The Ashford Zone Blog

Conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C., holds that impeachment would be a massive gift to President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election effort. President Bill Clinton famously stayed popular throughout his impeachment proceedings, and since any effort to remove Trump would likely fail in the Senate, many people believe impeachment would be doomed from the start.

But we really shouldn’t be so sure.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report lays out a powerful case for obstruction of justice for at least four different categories of acts, with potentially strong cases in several others. Moreover, Trump has already been implicated in court in criminal campaign finance violations, which may itself give rise to additional charges. Mueller’s investigation also led to to numerous still-redacted related investigations, and we know Trump’s conduct in other arenas is being probed by various investigatory bodies.

So if the House begins impeachment hearings, there will be a lot to cover and uncover. And while a plurality of voters oppose impeachment, according to a new poll from HuffPost and YouGov, there is a lot of malleability in the numbers.

Only 41 percent of people said Trump should not be impeached, according to the poll (37 percent favor impeachment). This presumably corresponds tightly with the 41 percent or so of people who approve of Trump in most polls. A surprisingly large portion of the population — 22 percent — says it’s unsure about whether Trump should be impeached.

While Trump’s base support appears to be quite solid, there’s a lot of risk for him in the “unsure” population. It wouldn’t be surprising, after all, if there were many people who didn’t approve of Trump for any number of reasons but thought that impeachment would be too extreme, that Democrats’ criticisms were unfair, or that the path would just be too difficult for the country. Instead, the poll suggests, there are few people outside of Trump’s core supporters who are ruling out impeachment. (The poll was conducted on April 18 and 19; Mueller’s report was released on April 18.)

That means, in other words, that the case can be made to the country that impeachment is worthwhile. Of course, it can be made both ways — if Trump and his defenders are convincing, he may be able to paint an impeachment push as extreme overreach and turn a majority of the country against impeachment.

But even in crass political terms, this should be an acceptable risk for Democrats. Doing something big and bold in politics is always a gamble, and you may end up giving ground to your opponents. But if you’re not willing to stand your ground and fight for important principles, what’s the point of being in Congress?

The polling also presents some evidence about how the House could use impeachment hearings to make the case against Trump. It found that only 35 percent of people believe Trump “committed crimes.” Another 21 percent said Trump did not commit crimes but people on his campaign did, 20 percent said no one on his campaign committed any crimes, and 25 percent said they weren’t sure.

A Politico/Morning Consult poll only muddies the results. The first finding of that poll shows that Trump’s approval rating has dropped 5 points, equaling his presidency’s low-water mark, since last week’s release of the special counsel report into the 2016 election.

But while views of Trump have tumbled since the publication of Robert Muller’s redacted report, so has support for impeaching him. Only 34 percent of voters believe Congress should begin impeachment proceedings to remove the president from office, down from 39 percent in January. Nearly half, 48 percent, say Congress should not begin impeachment proceedings.

But we should remember, as Kevin Krause points out, views on impeachment proceedings can change as the process moves forward:

It’s worth remembering how public opinion changed on Nixon’s impeachment.

A month into the Ervin Committee hearings, the percentage supporting Nixon's removal was still down in the teens.

A majority didn’t want him removed until late July 1974. He resigned two weeks later. pic.twitter.com/PwBqlhzqUx

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) April 19, 2019

Even if, as seems most likely, impeachment didn’t lead to Trump’s ouster, it might better inform the public about the kind of president he is and what he’s done. And that might be worth it in its own right.

1. This was as much a counterintelligence investigation as a criminal one. One of the new details in the report is that the FBI “embedded” approximately 40 personnel in the Special Counsel’s Office. Their role was not to contribute to the criminal probe, but instead to pore over the collected materials and pass written summaries of key counterintelligence findings to FBI headquarters and other agencies across the country.

2. Jerome Corsi isn’t out of the woods. One of the most surprising decisions at the close of the Mueller investigation was the lack of further indictments. But conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, at least, appears to still be very much in the sights of prosecutors. In fact, the very first mention of Corsi’s name appears in a redaction labeled “Harm to Ongoing Matter.” (We know that because we only see the “second” reference to Corsi’s name appear in a paragraph on page 54 of the first volume of the report.) Elsewhere, Corsi’s name is clearly hidden in other redactions, as context clues make clear he’s the “ongoing matter” under question.

3. Anyone demanding the unredacted version of the report is stalling. Democrats have spent the last four days hemming and hawing about impeachment, saying they need to read the unredacted report before they make a decision. That’s baloney. For the most part, the redactions aren’t that material to the underlying narrative. Mueller establishes all the damning evidence he needs to point to a pattern of obstruction in unredacted portions of Volume II of the report. (The clear exception where redactions could shed substantial new light: The six-page Appendix D, where Mueller lists the 12 still-secret ongoing cases referred to other prosecutors.) Throughout the remainder of the document, many redactions clearly deal with either Roger Stone or Jerome Corsi. The bulk of the rest appear focus on operational details of the GRU and the Internet Research Agency.

