Special counsel expanding inquiry
Special counsel reportedly asks for materials related to 13 areas
Robert Mueller seeking White House documents on the president’s campaign and his associates.
WASHINGTON — Special counsel Robert Mueller has sought a variety of documents related to President Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House, the president’s attorney, John Dowd, confirmed.
The inquiry from Mueller, the former FBI director who is heading the investigation of Russian election meddling and activities of Trump, his campaign and associates, suggests the investigation could be broadening and reaching a new phase. Dowd, however, said the requests were routine.
“There’s nothing remarkable or unusual about his requests and Ty is responding to them in due course,” Dowd said, referring to Ty Cobb, another attorney hired by Trump to cooperate with the special counsel.
The document requests were first reported Wednesday by The New York Times, which said Mueller had asked for materials related to 13 areas, including an Oval Office meeting Trump had with former Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in May — one day after firing James Comey as FBI director. In that meeting, Trump reportedly told Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, that firing Comey had relieved “great pressure” on Trump related to the Russia probe.
Mueller also reportedly has asked for records relating to the White House response to questions about a meeting last year in Trump Tower involving Donald Trump Jr. and several Russians. Emails revealed that Trump Jr. was told before the meeting that the Russian government had damaging information about Hillary Clinton, the president’s Democratic rival for the Oval Office.
The New York Times also reported that Mueller is seeking documents related to Trump’s ouster of Michael Flynn as his national security adviser. Flynn’s contacts with Russians are also part of the investigation.
Dowd said the White House is cooperating with Mueller completely. “We have said for now two months that we will cooperate with Bob,” Dowd said.
“He makes requests. We respond to them and we have a very good relationship with him and I don’t think it would be right for me to describe the contents.”
Mueller has been conducting an investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. It also includes an examination into Trump’s firing of Comey.
FBI agents in July raided the home of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that less than two weeks before Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, Manafort offered to provide briefings on the race to a Russian billionaire closely aligned with the Kremlin, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Manafort made the offer in an email to an overseas intermediary, asking that a message be sent to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with whom Manafort had done business in the past, these people said.
“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in the July 7, 2016, email, portions of which were read to The Washington Post along with other Manafort correspondence from that time.
The emails are among tens of thousands of documents that have been turned over to congressional investigators and Mueller’s team.
There is no evidence in the documents showing that Deripaska received Manafort’s offer or that any briefings took place. A spokeswoman for Deripaska dismissed the email exchanges as scheming by “consultants in the notorious ‘beltway bandit’ industry.”
Nonetheless, investigators believe that the exchanges created a potential opening for Russian interests at the highest level of a U.S. presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the probe.
Several of the exchanges, which took place between Manafort and a Ukrainebased employee of his international political consulting practice, focused on money that Manafort believed he was owed by Eastern European clients.
Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said Wednesday that the email exchanges reflected an “innocuous” effort to collect past debts.
Maloni said no briefings with Deripaska ever took place, but that, in his email, Manafort was offering what would have been a “routine” briefing on the state of the campaign.