by Rosalind S. Helderman and Matt Zapotosky of The Washington Post
The special counsel investigation that threatened Donald Trump’s presidency was born of the commander-in-chief’s rage.
In his first months in office, Trump had seethed over FBI director James B. Comey’s refusal to tell the world that the president was not being scrutinized personally as part of the bureau’s investigation of whether the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia to interfere with the 2016 presidential race.
On May 9, 2017, Trump snapped. In a sharp break from Washington norms that afford FBI directors ten-year terms to give the bureau independence from politics, the president unceremoniously fired Comey. He conveyed the news in a terse letter, hand-delivered to FBI headquarters by his former personal bodyguard.
Trump’s closest aides had warned him that the move could trigger a political uproar and lead to an expansion of the Russia inquiry—and it did.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill cried foul. The FBI, already deep into its investigation of election interference, now feared that the most powerful man in the country was trying to obstruct its work. And Rod J. Rosenstein, the No. 2 official at the Justice Department, who had written a memo supporting Comey’s dismissal, was incensed about the way the White House was pinning nearly all responsibility for the firing on him. He briefly considered resigning. Instead, Rosenstein turned to Robert S. Mueller III.
The deputy attorney general announced on May 17, 2017, that he had appointed the then-seventy-two-year-old Vietnam veteran and former FBI director to lead an independent investigation of interference in the 2016 election and other matters that might stem from the inquiry.
It was a broad mandate.
Over the next twenty-two months, Mueller, who had led the FBI through the attacks of September 11, 2001, and embodied the bureau’s straight-arrow traditions, quietly and methodically investigated Trump and nearly everyone in his orbit, trying to determine whether any had conspired with the Kremlin to tilt the election, and whether the president himself had tried to obstruct justice.
That investigation culminated on March 22, 2019, when Mueller formally concluded his work and submitted a final report to Attorney General William P. Barr.
Barr held a press conference the next month less than two hours before the two-volume Mueller findings—Report on the Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election—would be turned over to Congress. The attorney general noted repeatedly there was no “collusion”—a word Trump had popularized as he attacked the investigation—and Barr revealed how the White House and Trump’s personal lawyers had been given an advance look at the redacted document.
Barr’s description of Mueller’s report was favorable to Trump. In addition to finding no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, the attorney general said, Mueller had declined to reach a conclusion on whether the president had obstructed justice.
But the anodyne description belied what would soon be released. Mueller’s report, despite redactions, offered a stunning account of how Russia worked to help the Trump campaign and how Trump’s associates were willing to accept Russian assistance, and it presented an explosive and detailed narrative of how Trump sought to shut down the investigation as he worried about its impact.
“This is the end of my presidency,” Trump said, by Mueller’s account, when he learned of the special counsel’s appointment. “I’m fucked.”
Some—though not all—of what Mueller revealed had already been publicly known, though the report added layers of both facts and legal analysis. It told readers what the special counsel believed really happened at some shadowy, meetings. Mueller’s team, for example, described how in early August 2016, Trump’s then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, met with a man whom the FBI had assessed as having ties to Russian intelligence and that that individual wanted “to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel's Office was a 'backdoor' way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine.”
“Both men believed the plan would require candidate Trump's assent to succeed (were he elected President),” the special counsel wrote. “They also discussed the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort’s strategy for winning Democratic votes in Midwestern states.”
Mueller over and over again detailed moments when Russian government officials and others tried to make contacts with Trump's campaign, including a number of episodes not previously revealed in press coverage: A New York banker told the campaign about an outreach he'd received from "senior Kremlin officials" and tried to invite Trump to Russia; Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko emailed Trump's assistant to ask the then-candidate to attend a Russian economic forum.
But the report confirmed, as Barr had suggested, that Mueller did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians—though it suggested they had a shared motive.
“Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” Mueller’s team wrote.
Mueller made clear that prosecutors did not consider "collusion" a legal term and never performed an analysis of that issue. They instead looked to see whether campaign aides made any agreements with Russians to assist in their effort to interfere in the election. Using that standard, they found no signs of coordination between the campaign and Russia.
The report also confirmed Mueller had declined to reach a conclusion on obstruction, though it suggested that decision was heavily influenced by Justice Department legal guidance that says a sitting president can’t be indicted. Mueller’s team wrote that, based on that and other Justice Department policies, they decided “not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes.”