Two of the most intriguing redactions come on page 12, where the report outlines five (or maybe six) individuals Mueller was specifically authorized to investigate. Two (or maybe three) of those are redacted. Because of the alphabetical list and way the lines fall—there’s a tiny two-letter redaction that spills over to the next line—the final redacted name is almost certainly “Donald Trump Jr.” The other is still unknown, falling somewhere in the alphabet between “Gates” and “Stone.”

4. The Trump campaign really wanted Hillary’s emails. The role of Michael Flynn aide Peter Smith has long been unclear. Smith evidently tried to mount an effort in 2016 to find Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails through the dark web, and later apparently killed himself days after the Wall Street Journal reported on those efforts in 2017. Mueller makes clear that Smith’s actions were extensive, well-funded, and part of multiple initiatives by people connected to the Trump campaign to find Hillary’s emails—all of which were then overtaken by the Russian theft and email dumps of DNC and Clinton campaign emails.

5. The Trump Tower Moscow Project was a big deal. While Donald Trump has long tried to downplay his company’s overtures to Russia, Trump fixer Cohen and associate Felix Sater actually saw the Trump Tower Moscow as potentially helpful to Trump’s campaign. In one email in November 2015, the day after the Trump Organized sent Russia its “letter of intent” to proceed with the project, a highly detailed document that outlined precisely how much money Trump would earn and when, Sater emailed Cohen, “Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it.”

6. Mueller never understood why Paul Manafort shared polling data with Russian intelligence asset Konstantin Kilimnik. If you’re only going to read one section of the Russia-focused Volume 1, tune into pages 129 through 144. That’s where Mueller lays out the still-puzzling actions of campaign chair Paul Manafort, and makes clear that Mueller might not have ever gotten to the bottom of the core question of a Trump-Russia conspiracy.

The final report is the first time that Mueller has ever addressed the incident, which only came to light because Manafort’s lawyers are bad at technology. Mueller adds detail and breaks new ground by saying that the data-sharing “continued for some period of time,” but comes up empty on the most important questions. “The Office could not reliably determine Manafort’s purpose in sharing internal polling data with Kilimnik during the campaign period,” Mueller writes, adding also that “the Office could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it.” Given that the polling data has always been one of the most suspicious actions during the campaign—did Russia’s Internet Research Agency use it to aid in their own targeting of American voters?—that leaves a glaring hole in the center of the conspiracy investigation.

It’s indicative of a point Mueller makes throughout the report. He remains puzzled, he writes, about the sheer volume of seemingly unnecessary lies that emanated from Trump world, and notes that his investigation was stymied by lying witnesses, deleted evidence, and the sheer complexity of investigating shadowy entities and people beyond the reach of US law enforcement. As Mueller phrased it, “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.” That’s a long-winded, prosecutorial way of making clear that the report isn’t exactly a “total EXONERATION” of the idea of Russian collusion—more that they were never able to establish evidence of such beyond a reasonable doubt.

7. Donald Trump runs his White House like a Mafia boss.When Michael Cohen testified before Congress earlier this winter, he made clear how much Donald Trump operated his family business like a mob boss: speaking in code, refusing to have written agreements, prizing loyalty. Mueller’s report is littered with examples that read more like the behavior of a Mafioso than a commander-in-chief, from pushing FBI director James Comey for “loyalty,” to chastising White House counsel Don McGahn for writing down notes, to private messages through intermediaries asking for continued silence, to public attacks on those, like Cohen, who “flipped.” Just because it’s familiar behavior from Trump by now doesn’t make it any less troubling.

8. Maria Butina and the National Rifle Association aren’t mentioned at all. More conspiracy-minded Muellerologists have long zeroed in the “pee tape” and Michael Cohen’s trip to Prague—a rumor specifically debunked by Mueller in his report. But the odd case of the alleged Russian spy arrested in the midst of Mueller’s investigation has left observers wondering if a larger Russian effort, involving the National Rifle Association, was also afoot. In the end, Butina’s name doesn’t appear in Mueller’s report at all, unless it’s redacted. Neither do two other key unresolved threads, the Alfa Bank server and Trump’s data firm, Cambridge Analytica. Based on redactions it also seems unlikely—although not impossible—that any of those matters are part of the 12 still-secret investigations handed off to other prosecutors. Mueller does have one intriguing, newsy footnote on page 14, where he says “other Russian entities” may have engaged in active-measure operations against the US.

