Analysis: The normal person’s guide to the Mueller report
By Philip Bump Philip Bump National correspondent focused largely on the numbers behind politics Email Bio Follow April 17 at 12:20 PM On Thursday, the Justice Department is expected to release a redacted version of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s summary of his team’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible coordination with President Trump’s campaign.
The investigators Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Mueller served as FBI director under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He retired in 2013. In May 2017, he was asked by Rod J. Rosenstein to serve as special counsel to investigate possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Former FBI director James B. Comey. Comey took over the FBI after Mueller’s retirement. He served until his dismissal in May 2017 by Trump.Donald Trump Jr. Trump’s eldest son. He worked closely with the Trump campaign and runs the Trump Organization. Michael Flynn. Flynn, a former Defense Department official under Bush and Obama, joined Trump’s campaign early in 2016. He went on to briefly serve as Trump’s national security adviser.
WikiLeaks. The document-sharing organization was eventually responsible for the dissemination of the bulk of the hacked information.Aras and Emin Agalarov. The Agalarovs are a family of developers in Moscow. They partnered with the Trump Organization in 2013 to host the Miss Universe pageant when it was owned by Trump. Emin Agalarov is also a pop singer.
Konstantin Kilimnik. A Russian-born aide to Manafort’s lobbying work with reported ties to Russian intelligence.Joseph Mifsud. A British professor with alleged links to the Russian government. There was Manafort, who had links to Russian oligarchs and to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. There was Page, who traveled to Russia in July 2016 to give a speech and who was already on the FBI’s radar. There was Flynn, who’d traveled to Moscow for a dinner in December 2015, sharing a table with Putin.
Once Trump was inaugurated, he saw the investigation as a “cloud” overhanging his presidency. After reportedly pressuring Comey to end an investigation into Flynn and asking Comey to help lift that cloud, Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017. Eight days later, Rosenstein, apparently worried about protecting the investigations into Trump’s campaign, appointed Mueller — moving the probe largely out of Trump’s grasp.
This summary was used by Trump and his supporters to argue that he’d been cleared on both the charge of collusion and any obstruction of justice. That’s not the case. What we already know That said, we already know a lot. In February, we looked at the fact that Mueller had already published hundreds of pages of material related to existing indictments and plea deals.The numbers that we already know about are big: 2,800 subpoenas, 500 witnesses, 500 search warrants leading to nearly 200 individual criminal counts obtained against more than 30 people.
The accuracy of that statement depends on how you use the word “collusion,” which can vary wildly. What’s unquestioned is that there were numerous points at which Trump’s campaign was directly or indirectly linked to Russian actors and/or Russia’s two-pronged effort to interfere in the election.Those connections include the following.
The meeting ended up centering on the issue of Russian sanctions, according to attendees and to contemporaneous notes taken by Manafort. Various possible connections to WikiLeaks. Both Trump Jr. and Stone interacted privately with WikiLeaks during the campaign, during the period between the organization’s July release of DNC data and its October dump of Podesta’s emails. In neither case did those interactions amount to anything suggesting significant coordination.
Torshin’s outreach to the campaign. Torshin, the NRA-linked Russian politician, repeatedly tried to contact the campaign through intermediaries in the spring of 2016. That outreach was apparently blocked — but he ended up meeting Trump Jr. briefly at an NRA event in Kentucky in late May.Page’s interactions in Moscow. While in Moscow in July 2016, Page spoke with a deputy prime minister who, he told the campaign in an email, “expressed strong support for Mr. Trump.
Trump’s interactions with Comey. Comey and Trump first met on Jan. 6, 2017, at Trump Tower, when Comey and other officials briefed the then-president-elect on Russia’s interference efforts. Once Trump was inaugurated, he repeatedly — according to Comey — tried to get Comey to lighten the burden of the Russia investigation. That included pressuring Comey to “lift the cloud” the investigation posed and not pursuing charges against Flynn.
Trump’s tweets threatening or praising potential witnesses against him. As the Mueller probe wound on, Trump would express his views about it and its participants on his Twitter account. As Cohen moved to cooperate with investigators. and, later, as Stone faced potential charges, Trump weighed in on those actions in ways that some experts felt amounted to possible attempts at witness tampering.
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