Barr said he and Rosenstein reviewed the evidence themselves and determined it was not sufficient to make a case.
Mueller’s report offered a less charitable version for Trump: describing how, more often than not, Trump’s aides essentially saved their boss from his worst impulses by ignoring his directives to interfere with the Mueller investigation. In perhaps the most stark example, the report alleged that Trump called White House Lawyer Don McGahn in June 2017 and told him to tell the acting attorney general that Mueller had to be removed.
“McGahn did not carry out the direction, however, deciding that he would resign rather than trigger what he regarded as a potential Saturday Night Massacre,” Mueller’s team wrote, referring to the night when President Nixon ordered his attorney general to fire a special prosecutor, triggering a cascade of resignations.
“The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred,” Mueller’s team wrote. “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Mueller’ team wrote that their work was at times stymied by the lies witnesses told and the communications that they deleted or failed to maintain. And they said Trump himself, in resisting a sit-down interview, had provided “inadequate” written answers that stated more than 30 times he "does not 'recall' or 'remember' or have an 'independent recollection'" of information investigators asked about.
While Mueller’s team could have issued a subpoena to try to force his testimony, they wrote that would have caused a “substantial delay,” and they already had "sufficient evidence to understand relevant events and to make certain assessments.”
The report is doubly astonishing because, in a town fueled by leaks, Mueller largely kept his work under wraps. Until its release, Mueller had spoken almost entirely through indictments and other, often cryptic court filings.
In federal court, his team racked up an extraordinary record. His prosecutors charged thirty-four people, including twenty-six Russian nationals. They secured guilty pleas from seven people, including a former national security adviser and the chairman of Trump’s campaign. They reconstructed the day-to-day interactions of Trump’s closest aides and his adult children, exploring dozens of instances of Russian contacts with the Trump campaign. They documented the Russian attack on American democracy in breathtaking detail, even tracing individual keystrokes of Russian military officers in Moscow.
This introduction to the Mueller report is based on nearly three years of interviews by Washington Post reporters with the key figures in the saga at the White House, at the Justice Department, in the intelligence community, in the Trump campaign, in Moscow, and among the lawyers hired to defend those targeted by Mueller.
RUSSIAN FOOTSTEPS
The roots of the Mueller investigation were planted long before Trump was elected.
In the summer and fall of 2016, the FBI watched with alarm as the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks released Democratic Party emails that the bureau believed had been stolen by Russian government hackers. There were signs of foreign targeting of state voting systems. Also underway was a little-understood effort by Russian Internet trolls to influence American voters on social media through false news reports and incendiary political ads.
Meanwhile, Trump surrounded himself with campaign aides who had long-standing financial ties to Moscow. The candidate echoed Kremlin talking points about NATO and the European Union. Rather than condemning the Russian activity or calling on Russian president Vladimir Putin to stop it, he mocked the threat. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing,” he said at a news conference in July 2016, referring to emails that Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, had purged from a private server, saying they were personal communications and not related to her work while secretary of state. At that moment, WikiLeaks had just upended the Democratic National Convention by publishing thousands of internal party emails.
Soon after, the US government received a disturbing report from its ally Australia. Officials were told that George Papadopoulos, a young energy consultant chosen to advise Trump on foreign policy, had bragged to an Australian diplomat that he had been told Russia had dirt on Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Papadopoulos’s boasts had come in May 2016, before the public even knew that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked.
In late July, the FBI opened “Crossfire Hurricane,” a formal counter-intelligence investigation of Russia’s efforts that was focused in part on Papadopoulos. In October, as WikiLeaks published more stolen Democratic emails, a federal judge approved a secret order allowing the FBI to monitor Carter Page, another former Trump adviser. The bureau told the judge that it suspected Page was a Russian agent. It also was looking at Michael T. Flynn, a retired general who would become Trump’s national security adviser, and Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman.
The investigation was charged from the start. It was highly unusual for the FBI to examine advisers of a leading presidential candidate in the middle of a campaign. Plus, the bureau had to sort out explosive but unverified allegations of Trump-Russia coordination slipped to agents in the summer of 2016 that came to be known as the “Steele Dossier.”
