Mueller cannot confidently state Trump didn’t obstruct justice

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report says investigators could not confidently state that President Donald Trump did not obstruct justice, and details numerous episodes in which Trump appeared to interfere with the Russia probe.

One reason Mueller's prosecutors said they could not clear Trump on obstruction of justice was that while the president was confident his campaign had not conspired with Russia to sway the 2016 election, he was still fearful that the FBI might uncover other crimes during its probe.

“The evidence uncovered in the investigation did not establish that the President or those close to him were involved in the charged Russian computer-hacking or active-measure conspiracies, or that the President had an otherwise unlawful relationship with any Russian official,” Mueller’s team wrote.

“But the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns.”

Among those concerns were the fact that Trump was still seeking business in Russia through the 2016 campaign, including efforts his aides were making to advance a Trump Tower Moscow project.

The 448-page report is the culmination of a nearly two-year-long investigation that has cast a shadow over Trump’s time in office as questions swirled around whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Moscow intermediaries to sway the 2016 election, and whether the president tried to impede an investigation into the matter.

While the exhaustive document confirms that Mueller found no conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin, it contains numerous unfavorable observations regarding potential obstruction of justice.

“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. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment,” the report says in a 182-page section dedicated to obstruction.

“Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” it continues.

The passage is particularly notable as it contains the full context of a line that Attorney General William Barr used in an initial March 24 letter he released summarizing the principal conclusions of Mueller’s report. Barr chose only to include a portion of the final sentence, frustrating Democrats, some former DOJ officials and even some on Mueller’s team, who felt that the selective editing narrowly presented the special counsel’s findings.

Barr also proactively announced in his March letter that he would not bring an obstruction case against the president, further irritating Democrats.

Mueller’s report leaves open the possibility that Trump could at least in theory face prosecution for criminal acts after he leaves office. Mueller’s prosecutors decided, therefore, that a criminal investigation of the president was appropriate.

However, Mueller’s team said making a decision about whether crimes were committed would have gone too far. Long-standing DOJ legal guidance dating to Watergate says a sitting president can’t be indicted.

“Fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought,” the report says.

Still, the report details a number of incidents of presidential meddling that Mueller and even Trump’s own aides found troubling.

It recounts an attempt Trump made to get a senior adviser to send an email insisting that the president had not ordered Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, to discuss economic sanctions with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. during the presidential transition period.

Flynn initially lied to the FBI about communications with the Russian official amid questions about whether the incoming Trump administration was seeking to undermine economic penalties the Obama administration had just imposed on Moscow.

Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to authorities about the chats, but questions have long lingered about how much involvement Trump had in the incident. According to Mueller’s report, Trump asked his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to get Flynn’s deputy, K.T. McFarland, to “draft an internal email that would confirm that the President did not direct Flynn to call the Russian Ambassador about sanctions.”

“MacFarland told Priebus she did not know whether the President had directed Flynn to talk to [the Russian ambassador] about sanctions, and she declined to say yes or no to the request.”

The exchange took place after McFarland had been told she’d been fired as deputy national security adviser, but had been offered an ambassadorship to Singapore, the report noted.

“The evidence does not establish that the President was trying to have MacFarland lie,” the report says, while adding that MacFarland and another official considered the request “sufficiently irregular” to document it and raise concerns about it.
 

Another incident of possible obstruction surround a discussion Trump had with former FBI Director James Comey. According to Comey, Trump leaned on him to drop the investigation into Flynn regarding his untruthful interview with the FBI.

The Mueller report says that when that conversation occurred, Justice Department officials had already told White House counsel Don McGahn that Flynn’s conduct could be considered unlawful, and that McGahn related that information to the president.

The report also says that Trump repeatedly directed McGahn to dissuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the Trump-Russia probe, given his integral role in the Trump campaign.

“McGahn continued trying to behalf of the President to avert Sessions’ recusal by speaking to Sessions’s personal counsel, Sessions’s chief of staff and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and by contacting Sessions himself,” Mueller’s team wrote.

After the recual was announced, Trump pulled Sessions aside during a weekend visit to Mar-a-Lago and suggested he “unrecuse,” the report says.

The report says that various actions Trump took seemed to have multiple motivations, which made it difficult to conclude whether the President had corrupt intent when he took certain steps, like firing Comey in May 2017.

“Evidence indicates that the President was angered by both the existence of the Russia investigation and the public reporting that he was under investigation, which he knew was not true based on Comey’s representations,” the report says. “Other evidence indicates that the President was concerned about the impact of the Russia investigation on his ability to govern. “

Mueller’s report found that the initial explanation Trump and the White House gave for firing Comey was “pretextual” and that Trump had already decided to fire Comey before Justice Department officials like Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein weighed in with critiques of Comey’s actions during an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

Read More (...)