Some ‘crazy’ stuff to thwart inquiry
But aides largely declined to carry out his orders
But Trump’s legal team defends Comey’s firing, other actions.
WASHINGTON – To thwart a federal investigation of Russian efforts to help him win the White House, President Donald Trump fired the FBI director, ordered an aide to fire special counsel Robert Mueller and urged associates to pressure the attorney general to curb the inquiry.
From the first months of his administration, Trump pushed repeatedly to limit the inquiry into Russian interference with the 2016 election that began with the FBI and continued under Mueller. His attempts to block or curb the inquiry that he worried could tarnish his presidency are detailed in Mueller’s final report on his 22-month investigation, released Thursday by the Justice Department.
Four months into his term, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. The next day he told Russia’s foreign minister that he “faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off . ... I’m not under investigation.”
When Mueller was appointed days later to take over that investigation, Trump feared it would end his presidency. He told then-White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, but McGahn refused and later told another White House aide that the president asked him to “do crazy s - - - .”
Trump also erupted at his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for removing himself from the Russia investigation because of his work for Trump’s campaign. After Mueller was appointed in May 2017, Sessions handed Trump a resignation letter, but Trump pocketed it instead of ousting him. Then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said it would be bad for Trump to keep the letter because it would act like a “shock collar” that would hold “DOJ by the throat.”
Trump met in June 2017 with former
campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and forced him to take dictation for a message to Sessions. Trump said he felt “treated very unfairly” and told Sessions that the inquiry should be limited to “investigating election meddling for future elections,” not the one that had put him in office. Lewandowski never delivered the message.
None of those was sufficient for prosecutors to conclude that Trump had committed a crime by obstructing the Russia investigation, in part because his aides largely refused to carry out his orders. But Mueller’s office pointedly declined to say that it had cleared the president of wrongdoing, writing instead that the report “also does not exonerate him.”
“The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that was largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” the report said. “Consistent with that pattern, the evidence we obtained would not support potential obstruction of justice charges against the president’s aides and associates beyond those already filed.”
Trump’s personal lawyers said in a statement Thursday that the president’s actions were justified. They said he acted correctly in firing Comey for launching a “biased, political attack,” though that is not the reason Trump gave at the time for ousting the FBI director.
“Instead of protecting the time-honored principle that the president – as with any American – is innocent until proven guilty, they clearly set up a scheme to derail the President,” they said in the statement.
Mueller also suggested Congress could make its own judgment about the president’s conduct with evidence from the report, one that is not necessarily tethered to criminal law.
The redacted report was released in two volumes Thursday, one dedicated to answering whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election and the other to whether the president attempted to obstruct the investigation.
In the report, Mueller laid out what investigators considered to be key events in which they believed Trump had sought to influence the investigation into his campaign. Most had been revealed publicly already, but the special counsel’s report spelled them out in staggering detail:
❚ Trump’s reaction to the inquiry. Sessions announced his recusal from the investigation March 2, 2017, because he had worked on Trump’s campaign. Trump expressed anger, and that weekend Trump took Sessions aside and urged him to “unrecuse.”
❚ Trump’s firing of Comey. Trump had earlier asked Comey to go easy on his investigation of then-National Security Adviser Mike Flynn. On March 30, Trump asked Comey to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation. The day after firing him, Trump told Russia’s foreign minister: “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job.”
❚ The appointment of Mueller and efforts to remove him. Trump reacted angrily to Mueller’s appointment. “Oh my God,” Trump said, according to the report. “This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency.”
❚ Efforts to prevent public disclosure of evidence. When Trump heard of press inquiries about a June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between a Russian lawyer and members of his campaign, the president edited a press statement for his son Donald Trump Jr., who attended the meeting, by deleting a line that acknowledged the meeting was with “an individual who (Trump Jr.) was told might have information helpful to the campaign” and instead said only the meeting was about adoptions.