The dossier had been commissioned by Fusion GPS, a Washington opposition research firm, and was funded by the Clinton campaign. It alleged that the Russians held salacious compromising material about Trump and that the Republican candidate had entered into a conspiracy with Russia to win the election. The FBI had worked previously with the dossier’s author, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, and believed he was credible, although the document was a political product, commissioned by Trump’s opponents. Trump and his allies would later argue that the FBI’s investigation was tainted from the start by its reliance on Steele’s work.
The inquiry also was marred by the texting between two FBI officials working on the case: agent Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, a bureau lawyer. Unbeknownst to many of their colleagues, the two had been having an extramarital affair and exchanged tens of thousands of text messages sharing their opinions of US political officials and expressing open disdain for Trump. One text from Strzok called the investigation of Trump’s campaign an “insurance policy,” while another declared “we’ll stop” Trump from becoming president. Although the pair would assert that their personal views had no bearing on their work, the texts, when they later became public, gave Trump’s supporters room to argue that the investigation was a set-up from the start. Strzok was later removed from the team and fired from the FBI; Page left the team and the bureau on her own.
If the FBI had wanted to stop Trump, a leak about the investigation might have done the trick. Instead, the bureau kept its work secret. That stood in contrast to the FBI’s handling of its investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server, which Comey repeatedly addressed publicly in 2016, including in the final days of the campaign.
THE SESSIONS RECUSAL
On November 8, 2016, Trump was elected the nation’s forty-fifth president. But as he prepared to take office, questions about Russia’s role in the campaign only grew.
On December 29, President Barack Obama imposed new sanctions to punish the Kremlin for targeting the race. The next month, the US intelligence community formally concluded that Putin had ordered a covert operation to sow dissent in the American electorate, harm Clinton, and elect Trump.
In February, Flynn, Trump’s newly installed national security adviser, was forced to resign after it was discovered that he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence when he said he had not spoken to a Russian envoy about the Obama sanctions. The next day, Trump pulled Comey aside in the Oval Office and, referring to the FBI’s investigation of Flynn’s activities, asked him to “let this go,” according to Comey’s account
Shortly after, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he would recuse himself from any investigation of the 2016 campaign.
The recusal came after The Washington Post reported that during the presidential campaign, Sessions, who was then a senator from Alabama, had twice met with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Sessions had not disclosed the meetings when he was asked at his confirmation hearing about contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign.
“I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have—did not have communications with the Russians,” Sessions had said.
At a hastily arranged news conference, Sessions insisted that his recusal was not a reaction to the Post’s reporting, but instead the result of weeks of consultations with Justice Department ethics officials who had advised him to recuse.
When asked earlier in the day whether his attorney general should step aside, the president said, “I don’t think so.”
Sessions told advisers in the months that followed that he had no choice in the matter. The investigation was of Trump’s campaign and its relationship with a foreign power. How could Sessions oversee that without raising questions about whether he had a conflict of interest?
Next, in the swirl of news roiling Washington, came the May 9, 2017, firing of Comey and the entry of Mueller.
Sessions happened to be at the White House for a meeting with Trump and others when word came that Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, was appointing a special counsel.
Trump was livid. “How could you let this happen, Jeff,” he told Sessions, according to Mueller's report, amid a lengthy diatribe in the Oval Office.
Sessions left the White House shaken, according to people who spoke with him, and that night handed in a letter of resignation. Advisers convinced the president that he could not fire Sessions so soon after Comey without risking even more political fallout. Trump returned Sessions’s letter with a curt handwritten note saying that he would not allow the attorney general to quit.
The president would never stop seething, however. Until the day Sessions stepped down eighteen months later, Trump relentlessly attacked his attorney general and the department he commanded—raising fears that he would end Mueller’s work.
Mueller, after all, was not an independent counsel, and thus not truly independent of Trump. The reason reached back to the 1990s. The lawyers who investigated the Iran-Contra scandal and the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair worked under a now-defunct law, commonly known as the independent counsel act, which gave them wide latitude. These independent counsels were picked by a three-judge panel, and they did not answer directly to anyone in the executive branch.
That law was allowed to expire in 1999, after officials who worked under it—including independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr—came to believe it created an unelected, fourth branch of government to enforce the laws against the others. In its place, officials crafted the special counsel regulations, under which Mueller was appointed.
By design, Mueller was selected by the attorney general—or in this instance the acting attorney general, Rosenstein, because Sessions was recused—and subject to that official’s oversight. The special counsel was required to notify the attorney general of significant steps he planned to take, not unlike any of the ninety-three US attorneys nationwide, and the attorney general was allowed to veto his decisions. Trump could have ordered Rosenstein to fire Mueller, although doing so would have caused a cascade of resignations at the Justice Department.
