone to target WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Trump Jr. replied that he already “had done so” and asked, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?” WikiLeaks did not respond.On Oct. 12, several days after WikiLeaks began publishing emails hacked from Podesta’s account, WikiLeaks wrote him again, saying it was “great to see you and your dad talking about our publications. Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if mentions us...” Two days later, Trump Jr. tweeted the link.While Russian hackers chiseled away at the Clinton campaign, another group was setting up fake social media accounts — and making inroads with the Trump campaign and its supporters.The social media campaign began in 2014 as a “generalized program” to undermine the U.S. election system, Mueller wrote. But it evolved into “a targeted operation” that by early 2016 “favored candidate Trump and disparaged candidate Clinton.”At the center of the operation was an organization based in St. Petersburg, called the Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” that churned out tendentious and manipulative posts and images.The organization, which received funding from an oligarch with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, used fictitious personas to open accounts on Twitter and Instagram and to start group pages on Facebook. They were all designed to attract followers with polemic content on race, gender and other often-polarizing topics.The Russians’ following grew, and they eventually reached millions of Americans with their messages, Mueller found. The content was even spread by U.S. political figures, who retweeted messages from Internet Research Agency-controlled Twitter accounts.Some employees from St. Petersburg traveled to the United States to obtain information and gather photographs to use in their posts. They are among those Mueller indicted last year.“On multiple occasions,” Mueller wrote, “members and surrogates of the Trump Campaign promoted — typically by linking, retweeting, or similar methods of reposting — pro-Trump or anti-Clinton content published by the IRA through IRA-controlled social media accounts.”A single Twitter account, @TEN_GOP, purporting to represent Tennessee Republicans but actually operated by the Russian troll farm, was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, digital operations chief Brad Parscale and national security adviser Flynn.Mueller also noted that Russian operatives directly contacted Trump supporters “in a few instances” to help coordinate political rallies inside the United States. Mueller ultimately chose not to bring prosecutions because the Americans did not realize that they were in contact with Russians.Getting the Trump campaign — or better yet, Donald Trump himself — to tweet or retweet material put out by the Russian disinformation campaign was a closely watched goal for the operatives at the Internet Research Agency, Mueller found.The report recounts the celebration when Trump applauded an event in Miami the Russians had organized in August 2016, by tweeting, “THANK YOU for your support Miami!… TOGETHER, WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”A Russian account on Facebook, posing as an American named Matt Skiber, sent a message to an American tea party activist afterward saying, “Mr. Trump posted about our event in Miami! This is great!”Russian disinformation teams used social media to recruit Americans across the political spectrum to help push their themes online and also to participate in real-world political rallies and other events, Mueller found.The recruiting of Americans started in 2014 and continued even beyond the November 2016 election. An African American “self-defense instructor” in New York offered classes for the Russian-created social media group “Black Fist” in February 2017.Conservative activists participated in a range of political events organized by the Internet Research Agency, including appearing as Santa Claus while wearing a Trump mask in New York City.Overwhelmingly, such efforts were intended to help Trump and hurt Clinton, Mueller’s investigators concluded. They found no similar contact between Russians and Americans supporting Clinton.
The Trump presidency long has been an exercise in normalizing extraordinary behavior, with President Trump repeatedly stretching the limits of what is considered appropriate conduct by the nation’s chief executive. The report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III puts into high relief the degree to which President Trump has violated the norms.The principal focus of the special counsel’s investigation was on questions of criminality. But there is more than the issue of what rises to the level of criminal conspiracy or criminal obstruction when judging a president and his administration. These are questions that go to the heart of what is acceptable or normal or advisable in a democracy. On that basis, the Mueller report provides a damning portrait of the president and those around him for actions taken during the 2016 campaign and while in office.The 448-page document is replete with evidence of repeated lying by public officials and others (some of whom have been charged for that conduct), of the president urging not to tell the truth, of the president seeking to shut down the investigation, of a Trump campaign hoping to benefit politically from Russian hacking and leaks of information damaging to its opponent, of a White House in chaos and operating under abnormal rules.It shows a White House where officials sometimes — but not always — resisted the president’s more nefarious orders and concludes that Trump was not able to influence the investigation as much as he wished because advisers declined to carry out some of those orders. It also suggests, despite his many claims to the contrary, that the president felt vulnerable to an investigation. When informed just months after taking office that a special counsel was to be appointed, Trump exclaimed that it would mean “the end of my presidency.”[Mueller report lays out obstruction evidence against the president]The legal findings in the report are important and significant. Mueller’s team found no criminal conspiracy on the part of Trump campaign associates in Russian efforts to sabotage the 2016 election. Attorney General William P. Barr concluded, based on his reading of the report, that there was insufficient evidence to charge the president with obstruction. The president, in tweets and public statements Thursday morning, embraced the findings as full exoneration. “Game Over,” said one tweet triumphantly.Still, the investigation should be looked at in its broadest outlines, as one that was examining basic questions about political campaigns, political operatives, presidential candidates and presidents, along with the overriding issue of foreign interference in America’s democracy and the president’s reaction to it.The Mueller report provided overwhelming evidence of how the Russians carried out their effort to interfere with the election. The details in the report buttress the earlier findings by the U.S. intelligence community of Russian meddling with the intent of helping Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. It is a finding the president has never fully embraced, repeatedly equivocating as to whether Russians were responsible, for reasons that remain unclear.That’s just one of the elements that underscore the president’s departure from traditional rules. The number of contacts between associates of the Trump campaign and Russians connected with their government are anything but normal in presidential campaigns. The contacts were “numerous,” according to the report, though not conspiratorial. What should Americans make of that, even if it did not amount to criminal conspiracy?The biggest questions about the president’s behavior involve the issue of obstruction. On this, Mueller and his team came to no conclusion, allowing Barr to make the most controversial judgment of the investigation, based on his reading of the evidence and the law and in consultation with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.Mueller’s report looks at episodes in which the president’s actions might be construed as an attempt to obstruct the investigation. Those include his conduct related to the firing of Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser; the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey and subsequent appointment of a special counsel; the president’s efforts to remove the special counsel; efforts to prevent disclosure of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians; Trump’s efforts to force then-White House counsel Donald McGahn to deny that he had been ordered to fire Mueller.Some of the episodes examined by Mueller’s team happened in plain view of the public. Much else took place behind the scenes, although any number were later revealed by news organizations. At the time those stories were published, the president often called them “fake news.” The Mueller report now documents them as accurate.Barr said Thursday that he found that the evidence was insufficient to conclude that the president had engaged in criminal obstruction, largely because of offsetting circumstances. One major mitigating factor, he said, was that the White House had cooperated fully with the Mueller investigation, including allowing White House officials to be interviewed by investigators.What Barr did not point out was that the president never agreed to be interviewed by investigators. Trump provided written answers to questions about Russia-related topics, but the report notes that he did not agree to offer written answers to questions about obstruction. Beyond that, Mueller and his team found some of the president’s written answers inadequate but chose not to pursue an interview in the interest of finishing the investigation in a timely way.Barr also noted that the president was justifiably angry and frustrated because he was being investigated for something that he believed he had not done and that things he said or did should be weighed with that in mind. Trump, the attorney general said, was also irritated by all the public speculation and discussion about what might come of that investigation. Trump’s allies have often questioned whether someone can be guilty of obstruction of an investigation into a crime he or she did not commit.Barr’s conclusion about obstruction was a judgment call that others are questioning. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) held a news conference to question Barr’s interpretation of Mueller’s conclusions about obstruction. House Democrats, who will forge ahead with their own inquiries, could put the obstruction line that Barr says the president did not legally cross in a different place.The Mueller report represents findings in the most charged examination of a president since the investigations of Presidents Bill Clinton in 1998 and Richard Nixon in 1974. It provides the fullest accounting to date of a controversy that has raged since Trump was sworn into office, one that will continue for as long as he is in office. How much it will change things politically is a far different matter.Long before the release of the report, the president had effectively politicized the Mueller investigation. For many of Trump’s loyalists, retribution is the next order of business. The president said, “This hoax . . . should never happen to another president.” His reelection campaign sent out an email Thursday headlined, “Time to Turn the Tables,” saying it was time “to investigate the liars who instigated this sham investigation.”Many Americans already have reached their own conclusions about the president, pro and con. They are likely to take from the Mueller report whatever they can find to reinforce those judgments. The legal findings have provided good news for the president, but he will still face the judgment from voters in November 2020 about what they want of and expect from a president. Russia might not be at the top of voters’ minds when they cast those ballots, but the Mueller report will stand as documentation of a presidency that is anything but normal or customary.