The Battle to Stop Robert Mueller
We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA—NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!
—DONALD TRUMP
TRUMP’S BATTLE AGAINST ROBERT MUELLER WAS AT first a battle against James Comey and the FBI.
Although Comey and the FBI had been instrumental in handing the 2016 election to Donald Trump by reviving the Clinton email controversy a week before Election Day, Trump and his far-right media allies quickly turned against Comey for insisting that the FBI thoroughly investigate Russian interference in the election.
There was a lot to investigate.
That Russian operatives engaged in criminal conduct, including computer hacking and fraudulent use of social media accounts, is obvious. That Donald Trump and his campaign knew about and benefited from those actions is also obvious. He even shouted encouragement to Putin, urging the Russian president on TV to “hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.”
What was not obvious, and what an investigation could reveal, was:
1. Who collaborated with the Russians;
2. Whether that collaboration was criminal conspiracy or noncriminal;
3. The impact on our national security (including whether the Russians could blackmail anyone in our government and whether anyone who had collaborated with the Russians, even if not criminally, held a high position in the US government and/or had a security clearance); and
4. How we could prevent a foreign power from ever attacking our electoral process again.
There needed to be an investigation.
But Trump never wanted an investigation, and he has spent his entire presidency trying to prevent it.
We now know that the available evidence hasn’t proved that Trump personally conspired with the Russians to commit a crime (although nobody knows what he said in those private meetings with Putin). There apparently wasn’t sufficient evidence of criminal conspiracy to justify a prosecution of any Americans for conspiracy with the Russians (the extent of that evidence remains a mystery because large portions of the first part of Robert Mueller’s 2019 report have been redacted).
But collaboration, if not criminal conspiracy, was obvious. It was clear that Trump and people working in his campaign knew about a lot of what the Russians were doing and that he would benefit from it. There was also evidence of Trump campaign workers sharing polling data with the Russians. Then there was the Trump Tower meeting with Russian operatives who offered to get the “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Also, the Trump campaign “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos, who sat at the table with campaign top brass (there’s a photo of that) and met with his Russian handler, the “professor,” when traveling to the United Kingdom. And there were many people closely connected to Donald Trump who lied about their contacts with the Russians, some of whom have been criminally convicted.
There needed to be an investigation.
But Donald Trump did not want an investigation. This conflict between what needed to happen—what the rule of law and national security required—and the narcissistic will of a single man from the outset put Trump on a collision course first with James Comey, then with Robert Mueller, and ultimately with Congress and the Constitution.
As is typical for Trump, his propaganda campaign began with speeches and tweets to his supporters as soon as the election was over. Trump called any attempt by the press to discuss Russian interference in the election “fake news” and a “witch hunt.”
As soon as he took office on January 20, 2017, Trump was in a position to do a lot more than complain about the Russia investigation in speeches and tweets. As president he could obstruct the investigation.
And—as outlined in great detail in the second half of Robert Mueller’s 2019 report—that is exactly what Trump did. Whether or not Trump had the constitutional power to obstruct an investigation conducted by an executive branch under his complete control is a legal question that Mueller did not definitively answer (his 2019 report strongly suggested that the answer is “no,” an issue we discuss in Chapter 30). But the fact that Trump obstructed the investigation is obvious.
He started by putting the screws to FBI Director James Comey, asking for his loyalty.
When asked how he took the request, Comey later said he “took it as a direction. I took it as, this is what he wants me to do.” Comey said it was “a very disturbing thing, very concerning.” Comey said he discussed with other FBI officials whether to open an obstruction of justice investigation right there and then.
In March 2017, Trump asked Daniel Coats, the director of national intelligence, and Mike Pompeo, the CIA director, to speak with Comey directly to persuade him to back off from investigating Flynn.
When Comey in March revealed that the FBI was investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, Trump asked Coats and national security director Admiral Michael Rogers to publicly state that there was no evidence of such collusion.
Both Coats and Rogers were taken aback by the request and refused. Both exchanged notes about Trump’s request.
Jeff Sessions, whom Trump chose to be his first attorney general, was one of Trump’s most loyal supporters. Trump fully expected Sessions to be the firewall between him and any fallout from his illegal activities, but on March 1, 2017, Sessions gave Trump a jolt of reality by recusing himself from the Russian investigation. With Sessions stepping away, Comey was in charge, and it was clear to Trump that Comey had no intention of letting it go.
On May 9, 2017, Trump fired Comey.