Rosenstein’s decision to turn to an outsider to take over the politically charged investigation plucked the inquiry out of a toxic stew of internal Justice Department politics. Andrew McCabe, Comey’s deputy, had been alarmed when his boss was fired. Wary of the president and Justice Department leaders, he began documenting his interactions with Rosenstein and others, including a meeting where he said Rosenstein had suggested wearing a wire to record the president. After Comey was fired, McCabe immediately authorized the FBI to open an investigation of Trump himself, something the bureau had declined to do for months.
Some at the Justice Department feared that McCabe was acting out of anger about Comey’s removal. At a meeting shortly after Mueller’s appointment, McCabe and Rosenstein each suggested that the other should recuse himself from any involvement with the case. Neither did.
THE G-MAN
At the time of his selection, Mueller was working as a partner at the white-shoe Washington law firm WilmerHale, but he had been employed in the private sector only since 2014. Before that, he had earned a reputation as a prosecutor of extraordinary discipline and intellect over a career in the nation’s highest law enforcement jobs. Mueller, a Republican, had been appointed to top positions by four US presidents, two from each party.
Born into privilege, he graduated from Princeton University, then joined the Marines during the Vietnam War, at a time when many men his age, including Trump, looked to avoid service. Overseas, he led a rifle platoon and earned a Bronze Star Medal and a Purple Heart in combat.
Upon returning home, he enrolled at the University of Virginia Law School and after graduating, became a federal prosecutor in California and then Massachusetts. With only brief stints in private practice, he spent the next thirty years cycling through top jobs at the Justice Department until President George W. Bush appointed him to lead the FBI in July 2001. He was confirmed in August and had been on the job for less than a week when terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. For the next decade, he led the FBI through a tumultuous reorientation to focus on terrorist threats.
Mueller favored the G-Man’s traditional uniform: business suits with starched white shirts, never colored. At the FBI, he was known for a punishing work ethic, and was often at his desk by 6 a.m. And he was famously press adverse, with no tolerance for leaks by underlings.
Mueller quickly assembled a team of some of the most experienced lawyers in the country. He took with him from WilmerHale James Quarles, who had been an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and Aaron Zebley, who had been Mueller’s chief of staff at the FBI. Quarles would come to work as a sort of senior executive in the office, handling many of the interactions with the White House, with Zebley again serving as Mueller’s right-hand man.
As the summer of 2017 progressed, the group grew. Mueller added Andrew Weissmann, a prosecutor who had been involved in the high-profile Enron cases and was well known among defense lawyers as being aggressive; Zainab Ahmad, whose strong record of prosecuting terrorism cases earned her a glowing profile in The New Yorker; and Andrew Goldstein, a public-corruption specialist who had helped bring charges against prominent state officials in New York.
Signaling that he expected his work might generate cases worthy of consideration by the highest courts, Mueller also added several appellate specialists, including Michael Dreeben, who had argued more than a hundred cases before the Supreme Court and was considered one of the country’s foremost experts in criminal law.
Trump, meanwhile, had trouble finding and keeping a lawyer to face down Mueller’s dream team. Many of the nation’s most prominent white-collar defense lawyers declined to represent the president of the United States, some citing conflicts and others privately confiding that they worried about the reputational harm that could come from an affiliation with an unpopular president.
When Mueller was appointed, Trump’s legal team was led by Marc Kasowitz, a combative New York litigator who had defended Trump in business disputes but had little experience with Washington investigations. Trump soon replaced Kasowitz with John Dowd, a Washington fixture who had handled big cases but had a reputation as a bit of a loose cannon and was nearing the end of his career.
To deal with the inevitable crush of special counsel requests to interview White House staff members and review government documents, Trump named to the White House counsel’s office Ty Cobb, who sported a walrus mustache and was a distant relative of the baseball great with whom he shared a name.