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election details 10 episodes of potential obstruction of justice by President Trump that prosecutors examined. Mueller did so even as he declined to make a traditional judgment about whether Trump committed a crime.“The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment,” the report stated. “At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.”Attorney General William P. Barr and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, examined the obstruction evidence laid out by Mueller’s team and concluded that it did not rise to the level of obstruction of justice — a controversial decision, given that Trump recently appointed Barr and Barr had criticized Mueller’s obstruction probe.At a news conference Thursday, Barr said he and Rosenstein disagreed with “some of the special counsel’s legal theories” but ultimately found the evidence was “not sufficient” to allege that the president engaged in criminal obstruction. Barr defended Trump’s actions, saying the president was frustrated and angry about the probe.What follows is a breakdown of the 10 episodes examined by the special counsel’s office.1. “Conduct involving FBI Director [James B.] Comey and Michael Flynn”Flynn, the White House’s national security adviser, had lied about his interactions with the Russian ambassador during the transition period between Trump’s election and his inauguration. When Trump fired him, he said, “Now that we fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over.” This matches how Trump adviser and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie has portrayed things.The report also confirms reporting about a request Trump made to Comey shortly thereafter: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” Trump has denied saying such a thing, but Mueller says it happened.Trump also directed deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland to send an email denying that Trump had instructed Flynn to have such conversations. McFarland declined to do so, because she didn’t know whether it was true.2. “The President’s reaction to the continuing Russia investigation”Trump attempted to prevent Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the investigation before the special counsel was appointed. The president said he needed an attorney general who would protect him.Trump also tried to get top intelligence officials and Comey to publicly distance Trump from the investigation. His outreach to Comey came despite guidance from then-White House counsel Donald McGahn not to get involved in internal Justice Department matters.3. “The President’s termination of Comey”The report indicates that the breaking point for Trump was when Comey testified to Congress that there was a Russia investigation but declined to elaborate or say whether anyone on the Trump campaign was a target — including whether he had ruled out Trump personally.Trump quickly declared to Sessions: “This is terrible, Jeff. It’s all because you recused.” Then the next weekend, the report says that “the President stated that he wanted to remove Comey and had ideas for a letter that would be used to make the announcement.”A memo was drafted explaining Comey’s firing, but one aide wrote at the time that the White House Counsel’s Office had decided that it should “[n]ot [see the] light of day” and that they should instead rely on justifications offered by Sessions and Rosenstein.4. “The appointment of a Special Counsel and efforts to remove him”Trump responded to the May 2017 appointment of Mueller as special counsel by saying he was “fucked” and that it was “the end of his presidency.” Trump insisted that Mueller had conflicts of interest but was told they were meritless and that they had already been a part of his consideration.Three days after the media reported that Mueller was looking into potential obstruction, Trump called McGahn and told him to have Rosenstein publicly attack Mueller’s alleged conflicts and call for his removal. McGahn declined.5. “Efforts to curtail the Special Counsel’s investigation”The report says Trump, two days after the above event, also tried to get Sessions to attack the investigation:On June 19, 2017, the President met one-on-one in the Oval Office with his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, a trusted advisor outside the government, and dictated a message for Lewandowski to deliver to Sessions. The message said that Sessions should publicly announce that, notwithstanding his recusal from the Russia investigation, the investigation was “very unfair” to the President, the President had done nothing wrong, and Sessions planned to meet with the Special Counsel and “let [him] move forward with investigating election meddling for future elections.” Lewandowski said he understood what the President wanted Sessions to do.But Lewandowski dragged his feet. Eventually, when Trump followed up a month later, Lewandowski asked senior White House official Rick Dearborn to do it. “Dearborn was uncomfortable with the task and did not follow through,” the report says.6. “Efforts to prevent public disclosure of evidence”Mueller fills in the details of previous Washington Post reporting that Trump sought to mislead about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer:On several occasions, the President directed aides not to publicly disclose the emails setting up the June 9 meeting, suggesting that the emails would not leak and that the number of lawyers with access to them should be limited. Before the emails became public, the President edited a press statement for Trump Jr. by deleting a line that acknowledged that the meeting was with "an individual who [Trump Jr.] was told might have information helpful to the campaign and instead said only that the meeting was about adoptions of Russian children.7. “Further efforts to have the Attorney General take control of the investigation”Trump called Sessions at home in summer 2017 to ask him to un-recuse himself and take control of the Russia probe. Sessions declined. Trump asked Sessions in October 2017 to take another look at investigating Hillary Clinton. He also told him in December 2017 that if he un-recused, he would be a “hero.”Trump told Sessions, “I’m not going to do anything or direct you to do anything, I just want to be treated fairly.”8. “Efforts to have [White House counsel Don] McGahn deny that the President had ordered him to have the Special Counsel removed”This episode was originally reported by the New York Times in March 2018, but Mueller fills in the details:On January 26, 2018, the President’s personal counsel called McGahn’s attorney and said that the President wanted McGahn to put out a statement denying that he had been asked to fire the Special Counsel and that he had threatened to quit in protest. McGahn’s attorney spoke with McGahn about that request and then called the President’s personal counsel to relay that McGahn would not make a statement. McGahn’s attorney informed the President’s personal counsel that the Times story was accurate in reporting that the President wanted the Special Counsel removed. 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. [White House spokeswoman Hope] Hicks recalled relaying to the President that one of his attorneys had spoken to McGahn’s attorney about the issue.9. “Conduct toward [Michael] Flynn, [Paul] Manafort, [REDACTED]”Flynn pleaded guilty to lying and cut a deal with Mueller to cooperate — and accordingly had to withdraw from his joint defense agreement with Trump’s legal team. But Trump’s personal lawyer reached out to Flynn’s team and assured them that Trump still had warm feelings for Flynn. The lawyer also asked for a heads-up in case Flynn had any “information that implicates that President.” When Flynn’s lawyer said such information couldn’t be shared, Trump’s lawyer said he would relay the message of “hostility” to Trump.The report also noted Trump’s continued praise for former campaign chairman Manafort during his trials and his leaving open of the possibility of a pardon. Manafort also agreed to cooperate before he voided his deal by lying to investigators.10. “Conduct involving Michael Cohen”While Michael Cohen has said Trump didn’t directly tell him to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow effort lingering into the 2016 campaign, Cohen accuses Trump’s lawyers of guiding his testimony. And one key figure declined to dispute that.“While preparing for his congressional testimony, Cohen had extensive discussions with the President’s personal counsel, who, according to Cohen, said that Cohen should ‘stay on message’ and not contradict the President."When Cohen didn’t contradict Trump (by lying), he earned praise:Cohen recalled that the President’s personal counsel said 'his client’ appreciated Cohen, that Cohen should stay on message and not contradict the President, that there was no need to muddy the water, and that it was time to move on. Cohen said he agreed because it was what he was expected to do. After Cohen later pleaded guilty to making false statements to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow project, this Office sought to speak with the President’s personal counsel about these conversations with Cohen, but counsel declined, citing potential privilege concerns.
President Trump, upon first learning of the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, cursed and declared, “this is the end of my presidency,” according to the redacted 400-page report by Mueller released Thursday by the Justice Department.The document depicts a Trump campaign that expected to “benefit electorally” from information stolen and released by Russia and a president who engaged in alarming actions that included seeking the ouster of former officials and ordering a memo that would clear his name.The release of the report followed a news conference at which Attorney General William P. Barr said neither Trump nor his campaign colluded with Russia and that none of Trump’s actions rose to the level of obstruction of justice, despite Mueller leaving that question unanswered in his report.A team of Post reporters spent the day reading every page of the Mueller report. Their findings and insights are below.Mueller's key findings● Mueller rejects the argument that the president is shielded from obstruction laws.●Trump, when told of appointment of special counsel Mueller, said: “This is the end of my presidency.”● “Substantial evidence” supports Comey over Trump in account of Flynn meeting.●Trump campaign attempted to obtain Hillary Clinton’s private emails.● Campaign expected to benefit from stolen information released by the Russians.● Mueller probe spawned 14 other investigations, including two unidentified cases that remain ongoing.● Putin stepped up outreach to Trump after election.● Special counsel team concluded Trump intended to obstruct probe in tweeting support for Manafort.● Mueller appears to kick obstruction question to Congress.