The next day Trump told Russian officials that the firing had “taken off the great pressure” of the Russian investigation. Two days later, he told Lester Holt on NBC Nightly News that he fired Comey because of “this Russia thing.” (A year later Trump, finally understanding the meaning of his confession, accused Holt in a tweet of “fudging my tape on Russia.” Trump’s attorney made the same assertion. Neither had any evidence to back up their claims.)
Firing Comey was obstruction of justice on its face. Here was the president of the United States interfering with an FBI investigation into the guilt or innocence of people who worked on his own campaign, including family members and potentially himself. Obstruction of the FBI investigation might not have been sufficiently within Trump’s constitutional powers as president so that he could not be prosecuted for it criminally (that is the legal question addressed in the 2019 Mueller Report, which strongly suggested that the president did not have such powers). But it was obstruction of justice, and something for which Trump could be, and should be, impeached (the Mueller Report came close to suggesting that, without expressly telling Congress exactly what to do).
Wrote Trump to Comey in his firing letter, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau.”
When Andrew McCabe became acting director of the FBI in May 2017, Trump had a conversation with him similar to the one he had had with Comey, asking for loyalty. McCabe replied by saying he had not voted in the election. McCabe also took copious notes of the meeting.
As expected, Democratic legislators cried foul. So did Representative Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican who said he supported an independent commission to investigate the Russian links to Trump. As for Trump saying that Comey had cleared him three times, Amash said his claim was “bizarre.”
Even more bizarre was Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyak meeting the next day in the Oval Office with Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
More bizarre than that was that the American press, barred from attending the meeting, didn’t even know that either Trump or Kislyak were there. The American public found out only because photos of the four men were posted on the Russian government’s Twitter account.
Later it was reported that Trump had divulged classified information to the two Russians (most likely this was information obtained from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency).
The next day Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
A day later on Twitter, Trump reverted to his witch-hunt charge.
“This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history,” he said. Then he tweeted a misdirection: “With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special counsel appointed!”
That afternoon he took questions from reporters and said, yet again, “There was no collusion.”
As May blended into June, Trump continued to deny any wrongdoing. Once again he tried to turn the country’s attention to things Hillary Clinton might have done. On June 15, 2017, he tweeted, “They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice … You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history—led by some very bad and conflicted people! … Why is [it] that Hillary Clintons family and Dems dealings with Russia are not looked at, but my non-dealings are? … Crooked H destroyed phones w/ hammer, ‘bleached’ emails & had husband meet w/AG days before she was cleared—& they talk about obstruction?”
On July 6, 2017, the day before Trump was to meet with Vladimir Putin in Warsaw, Trump told reporters that “nobody knows for sure” whether Russia meddled in the election.
“Well, I think it was Russia, and I think it could have been other people and other countries. It could have been a lot of people interfered.”
The next day in Hamburg, Germany, Trump met with Putin during a meeting of twenty world leaders. At first Trump only admitted meeting Putin one time. According to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Trump asked Putin about meddling in the election, and Putin once again denied any such thing. It took an investigation by the New York Times to discover that Trump had met with Putin a second time for an hour. Trump, breaking protocol, went alone. There was no secretary or assistant to record what was said at the meeting. He spoke to Putin through a Russian translator. There has never been a report as to what the two talked about. Trump made sure of that.
Trump in a statement downplayed the significance of the meeting.
“It is not merely perfectly normal, it is part of a president’s duties, to interact with world leaders,” the statement said.
Then why had he not disclosed the one-on-one discussion with Putin?
Trump blasted the media for reporting on his undisclosed meeting with the Russian president, saying the “fake news” was “sick” and “dishonest.” Trump misrepresented what was said about the meeting. He said the media had reported a “secret dinner,” when it was, in fact, an undisclosed dinner. Without basis, he stated that the reporters knew all about the meeting, when they hadn’t.
What was the meeting about? There was no way to know.
Trump’s denials about the campaign colluding with the Russians during the run-up to the election became harder to swallow when on July 8, 2017, the New York Times revealed that in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr., campaign manager Paul Manafort, and son-in-law Jared Kushner had met at Trump Tower with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya after the Russians promised Trump Jr. damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Veselnitskaya was married to a Russian deputy minister of transportation.
Donald Trump Jr. admitted to the New York Times that the meeting had, in fact, taken place, and the next day Trump Jr. said in a statement that they had met to discuss “adoptions.” Why adoptions? Because the Russians had barred Americans from adopting Russian orphans in retaliation for sanctions. And that—adoptions—was the issue that would lead the top brass of Trump’s campaign to meet with a Russian agent?
