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. […]
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.
Mueller report suggests Congress should judge whether Trump obstructed justice
[…] Trump’s efforts to obstruct the investigation “were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels,” Mueller wrote.
“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,” he continued.
The special counsel’s office would have exonerated Trump if the facts had supported that conclusion, Mueller’s report says, but it adds that “based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.”
In fact, the report says Mueller’s team unearthed “multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations.”
Five tantalizing redactions in the Mueller report
More than one third of the 448 pages of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report include redactions of some kind.
On some pages it’s just a word or two, on others nearly all the text is redacted, setting up a tantalizing mix of what we know and what we don’t. […]
Here are some of the more notable samples:
In a section that looks at Trump’s potential motives for firing FBI Director James B. Comey — after a sentence saying Trump knew about efforts to build a new Trump Tower in Moscow — is a redaction about something that Trump was aware of when it became known that Russian intelligence officials were behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee. […]
Much of this passage dealing with WikiLeaks’ dump of Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton emails is redacted because of the potential harm to an ongoing investigation. (It doesn’t specify which one.) Among the redactions is the detail that Trump took a phone call and told then-deputy campaign manager Rick Gates that more damaging releases would be coming.
Associated Press
Mueller reveals Trump’s attempts to choke off Russia probe
[…] In one particularly dramatic moment, Mueller reported that Trump was so agitated at the special counsel’s appointment on May 17, 2017, that he slumped back in his chair and declared: “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”
With that, Trump set out to save himself.
In June of that year, Mueller wrote, Trump directed White House Counsel Don McGahn to call Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the probe, and say that Mueller must be ousted because he had conflicts of interest. McGahn refused — deciding he would sooner resign than trigger a potential crisis akin to the Saturday Night Massacre of firings during the Watergate era.
Two days later, the president made another attempt to alter the course of the investigation, meeting with former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and dictating a message for him to relay to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The message: Sessions would publicly call the investigation “very unfair” to the president, declare Trump did nothing wrong and say Mueller should limit his probe to “investigating election meddling for future elections.” The message was never delivered.
Analysis: Mueller paints a damning portrait of the president
The episodes detailed by the special counsel paint a damning portrait of a president consumed by the investigation. Even after more than two years of revelations about Trump’s willingness to lie or press others to do so, Mueller’s report put into sharp focus the president’s disregard for governing norms and his willingness to challenge both legal and political limits. […]
“His greatest rebuttal will be he’s in office, he’s going to remain in office and he’ll get re-elected because the Democrats have nothing,” Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House adviser, said of the president.
Indeed, the Democrats’ next steps are unclear. Some lawmakers will likely continue to press for impeachment proceedings, though party leaders are skeptical of that approach. House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler has requested that Mueller testify before his committee within weeks and plans to subpoena for the full report and underlying evidence.
Vox
The best defense of Trump is still a damning indictment
[…] The first half of the Mueller report concludes that “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” that it did so on Trump’s behalf, and that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit” from Russia’s intervention. The report also shows that the Trump organization was in negotiations to build a Trump hotel in Moscow through 2016, and that people in Trump’s orbit appeared to have advance warning of the emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
What the report does not establish is explicit coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. There is no smoking gun where a Trump confidant asks Russian operatives to hack Clinton’s emails — well, aside from the time Trump asked Putin to do so in public — or advises them on when to release them.
Trump received help from the Russians, welcomed that help, and arguably rewarded Russia for that help, but Mueller does not present evidence that Trump or any of his associates helped Russia help him.
The second half of the Mueller report is about obstruction of justice. Here, the report establishes a pattern of behavior on the part of Trump himself. Trump fires people, threatens to fire people, tries to fire people, and repeatedly lies to the public and to his own staff in an effort to derail the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election.
It’s official: House Democrats will subpoena the full, unredacted Mueller report
House Democrats want to see special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report, and they don’t plan to settle for the redacted version released to Congress and the public by Attorney General William Barr.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) said Thursday he will issue a subpoena to get the Mueller report in its entirety. Nadler was supposed to be among the select number of senior House and Senate Committee members who Barr promised would receive nearly full access to Mueller’s report, minus information from the grand jury. But Nadler said it hadn’t even been made available to him as of Thursday afternoon.
“Contrary to public reports, I have not heard from the Department about receiving a less-redacted version of the report,” Nadler said in a statement. “Because Congress requires this material in order to perform our constitutionally-mandated responsibilities, I will issue a subpoena for the full report and the underlying materials.”
The Mueller report’s collusion section is much worse than you think
What “no collusion” gets wrong
The report is littered with evidence Trump and his staff were open to Russian interference in the election. Mueller explicitly concludes that “the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian effort.” […]
Does that rise to the level of “collusion?” It’s a slippery term. But if “collusion” refers to a willingness to cooperate with Russian interference in the 2016 US election and actively taking steps to abet it, it seems to me that the Mueller report does in fact establish that it took place.