President Trump pushed for obtaining Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s private emails, and his campaign was in touch with allies who were pursuing them, according to the redacted special counsel’s report released Thursday.On July 27, 2016, Trump famously said at a campaign rally, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” referring to emails that Clinton said she had deleted from her private server. She had used a private account during her tenure as secretary of state.Trump also “made this request repeatedly” during the campaign, former national security adviser Michael Flynn told special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. Flynn “contacted multiple people in an effort to obtain the emails,” including Peter Smith, a longtime Republican operative, and Barbara Ledeen, a Republican Senate staffer who herself had previously tried to find the emails. Ledeen, at the time, worked for Sen. Charles E. Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee.Months earlier, Ledeen had written to Smith that Clinton’s server had likely been breached long ago and that “the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian intelligence services could ‘reassemble the server’s email content.’”After Trump’s July comments about Russia, Smith launched his own effort to find the missing emails.“He created a company, raised tens of thousands of dollars, and recruited security experts and business associates,” the investigation found. Smith also claimed “he was in contact with hackers ‘with ties and affiliations to Russia’ who had access to the emails, and that his efforts were coordinated with the Trump campaign,” but the special counsel could not establish if that was true.In August, Smith wrote to Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis, among others, about his efforts. “Parties with varying interests, are circling to release [the emails] ahead of the election,” Smith said. And as Smith raised thousands of dollars for his efforts, he told potential donors he was doing his work “in coordination” with the Trump campaign, the special counsel found. The investigation only found that Smith communicated directly with Flynn and Clovis.Ledeen later told Smith she believed she had obtained a trove of emails that might be Clinton’s. Smith wanted to authenticate them, and Erik Prince, the private military contractor, Trump supporter and brother of current Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, “provided funding to hire a tech adviser to ascertain the authenticity of the emails.”According to Prince, the tech adviser determined that the emails were not authentic, the report found. Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that Smith, Ledeen, or others in touch with the Trump campaign obtained the Clinton emails.The special counsel also did not find evidence that any Trump campaign staff or associates “initiated or directed Smith’s efforts.”
The long-awaited report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III lays out in alarming detail abundant evidence against President Trump, finding 10 “episodes” of potential obstruction of justice but ultimately concluding it was not Mueller’s role to determine whether the commander in chief broke the law.Submitted to Congress on Thursday, the 448-page document alternates between jarring scenes of presidential scheming and dense legal analysis, and it marks the onset of a new phase of the Trump administration in which congressional Democrats must decide what, if anything, to do with Mueller’s evidence. The report suggests — though never explicitly states — that Congress, not the Justice Department, should assume the role of prosecutor when the person who may be prosecuted is the president.“The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law,” Mueller’s team wrote.Trump once feared Mueller could destroy his presidency, but the special counsel may instead define it. By releasing a thick catalogue of misconduct and mendacity that, if not criminal, is deeply unflattering, Mueller’s report may mean long-term political problems for a president seeking reelection next year.Still, Trump’s electoral base has not been swayed by such stories in the past, and he has already claimed victory on the investigation’s bottom line: no conspiracy with Russia, no obstruction of justice.Since Mueller ended his investigation last month, a central question facing the Justice Department has been why Mueller’s team did not reach a conclusion about whether the president obstructed justice. The issue was complicated, the report said, by two key factors — the fact that, under department practice, a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime, and that a president has a great deal of constitutional authority to give orders to other government employees.Trump submitted written answers to investigators. The special counsel’s office considered them “inadequate” but did not press for an interview with him because doing so would cause a “substantial delay,” the report says.The report said investigators felt they had “sufficient evidence to understand relevant events and to make certain assessments without the President’s testimony.”Trump’s legal team declared Mueller’s report “a total victory” for the president. It “underscores what we have argued from the very beginning — there was no collusion — there was no obstruction,” they said.In their statement, Trump’s lawyers also attacked former leaders at the FBI for opening “a biased, political attack against the President — turning one of our foundational legal standards on its head.”Trump said little publicly about the report’s release. At an event Thursday, he indicated he was having a “good day,” and adding that “this should never happen to another president again, this hoax.” Ahead of the report’s release, the president lobbed a familiar attack on the investigation. “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” he tweeted. “The Greatest Political Hoax of all time! Crimes were committed by Crooked, Dirty Cops and DNC/The Democrats.”But if Mueller’s report was a victory for the president, it was an ugly one. Investigators paint a portrait of a president who believes the Justice Department and the FBI should answer to his orders, even when it comes to criminal investigations.During a meeting in which the president complained about then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, Trump insisted that past attorneys general had been more obedient to their presidents, referring to President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, as well as the Obama administration.“You’re telling me that Bobby and Jack didn’t talk about investigations? Or Obama didn’t tell Eric Holder who to investigate?” Trump told senior White House staffers Stephen K. Bannon and Donald McGahn, according to the report.“Bannon recalled that the President was as mad as Bannon had ever seen him and that he screamed at McGahn about how weak Sessions was,” the report said.Repeatedly, it appears Trump may have been saved from more serious legal jeopardy because his own staffers refused to carry out orders they thought were problematic or potentially illegal.For instance, in the early days of the administration, when the president was facing growing questions concerning then-national security adviser Michael Flynn’s conversations about sanctions with a Russian ambassador, the president ordered another aide, KT McFarland, to write an email saying the president did not direct those conversations. She decided not to do so, unsure if that was true and fearing it might be improper.“Some evidence suggests that the President 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,’ ” the report said.The report also recounts a remarkable moment in May 2017 when Sessions told Trump that Mueller had just been appointed special counsel. Trump slumped back in his chair, according to notes from Jody Hunt, Sessions’s then-chief of staff. “Oh my God, this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked,” Trump said. Trump further laid into Sessions for his recusal, saying 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 special counsel’s report on possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russians to interfere in the 2016 election is extremely detailed with only modest redactions — painting a starkly different picture for Trump than Attorney General William P. Barr has offered, and revealing new details about interactions between Russians and Trump associates.Mueller’s team wrote that though their investigation “did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” that assertion was informed by the fact that coordination requires more than two parties “taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests.”And Mueller made it clear: Russia wanted to help the Trump campaign, and the Trump campaign was willing to take it.“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 investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” Mueller’s team wrote.The report detailed a timeline of contacts between the Trump campaign and those with Russian ties — much of it already known, but some of it new.For example, Mueller’s team asserted that in August 2016, Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the FBI has assessed as having ties to Russian intelligence, met with Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, “to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine.”The special counsel wrote that both men believed the plan would require candidate Trump’s “assent to succeed (were he elected President).”“They also discussed the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort’s strategy for winning Democratic votes in Midwestern states,” the special counsel wrote. “Months before that meeting, Manafort had caused internal polling data to be shared with Kilimnik, and the sharing continued for some period of time after their August meeting.”Mueller’s report suggests his obstruction of justice investigation was heavily informed by an opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that says a sitting president cannot be indicted — a conclusion Mueller’s team accepted.“And apart from OLC’s constitutional view, we recognized 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,” Mueller’s team wrote.That decision, though, seemed to leave investigators in a strange spot. Mueller’s team wrote that they “determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes.” They seemed to shy from producing even an internal document that alleged the president had done something wrong — deciding, essentially, that they wouldn’t decide.“Although a prosecutor’s internal report would not represent a formal public accusation akin to an indictment, the possibility of the report’s public disclosure and the absence of a neutral adjudicatory forum to review its findings counseled against determining ‘that the person’s conduct constitutes a federal offense.’ ”Barr said during a news conference Thursday that Justice Department officials asked Mueller “about the OLC opinion and whether or not he was taking the position that he would have found a crime but for the existence of the OLC opinion.”“He made it very clear, several times, that he was not taking a position — he was not saying but for the OLC opinion he would have found a crime,” Barr said.Mueller did not attend the news conference.Barr addressed the media before releasing the report. He made repeated references to “collusion,” echoing language the president has stressed even though it is not a legal term.Barr also described how the nation’s top law enforcement officials wrestled with investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice. He and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein “disagreed with some of the special counsel’s legal theories and felt that some of the episodes did not amount to obstruction as a matter of law” but that they accepted the special counsel’s “legal framework” as they analyzed the case, Barr said.It was the first official acknowledgment of differing views inside the Justice Department about how to investigate the president.Barr also spoke about the president’s state of mind as Trump responded to the unfolding investigation. “As the Special Counsel’s report acknowledges, 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 said.The Mueller report is considered so politically explosive that even the Justice Department’s rollout plan sparked a firestorm, with Democrats suggesting that the attorney general was trying to improperly color Mueller’s findings before the public could read them.Prompted by a reporter, Barr responded to a call earlier Thursday from the top two Democrats in Congress to have Mueller appear before House and Senate committees. “I have no objection to Bob Mueller personally testifying,” the attorney general said.In a letter, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said they wanted testimony “as soon as possible” from Mueller. And after Barr’s news conference, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) released a letter to the special counsel seeking an appearance before his panel “no later than May 23.”Congressional Democrats have vowed to fight to get the entire report, without redactions, as well as the underlying investigative documents Mueller gathered.The report has been the subject of heated debate since Barr notified Congress last month that Mueller had completed his work.Barr told lawmakers he needed time to redact sensitive information before it could be made public, including any grand jury material as well as details whose public release could harm ongoing investigations.Barr also said he would review the document to redact information that would “potentially compromise sources and methods” in intelligence collection and anything that would “unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties.”That language suggests Barr wants to keep secret any derogatory information gathered by investigators about figures who ended up not being central to Mueller’s investigation.Barr notified Congress after the report’s release that senior members of each party would get a chance to review a less-redacted version next week. The invitation was extended to the leaders of congressional committees and one staffer each. Democrats immediately panned the offer, though, calling it a “non-starter.”