Trump Jr. was lying, of course. The adoption issue was just a smoke screen. At that Trump Tower meeting, the topic of discussion was the “dirt” the Russians had on Hillary Clinton and how the Trump campaign could use it, as well as concerns that the Russians had about American sanctions on Russia (which were tangentially connected to the baby adoption issue). There was no provable quid pro quo (dirt on Hillary in exchange for relief from the sanctions), but that was the obvious drift of the meeting.
The Washington Post then revealed that President Trump himself had written the statement delivered by his son about the Trump Tower meeting. A few days later Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow lied to CNN, saying that neither he nor Trump were involved in writing that statement and that the meeting had been about adoption.
Exposure of the Trump Tower meeting represented the first public disclosure that high-ranking members of the Trump campaign were meeting with Russian agents and willing to accept Russian help. Robert Mueller in his 2019 report apparently concluded that the meeting was not a provable criminal conspiracy (not all collaboration between political campaigns and outside persons is criminal). Nonetheless, the meeting was a clear example of collusion, and it had to do with a lot more than Russian baby adoptions.
Trump, upon hearing of revelations about the Trump Tower meeting, attempted to deflect any criticism from himself.
“I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion … We negotiated a ceasefire in parts of Syria which will save lives. Now it is time to move forward in working instructively with Russia! … Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking & many other negative things, will be guarded … Sanctions were not discussed at my meeting with President Putin. Nothing will be done until the Ukrainian & Syrian problems are solved.”
Trump was going to team up with the Russians to form a cybersecurity unit to prevent election hacking? Was he trying to be funny? Short of sharing our nuclear codes with the Kremlin, it is hard to imagine a crazier idea.
Donald Trump Jr., meanwhile, cast the Russian agent at the meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, as a woman who was “vague, ambiguous, and made no sense.”
Said Trump Jr., “It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information. Then she changed subjects and began talking about the adoption of Russian children and mentioned the Magnitsky Act.” Trump Jr. concluded that this had been her primary purpose all along.
Veselnitskaya, backpedaling as fast as the Trump team, denied the discussion had anything to do with the presidential campaign, and she denied acting on behalf of the Russian government.
“I never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government,” she said.
Trump Jr.’s problem was that the New York Times had copies of his emails. One of them was from Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist, who at the behest of a Russian client informed Trump Jr. that the information Veselnitskaya would give him at the meeting was from the Russia government’s efforts to help his father win the presidency. Veselnitskaya worked for Yuri Chaika, Russia’s prosecutor general.
When Trump Jr. learned that the Times had his emails, he hastily released them himself. In one of them, Goldstone promised him “information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. The information is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Replied Trump Jr., “If it is what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer.”
Here was an operative of a foreign adversary giving the Trump campaign information on their opponent in an attempt to compromise the election. Most any other campaign operative would have called the FBI.
Instead Donald Trump Jr. replied, “I love it.”
That night Trump Jr. was interviewed by Fox News sycophant Sean Hannity. Trump Jr. said that the meeting was “such a nothing.” He also admitted he should have “done things a little differently.”
On July 16, Jay Sekulow repeated the lie that President Trump wasn’t involved in preparing the statement about the meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya.
To this day, President Trump stands by his assertion that, if a foreign agent offers an American political candidate dirt on his opponent, the candidate should “listen” to what the agent has to say. As Trump said in a June 2019 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, he could, of course, listen to the foreign agent and not call the FBI (“Who calls the FBI?”). When FBI Director Chris Wray countered with the view that a person presented with potentially stolen information should call the FBI, Trump said, “The FBI director is wrong.”
The news of the various Russian connections to Trump and his team must have been weighing on him heavily, when on July 19, 2017, Trump in an interview with the New York Times complained bitterly about having appointed Jeff Sessions to be his attorney general. Sessions’s recusal, Trump said, was “very unfair to the president.” Trump wanted Sessions to un-recuse from the Russia investigation and rein in—or fire—Robert Mueller.
A day after that admission, Trump’s legal team spokesperson, Mark Corallo, quit after only two months on the job. Trump that day reportedly asked his lawyers whether he could pardon his campaign team, his family members, and even himself should he be found guilty of collusion with the Russians. Incredibly, he even asked about his power to issue pardons in a Twitter rant.
“While all agree the U.S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us. FAKE NEWS My son Donald openly gave his emails to the media & authorities whereas Crooked Hillary Clinton deleted (& acid washed) her 33,000 emails!”