But even if you find that definition too loose, the report’s message is not that there was nothing to worry about on the Trump-Russia front in 2016. Instead, it confirms that there were multiple shady connections between Trump and Russia, and that the president’s “no collusion” line is quite misleading. And at worst, the way it’s been presented suggests that the president and his attorney general are still actively trying to deceive the American people about what happened in 2016.
Mother Jones
The Mueller Report: A Detailed Account of Trump’s Lies and Misconduct
[…] Yet the Mueller report—while, as expected, not revealing any further criminality beyond the indictments already brought during the investigation—reinforces the case that much wrongdoing occurred on the part of Trump and his crew.
Here is just one overview Mueller provides in the report:
During the 2016 campaign, the media raised questions about a possible connection between the Trump Campaign and Russia. The questions intensified after WikiLeaks released politically damaging Democratic Party emails that were reported to have been hacked by Russia. Trump responded to questions about possible connections to Russia by denying any business involvement in Russia—even though the Trump Organization had pursued a business project in Russia as late as June 2016. Trump also expressed skepticism that Russia had hacked the emails at the same time as he and other Campaign advisors privately sought information [redacted] about any further WikiLeaks releases.
Lying and subterfuge—not crimes, but that’s what Mueller accuses Trump of engaging in. And given that this particular redaction probably refers to longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, whose lying-to-Congress case is still pending, this portion suggests that Trump himself ordered Stone to be in contact with WikiLeaks, while Julian Assange’s outfit was being used by the Russians as part of their covert operation to help Trump. Pause for a moment: A presidential candidate apparently directed a henchman to make contact with—perhaps collaborate with—an ongoing attack on American democracy.
CNN
Erik Prince financed effort to find Clinton's emails, Mueller report says
Erik Prince, brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, helped finance an effort to obtain Hillary Clinton's deleted emails in 2016, according to the publicly released version of special counsel Robert Mueller's report.
The redacted report said the effort was led by Barbara Ledeen, a onetime GOP staffer on Capitol Hill and associate of … Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Flynn reached out to Ledeen after Trump privately and repeatedly asked him and other campaign officials to obtain the deleted emails from Clinton's private server, according to the report. This was one of multiple Flynn-linked efforts to get Clinton's emails, another being with GOP operative Peter Smith.
Bloomberg
Mueller Weighed Charges Against Trump Jr. Over Tower Meeting
Special Counsel Robert Mueller said he considered charging … Donald Trump’s eldest son and other participants in a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with campaign-finance violations but chose not to because of a high bar to prove they intended to break the law.
Mueller’s decision not to charge Donald Trump Jr. or anyone else at the gathering, including Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, was based in part on a lack of evidence about their state of mind when they agreed to meet a Kremlin-linked lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton, the special counsel said in his report released Thursday.
Campaign finance violations require that the conduct be willful because, like some tax crimes, it isn’t "obviously illegal," said Harry Sandick, a former federal prosecutor who’s now a criminal defense lawyer. That’s a departure from the usual rule that ignorance of the law is not a defense, he said.
"For a willful violation, you must know that what you are doing violates some known legal duty," said Sandick, who isn’t involved in the probe. "Trump Jr. was not viewed as someone who necessarily would have known the law in this area."
Mueller Spells Out Trump’s ‘Multiple Acts’ to Undermine Russia Probe
Robert Mueller delivered an exhaustive account of … Donald Trump’s efforts to head off or undermine the special counsel’s Russia probe, all but inviting Congress to take action on at least 10 instances of potential obstruction of justice.
“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," he said in his report sent to Congress on Thursday. […]
“Our investigation found multiple acts by the president that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russia-interference and obstruction investigations," according to the report. “The president engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.”
The damning assessment was at odds with comments by Attorney General William Barr, who said in a news conference that he found Trump had “non-corrupt motives.” After Barr spoke, Trump quickly tweeted, “Game Over.”
USA Today
'I do not recall': Read Trump's written answers to Mueller on Russian contacts, Trump Tower meeting
Donald Trump, in his written answers to special counsel Robert Mueller, said more than 30 times that he did not "recall" or "remember" or have an "independent recollection" of events related to key questions surrounding Russian investigation. [...]
Trump's answers were dubbed both "inadequate" and "incomplete or imprecise" by Mueller in the report. Mueller added that his office considered subpoenaing the president for his testimony but decided the "investigation had made significant progress" and that he had enough evidence from other sources to determine the credibility of Trump's answers, the report states.
NPR News
Mueller Report: Trump Tried To Stop Investigation Fearing His Presidency Was Over
…the Mueller report's conclusion on whether the president obstructed justice was decidedly noncommittal.
"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 reads. "Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards however we are unable to reach that judgment. The evidence we obtained about the president's actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred."
Mueller's doorstop report thumped to Earth on Thursday after much anticipation.
The Guardian
Mueller's report would have signaled the end for anyone other than Trump
Any other president in America’s history would have had to resign or now face being ousted.
But no past president has so frequently denied reality, nor seemed so unfamiliar with the very concept of shame. Neither, perhaps, has any past president enjoyed the support of such a compliant Senate, which is Republican-held, and willing to excuse his every scandal in the service of their agenda.