What you missed in the Mueller report

POLITICO dived back into the report and its 2,000-plus footnotes to unearth a few details that have not gotten much attention.

Annie Donaldson took devastating notes

Annie Donaldson took devastating notes

Annie Donaldson, chief of staff to former White House counsel Don McGahn, appears throughout Mueller’s report in some of its most critical moments, often as the White House aide who took some of the most critical and contemporaneous notes.

Her memos document in vivid detail the chaos inside the West Wing as Trump raged about the Russia investigation.

“Just in the middle of another Russia Fiasco,” McGahn told Donaldson, according to a note she took on March 2, 2017, as Trump pressured Sessions not to recuse from the probe.

Donaldson also memorialized a White House counsel’s office meeting that day in which she described “serious concerns about obstruction” after referencing Sessions. And 10 days later, after FBI Director James Comey confirmed the existence of the Trump-Russia probe, she wrote “POTUS in panic/chaos … Need binders to put in front of POTUS. All things related to Russia.” She later said this commentary was based on discussions with other officials, not an eyewitness account.

On March 21, 2017, Donaldson similarly recalled that Trump himself said Comey had “made [him] look like a fool.” But May 9 was the most devastating of all.

“Is this the beginning of the end?” Donaldson wrote, which Mueller indicated she said “because she was worried that the decision to terminate Comey and the manner in which it was carried out would be the end of the presidency.”

Mueller hampered by missing and deleted messages

The special counsel didn’t mince words in noting his work was stymied in part by missing messages and other communications.

Former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon and his associate Erik Prince, for example, gave conflicting accounts of their discussions about Prince’s post-election trip to the Seychelles, where Prince met with a high-level associate of the Kremlin. Both claimed they inadvertently lost all records of their communication.

A related problem hampered Mueller’s efforts to investigate Manafort because “in some instances, messages were sent using encryption applications.” In addition, Manafort deputy Rick Gates sent internal campaign polling data to a longtime associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, designed for sharing with Ukrainian oligarchs. But those messages were sent by the encrypted service WhatsApp, and “Gates then deleted the communications on a daily basis.”