In another display of anger, Trump again went after Sessions as well as Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
“So why aren’t the Committees and investigators, and of course our beleaguered A.G., looking into Crooked Hillarys crimes & Russia relations? Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes (where are E-mails & DNC server) & Intel leakers! … Problem is that the acting head of the FBI & the person in charge of the Hillary investigation, Andrew McCabe, got $700,000 from H for wife!”
That day, July 25, 2017, the House passed sanctions on Russia. The vote was 419 to 3. The days of Putin thinking that Trump could make a deal and do away with American sanctions on Russia were over.
That same day FBI agents raided the home of Paul Manafort, collecting documents and computer files. In response, Trump again went after Sessions.
“Why didn’t A.G. Sessions replace Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of Clinton investigation but got … big dollars ($700,000) for his wife’s political run from Hillary Clinton and her representatives? Drain the Swamp!”
The next day George Papadopoulos was arrested at Dulles International Airport. (He later pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to investigators.) Back in the Senate, despite opposition from Trump, the bill to add sanctions to Russia passed by a 98 to 2 vote.
On September 5, Putin commented, “[Trump is] not my bride, and I am not his groom.”
In September 2017, Facebook agreed to provide congressional committees investigating Russian meddling with details about Russian bots that influenced the election. Trump tweeted, “What about the totally biased and dishonest Media coverage in favor of Hillary Clinton?”
When in late October 2017 it was revealed that Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier, had been hired by Marc Elias, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign after the initial funding by Republican opponents of Trump, Trump countered that the collusion with the Russians wasn’t by his campaign, but rather Hillary Clinton’s.
The noose tightened in late October when Paul Manafort and his aide Rick Gates turned themselves in to the FBI after being indicted for money laundering and making false statements. Trump fell back to the position that Manafort did what he was accused of, long before he joined the Trump campaign, and that the campaign had nothing to do with it. George Papadopoulos, meanwhile, made a plea deal with Robert Mueller to cooperate with prosecutors.
Since Robert Mueller took over the investigation in May 2017, it is clear that Trump had done all he could to obstruct the investigation. That is the focus of the entire second half of Mueller’s 2019 report, which outlines a dozen separate incidents in which Trump obstructed justice in the investigation.
Mueller sought to question Trump about the firings of both Michael Flynn and James Comey, but to no avail. Trump made it clear that he would resist a one-on-one interview with Mueller. Mueller eventually decided to forgo this interview rather than delay the investigation for months, if not years. Waiting to interview Trump under court order (assuming Mueller was able to get a court order and defend it all the way to the Supreme Court) would have delayed considerably the release of the Mueller Report, which the House believed it needed to proceed with further investigations and possible impeachment. Not to mention the fact that, in any such interview, Trump likely would do what he does best—lie.
Mueller interviewed Andrew McCabe and Jeff Sessions. He interviewed Mark Corallo, the former spokesperson for Trump’s legal team, and Hope Hicks, a longtime aide, about whether Trump obstructed justice. Corallo had resigned over his concern that Trump had done just that. Mueller interviewed White House counsel Don McGahn, who disclosed that Trump had ordered him to contact the Department of Justice to get Mueller fired. (Trump of course denies this ever happened.)
As Mueller was building cases against Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, Trump’s attorney John Dowd talked to Manafort and Flynn’s personal attorneys about the possibility of both of them getting pardoned by Trump. There was a report in March 2018 that Manafort was considering just that option. Dangling pardons to witnesses was yet another instance where Trump sought to obstruct justice in the Mueller investigation.
In January 2018, Trump’s attorneys wrote a letter to Mueller arguing that Trump as the president cannot obstruct justice, because the Constitution grants him full authority over all federal investigations.
“If he wished, [he could] terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon.”
In sum, Trump not only fired FBI Director Comey to stop the Russia investigation, but he was going to do everything possible to obstruct Mueller as well. The full details of his obstruction of the investigation were not made public until publication of Mueller’s (heavily redacted) report in May 2019. It is very clear that Trump did a lot of obstructing.
When Comey went before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017, he testified he was certain he had been fired because of Trump’s concern about the Russia investigation, not because of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
“I was fired, in some way, to change—or the endeavor was to change the way the Russia investigation was being conducted,” Comey testified.
Comey also testified that three times he had told Trump he was not under investigation.
In response Trump tweeted that he felt “total and complete vindication.”
On June 15, 2017, Trump went on what is now known as a tweet storm.