In fact, one of the conclusions drawn from the totality of Volume I is that while the GRU and Internet Research Agency efforts were clearly well-funded, coordinated, and well-executed, there really doesn’t seem to have been a sweeping conspiracy on the Russian side either. Many of the Russian contacts to the Trump campaign appear too haphazard to be part of an active intelligence effort. Even the suspicious June 2016 Trump Tower meeting comes across in Mueller’s report more as a bungled miscommunication than a key part of a conspiracy. If one of the takeaways of the report is that the Trump campaign was simply never organized enough to engage in a conspiracy—that they had the motive and the willingness to collude, but never got their act together to do so—it seems possible that the Russians weren’t organized on their side enough either.

9. Mueller goes to great lengths to demolish William Barr’s theory of obstruction. One of the major overlooked sections of the report is the roughly 20-page portion—akin almost to a Harvard Law Review article—at the end, where Mueller’s team makes clear how vigorously they disagree with attorney general William Barr’s controversial memo last year. At the time, Barr argued that the obstruction statute doesn’t apply to the president. It’s easy to imagine Mueller team member Michael Dreeben, perhaps the Justice Department’s best appellate lawyer, laboring long and hard over pages 159 to 181 of Volume II. The report argues the idea that the president can’t obstruct justice “is contrary to the litigating position of the Department of Justice and is not supported by principles of statutory construction.”

10. Google was a problem for everyone. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have received plenty of attention for the way Russia’s Internet Research Agency weaponized their platforms. But reading through the Mueller Report, it’s hard not to escape how Google caused problems for the Trump campaign in 2016. The pages are littered with examples of how the scattershot Trump team, full of neophytes, haphazardly relied on Google when they got in over their heads, and how those answers led them astray.

There’s the moment George Papadopoulos thought he was meeting privately with Putin’s niece (he wasn’t), a fact the special counsel corroborates because Papadopoulos searched for, among other phrases, “putin’s niece.” Sam Clovis, the campaign co-chair, recruited Papadopoulos to the campaign after only a Google search, which showed that he’d worked with conservative think tank the Hudson Institute—a credential that alone wouldn’t have impressed most GOP campaigns. Meanwhile, both Ivanka and Michael Cohen struggled to understand who they were dealing with in the Trump Tower Moscow project. According to the special counsel, Ivanka Trump in November 2015 received an email from a woman who identified herself as “Lana E. Alexander,” which said in part, “If you ask anyone who knows Russian to google my husband Dmitry Klokov, you’ll see who he is close to and that he has done Putin’s political campaigns.” Yet when Cohen did, he somehow concluded, incorrectly, that Klokov was a weightlifter. When Putin ally and the head of Russia’s development bank Sergey Gorkov met with Jared Kushner after the election—a meeting that would cause no end of headaches for Kushner once it was publicized—Kushner’s team did little prep work beyond a Google search that determined Gorkov was a “banker,” leaving out his key role in the Kremlin hierarchy.

11. The US has an important political and policy question ahead: Is accepting known help from a foreign power something we want to prohibit in campaigns? Mueller’s team obviously wrestled with the help that Russia offered the Trump campaign, including at the June 9 Trump Tower meeting. Similarly, the Trump campaign “expecting” help from Russia—via the WikiLeaks dumps and perhaps even having Donald Trump solicit it, with his “Russia, if you’re listening” comment—doesn’t appear to be a conspiracy in the way that Mueller legally defined it, since it didn’t involve a formal agreement of cooperation. The president’s defense attorney Rudy Giuliani said as much Sunday on CNN, tellingJake Tapper “There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.” He continued, “Who says it’s even illegal?”

It’s hard to imagine that would be the GOP’s interpretation if Hillary Clinton had accepted similar help from the Chinese Ministry of State Security. So maybe there should be policy changes to make it illegal—before foreign governments line up behind the 2020 candidates of their choice.

12. The Atlanta traveler might still matter. I’ve always been particularly interested in the possibility that Mueller and the US government has a cooperator from inside the Internet Research Agency itself, one of the three people who traveled to the US in 2014 as part of the original scouting for their information operations. Mueller in his IRA indictment named and charged two of the three travelers, but left out the third, despite highly detailed knowledge of the third’s travels and role. On page 4 of Volume I of the Mueller report, there’s a redaction where Mueller appears to discuss the details about that trip, citing “Harm to Ongoing Matter.” The IRA case is continuing in court, as one of the corporate entities Mueller charged has shown up to defend itself.

13. Sergey Kislyak was perhaps totally irrelevant. One of the biggest red flags in the opening stages of the reporting on Trump’s Russia ties in 2017 was how the Russian ambassador kept popping up in odd places. He met with Jared Kushner, with Jeff Sessions, and appeared (maybe!) at Trump’s foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in 2016. The ghost of Sergey Ivanovich does swirl through the final Mueller report, as the special counsel’s office sought to understand his mysterious appearances, but it appears he might not really have had a role in anything of consequence.