The moment President Trump learned two years ago that a special counsel had been appointed to investigate Russian election interference, he declared in the Oval Office, “This is the end of my presidency.”Trump nearly made that a self-fulfilling prophecy as he then plotted for months to thwart the probe, spawning a culture of corruption and deception inside the White House.Trump’s advisers rarely challenged him and often willingly did his bidding, according to the special counsel’s report released Thursday. But in some cases, they refused when Trump pushed them to the brink of committing outright crimes — a pattern of inaction that ended up protecting the president.Trump ordered Donald McGahn to instigate special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s firing, but the White House lawyer decided he would resign rather than follow through.Trump urged Corey Lewandowski to ask then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to curtail the investigation, but his former campaign manager only delivered the message to an intermediary.And Trump demanded that Reince Priebus procure Sessions’s resignation, but the White House chief of staff did not carry out the directive.The vivid portrait that emerges from Mueller’s 448-page report is of a presidency plagued by paranoia, insecurity and scheming — and of an inner circle gripped by fear of Trump’s spasms.Again and again, Trump frantically pressured his aides to lie to the public, deny true news stories and fabricate a false record. But their unwillingness to execute his most drastic wishes were part of what kept Mueller from making a determination about obstruction of justice.“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,” the report says. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.”While many of the episodes catalogued have previously been explored in first-person accounts and news reports, Mueller’s report is singular for its definitive examination of the events — and will not easily be dismissed by Trump and his aides as “fake news.” The main actors are under oath and on the record, and the narrative they laid bare stands as a historical product with the imprimatur of a former FBI director who attained a cult status for his impartiality.The political impact remains unsettled. Republicans were eager to turn the page Thursday, echoing the refrain of Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr: “No collusion.” But Democratic leaders insisted that Trump’s conduct amounted to obstruction of justice and necessitated further inquiry, including calling on Mueller to testify before Congress.Regardless, the Mueller report revealed how a combustible president bred an atmosphere of chaos, dishonesty and malfeasance at the top echelons of government not seen since the Nixon administration.Trump officials frequently were drawn into the president’s plans to craft false story lines. In one instance, while he was watching Fox News, Trump asked Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to hold a news conference and claim that Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director based on Rosenstein’s recommendation. Rosenstein declined and told Trump that he would tell the truth — that firing Comey was not his idea — if he were asked about it.White House press secretary Sarah Sanders attempted to buttress Trump’s cover story. She said at a news briefing that countless members of the FBI were seeking Comey’s removal, but she later admitted to Mueller’s team that her comment had been completely fabricated, calling it a “slip of the tongue” that was not founded on evidence.In another example, Trump dictated to communications director Hope Hicks an intentionally misleading statement for the media about Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower.Trump’s drumbeat to end the investigation was driven by his belief that the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusive determination of Russian interference threatened the legitimacy of his election. It was, as Hicks told Mueller’s investigators, his “Achilles’ heel.”The report exhaustively documents the fraught relationship between Trump and McGahn. In the weeks following Mueller’s May 2017 appointment, Trump repeatedly considered firing the special counsel. On June 17, Trump was at Camp David and twice called McGahn at home and directed him to call Rosenstein, who supervised the probe, and explain that Mueller had conflicts of interest and could not serve.“You gotta do this. You gotta call Rod,” Trump said on the first call, according to the account McGahn gave investigators.McGahn did not act on the request, but Trump called a second time.“Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the special counsel,” Trump said, according to McGahn. The president told him, “Mueller has to go” and “Call me back when you do it.”McGahn told investigators that he felt trapped and decided to resign. He drove to the office to pack up his belongings and prepare to submit a resignation letter. He also called Priebus and chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon and told them of his intentions, but they urged him to stay, and McGahn returned to work that Monday.Trump’s claim that Mueller had “conflicts” — a dispute over membership fees at a Trump golf course in Virginia — was called “ridiculous” by Bannon and “silly” by McGahn. The report is peppered with similar times of aides grousing behind Trump’s back about his tirades and impulsive directives.Seven months later, after the New York Times reported that Trump had ordered McGahn to have Mueller fired and that McGahn had refused, Trump instructed the White House counsel to deny it — but McGahn said he would not rebut the article.The president was furious. Staff secretary Rob Porter told investigators that Trump told him the story was “bullshit” and that McGahn was “a lying bastard.” Trump directed Porter to tell McGahn to create a written record stating that the president never directed the White House counsel to fire Mueller.“If he doesn’t write a letter, then maybe I’ll have to get rid of him,” Porter recalled Trump telling him.The next day, Trump met with McGahn to discuss the article. The president insisted he never told McGahn to “fire” Mueller, but McGahn said that he had told him, “Mueller has to go.” Trump then harangued McGahn about there being 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 to investigators.McGahn responded that he was a “real lawyer.”“I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes,” Trump replied, referencing a former lawyer and mentor who was disbarred for unethical conduct.[Balz: Mueller’s report paints a damning portrait of Trump’s presidency]Meantime, as Trump’s unhappiness with Sessions lingered into the summer of 2017, he tried several times to push the attorney general to either step down or limit the scope of the probe.In between bursts of angry tweets about Sessions that June, he told Lewandowski he had a mission for him.“Write this down,” Trump instructed his former campaign manager, who is described in the report by Trump officials as a “devotee” who would do almost anything for the president.Trump told Lewandowski to quietly approach Sessions, far outside of the usual chain of command, and suggest that the president would prefer that the Justice Department investigate only foreign interference in “future elections” — and to stop its probe of the 2016 campaign.Lewandowski never delivered that message directly, reflecting his own unease with the president’s request. He instead turned to Rick Dearborn, a veteran Sessions aide then working as a deputy White House chief of staff, to take the message to the attorney general. Dearborn, too, declined to do so, later telling investigators that the idea of being a messenger to Sessions made him uncomfortable.Trump tried other ways to remove Sessions. In early July 2017, he asked Porter whether Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand was “on the team” and instructed him to sound her out about taking over responsibility for the Mueller probe and becoming attorney general. Porter told investigators that he understood Trump to want to find someone to end the investigation and did not contact her because he was uncomfortable with the task.That same month, after The Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence intercepts showed Sessions had discussed Trump campaign-related matters with the Russian ambassador, Trump erupted and demanded the attorney general’s resignation.Trump told Priebus that he needed “a letter of resignation on [his] desk immediately,” according to the account Priebus gave investigators. He said the attorney general had “no choice” and “must immediately resign.”Trump said Sessions had to resign because of negative publicity, but Priebus told investigators he believed the president was driven because of his hatred over Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation. Priebus consulted McGahn and they discussed the possibility that they would both resign rather than carry out Trump’s order to fire Sessions, according to Mueller’s testimony.The president followed up: “Did you get it?” he asked Priebus. “Are you working on it?”Priebus explained that firing Sessions would be a calamity, and Trump agreed to hold off and eventually relented, although he tweeted for the next several days about the attorney general, including calling him “beleaguered.”Sessions stayed on the job until November 2018, but his experience was reflective of the torment caused by Trump.The attorney general’s chief of staff told investigators that after the president tried to oust him in July 2017, Sessions carried a resignation letter in his pocket every time he went to the White House.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders admitted to federal investigators that she provided reporters baseless information related to former FBI Director James Comey's dismissal, according to special counsel Robert Mueller's redacted report.The report released Thursday stated that Sanders conceded to the special counsel's office she had a "slip of the tongue" when she told the media that "countless members of the FBI" had lost faith in Comey."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," the Mueller report stated.CNN has reached out to Sanders.During the White House press briefing on May 10, 2017, Sanders, who was then deputy press secretary, told reporters a day after Trump fired Comey that the "rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in Comey.""Accordingly, the President accepted the recommendation of his deputy attorney general to remove James Comey from his position," Sanders said.Sanders was later asked during the briefing what her response was to the rank-and-file FBI agents who "disagree with your contention that they lost faith in Director Comey.""Look, we've heard from countless members of the FBI that say very different things," Sanders replied.
