Here’s POLITICO’s rolling analysis of the hotly anticipated document.
Trump’s former staff secretary Rob Porter spoke with Mueller — and he revealed that Trump mused about installing other senior DOJ officials like Rachel Brand to supervise Mueller.
.. Trump went to great lengths to encourage Sessions to investigate a political enemy: Hillary Clinton. But Sessions routinely did not commit to honoring such requests, which clearly irked the president. Mueller notes that Trump’s tweets in the following days reflected his ire.
This is also the first we’re learning that Porter took contemporaneous notes about things the president said in private. But he notes that Trump specifically told Sessions he wasn’t “telling you to do anything” — which might have given Barr and Rosenstein a reason to question whether Trump had corrupt intent to obstruct an investigation. ”
.. Here, Mueller reveals that Trump tried to get ex-White House Counsel Don McGahn to deny the New York Times story that Trump directed McGahn to fire Mueller. McGahn refused because he knew that the story was true. Meanwhile, Trump was publicly deriding the Times story as “fake news.”
.. In trying to determine Trump’s intent in directing McGahn to deny that he had sought to fire the special counsel, Mueller said Trump “likely contemplated the ongoing investigation and any proceedings arising from it.” In other words, Trump knew that the Times story could be part of an obstruction investigation when he tried to create a “record” stating that the Times story wasn’t true.
.. This section tells us that McGahn viewed Trump’s threats to fire him as completely empty. According to Porter, McGahn said the optics of a firing would be terrible, and he therefore refused to write such a letter denying the Times story.
.. Trump was clearly livid when he found out that his aides were taking notes to memorialize their conversations. The president also routinely referred to Roy Cohn as an example of someone who would protect him.
.. This section deals with the potential dangling of pardons, and the idea that Trump tried to obstruct the investigation by preventing Manafort and others from cooperating. According to Mueller, Manafort spoke with Trump’s attorneys and relayed to Gates that “we’ll be taken care of” — but Manafort said the word “pardons” was not used.
.. Mueller concluded that Trump sought to “encourage” Manafort not to cooperate with prosecutors through both public and private statements. Additionally, Mueller said Trump “intended Manafort to believe that he could receive a pardon,” which would make Manafort less likely to cooperate with the government.
.. From the beginning, Mueller and his team decided that it would not make a “traditional” judgment on obstruction of justice. But prosecutors said they could not say with confidence that Trump did not commit obstruction of justice. Much of this paragraph was summarized in Barr’s controversial four-page memo from last month.
.. Mueller indicates here that the special counsel’s team did not have confidence the president was innocent of obstruction.
.. Mueller reveals that he interviewed deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein on May 23, 2017, just six days after Mueller was appointed. Legal experts have questioned Rosenstein’s ability to oversee Mueller’s probe while also acting as a witness in the matter. Mueller indicated Rosenstein testified about his role in the firing of FBI Director Comey... Sanders acknowledged that she gave a false explanation for Comey’s firing in May 2017, when she told reporters that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director. Accordingly, the President accepted the recommendation of his Deputy Attorney General to remove James Corney from his position.” It’s a rare example of a senior Trump administration official admitting an inaccuracy, and could undermine her credibility with reporters... Trump’s initial reaction to the appointment of Mueller as special counsel was one of fury. Mueller, attempting to establish Trump’s state of mind, learned that Trump told allies “I’m fucked” after learning of Mueller’s appointment. He then told aides that a special counsel would affect his ability to govern... Senior White House advisers, including Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus, told the special counsel they were worried that Trump would use Sessions’ resignation letter to influence the Justice Department. “Priebus told Sessions it was not good for the President to have the letter because it would function as a kind of ‘shock collar’ that the President could use any time he wanted; Priebus said the President had “DOJ by the throat.” Trump eventually returned the letter almost two weeks later... Next: White House aides worried Trump would try to control DOJ
Why do people have such divergent perspectives on the Mueller Report, ranging from Trump being completely exonerated to Trump being guilty of obstruction of justice and impeachable?