14. Mueller was deeply conservative in his approach. In almost every section, Mueller makes clear how legally and investigatively conservative he was. He pursued every avenue—racking up more than 2800 subpoenas and 500 search warrants along the way—but also stopped short of charging any case where he wasn’t 100 percent certain of a crime. Far from the “Witch Hunt” that Trump spent two years attacking, Trump should be deeply grateful that Mueller isn’t his own equivalent of a Ken Starr. The report is bad enough for Donald Trump as it is. Almost any other prosecutor, especially one who likes to grandstand, would have brought far more charges against the president’s world, including, most likely, charging the President himself with obstruction. As it stands, Mueller has clearly left that question instead to Congress.

Clearly, the pro-Trump spin attempts have failed. And they know it.

The day after the Justice Department released the Mueller report, President Donald Trump tweeted that, in his opinion, parts of the report are “total bullshit.” That’s quite a departure from Trump’s earlier comments, in which he claimed that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was a “total exoneration” of him.

Last month, Trump repeatedly proclaimed his own exoneration after Attorney General William Barr released a memo which concluded that the Mueller report did not find the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

However, the redacted version of the Mueller report released Thursday impliedthat impeachment and removal from office could be the more suitable consequence for the president’s decisions, detailed 10 instances in which the president tried to hinder the investigation into him, and revealed more information on Russia’s interference campaign.

Now, the president is changing his tune.

In a series of tweets on Friday morning, Trump referred to the report as the “Crazy Mueller Report,” the fruits of an “Illegally Started Hoax.” He tweeted, “it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the ‘Report’ about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad).”

In his tweets, Trump seemed particularly incensed at one section of the report, that documented an occasion in which he asked White House lawyer Don McGahn why he was taking notes during a conversation.

According to the Mueller report, Trump said of McGahn’s notes, “Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.” When McGahn said he is a “real lawyer” who keeps records, Trump reportedly said, “I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.”

Despite Trump’s previous insistence that he was exonerated by the report, his legal team has been working for months on producing a counter-report attacking the investigation’s legitimacy. That counter-report, is expected to be 34 pages in comparison to the 448-page Mueller report, and may be released next week. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told the Daily Beast in August that there is nothing in it “that isn’t publicly available in some form or another.”

Barr’s statements about the report repeatedly downplayed the factors that went into Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump.

Barr said on Thursday morning that Mueller “made it clear that he had not made the determination that there was a crime,” even though the report does not state that at all. Instead, Mueller mentions Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, one of which said, “the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions” in violation of “the constitutional separation of powers.”

In addition, Mueller made it clear that he was unable to reach the judgment that the president did not commit obstruction of justice.

Nunes says not to read it:

As I said tonight with ⁦@seanhannity⁩ don’t waste your time reading #MuellerDossier instead read a real report done by House Intel Committee Republicans – finished over a year ago – Cost 30M less and doesn’t read like a really bad Russian Spy novel! https://t.co/jSnAigfnnZ

— Devin Nunes (@DevinNunes) April 19, 2019

And now I share Lawfare’s analysis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Results of the Russia Investigation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, the special counsel’s report puts to rest suggestions that the Republican National Convention platform on Ukraine was altered at the direction of Trump or Russia. While Trump advisor J.D. Gordon did champion an effort on behalf of the campaign to soften a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform on supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression, the report makes clear that Gordon was not directed to seek the change by Trump. He did so after deciding that the change would better align the platform with Trump’s stated policy.
So that’s all good news for Trump. Reporting on these matters had accurately described these events as having occurred, but the Mueller report should end speculation that they were evidence of collusion or anything untoward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite the overwhelming number of contacts and ties, Mueller concludes this section by noting that the investigation did not “yield evidence sufficient to sustain any charge that any individual affiliated with the Trump Campaign acted as an agent of [the government of Russia] within the meaning of FARA.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those contacts did not end with Trump’s election to the presidency. The Mueller report devotes a substantial number of pages to chronicling Russia’s post-election efforts to make contact with the Trump administration, through both official and unofficial channels.
Some of the contacts are not necessarily untoward. Russia’s official outreach efforts began at 3:00 am following the election, when a Russian Embassy official reached out to Trump campaign press secretary Hope Hicks with a message of congratulations from Putin. This ultimately led to the first Trump-Putin call just days later, on Nov. 14, 2016. A message of congratulations and phone call with a foreign head of state isn’t especially surprising or even necessarily inappropriate.

