We're still analyzing the Mueller report, but we'll thread what we know so far and continue to add as we learn more
By Washington Post Staff April 18 at 3:21 PM President Trump, upon first learning of the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, cursed and declared, “this is the end of my presidency,” according to the redacted 400-page report by Mueller released Thursday by the Justice Department.
●Trump, when told of appointment of special counsel Mueller, said: “This is the end of my presidency.”●Trump campaign attempted to obtain Hillary Clinton’s private emails. 2:30 p.m.: Russian interference sought to boost Bernie Sanders in 2016, report says While Sanders had said in a previous radio interview that one of his campaign workers figured out what was going on and alerted Clinton campaign officials, his 2016 campaign manager Jeff Weaver told The Post in a recent interview for the story that Sanders “misspoke a little bit and conflated a few of the facts. . . . He did not know, I did not know, none of us knew” that Russia was behind the efforts.
The week before, Flynn had been less successful in similar efforts to get Russia to back the Trump transition team’s efforts to delay or block a U.N. Security Council vote on Israeli settlements. Despite Flynn’s outreach, Kislyak told Flynn that when the matter came to a vote “Russia would not vote against it.
When Russian oligarch and Alfa Bank board member Petr Aven approached former U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Burt about contacting the Trump transition team, Burt viewed the request as “unusual and outside the normal realm of his dealings with Aven.” Flynn was told by Priebus that the president wanted Flynn to “kill the story,” referring to the Ignatius column. Rattled, Flynn “felt a lot of pressure” and “directed” his aide, K.T. McFarland, to call Ignatius and “inform him that no discussion of sanctions had occurred.”
Two investigations transferred by the special counsel’s office to other Justice Department prosecutors remain ongoing and were not identified, the report stated. “The Constitution does not categorically and permanently immunize the president,” the Mueller report said in a dense section of legal analysis that suggested that investigators found abundant evidence that Trump had in fact repeatedly sought to undermine the probe.
The 25-page section dispenses with a series of arguments that Trump defenders have raised for months for presidential immunity, saying it doesn’t matter whether there was any underlying crime or whether Trump’s conduct — dangling pardons, attacking investigators — was in plain view for the public. “On Saturday, June 17, 2017, the President called then White House counsel Donald McGahn and directed him to have the Special Counsel removed,” Mueller writes in the report, noting that “McGahn was at home and the President was at Camp David.”
Mueller’s team concluded that it couldn’t be sure of Trump’s intent in his public statements and tweets about his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. That was partly because the team could not gain certain evidence about Trump’s role in Flynn ultimately agreeing to cooperate with investigators.
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, a confidant of Trump, was told by Trump on June 19, 2017, to deliver a sharp message to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions: Meet with the special counsel to limit its jurisdiction to future election interference, rather than focus on the 2016 election.
On June 14, 2016, according to Mueller, @dcleaks_ sent a direct message to @WikiLeaks noting WikiLeaks was preparing to publish more Clinton emails. “We have some sensitive information too, in particular, her financial documents,” they said. “Let’s do it together. What do you think about publishing our info at the same moment?”
“The Report confirms that the June 9, 2016 meeting was just what Don said it was, and nothing more, and that there was nothing improper about potentially listening to information,” said Alan S. Futerfas, an attorney representing Donald Trump Jr. and the Trump Organization. 1:50 p.m.: Attorneys for indicted Russian company say Mueller report’s release deprives it of its right to a fair trial
Based on the legal policy that prohibits prosecuting a sitting president, the team members concluded they had to leave the decision to Congress about how to handle their evidence of Trump engaging in obstruction, rather than make a decision about whether to accuse a sitting president. Based on the facts, also, it was difficult to make a conclusion about the president’s intent.
In a joint statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer said “the differences are stark” between what Barr and Mueller said on potential obstruction of justice by Trump — a sign that congressional Democrats will press further on the issue. In January 2017, Dmitriev also met twice in the Seychelles with Prince, whom he had been assured by Nader was a “trusted associate” of the Trump transition team. Nader had told Dmitriev that Bannon personally dispatched Prince to meet with him — a claim Prince and Bannon both denied. Prince said he did brief Bannon on the meeting after it happened, but Bannon said that conversation never happened, and the special counsel was not able to reconcile their conflicting accounts.
