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Mueller report cites 10 episodes of suspicious behavior by the president
WASHINGTON — The longawaited report from special counsel Robert Mueller details abundant evidence against President Donald Trump — finding 10 episodes of suspicious behavior — but ultimately concluding it was not Mueller’s role to determine whether the commander in chief broke the law.
“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,” Mueller’s team stated in the report submitted to Congress on
Thursday.
Mueller wrote that he would have exonerated Trump if he could, but he wasn’t able to do that given the evidence he uncovered.
“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,” the report said. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.”
Since Mueller ended his investigation last month, a central question facing the Justice Department has been why Mueller’s team did not reach a conclusion about whether the president obstructed justice. The issue was complicated, the report said, by two key factors — the fact that, under department practice, a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime, and that a president has a great deal of constitutional authority to give orders to other government employees.
While the report marked the end of Mueller’s work, his investigation has already produced criminal charges against 34 people, including six former Trump associates and advisers. Multiple related investigations involving the president are ongoing.
The report has been the subject of heated debate since Attorney General William Barr notified Congress last month that Mueller had completed his work.
Barr told lawmakers he needed time to redact sensitive information before it could be made public, including any grand jury material as well as details whose public release could harm ongoing investigations or “potentially compromise sources and methods” in intelligence collection and anything that would “unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties.”
Barr said the released report was marred only by “limited redactions,” but that's true only for the part dealing with possible obstruction by Trump.
An Associated Press analysis of the full document shows that nearly two-thirds of the section dealing with Russia's meddling — 139 pages —had some form of redaction.
By comparison, only 24 out of 182 pages in the obstruction section were at least partially masked.
Trump’s legal team called Mueller’s report “a total victory” for the president.
“The report underscores what we have argued from the very beginning — there was no collusion — there was no obstruction,” his team said.
In a statement, Trump’s lawyers attacked former leaders at the FBI for opening “a biased, political attack against the President — turning one of our foundational legal standards on its head.”
But if Mueller’s report was a victory for the president, it was an ugly one.
While the president’s lawyers have said Trump’s conduct fell within his constitutional powers, Mueller’s team deemed the episodes deserving of scrutiny for potential criminal acts.
Investigators painted an unflattering portrait of a president who believes the Justice Department and the FBI should answer to his orders, even when it comes to criminal investigations.
During a meeting in which the president complained about then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, Trump insisted that past attorneys general had been more obedient to their presidents, referring to the Kennedy brothers and the Obama administration.
“You’re telling me that Bobby and Jack didn’t talk about investigations? Or Obama didn’t tell Eric Holder who to investigate?” Trump told senior White House staffers Stephen Bannon and Don McGahn, according to the report.
“Bannon recalled that the President was as mad as Bannon had ever seen him and that he screamed at McGahn about how weak Sessions was,” the report said.
Repeatedly, it appears Trump may have been saved from more serious legal jeopardy because his own staffers refused to carry out orders they thought were problematic or potentially illegal.
For instance, in the early days of the administration, when the president was facing growing questions concerning then-national security adviser Michael Flynn’s conversation about sanctions with a Russian ambassador, the president ordered another aide, KT McFarland, to write an email saying the president did not direct those conversations. She decided not to do so, unsure if that was true and fearing it might be improper.
“Some evidence suggests that the President knew about the existence and content of Flynn’s calls when they occurred, but the evidence is inconclusive and could not be relied upon to establish the President’s knowledge,’ ” the report said.
The report also recounts a remarkable moment in May 2017 when Sessions told Trump that Mueller had just been appointed special counsel. Trump slumped back in his chair, according to notes from Jody Hunt, Sessions’ thenchief of staff. “Oh my God, this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency,” Trump said.
Trump further laid into Sessions for his recusal, saying Sessions had let him down.
“Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency,” Trump said, according to Hunt’s notes. “It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
With that, Trump set out to save himself.
In June of that year, Mueller wrote, Trump directed McGahn to call Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the probe, and say that Mueller must be ousted because he had conflicts of interest. McGahn refused — deciding he would sooner resign than trigger a potential crisis akin to the Saturday Night Massacre of Watergate firings fame.
Two days later, the president made another attempt to alter the course of the investigation, meeting with former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and dictating a message for him to relay to Sessions. The message: Sessions would publicly call the investigation “very unfair” to the president, declare Trump did nothing wrong and say that Mueller should limit his probe to “investigating election meddling for future elections.”
The message was never delivered.
Trump himself was never questioned in person, but the report’s appendix includes 12 pages of his written responses to queries from Mueller’s team.
Mueller deemed Trump’s written answers — rife with iterations of “I don’t recall” — to be “inadequate.” He considered issuing a subpoena to force the president to appear in person but decided against it after weighing the likelihood of a long legal battle.
In his written answers, Trump said his comment during a 2016 political rally asking Russian hackers to help find emails scrubbed from Hillary Clinton’s private server was made “in jest and sarcastically” and that he did not recall being told during the campaign of any Russian effort to infiltrate or hack computer systems.
But Mueller said that within five hours of Trump’s comment, Russian military intelligence officers were targeting email accounts connected to Clinton’s office.
Mueller evaluated 10 episodes for possible obstruction of justice, and said he could not conclusively determine that Trump had committed criminal obstruction. The episodes included Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, the president’s directive to subordinates to have Mueller fired and efforts to encourage witnesses not to cooperate.
The special counsel’s report on possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russians to interfere in the 2016 election is detailed with only modest redactions — painting a starkly different picture for Trump than Barr has offered, and revealing new details about interactions between Russians and Trump associates.
And Mueller made clear: Russia wanted to help the Trump campaign, and the Trump campaign was willing to take it.
“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,” Mueller’s team wrote.
Mueller’s report suggests his obstruction of justice investigation was heavily informed by an opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opinion that says a sitting president cannot be indicted — a conclusion Mueller’s team accepted.
“And apart from OLC’s constitutional view, we recognized 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,” Mueller’s team wrote.
That decision, though, seemed to leave investigators in a strange spot.
Barr said during a news conference Thursday that Justice Department officials asked Mueller “about the OLC opinion and whether or not he was taking the position that he would have found a crime but for the existence of the OLC opinion.”
“He made it very clear, several times, that he was not taking a position — he was not saying but for the OLC opinion he would have found a crime,” Barr said.
Mueller did not attend the news conference.
Barr addressed the media before releasing the the two-volume, 448-page redacted report. He made repeated references to “collusion,” echoing language the president has stressed even though it is not a legal term.
Barr also described how the nation’s top law enforcement officials wrestled with investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice.
He and Rosenstein “disagreed with some of the special counsel’s legal theories and felt that some of the episodes did not amount to obstruction as a matter of law” but that they accepted the special counsel’s “legal framework” as they analyzed the case, Barr said.
It was the first official acknowledgment of differing views inside the Justice Department about how to investigate the president.
Barr also spoke about the president’s state of mind as Trump responded to the unfolding investigation.
“As the Special Counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show 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,” he said.