Working together, Dowd and Cobb devised a strategy of quiet accommodation to the special counsel. Instead of fighting his every request, they made more than twenty White House staff members available for interviews and turned over twenty thousand pages of official documents. Meanwhile, they made cheery but inaccurate pronouncements about the state of Mueller’s inquiry. Cobb declared at one point that he was confident that the investigation would wrap up by Thanksgiving 2017. When the holiday came and went with no end, Cobb revised his prediction. The inquiry, he said, would be finished by Christmas, then soon after New Year’s Day 2018. It was still underway in May 2018, when Cobb resigned and was replaced at the White House by Emmet T. Flood, a stern tactician who made no public pronouncements about anything at all.
ATTACKING MUELLER
Dowd and Cobb drew the line in their strategy of cooperation at allowing Mueller to interview the president. Trump repeatedly told the public that he would talk to Mueller’s investigators, sparking a long-running will-he-or-won’t-he drama. With his typical braggadocio, Trump believed he could talk his way out of anything Mueller might throw at him and, for a time, seemed open to a sit-down. His lawyers were adamantly opposed to the idea. They did not trust Mueller’s team and feared that their client could not get through an interview session without being accused of perjury.
Disputes over the issue led to Dowd’s resignation in March 2018. He was replaced by former New York mayor and federal prosecutor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who adopted a legal strategy more in keeping with the president’s style. Confident that Mueller would abide by a long-standing Justice Department guideline that the Constitution does not allow for the criminal indictment of a sitting president, he believed Trump could face a political threat from impeachment but no true legal peril. In his view, the best legal defense was a political offense in the form of an unrelenting public campaign to undermine Mueller’s credibility and convince voters that impeachment based on his findings would be unfair and unpalatable.
Giuliani’s strategy had the added benefit of convincing Trump that there was no need to appear cooperative and sit for an interview. This approach suited Trump’s lifelong ethos of responding to any threat by punching back harder. He amplified Giuliani’s attacks, not just on the special counsel, but on the entire justice system.
People who spoke to Trump said that he derided Sessions privately as “Mr. Magoo,” an elderly cartoon character popular in the 1960s and iconic for not acknowledging his poor eyesight, and Rosenstein as “Mr. Peepers,” a bespectacled high school teacher from a 1950s sitcom. After word of the insults leaked, Trump denied using the nicknames. In public, he was nearly as insulting, asserting in September 2018 that “I don’t have an attorney general.” To witnesses involved in the Mueller investigation, Trump sent a clear message: Cooperate with investigators, and you will feel my wrath. Fight back, and you will have my support.
After Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and self-described fixer, pleaded guilty and implicated the president in a scheme to break campaign finance laws, Trump deemed him a “rat” and called for Cohen’s father-in-law to be investigated for unnamed crimes.
In contrast, Trump had nothing but praise for Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman, whose lawyers quietly assured Trump’s team that he was not providing damaging information about the president, even after he pleaded guilty to crimes including tax fraud and began cooperating with Mueller.
“I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “ ‘Justice’ took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’—make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ Such respect for a brave man!”
Legal analysts asserted that Trump might be obstructing justice in real time—using his presidential platform and pardon power to dissuade possible witnesses from cooperating with Mueller.
Trump’s posture as president toward Russia also gave the law enforcement and intelligence communities cause for concern. He took great pains to conceal the details of his conversations with Putin, including at least once taking the notes of his own interpreter and demanding that the details of the discussion not be disclosed, even inside his administration. In a White House meeting in May 2017, he was said to have revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador—details so sensitive that they had been kept from close allies.
At a news conference in Helsinki the following year, Trump stood next to his Russian counterpart and seemed to cast doubt on whether Russia had been responsible for the election-related meddling at all—delivering a remarkable rebuke to those in the US intelligence community who had assessed the Kremlin was to blame.
“President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” Trump said.
MUELLER’S FINDINGS
If Trump’s goal was to derail the investigation, however, he failed. Mueller’s team pushed forward, serving 2,800 subpoenas, executing nearly 500 search warrants, and questioning around 500 people. Witnesses who sat for those interviews said afterward that they were surprised by the prosecutors’ careful, detailed work.
“The Mueller team knew more about what I did in 2016 than I knew myself,” former Trump aide Michael Caputo said on CNN after emerging from his interview. “I think they know more about the Trump campaign than anyone who ever worked there.”
Mueller’s investigation accelerated in July 2017, after it emerged that Donald J. Trump Jr., the president’s son, had attended a meeting at Trump Tower in New York during the campaign with a Russian lawyer who he was told would provide damaging information about Clinton. “If it’s what you say, I love it,” Trump Jr. had written in an email at the time.