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

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

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

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

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

Findings on Obstruction of Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The report identifies and analyzes ten episodes of concern in the obstruction investigation.

conduct involving then-FBI Director Comey and Michael Flynn;
the president’s reaction to the continuing Russia investigation;
the president’s termination of Comey;
the appointment of a special counsel and efforts to remove him;
efforts to curtail the special counsel’s investigation;
efforts to prevent public disclosure of evidence;
further efforts to have the attorney general take control of the investigation;
efforts to have White House Counsel Don McGahn deny that the president had ordered him to have the special counsel removed;
conduct toward Flynn, Manafort, and a redacted individual (likely Roger Stone); and
conduct involving Michael Cohen.

Each episode includes a detailed set of factual findings and then analyzes how the evidence maps onto the criminal charge of obstruction, which requires (1) an obstructive act; (2) a nexus with an official proceeding; and (3) a corrupt intent. We have summarized all of the episodes and Mueller’s analysis of them under the obstruction statutes here.

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

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

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

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

Barr’s Bad Day

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

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

Barr had to elide a lot of Mueller’s actual findings in order to describe them this way. In addressing the Trump campaign’s possible involvement in the dissemination of hacked DNC materials through WikiLeaks, the attorney general concluded that the report found that no one associated with the Trump campaign had “illegally participated” in the dissemination, while noting that doing so would be criminal only if those involved in publishing them also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy. Similarly, in discussing contacts between the Trump campaign and those connected with the Russian government, Barr observed only that Mueller “did not find any conspiracy to violate U.S. law,” without characterizing the actual interactions that the investigation uncovered. Instead, Barr focused on the narrow question of whether the Mueller investigation found that there was a criminal conspiracy.
Barr then moved on to whether President Trump had obstructed justice in his removal of former FBI Director James Comey and other interactions with law enforcement. Without elaborating, he noted areas of disagreement with the legal framework that Mueller presented in his report, but claimed that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein nonetheless applied it in concluding that “the evidence developed by the Special Counsel is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

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

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

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

The Political Reaction

“I’m having a good day,” said Trump in his first remarks following the report. “No collusion, no obstruction.” Trump’s victory lap actually began hours earlier in a series of triumphant tweets. The president’s most ardent congressional defenders have repeated the line.
Senate Republicans have been more muted. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he looked forward to reading the documents. Senate intelligence committee Chairman Richard Burr praised Barr’s commitment to publicly releasing the report and said he was carefully reviewing the material.

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

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

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

Political judgment is precisely what the circumstances require. Whether that judgment takes the form of an impeachment inquiry, an election campaign, or both is a question with which the political system will wrestle over the coming months. But no longer can the country escape the question of the acceptability of the president’s conduct by saying that it is under investigation, that we will wait until the facts come out, or that we won’t proceed on the basis of anonymous sources in news stories.
Mueller has put on the record a remarkable litany of opprobrious behaviors by the president and the people around him. He has also determined, for a variety of different reasons—legal, factual and prudential—not to proceed criminally against any more subjects. That leaves the judgment of those behaviors in other hands.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY TO VOLUME I

RUSSIAN SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN

The 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 OPERATIONS

At 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 CAMPAIGN

The 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 3 I, 20 I 6, 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 DECISIONS

In 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 II

Our 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 INVESTIGATION

The 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 DEFENSES

The 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 provision

in 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. Tt 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.

CONCLUSION

Because 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.

It’s out. (searchable version here)

This is a bad document for Trump and terrible for Barr who clearly was running interference for Trump.

Trump upon learning of Mueller’s appointment: “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”:

One takeaway throughout is how frequently White House aides lied to reporters. On day of Mueller appointment, WH aides said Trump reacted calmly. But Mueller report says Trump’s first reaction was: “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”

— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) April 18, 2019

About collusion:

Mueller team considered Trump’s written answers ‘inadequate,’ but decided against subpoena fight for interview.

Trump directed White House Counsel Don McGahn in June 2017 to call the acting attorney general and say that Mueller must be ousted because he had conflicts of interest.

This line comes pretty close to making a formal impeachment referral. pic.twitter.com/1fH6t9IiNp

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) April 18, 2019

Mueller declined to make a call on obstruction based in part on the unsettled Q of whether POTUS can obstruct justice. He then makes the case that POTUS *can* obstruct, knocking down the legal argument made by Barr in his 2018 memo..this is the “legal theory” Barr disagreed with.

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) April 18, 2019

MORE MUELLER: “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.”

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) April 18, 2019

Mueller Report: “Some” Trump associates “deleted relevant communications” or used “encryption” applications, so the office was not “able to corroborate witness statements” in some instances

— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) April 18, 2019

PETER SMITH was contacted by Michael Flynn to find the deleted Clinton emails, at Trump’s request, per Mueller. pic.twitter.com/jKhZZAOcrp

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) April 18, 2019

Peter Smith is the guy who committed suicide.