The outreach had begun by August 2015, when Donald Trump was a newly announced presidential candidate in a crowded Republican field and a Russian news outlet emailed a top Trump aide to request an interview.It persisted through the next 15 months of the 2016 campaign and into the presidential transition, when a Russian banker back-channeled a plan for reconciliation between the United States and the Kremlin to the new administration through a friend of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.The portrait painted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in his report released Thursday is one in which, again and again, Russian officials and business executives offered assistance to Trump and the people around him.The campaign was intrigued by the Russian overtures, Mueller found, which came at the same time that the Russian government was seeking to tilt the outcome of the race in Trump’s favor.The special counsel did not find any of the contacts between Trump associates and Russians constituted a crime. Mueller said his “investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”But the episodes detailed in his report show that Trump aides declined to forcefully reject the Russian offers or report them to law enforcement. Amid a growing awareness that Russia probably had hacked and disseminated Democratic emails, the campaign eagerly made use of the material — and its flirtation with Russian figures continued.information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”There were, Mueller wrote, “numerous links” between individuals tied to the Russian government and people associated with Trump. The special counsel said the communications consisted of business contacts, offers to assist the campaign, invitations for Trump and Putin to meet and for campaign aides to meet with Russian government officials, and policy proposals to improve U.S.-Russia relations.“The number of meetings with Russians during the campaign was extraordinary and unprecedented,” said Michael McFaul, a Russia scholar who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration.“I cannot understand why there were so many contacts,” he added. “I would like to know more about motivations on both sides.”Various episodes detailed in Mueller’s report were revealed in news coverage during the past two years.But investigators laid out intriguing new details about those incidents — and also identified moments of interaction previously unknown publicly.Overtures through business associatesMueller wrote that Russian interest in Trump’s campaign began soon after the celebrity mogul announced he was running for president in June 2015.On Aug. 18, 2015, the editor in chief of an online news outlet called Vzglyad emailed Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign aide, to request an interview with the new candidate. The publication was founded by a former Russian lawmaker who days earlier had registered two pro-Trump websites in Russia, according to the report.The interview apparently never took place — the first of numerous moments in which Russian outreach appeared to falter through happenstance, the hectic nature of the campaign or, at times, lack of interest from the Trump campaign.“In some instances, the campaign was receptive to the offer, while in other instances, the campaign officials shied away,” Mueller wrote.At times, the Russians sought to make connections with Trump through business ties and his children’s professional contacts.Twice, longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen fielded offers to build a Trump tower in Moscow during the campaign, even as the candidate was publicly claiming he had no business ties to Russia. Cohen reached out directly to the Kremlin for assistance with one of the projects, though it did not ultimately advance.Later, a fashion world contact reached out to Trump’s daughter Ivanka to pass along an invitation from a Russian deputy prime minister to attend an annual economic forum in St. Petersburg with her father.Trump’s assistant Rhona Graff declined the invitation but received a follow-up email from Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko in March 2016 renewing the invitation, according to the report — perhaps the only instance during the campaign of a Russian government official directly reaching out to Trump.Graff declined, noting Trump’s busy campaign schedule, but added that he would otherwise “have gladly given every consideration to attending such an important event.”New York investment banker Robert Foresman used a connection to Mark Burnett, the producer of Trump’s television show “The Apprentice,” to try to pass along an invitation to the same event from a Russian presidential aide, the special counsel wrote.In an email to Graff, Foresman wrote that he’d had an “approach” from “senior Kremlin officials” about Trump.Foresman did not respond to a request for comment.Mueller wrote that investigators did not locate evidence that Foresman reached Trump. The banker told prosecutors that he was merely trying to burnish his credentials with the campaign and not establish a Russian back channel to Trump.In one of the best-known examples of Russia overtures, Russian business executives Aras and Emin Agalarov, who had hosted the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013, helped arranged a meeting for a Russian lawyer with Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr.Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting after being told the lawyer would share damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to assist his father’s campaign, responding: “I love it.”Mueller’s team assessed whether the meeting violated campaign finance prohibitions on accepting foreign contributions. The special counsel concluded that charges would not meet Justice Department standards requiring that “admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction” because it was not clear the offer of information on Clinton would have constituted an in-kind contribution and because it would be difficult to demonstrate that participants knowingly and willfully broke the law, the report said.Campaign contactsThe Russians also sought to forge relationships with people involved directly in Trump’s campaign — particularly through aides with their own connections to Russia.One of the first contacts came through Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who was told by London-based professor Joseph Mifsud in April 2016 that the Russians had dirt about Clinton in the form of thousands of emails, according to court documents.Mueller revealed in his report that Mifsud “maintained various Russian connections,” including with people associated with entities involved in the Russian election interference operation.The report delves deeply into the relationship between Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and figures in Russia and Ukraine with ties to Putin, revealing the extent of Manafort’s efforts to leverage his role on the campaign to get work in Eastern Europe.Immediately upon joining the Trump campaign in March 2016, Manafort instructed deputy Rick Gates to send memos announcing his appointment to four “friends” with Russia connections: three Ukrainian business titans and one Russian, the Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, the report said.Soon after, Manafort told Gates to begin sending “internal polling data” to the business executives, the report said.The man Manafort and Gates trusted to translate and disseminate the information was Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime Manafort associate assessed by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence, according to court documents.Gates told the special counsel he suspected Kilimnik was a “spy,” a characterization Manafort disputed. In a 2017 statement to The Washington Post, Kilimnik denied ties to Russia intelligence.That spring, Manafort briefed Kilimnik in person on the campaign. Kilimnik requested the second meeting, at a New York City cigar bar, to deliver a proposal from former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych that would guarantee Russian control over a new autonomous region in eastern Ukraine, according to Mueller.Manafort claimed he dismissed the plan as crazy, but he continued to discuss it with Kilimnik through Trump’s victory and presidency, the report said. In one email, Kilimnik wrote that with a “minor ‘wink’ (or slight push),” Trump “could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.”Manafort, who was deeply in debt, told the special counsel he hoped to revive a once-lucrative consulting relationship with Deripaska and the Ukrainians. He denied bringing the peace plan to Trump or the campaign. The special counsel noted that Manafort lied repeatedly in interviews and before the grand jury about his interactions with Kilimnik, who could not be reached.Meanwhile, Dimitri Simes, the Russian-born head of a Washington think tank, the Center for National Interest, who has advocated improved U.S.-Russian relations, had repeated communications with Kushner during the campaign, the special counsel found. Simes has numerous Russian government contacts, Mueller said.Simes helped arrange an April 16, 2016, speech by Trump at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington that was attended by the Russian ambassador.The report provided new details about an August 2016 discussion between Simes and Kushner to discuss how to respond to Clinton campaign criticism of Trump and Russia.Before the meeting, Mueller wrote, “Simes sent Kushner a ‘Russia Policy Memo’ laying out ‘what Mr. Trump may want to say about Russia.’ ”In an email setting up the meeting, Simes also told Kushner about “a well-documented story of highly questionable connections between Bill Clinton and the Russian government.”Kushner forwarded the email to top campaign officials and met with Simes to discuss the matter, but he told investigators that he didn’t believe Simes had provided anything that could be “operationalized” for the Trump campaign.In an interview Thursday, Simes said that the information he discussed with Kushner came from U.S. government sources, not from Russia. He said the Mueller report was “on target in that it found there was no collusion but that there was Russian interference” in the U.S. election.'Don't want to blow off Putin!'Russian overtures to Trump world intensified after the election, Mueller found.Putin was anxious after Trump’s victory that he didn’t know the new president’s team better, Russian businessman Petr Aven told Mueller’s investigators.Aven, who sits on the board of Alfa Bank, said that in late 2016, Putin appealed to his country’s most influential business executives to make contacts with the Trump transition team. Aven said the Russian president made it clear “there would be consequences” if they did not deliver, the report said.In early 2017, Aven said, he met again with Putin and told him he had failed to build contacts with the Trump team. In subsequent meetings, the Russian president continued to press him to make further efforts, he told investigators. At one point, Aven told Putin’s chief of staff he had been subpoenaed by the FBI and asked about whether he had tried to create a back channel between Russia and the Trump administration.A spokesman for Aven declined to comment.At 3 a.m. on election night, Hicks received a call on her cellphone from a man who said something about a “Putin call,” she told investigators. The man, an official at the Russian Embassy, sent her a note the following morning with the subject line “Message from Putin.”Uncertain about the man’s identity, Hicks forwarded the email to Kushner, writing, “Can you look into this? Don’t want to get duped but don’t want to blow off Putin!”Two days before Trump’s inauguration, the chief executive of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, Kirill Dmitriev, submitted a “a proposal for reconciliation between the United States and Russia” to Kushner via an associate, according to the report. Kushner gave the proposal to incoming chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and incoming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, but neither ever followed up before Trump and Putin spoke later in January, Mueller found.Even after 22 months of investigation, the special counsel’s team was unable to fully examine all the Russian contacts, Mueller said.Some key players communicated using encrypted apps or ones that do not preserve records. Some witnesses provided false or incomplete testimony, and some could not be interviewed because they were overseas.Among the remaining mysteries: the full story of a meeting at a Seychelles resort between Trump associate Erik Prince and Dmitriev, a Russian banker close to Putin, and why Manafort shared polling data with Kilimnik — and then lied about it. Prosecutors said they did not establish that Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page, who was under surveillance for nearly a year, conspired with Russia. But they also said they were unable to fully determine his activities during a July 2016 visit to Moscow.Page said Thursday he was not surprised.“As I have been explaining for years, this was a big nothingburger,” he said in an interview.The special counsel indicated he believes there is more to learn.“While this report embodies factual and legal determinations that the Office believes to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible,” Mueller wrote, “given these identified gaps, the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.”
WASHINGTON — As President Trump met with advisers in the Oval Office in May 2017 to discuss replacements for the F.B.I. director he had just fired, Attorney General Jeff Sessions slipped out of the room to take a call.When he came back, he gave Mr. Trump bad news: Robert S. Mueller III had just been appointed as a special counsel to take over the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and any actions by the president to impede it.Mr. Trump slumped in his chair. “Oh, my God,” he said. “This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”It has not been the end of his presidency, but it has come to consume it. Although the resulting two-year investigation ended without charges against Mr. Trump, Mr. Mueller’s report painted a damning portrait of a White House dominated by a president desperate to thwart the inquiry only to be restrained by aides equally desperate to thwart his orders.The White House that emerges from more than 400 pages of Mr. Mueller’s report is a hotbed of conflict infused by a culture of dishonesty — defined by a president who lies to the public and his own staff, then tries to get his aides to lie for him. Mr. Trump repeatedly threatened to fire lieutenants who did not carry out his wishes while they repeatedly threatened to resign rather than cross lines of propriety or law.At one juncture after another, Mr. Trump made his troubles worse, giving in to anger and grievance and lashing out in ways that turned advisers into witnesses against him. He was saved from an accusation of obstruction of justice, the report makes clear, in part because aides saw danger and stopped him from following his own instincts. Based on contemporaneous notes, emails, texts and F.B.I. interviews, the report draws out scene after scene of a White House on the edge.At one point, Reince Priebus, then the White House chief of staff, said the president’s attacks on his own attorney general meant that he had “D.O.J. by the throat.” At another, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, complained to Mr. Priebus that the president was trying to get him to “do crazy shit.” Mr. Trump was equally unhappy with Mr. McGahn, calling him a “lying bastard.”‘We’ll Take Care of You’From its first days, Mr. Trump’s presidency struggled to contain the threat stemming from Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and suspicions about his team’s contacts with Moscow.Just weeks after taking office, Mr. Trump pushed out his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, who lied to the F.B.I. about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador.But Mr. Trump hugged Mr. Flynn, telling him: “We’ll give you a good recommendation. You’re a good guy. We’ll take care of you.”Mr. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, mistakenly assumed that getting rid of Mr. Flynn would derail the investigation then being led by James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director. During lunch with Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, Mr. Flynn called and Mr. Kushner spoke with him.“The president cares about you,” Mr. Kushner told Mr. Flynn. “I’ll get the president to send out a positive tweet about you later.”Mr. Trump was worried about Mr. Comey, too. During the lunch, he asked Mr. Christie to call his friend Mr. Comey. “Tell him he’s part of the team,” Mr. Trump instructed.Mr. Christie thought the president’s request was “nonsensical” and never followed through.Other advisers feared Mr. Trump was not telling the truth to the public. After a news conference at which he denied any business dealings in Russia, Michael D. Cohen, then the president’s personal lawyer who had been trying to arrange a Trump Tower in Moscow, expressed concern.Mr. Trump said that the project had not yet been finalized. “Why mention it if it is not a deal?” he said.‘You Left Me on an Island’With the investigation bearing down on him, Mr. Trump wanted to make sure Mr. Sessions remained in charge at the Justice Department, and he asked Mr. McGahn to tell the attorney general not to recuse himself because of his work on the Trump campaign. Mr. McGahn tried to head off a recusal by calling the attorney general three times, but Mr. Sessions announced his recusal that afternoon.Mr. Trump was furious. Summoning Mr. McGahn to the Oval Office the next day, he said, “I don’t have a lawyer,” and added that he wished Roy Cohn, the famed bare-knuckled attorney who once worked for him in New York, was still his lawyer. Mr. Trump said that Robert F. Kennedy protected John F. Kennedy, and Eric H. Holder Jr. protected Barack Obama.“You’re telling me that Bobby and Jack didn’t talk about investigations?” he demanded. “Or Obama didn’t tell Eric Holder who to investigate?”Mr. Trump screamed at Mr. McGahn about how weak Mr. Sessions was, and Stephen K. Bannon, then the president’s chief strategist, thought he was as mad as he had ever seen him.The president asked Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, if he could do anything to rebut news stories on the Russia matter. The admiral’s deputy, Richard Ledgett, who was present for the call, considered it the most unusual experience of his 40 years in government and prepared a memo describing the call that he and Admiral Rogers signed and put in a safe.Mr. Trump groused about the Russia investigation with his intelligence chiefs on multiple other occasions. At one point, Admiral Rogers recalled a private conversation in which the president said something like the “Russia thing has got to go away.” But the intelligence chiefs said they did not feel pressured to take specific actions.Mr. Trump increasingly focused his ire on Mr. Comey, who during testimony on Capitol Hill on May 3, 2017, refused to answer questions about whether the president himself was under investigation.Angry, Mr. Trump wheeled on Mr. Sessions. “This is terrible, Jeff,” he said. “It’s all because you recused.” He added: “You left me on an island. I can’t do anything.”Mr. Sessions said he had no choice, but said that a new start at the F.B.I. would be appropriate and that the president should consider replacing Mr. Comey.Mr. Trump was fixated on the F.B.I. director. Mr. Bannon recalled that he brought up Mr. Comey at least eight times on May 3 and May 4. “He told me three times I’m not under investigation,” the president said. “He’s a showboater. He’s a grandstander. I don’t know any Russians. There was no collusion.”Mr. Bannon told Mr. Trump that he could not fire Mr. Comey because “that ship has sailed” and that it would not stop the investigation.