In the days before the June 9, 2016, meeting, the report states that campaign adviser Rick Gates recalled Donald Trump Jr. telling a meeting of senior campaign staff and Trump family members “that he had a lead on negative information about the Clinton Foundation.” The report contains new revelations about Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy adviser who visited Moscow in July 2016.
Mueller reveals that Page was interviewed by investigators five times. They indicate that they obtained emails showing that Russian government officials, including Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, were aware of Page’s visit to Moscow in July 2016 and discussed whether they should meet with him. Peskov wrote dismissively, “I have read about [Page]. Specialists say that he is far from being the main [adviser]. So I better not initiate a meeting in the Kremlin.
House Democrats have been looking for a sign that Mueller wanted them — not Barr — to answer the question of whether Trump obstructed justice by investigating and through impeachment proceedings.Getting the Trump campaign — or better yet, Donald Trump himself — to tweet or retweet about the activities of the Russian disinformation campaign was a closely watched goal for the operatives at the Internet Research Agency, Mueller found.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “preference was for candidate Trump to win,” a Russian oligarch told his contact in the U.S. – but according to the special counsel’s probe, the Russians “appeared not to have preexisting contacts” with Trump’s campaign before the election “and struggled to connect with senior officials around the president-elect.”
Starting in June 2016, the Russian spy agency GRU posted hacked documents on the website it created under a fictitious name DCLeaks.com, according to the report. The material came from individuals associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, rather than the accounts of Democratic party organizations. Trump later told his lawyer to deny an account in the New York Times that he sought to fire special counsel Mueller, even though McGahn recounted that the president did want to fire the special counsel, according to the Mueller report.
The president later told then-aide Rob Porter that McGahn “leaked to the media to make himself look good” and called him a “lying bastard.” He wanted McGahn to write a letter denying the story or said he might fire McGahn, and told Porter to deliver the message. For example, on July 14, 2016, they sent a link and password to a non-public DCLeaks page to a reporter via Facebook. On Sept. 14, 2016, they sent reporters direct messages on Twitter with passwords to another non-public part of the website. The site was operational until March 2017.
Cohen said he took these messages to mean that if he “continued to toe the party line,” he would continue to have his legal fees paid by the Trump Organization and have the power of the president to protect him. Cohen soon after saw a tweet from Trump saying, “Michael is a businessman for his own account/lawyer who I have always liked & respected. Most people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble, even if it means lying or making up stories. Sorry, I don’t see Michael doing that despite the horrible Witch Hunt and the dishonest media!”
Conservative activists participated in a range of political events organized by the Internet Research Agency, including in one instance appearing as Santa Claus while wearing a Trump mask in New York City. Trump repeatedly asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “unrecuse” himself and weighed installing Rachel Brand, then the Department of Justice’s number three official, to lead the Russia probe.
In recent months, Papadopoulos has claimed that he believes Mifsud is tied to Western intelligence and that his information about the Clinton emails was a deep state conspiracy to plant damaging information that could be used against the Trump campaign. Meanwhile, Trump discussed with White House aides whether Manafort might be cooperating with the Mueller investigation and whether he knew any information that might be harmful to the president. And despite telling aides he did not like Manafort, Trump repeatedly voiced sympathy for Manafort in public appearances, and he and his advisers made clear they did not want Manafort to “flip” and cooperate with Mueller.
The Mueller team found evidence that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had not only met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign, but also that the two had discussed the presidential race on at least one occasion. In his meetings with investigators, Sessions said that he thought he had been asked narrowly about interactions with Russians that “involved the exchange of campaign information.” The special counsel found that explanation “plausible.”Newly-minted presidential candidate Rep. Eric Swalwell called for Barr to resign in the wake of his press conference about the Mueller report, citing what he called Barr’s “misconduct regarding the full report of Special Counsel.
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