Mueller says Trump “edited a press statement for Trump Jr. by deleting a line that acknowledged the meeting was with ‘an individual who [Trump Jr.] was told might have information helpful to the campaign’ …'”

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) April 18, 2019

Yup: Mueller decided Don Jr was too stupid to conspire. Told ya. pic.twitter.com/SfQtaSH1Mx

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) April 18, 2019

#MuellerReport

Trump, who has “one of the great memories of all time,” can’t recall under oath a lot of things about the Russia investigation.

👀 pic.twitter.com/hvXz6NI2Lx

— Bad Fox Graphics (@BadFoxGraphics) April 18, 2019

At 08/02/16 cigar bar meeting, Manafort, Gates and Kilimnik discussed the Trump campaign “messaging and its internal polling. According to Gates, it also included discussion of ‘battleground” states,’ which Manafort identified as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota” pic.twitter.com/lWrcroMGCB

— Joe Sudbay (@JoeSudbay) April 18, 2019

Mueller: “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.” pic.twitter.com/oy8OdQU1C5

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) April 18, 2019

Incredible.

Mueller report says Trump instructed Rosenstein to put something clearing him on Russia in memo he was drafting to justify firing of Comey.

So they all knew that was the motive.

But Rosenstein’s memo ended up citing concerns about the FBI’s treatment of Hillary! pic.twitter.com/a7pcOfr6WW

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) April 18, 2019

Mueller report concludes that Trump lied when he denied ordering McGahn to remove Mueller, and that “substantial evidence” supports the conclusion that Trump “directed McGahn” to “have the special counsel removed”: pic.twitter.com/Kt7JgmZXQn

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) April 18, 2019

Here’s Pap’s effort to set up an off the record September meeting with Russia.

Funny how the habit of not writing down what happened at meetings started before the election. pic.twitter.com/JjmdUGoUxx

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) April 18, 2019

Although we’ve heard the “no collusion” conclusion, this from #MuellerReport p. 62 is damning. Mike Flynn contacted associates who were already trying to find Clinton’s emails. Their plan included contacting foreign intelligence services to see if anyone had hacked HRC’s server. pic.twitter.com/d2iMaMnt9a

— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) April 18, 2019

Mueller explicitly says as a matter of DOJ rules, “no charges can be brought” against POTUS.

No charges possible means no charges possible, not by Mueller or by Barr.

So Barr’s letter was incorrect in its depiction of Mueller. (Barr can reach his own separate views.)

— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) April 18, 2019

So the Mueller report lists cases related to Manafort and one entirely redacted one as transferred to other offices, and 12 referrals redacted as “ongoing matters.” So 14 things still out there.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) April 18, 2019

Mueller reaches the conclusion that “we were not persuaded by the argument that the President has blanket constitutional immunity to engage in acts that would corruptly obstruct justice” but doesn’t seek indictment.

— Mark Sumner (@Devilstower) April 18, 2019

From AG Barr’s summary letter, quoting the Mueller Report:

“[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinate with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

The full paragraph in Mueller’s report:

The investigation also identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. 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 the Russian efforts,the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinate with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

Barr omitting the “although” part of that sentence he quoted on collusion tells you everything you need to know.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) April 18, 2019

This is they key take-away: Mueller has assembled the facts, many of which are prima facie very damning, but its not his job to hold Trump accountable. It’s the job of congress & the American public. Release of the redacted report is the beginning of that reckoning, not the end https://t.co/t5d7pCzfbE

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) April 18, 2019

A really striking contradiction in Mueller report from what Barr said this morning – Barr said Mueller told him that the OLC opinion on not indicting a sitting president wasn’t a factor. The report includes it as a factor.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 18, 2019

Omg. Not enough characters on twitter to address all the craziness on just this one page. (Lawyers do take notes actually) pic.twitter.com/eEHoUAd7ls

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) April 18, 2019

P 266: “Notes from the White House Counsel’s Office dated March 21, 2017, indicate that the President was ‘beside himself’ over Comey’s testimony. The President called McGahn repeatedly that day to ask him to intervene … the President was ‘getting hotter and hotter, get rid?’.”

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) April 18, 2019

Manafort had Gates regularly send campaign data to Kilimnik (who the FBI says has links to Russian intelligence); he also met with Kilimnik twice in the US in 2016 and gave him campaign info. Mueller’s office never figured out why the info was sent or what Kilimnik did with it. pic.twitter.com/Ae9fGrtZ96

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) April 18, 2019

Trump provided 33 paragraphs of answers to Mueller. His memory failed him 34 times.https://t.co/n8mCI7EigL

— Eli Stokols (@EliStokols) April 18, 2019

You know who this vindicates? @michelleisawolf https://t.co/XxIWY51MPl

— Daily Trix (@DailyTrix) April 18, 2019

House Judiciary Cmte. Chairman Nadler: “Attorney General Barr appears to have shown an unsettling willingness to undermine his own Department in order to protect President Trump.”https://t.co/iqaoEftQFP pic.twitter.com/TTNtNy69QQ

— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 18, 2019

It’s really pathetic that Bill Barr stood up in public and said Trump had cooperated with the investigation when he gave utterly contemptuous responses to Mueller’s questions.