Everyone who attended the meeting—including Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—said that it was a bust and that no dirt was provided. But the episode seemed to confirm that the Trump campaign was willing to accept Russian government help when offered. When Donald Trump Jr. was first asked about the meeting a year later, the president dictated a statement for his son that was misleading and incomplete. The meeting, it said, had been “primarily” about adoption.
Mueller’s team toiled for long stretches in silence, emerging periodically to file bombshell indictments.
Two of the indictments appeared designed to explain to the American people exactly what the Russians did during the campaign. In February 2018, Mueller’s team indicted thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies, alleging that they had engaged in a complex two-year scheme to interfere in US politics by posing as Americans and planting false news stories and divisive ads on social media. Working from a small office building in St. Petersburg, these trolls allegedly duped real Americans with whom they interacted online, amplifying tense debates about race, gun control, and sexual identity, pushing pro-Trump messages and even getting some Americans to organize and attend rallies they orchestrated. Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin, who the Russian news media has identified as the financial backer of the group, told Russia’s state news agency of the indictment, “The Americans are very impressionable people, and they see what they want to see,” adding, “I am not at all disappointed that I appear in this list. If they want to see the devil—let them.” Then, in July 2018, Mueller’s team indicted twelve Russian military intelligence officers, alleging that they hacked into the email accounts of the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign officials and posed online as an entity called Guccifer 2.0 to publish the material, including by passing it to WikiLeaks and others. The Russian Foreign Ministry rejected the indictment’s allegations as lacking evidence and described the charges as a clear effort to derail an upcoming Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki. “It is unfortunate that distributing false information has become the norm in Washington, and that criminal cases are being initiated based on clearly political motives,” the ministry said.
Among Trump’s friends and aides, six men pleaded guilty or were indicted. Mostly, they were charged with lying to Congress and the FBI about a wide range of issues. None were accused of criminally coordinating with the Russians. But over and over again, they were accused of lying about efforts to develop inroads with Russia and leverage that country’s hacking of Democratic emails.
Roger Stone, a Republican operative and longtime Trump friend, was charged in January 2019 with lying to Congress about his efforts to seek information from WikiLeaks as it was publishing hacked emails. He pleaded not guilty and vowed to beat the charges in court.
Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, including a phone call he had with an assistant to a top Putin aide.
Flynn admitted that he lied to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.
Papadopoulos said that he, too, had lied, hiding key details about his interaction with a London professor who had given him early warning about Russian hacking.
Manafort was convicted by a jury in Virginia in August 2018 of bank and tax fraud related to his handling of more than $60 million he earned consulting for Russia-friendly politicians in Ukraine before he joined the Trump campaign. He subsequently pleaded guilty to charges including not registering as a foreign agent for his Ukraine work.
Mueller’s prosecutors later told a judge that Manafort continued to lie even after his plea. Notably, they said many of his lies were about his interactions with a Russian employee whom the FBI found to have ties to Russian intelligence. That employee has denied any such connection.
The release of Mueller’s report thrust the case into the political arena, arming Democratic lawmakers with an array of new information to support their attacks on Trump and open possible new areas of inquiry for their own investigations.
Trump and his allies, in contrast, reacted with glee. “NO COLLUSION—NO OBSTRUCTION,” the president tweeted, reprising a phrase he used throughout the investigation.
As Democrats sought to digest Mueller’s voluminous findings, they also turned their fire on Barr, who many felt served as a shield for Trump by holding a press conference to summarize Mueller’s findings in a way that was favorable for the president.
Barr also had announced the conclusion of the probe weeks before the report’s release and revealed Mueller’s top line findings: that the special counsel could not prove coordination, and he would not reach a conclusion on obstruction. That, in Democrats’ view, set a narrative that was hard to shake.
Some Democrats immediately said the report provided evidence the president had committed a crime. “Even in its incomplete form,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee said in a statement, “the Mueller report outlines disturbing evidence that President Trump engaged in obstruction of justice and other misconduct.”
Nadler vowed to press on with investigations of Trump as Republicans called for them to end.
“Democrats who have been running around for the last two years making outlandish claims about the President and his family ought to apologize to the American people for misleading them and the press about this smear campaign,” said Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the Republican whip. “This report…delivered a death blow to their baseless conspiracy theories.”
Mueller’s investigation may have concluded but Washington’s political wars were as hot as ever.