‘The Beginning of the End?’Mr. Trump ignored the advice and fired Mr. Comey on May 9, justifying it on criticism of his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email the year before. Overruling objections by Mr. McGahn and Mr. Priebus, Mr. Trump insisted that the letter firing the F.B.I. director state that Mr. Comey told him three times the president was not under investigation.Aides were alarmed. “Is this the beginning of the end?” Annie Donaldson, Mr. McGahn’s chief of staff, wrote in her notes.Sarah Huckabee Sanders, then the president’s deputy press secretary, told reporters that the White House had talked to “countless members of the F.B.I.” who supported the decision to fire the director — but she later admitted to investigators that it was not true. Her comment, she said, was “a slip of the tongue” made “in the heat of the moment” and not founded on anything.Mr. Comey’s dismissal led the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to appoint Mr. Mueller, a former F.B.I. director, to take over the investigation. Fearing it would mean the end of his presidency, Mr. Trump lashed out again at Mr. Sessions.“How could you let this happen, Jeff?” he demanded. He told Mr. Sessions, “You were supposed to protect me,” or words to that effect.“Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels, it ruins your presidency,” he added. “It takes years and years, and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”Mr. Trump demanded that his attorney general resign. Mr. Sessions said he would, and he returned to the Oval Office the next day with a resignation letter he handed to Mr. Trump.The president put the letter in his pocket and repeatedly asked Mr. Sessions whether he wanted to continue serving as attorney general. When Mr. Sessions finally said he did, the president said he wanted him to stay. The two shook hands, but Mr. Trump kept the letter.When they learned about the letter, Mr. Priebus and Mr. Bannon worried that if he kept it, Mr. Trump could use it to improperly influence Mr. Sessions; it would, said Mr. Priebus, serve as a “shock collar” keeping the attorney general on a leash.The next day, May 19, Mr. Trump left the White House for the Middle East. On Air Force One flying from Saudi Arabia to Israel three days later, the president took the letter from his pocket and showed it off to aides. Later on the trip, when Mr. Priebus asked Mr. Trump for the letter, the president claimed he did not have it and it was actually back at the White House.Three days after the president returned to Washington, he finally returned the letter to Mr. Sessions with a note: “Not accepted.”But he did not give up trying to regain control of the investigation, calling Mr. Sessions at home to ask if he would “unrecuse” himself and direct the Justice Department to prosecute Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Sessions refused.‘Mueller Has to Go’If the attorney general would not rein in the special counsel, Mr. Trump resolved to find someone who would. On June 17, Mr. Trump called Mr. McGahn from Camp David and told him to have Mr. Rosenstein fire Mr. Mueller because of conflicts of interest.During a 23-minute conversation, Mr. Trump said something along the lines of: “You got to do this. You got to call Rod.” Mr. McGahn, who along with other advisers believed that the supposed conflicts were “silly” and “not real,” was perturbed by the call.The president then called again. “Mueller has to go,” he told Mr. McGahn. “Call me back when you do it.”Mr. McGahn decided he would resign, determined not to repeat the experience of Robert H. Bork, who complied with President Richard M. Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate prosecutor during the Saturday Night Massacre before going on to serve as an appeals court judge.Mr. McGahn, saying that he wanted to be more like Judge Bork and not “Saturday Night Massacre Bork,” drove to the office to pack his possessions and submit his resignation. When Mr. McGahn told Mr. Priebus and Mr. Bannon, they urged him not to resign and he backed off.Undeterred, Mr. Trump summoned his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to the White House two days later and dictated a message for him to deliver to Mr. Sessions that would have effectively limited the scope of the investigation to Russian interference in the 2016 election.In the message, Mr. Trump ordered Mr. Sessions to give a speech declaring that Mr. Trump was “being treated very unfairly” by the investigation.“He shouldn’t have a Special Prosecutor/Counsel b/c he hasn’t done anything wrong,” Mr. Sessions was to say. “I was on the campaign w/him for nine months, there were no Russians involved with him. I know it for a fact b/c I was there. He didn’t do anything wrong except he ran the greatest campaign in American history.”A scheduling conflict scotched the meeting, but Mr. Trump raised it again a month later, saying that if Mr. Sessions did not meet, Mr. Lewandowski should tell him he was fired. Mr. Lewandowski assured him that the message would be delivered.Hours later, the president criticized the attorney general in an interview with The New York Times. While the meeting with Mr. Lewandowski was never held, Mr. Sessions understood his tenuous position and carried a letter of resignation in his pocket every time he visited the White House.‘Boss Man Worried’In late June, presidential advisers and lawyers learned about a Trump Tower meeting with Russians during the campaign hosted by Donald Trump Jr., along with Mr. Kushner and Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman. But the president said he did not want to hear about it.A few days later, at the office of Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Hope Hicks, the president’s communications adviser, saw emails about setting up the meeting and offering “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton on behalf of the Russian government. In a meeting, Mr. Kushner played down the encounter with the Russians, telling the president it was about adoption.Ms. Hicks suggested getting ahead of the story by having Donald Trump Jr. release the emails as part of an interview with “softball questions.” She warned that the emails were “really bad” and the story would be “massive” when it broke, but the president again said he did not want to hear about it.On July 7, while the president was at the G-20 summit meeting in Germany, Ms. Hicks learned that The Times was preparing a story about the Trump Tower meeting. Ms. Hicks, on the flight home from Germany, recommended disclosing the entire story, but the president rebuffed her, saying a draft statement said too much.Instead, Mr. Trump suggested the statement say that his eldest son had attended a meeting about Russian adoptions.Ms. Hicks then texted Donald Trump Jr. a statement asking if that was all right. The president’s son wanted to insert that they “primarily” discussed Russian adoption because, as he texted to Ms. Hicks, they “started with some Hillary thing which was bs and some other nonsense which we shot down fast.”Ms. Hicks responded: “I think that’s right too but boss man worried it invites a lot of questions.” The younger Mr. Trump, who urged releasing the emails themselves, finally did once the White House learned that The Times was about to publish them.‘I’ll Have to Get Rid of Him’Mr. Trump did not stop pressing Mr. Sessions to take back control of the investigation. On Oct. 16, the president met privately with Mr. Sessions and said he should look again at Mrs. Clinton’s emails. Mr. Sessions made no promises.Two days later, the president posted the first of several tweets in the coming weeks complaining that the Justice Department was not investigating Mrs. Clinton. One of the tweets concluded: “DO SOMETHING!”The pressure on the president rose in November when Mr. Flynn’s lawyers told Mr. Trump’s team that he would be accepting a plea deal. One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers left a voice mail message for one of Mr. Flynn’s: “Remember what we’ve always said about the president and his feelings toward Flynn and, that still remains.”On Dec. 6, five days after Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying about contacts with the Russian government, Mr. Trump pulled Mr. Sessions aside after a cabinet meeting and again suggested he “unrecuse” himself. “You’d be a hero,” he said, while saying he was not going to “direct you to do anything.”In January 2018, The Times reported about the president’s June 2017 effort to have Mr. Mueller fired. A livid Mr. Trump pressed Mr. McGahn to publicly rebut the story, but he would not because the article accurately reported the president’s desires.Mr. Trump insisted that Mr. McGahn deny it. “If he doesn’t write a letter, then maybe I’ll have to get rid of him,” the president said, or something to that effect.John F. Kelly, who had replaced Mr. Priebus as chief of staff, then arranged a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. McGahn.“I never said to fire Mueller,” Mr. Trump said. “I never said ‘fire.’ This story doesn’t look good. You need to correct this. You’re the White House counsel.”“Did I say the word ‘fire’?” he asked.“What you said is, ‘Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the special counsel,’” Mr. McGahn replied. He refused the president’s request that he “do a correction.”Mr. Trump then complained about Mr. McGahn writing things down. “Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.”Mr. McGahn maintained he took notes because he was a “real lawyer” and they create a record.“I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn,” Mr. Trump said. “He did not take notes.”But Mr. McGahn did. And so did plenty of others.
WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III revealed the scope of a historic Russian campaign to sabotage the 2016 presidential election in a much-anticipated report made public on Thursday, and he detailed a frantic monthslong effort by President Trump to thwart a federal investigation that imperiled his presidency from the start.Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, laid out how his team of prosecutors wrestled with whether Mr. Trump’s actions added up to a criminal obstruction-of-justice offense. They ultimately chose not to charge Mr. Trump, citing numerous legal and factual constraints, but pointedly declined to exonerate him and suggested that it might be the role of Congress to settle the matter.The report laid bare that Mr. Trump was elected with the help of a foreign power, and cataloged numerous meetings between Mr. Trump’s advisers and Russians seeking to influence the campaign and the presidential transition team — encounters set up in pursuit of business deals, policy initiatives and political dirt about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president.The special counsel concluded that there was “insufficient evidence” to determine that the president or his aides had engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians, even though the Trump campaign welcomed the Kremlin sabotage effort and “expected it would benefit electorally” from the hacks and leaks of Democratic emails.Then, after federal investigators opened an inquiry into the extraordinary Russian campaign, the president repeatedly tried to undermine it.“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,” Mr. Mueller’s investigators wrote. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.”Fevered speculation, now put to rest, arose in some circles that Mr. Trump and his immediate family might be in legal peril from Mr. Mueller’s investigation. At the same time, the report offered reams of evidence of a climate of deceit — and a base impulse for self-preservation — among a president and his top aides not seen since the days of Richard M. Nixon.That impulse prompted some presidential advisers to try to block Mr. Trump’s demands that they take steps to protect him from federal investigators. Some feared getting wrapped up in the widening inquiry.“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 report said.The special counsel found that Mr. Trump had the authority to make many of his most controversial decisions, including the firing of James B. Comey as the F.B.I. director, by virtue of the powers the Constitution grants him. At the same time, it is a far more damning portrayal of his behavior than the one presented last month in a four-page letter released by Attorney General William P. Barr.“The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the president sought to use his official power outside of usual channels,” the report said. “These actions ranged from efforts to remove the special counsel and to reverse the effect of the attorney general’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony. Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.”In his letter, Mr. Barr announced that while Mr. Mueller had made no judgment about whether Mr. Trump had obstructed justice, he had stepped in to decide that the president had not.Mr. Barr defended his decision in a news conference on Thursday and said that some of the president’s actions were understandable given the “context” of his situation.“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,” Mr. Barr said.The Mueller report is a sometimes gripping account of a presidency consumed by a sprawling investigation, and of a president seized by paranoia about what it might unearth.Immediately after learning that a special counsel had been appointed to lead the Russia investigation, the report said, Mr. Trump became distraught and slumped in his chair.“Oh, my God. This is terrible,” he said. “This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”Mr. Trump had long denounced the inquiry as a politically motivated “witch hunt.” But since it began, a half-dozen former Trump aides have been indicted or convicted of crimes, most of them for lying to Congress or federal investigators.Last month’s release of Mr. Mueller’s primary conclusions seemed to blunt any momentum on Capitol Hill to initiate impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump, and it appeared unlikely then that the far more detailed accounting of the special counsel’s work would change that dynamic.But on Thursday, top Democratic lawmakers seized on the report’s findings and suggested that the issue of impeachment was not settled. At the very least, Mr. Mueller’s report seems certain to give Democratic lawmakers — and the many Democratic presidential candidates — ample political fodder for attacks on the president until he stands for re-election late next year.The release is the culmination of an investigation that consumed the national political conversation for nearly two years and was freighted with the outsize expectations of Mr. Trump’s most fervent critics.Mr. Mueller achieved a cult status among some Americans obsessed with the prospect that he might deliver a report that would put the Trump presidency in jeopardy — an image fueled by his general refusal to give public signals about the direction of his investigation. Mr. Mueller and his staff seemed monkish and enigmatic, choosing to speak only in court appearances and highly detailed indictments of Russian intelligence operatives or some of the president’s advisers.Some Americans invested so much hope in the Mueller investigation that they made plans to hold rallies in predetermined locations if Mr. Trump fired the special counsel and terminated the investigation. He never did.The Mueller investigation began in May 2017, but its origins go back nearly a year earlier. The F.B.I. opened the original inquiry into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia on July 31, 2016, in the midst of a heated presidential election contest that, the world now knows, Moscow made a concerted effort to sabotage.That summer saw WikiLeaks release thousands of hacked emails meant to cripple Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy, and American intelligence and law enforcement officials saw other ominous signs of Russian attempts to subvert the election.Determining the scope of the Russian interference campaign was a centerpiece of the Mueller investigation, and will most likely be one of its enduring legacies. His report leaves no doubt that it was the Russian government that orchestrated the effort, and that many of Mr. Trump’s aides welcomed it — even if they did not actively coordinate with Moscow.At the very least, in the face of a Russian intelligence effort to make contact with Mr. Trump’s advisers, none of the advisers thought to contact the F.B.I.When Mr. Mueller began his work, there were still prominent voices at both ends of the political spectrum openly debating whether the hacking and leaking of emails — and the fake news that spread like a wildfire on social media in the months before the election — was the work of Russia, China, stateless hackers or, as Mr. Trump once liked to say, “someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”Even last summer, standing next to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia after a summit meeting in Finland, Mr. Trump refused to accept that the Russians had carried out the election sabotage.Now, the voices of doubt have mostly been silenced, in part because of two indictments Mr. Mueller secured last year against a total of 25 Russian military intelligence operatives and experts in social media manipulation. The indictments gave exquisite details about the entirety of the Russian operation — how Russians paid unsuspecting Americans to stage pro-Trump rallies in battleground states, how Russian hackers penetrated the personal email account of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman and how a pair of Russian women took a scouting trip to the United States two years before the election to gather information for the planned assault.Just weeks into his presidency, Mr. Trump declared there had been no meetings or other communications during the campaign between his advisers and Russians or other Kremlin intermediaries. A parade of news media reports followed saying otherwise — reports that the White House denounced at the time as false but that Mr. Mueller’s report showed to be accurate.One of the most significant was a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower set up by Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, and a group of Russians who had promised political dirt about Mrs. Clinton.When The New York Times revealed the meeting a year later, there was a frenzied effort by the president’s aides to mislead the public about its purpose — including putting out a news release that the meeting had primarily been about a Russian adoption program.The report stated that Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer “repeatedly and inaccurately denied that the president played any role in drafting Trump Jr.’s statement,” and that the special counsel investigated whether that meeting violated campaign finance laws. Mr. Mueller’s team found that the evidence was “not sufficient.”Some of the meetings with Russians were a mélange of business and politics, and Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors wrapped up their inquiry still puzzled about their purpose.In December 2016, for instance, the head of a Russian bank under sanctions met in New York with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in law and senior adviser. Mr. Kushner told the special counsel it was a diplomatic meeting with a person close to Mr. Putin set to discuss the future of relations between the United States and Russia.The Russian banker, Sergey N. Gorkov, has given a different account of the meeting’s purpose: to sit down with Mr. Kushner, the scion of a New York real estate empire, for business purposes.In the end, the special counsel’s team “did not resolve the apparent conflicts in the accounts,” according to the report.Mr. Trump declared victory last month when Mr. Barr sent the four-page letter to Congress outlining the investigation’s main conclusions.“After three years of lies and smears and slander, the Russia hoax is finally dead,” Mr. Trump told thousands of his supporters at a Michigan rally days after Mr. Barr’s letter was made public. “Robert Mueller was a god to the Democrats. He was a god to them until he said ‘no collusion.’ They don’t like him so much now.”Even so, the revelations in Mr. Barr’s letter did not produce a noticeable bump in Mr. Trump’s approval rating, and polls taken in the weeks since Mr. Barr’s letter have shown that many Americans were reserving judgment until they had a fuller picture of Mr. Mueller’s conclusions.Other Americans made up their minds long ago, and it is unclear what the effect will be of the release of hundreds of pages of investigative conclusions by a team of seasoned prosecutors. Those already convinced that the investigation was a witch hunt, and those already convinced that Mr. Trump conspired with Russia to win the presidency, are unlikely to be moved by the conclusions of Mr. Mueller and his team.Mr. Mueller’s byzantine investigation amassed information from thousands of subpoenas, hundreds of search warrants and evidence turned over from more than a dozen foreign governments.The report released on Thursday revealed that his team of prosecutors had found enough evidence of potential crimes to make 14 different criminal referrals to other federal prosecutors.So far, only two of those have officially been made public.
The Mueller report, annotatedClick Here For A PDF Version#Resist