But I guess he doesn’t care.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) April 18, 2019

This is from Mueller report, volume II, p. 76, last paragraph. https://t.co/BBJfj2HajR

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) April 18, 2019

To name a few:

1-Trump claimed he never asked for loyalty from Comey – Mueller found he did.
2-Trump claimed he never asked Comey to let Flynn matter go – Mueller found he did.
3-Trump claimed he never pushed McGahn to fire Mueller – Mueller found he did. https://t.co/QdFTP0ZTFm

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) April 18, 2019

I suggest lowering expectations for the Mueller Report. I expect it to show evidence — evidence — of Trump’s obstruction, but since his motivation is an element that must be proven for an obstruction conviction, and since his motivation rests only in his head (or can at best be inferred, but not proved beyond a reasonable doubt), the report will likely conclude that an obstruction charge would be hard to prosecute. We already knew that.

Politically, of course, it will be damaging, but again, no new revelations. At the end, it will be fodder for impeachment talks, but in the end, nothing will come of it.

To the extent there is anything to look for, here are the questions:

Trump on obstruction and conspiracy

• Did Mueller consider Trump’s enthusiastic encouragement of Russia’s operation and his move to offer Russia sanctions relief from a prosecutorial standpoint (that is, a quid pro quo trading the Trump Tower deal and election assistance for sanctions relief)? If so, what were the considerations about potential criminality of it, including considerations of presidential power? If not, was any part of this referred?
• What was the consideration on Trump and obstruction? Did Mueller intend to leave this decision to Congress? [The report will not answer the second question; if Mueller did intend to leave the decision to Congress, as his predecessors Leon Jaworski and Ken Starr did for good Constitutional reasons, he will not have said so in the report.]

Paul Manafort on quid pro quo

• Was Mueller able to determine why Manafort shared polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik on August 2, 2016? Did he know it would be shared with Russians close to the election interference operation? Did he agree to a quid pro quo involving the Ukrainian peace deal as sanctions relief he pursued for another 20 months? Did Manafort’s lies prevent Mueller from answering these questions?
• What was the nature of and what was ultimately done with that polling data?
• Why didn’t Mueller charge this as conspiracy or coordination? Did it have to do with Manafort’s lies and Gates’ limited credibility?

The June 9 meeting and follow-up

• What consideration did prosecutors give to charging this as an instance of conspiracy or coordination?
• What consideration did prosecutors give to charging the public claims about this meeting as an instance of false statements?
• Did Trump know about this meeting and if so did that change the calculus (because of presidential equities) on a quid pro quo?
• Did Mueller decide Don Jr is simply too stupid to enter into a conspiracy?
• Did Mueller consider (and is DOJ still pursuing) prosecutions of some of the members of the Russian side of this meeting? [Note that Barr did not clear all US persons of conspiracy on the hack-and-leak; Emin Agalarov canceled his concert tour this year because his lawyer said he’d be detained, SDNY’s indictment of Natalia Veselnitskaya treats her as a Russian agent, and Rinat Akhmetshin and Ike Kaveladze may both have exposure that the Trump flunkies would not.]

The Seychelles meeting and related graft

• Did Mueller decide the graft he uncovered was not criminal, not prosecutable, or did he refer it?

It is 9:30 a.m. now and Congress is expected to get the report at 11:00. News reports are saying that the White House has seen the report, or at least discussed it with DOJ officials.

AG Barr is about to give a press conference. This came as a late night surprise to reporters. He is expected to talk about the process of redaction.

Trump is plugging it.

Attorney General William Barr’s Press Conference today at 9:30 AM ET. Watch on @FoxNews @OANN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2019

… not to mention…

PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2019

The Trump WH staff hope to make Mueller Report news a “slow burn” that will blow over by “next week,” (after the Holiday weekend). And they may well succeed. Certainly the rollout is being down to Trump’s benefit.

Barr is now speaking. My notes —

• “no collusion” by Trump campaign or any American
• Russia clearly tried to affect elections
• Barr says he and Rosenstein ‘disagreed with some of the special counsel’s legal theories.’
• On obstruction, the report recounts ten episodes involving the President and discusses potential legal theories for connecting these actions to elements of an obstruction offense
• He says evidence shows non-obstructive intent, but this seems to be HIS conclusion
• He says President Trump’s personal lawyer was allowed to read Mueller’s redacted report before release.

