‘BLOCK’ BUSTER
Mueller’s 11 ‘key issues’ for possible obstruction
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report addresses 11 ways President Trump potentially obstructed justice during the feds’ probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
It also shoots down Trump’s arguments that the Constitution gives him immunity for his actions but passes on deciding whether anything he did “constitutes a federal offense” — in part because doing so could cripple his presidency.
The report notes Trump’s “efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”
The 183 pages that deal with the obstruction probe are only lightly redacted, with some of the blacked-out material tied to the pending obstruction and witness-tampering case against longtime adviser Roger Stone.
These are the “key issues and events” Mueller examined:
During his 2016 campaign, Trump publicly questioned whether Russia was behind WikiLeaks’ release of hacked Democratic Party e-mails “at the same time” he and his campaign secretly tried to find out if any more e-mails would be leaked.
“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 Russian called Trump Tower Moscow,” the report says.
Trump told then-FBI Director James Comey during a private White House dinner in January 2017 that he “needed loyalty” in the investigation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI about discussing US sanctions against Russia with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
After firing Flynn the next month, Trump tried to get Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland to draft a letter saying Trump didn’t tell 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 the request would look like a quid pro quo for an ambassadorship she had been offered,” the report says.
Following then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the Russia probe in March 2017, Trump pulled him aside at an event and urged him to “unrecuse.” Trump also ignored thenWhite House counsel Don McGahn’s advice to not contact the Department of Justice and twice called Comey asking he publicly say Trump wasn’t under investigation.
When Comey refused to tell a congressional hearing in May 2017 whether Trump was being investigated, Trump decided within days to fire him. On the day Comey was canned, the White House claimed it was based on a DOJ recommendation over his “mishandling of the
Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation” — even though Trump made the decision before hearing from the department.
Following Mueller’s appointment, Trump called McGahn at home in June 2017 and ordered him to have Mueller fired for conflicts of interest. McGahn — who didn’t want to replay the Watergate-era “Saturday Night Massacre” — called his lawyer, drove to the White House and packed up his office, telling then-Chief of Staff Reince Preibus that Trump had asked him to “do crazy s- -t,” the report says. He returned to work the next Monday but never carried out Trump’s directive.
Two days after the call to McGahn, Trump met privately in the Oval Office with former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and dictated a message instructing Sessions to publicly call Mueller’s investigation “very unfair” and to say Trump had done nothing wrong.
A month later, after Trump asked about the status of the message, Lewandowski asked a senior White House official, Rick Dearborn, to deliver it, but Dearborn did not follow through.
In the summer of 2017, Trump repeatedly directed aides to not release e-mails that set up a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, where son Donald Jr. had been promised Russian government dirt on Clinton.
Trump resumed his effort to have Sessions reverse his recusal by calling him at home in early summer 2017 and also met with him in the Oval Office in December 2017. Trump told Sessions that he would be a “hero” if he took control of the Russia probe and launched an investigation of Clinton.
When news broke in early 2018 that McGahn had threatened to quit rather than have Mueller fired, Trump called the story “bulls- -t” and ordered then-White House staff secretary Rob Porter “to tell McGahn to create a record to make clear that the president never directed McGahn to fire the special counsel,” the report says.
McGahn later refused a personal request from Trump to “do a correction” during an Oval Office meeting that then-Chief of Staff John Kelly called “a little tense.”
After Flynn began cooperating with Mueller in November 2017, a Trump lawyer asked for a “heads-up” if “there’s information that implicates the president” — and warned Flynn’s lawyer that Trump would learn about Flynn’s “hostility” when the request was refused.
Trump also repeatedly refused to rule out a pardon for ex-campaign chair Paul Manafort, with the report citing a November 2018 Post interview in which Trump suggested Manafort was “very brave” for refusing to “flip” on him.
When Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen began cooperating with the feds in the summer of 2018, Trump went from praising him and sending messages of support to blasting him as a “rat” and suggesting his relatives committed crimes.