Mueller report exposes diminishing power of Trump denials
The report has reignited a media debate about how seriously to take the White House’s statements of fact.
They’re in for a long wait.
Mueller whacks Trump with evidence of obstruction
Far from the “complete and total exoneration” the president has declared in recent weeks, the report depicts a president who made repeated moves to thwart the investigation into his campaign and presidency, possibly because Trump was trying to hide other, potentially criminal behavior — although Mueller found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy to help Russia influence the 2016 election.
The report, which riveted Washington Thursday, recounts Trump’s repeated attempts to fire Mueller and his anger when those efforts became public. It also details an effort to pressure staffers to send an email exonerating him and notes that the president had more knowledge of an aide’s potentially criminal behavior than he may have let on.
One implication of the report is that Trump may have escaped a finding that he obstructed justice only because his top aides refused to carry out his most dramatic orders. Indeed, Mueller’s team describes several of Trump’s actions as satisfying all the legal elements of obstruction.
Perhaps most notably, Mueller’s prosecutors said that while Trump seemed confident the FBI would not uncover a conspiracy between his campaign and Moscow, he was still concerned about what else they might find. Among his anxieties were the ongoing attempts during the 2016 campaign to seek business in Russia, including an attempt to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
“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,” the report states.
.. In recent weeks, Attorney General William Barr has emphasized Trump’s intent as he explained his decision to not pursue an obstruction case against the president, even though Mueller chose not to make such a definitive conclusion.
“It is important to bear in mind the context,” Barr said at a Thursday morning press conference. “There was relentless speculation in the news media about the president’s personal culpability,” Barr added. “Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was in fact no collusion.”
.. Mueller’s team seemed far less definitive about Trump’s mindset regarding potential obstruction.
“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 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.
In a lengthy analysis, the report explains that claiming the president obstructed justice without the ability to charge him would taint his presidency and damage his ability to govern — leaving him with no legal recourse to clear his name or protections normally afforded to criminal defendants.
“Fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought,” the report says.
The obstruction section is one of the less-redacted sections in a report that includes 954 total redactions, mostly centered on withholding secret grand jury material and information that could harm ongoing investigations. In total, 40 percent of pages have at least one redaction, although only 14 percent of the obstruction pages have blacked out passages.
.. The obstruction section unveils new details about a much-scrutinzed discussion Trump had with former FBI Director James Comey. According to Comey, Trump leaned on him to drop an investigation into one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn regarding an untruthful interview with the FBI.
The Mueller report says 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.
.. “McGahn continued trying [on] 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.
.. Trump’s ire for McGahn is apparent in several of the document’s passages. One section recounts that after The New York Times reported that Trump had requested McGahn fire Mueller, the president few into a rage, calling McGahn a “lying bastard” in a conversation with White House staff secretary Rob Porter. Trump demanded that McGahn write a letter denying the firing request, but McGahn declined.
.. The report also said Trump once dressed down McGahn for his note-taking practice. “What about these notes? Why do you take notes? I never had a lawyer who takes notes,” the president declared, according to McGahn.
McGahn said he replied that he keeps notes because he’s a “real lawyer,” the report says.
.. 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.”
.. McFarland and another official considered the request “sufficiently irregular” to document it and raise concerns about it, the report says.
Mueller’s team concluded that some of Trump’s suspect actions 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.”
.. After White House officials asked the Justice Department to issue a statement saying it was Rosenstein’s idea to fire Comey, the deputy attorney general told aides that he wouldn’t put out a “false story,” according to the report.
Trump then called Rosenstein directly and urged him to hold a press conference about his role in the firing. “Rosenstein responded that this was not a good idea, because if the press asked him, he would tell the truth that Comey’s firing was not his idea,” the report says, citing accounts from Rosenstein and another DOJ lawyer.