Barr: “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.”

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) April 18, 2019

So basically Barr Letter, extended dance mix.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 18, 2019

Section of Barr’s remarks in which, despite sleight of hand, he left open the possibility that Mueller did find Trump associates were involved in the dissemination of hacked emails by WikiLeaks pic.twitter.com/g2rIf8NhJo

— Jon Swaine (@jonswaine) April 18, 2019

Please note this: Barr is confirming an extensive Russian effort to sabotage our democracy that Trump himself largely still refuses to acknowledge happened at all, for corrupt purposes. But he is doing HUGE pre-spinning.

Barr argues Trump didn’t do anything to prevent Robert Mueller from finishing his investigation, and contends that his actions can be explained by sincere frustration and anger that the probe was undermining his presidency. THAT’S NOT A DEFENSE!

Barr telling us all the ways the Mueller report exonerates Trump with nobody actually having seen it yet feels like the biggest act of confirmation bias in American history.

— Mike Rothschild (@rothschildmd) April 18, 2019

And now Trump…

pic.twitter.com/222atp7wuB

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2019

Embedded in Barr remarks is an important qualifier: Trump campaign collusion with WikiLeaks could not be an illegal conspiracy because WL publication of the emails was not a crime since WL didn’t help hack them. pic.twitter.com/4E9TpxhUx0— Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) April 18, 2019

Barr flatly asserts that Trump's situation was NOT of his own making: "President Trump faced an unprecedented situation, as he entered into office and sought to perform his responsibilities as president, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct…"

— Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) April 18, 2019

Barr’s repeated use of the term “no collusion” only shows he is in the pocket of Trump.

Chris Wallace on Fox: "The Attorney General seemed almost to be acting as the counselor for the defense, the counselor for the president, rather than the Attorney General, talking about his motives, his emotions… Really, as I say, making a case for the president."

— Michael M. Grynbaum (@grynbaum) April 18, 2019

Indulge me while I put on a lawyer hat. If I heard AG Barr correctly, he said that Trump could not be held liable for obstruction of justice because he acted (i.e., fired Comey) out of frustration and anger about an investigation which Trump honestly believed was brought for political purposes by his political enemies. In doing so, Barr has made a classic law school student mistake (although lawyers and even judges sometimes make this mistake too). Barr is conflating “intent” with “motivation”
To prosecute for obstruction of justice, intent must be proven. Although the word “intent” is often used synonymously with “motivation”, they are not the same thing. “Motivation” alludes to the ulterior cause, that induces a person to do a particular act. “Intent” refers to a purposeful action and a conscious decision to perform an act, that is forbidden by law.
Take a shoplifting case where Jane Doe walks off with mascara in her purse without paying for it. Her motivation may be obvious: she wanted the mascara. But wanting the mascara is not illegal. It’s her intent that matters. She could have wanted the mascara, but absent-mindedly put it in her purse, INTENDING to pay for it at the counter. That would make her innocent of shoplifting. On the other hand, if she put it in her purse INTENDING to hide it so she could leave without paying, that is a criminal intent.
Barr seems to be saying that Trump’s motivation (to end an investigation that was dogging him) is a defense. I am happy to agree Trump’s MOTIVATION may have been “legal” or reasonable, just as it is legal and reasonable to “want mascara”. But it is the INTENT that matters. And Trump’s firing of Comey was, it seems, INTENDED to cut off an investigation. (The fact that it failed to do so is also irrelevant). Barr actually seems to agree (without saying so) that the intent was to end the investigation, which leads me to suspect that Mueller concluded the same thing.

f an investigation. (The fact that it failed to do so is also irrelevant).

NBC:

Some of the more than dozen current and former White House officials who cooperated with special counsel Robert Mueller are worried that the version of his report expected to be made public on Thursday will expose them as the source of damaging information about President Donald Trump, according to multiple witnesses in the investigation.

Some of the officials and their lawyers have sought clarity from the Justice Department on whether the names of those who cooperated with Mueller’s team will be redacted or if the public report will be written in a way that makes it obvious who shared certain details of Trump’s actions that were part of the obstruction of justice probe, people familiar with the discussions said. But, they said, the Justice Department has refused to elaborate.

Of particular concern is how Trump — and his allies — will react if it appears to be clear precisely who shared information with Mueller, these people said.

“They got asked questions and told the truth, and now they’re worried the wrath will follow,” one former White House official said.

I’m not sympathetic. These people chose to work for this madman. That should come with a cost. The idea of presidential advisers cowering to a President — any president, but especially an unhinged one — should be of concern to every American who is interested in efficient government as well as government transparency.

More than that, it sends a message to every future White House worker — you work for the people; not for the president. You should expect to be held accountable to the people; not the president.