At 5:55 AM he tweeted, “They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go to obstruction of justice on the phone story. Nice.”
At 6:57 he tweeted, “You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history—led by some very bad and conflicted people! #MAGA.”
At 2:34 PM Trump tweeted, “Why is that Hillary Clintons family and Dems dealing with Russia are not looked at, but my non-dealings are?”
Thirteen minutes later he added, “Crooked H destroyed phones w/ hammer, ‘bleached’ emails, & had husband meet w/AG days before she was cleared—& they talk about obstruction?”
Never mind that Hillary Clinton never personally destroyed her phone with a hammer. One of Clinton’s aides told the FBI that, on two occasions, he disposed of her unwanted mobile devices by breaking or hammering them. Cell phone owners commonly destroy old phones to keep others from using them. Furthermore, it was true that Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch days before Hillary Clinton was cleared of any wrongdoing with respect to her emails, but that had nothing to do with the Russia investigation. As usual, months after the 2016 presidential election, Trump deflected by playing the Hillary card.
A month later, in mid-July 2017, Trump threatened Mueller and his investigation, again calling it a “witch hunt” and warning Mueller that if he looked into his personal finances, that would be a “violation.” Trump stated that any member of Mueller’s team who had ever contributed to the Democratic Party was ethically compromised.
Trump and his team were reportedly stockpiling information to use against Mueller in order to discredit the investigation.
His spokesperson, Sarah Sanders, said that Trump reserved the right to remove Mueller.
By December 2017, experts were saying that Trump was trying to undermine the special counsel in order to sow doubt and shape public perception in the event Trump decided to pardon some of his officials who were being investigated or indicted by Mueller. If Americans believed Mueller was politically motivated, Trump thought, the political blowback from pardons would be less severe. Experts also said it was a better strategy than terminating Mueller, because of the storm of criticism that yet another firing would unleash after the Comey dismissal.
Mueller, meanwhile, continued his investigation, silent and resilient, his visage looming large over the Trump presidency. In April 2018 Mueller’s team raided the home of Trump’s fixer and personal lawyer Michael Cohen. Around that time, Trump pardoned Scooter Libby (former vice president Cheney’s chief of staff, convicted of perjury a decade earlier) and the far-right commentator Dinesh D’Souza (convicted of felony campaign finance violations). Trump was accused of advertising his pardon power to say to those who Mueller indicted, including Cohen and former campaign manager Paul Manafort, that if they refused to cooperate with the special counsel, Trump would pardon them as well.
When in June 2018 Trump ramped up his attacks on Mueller, former CIA director John Brennan said of Trump, “Your fear of exposure is palpable. Your desperation even more so.”
Brennan then asked, “When will those of conscience among your cabinet, inner circle, and Republican leadership realize that your unprincipled and unethical behavior, as well as your incompetence, are seriously damaging our nation?”
In July 2018 Trump returned to his rant against the Steele dossier, tweeting a series of false claims, including his charge that the 2016 FISA (a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court) warrant application against Carter Page was responsible for starting Mueller’s investigation. The final line of his tweet was that “Fake Dirty Dossier, that was paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the DNC, that was knowingly and falsely submitted to FISA and which was responsible for starting the totally conflicted and discredited Mueller Witch Hunt!” Here Trump picked up on another conspiracy theory—that the entire Russia investigation was a hoax the FBI had started under President Obama to gather incriminating information and falsely link the Trump campaign to the Russians. The FISA submissions had been made by the FBI to a FISA judge for purposes of obtaining search warrants because the FBI had suspected certain Trump associates of collaborating with the Russians. Trump now claimed these FISA warrants—approved by judges—were somehow part of a domestic spying conspiracy against him.
Trump also tweeted, “Carter Page wasn’t a spy, wasn’t an agent of the Russians—he would have cooperated with the FBI. It was a fraud and a hoax designed to target Trump.”
In mid-August 2018, Trump tweeted that Mueller was “disgraced and discredited” all the while calling his team of prosecutors a “National Disgrace.”
It soon became apparent that Trump’s verbal barrage against Mueller was having little effect. A Fox News poll showed that 59 percent of registered voters approved of Mueller’s investigation.
Initially, Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, knowing himself to be in deep trouble for money laundering and other crimes, cooperated with the special counsel. But on November 27, 2018, Mueller accused Manafort of lying and breaking his cooperation agreement.
In response Trump went on another Twitter tirade:
“The Fake News Media builds Bob Mueller up as a Saint, when in actuality he is the exact opposite. He is doing TREMENDOUS damage to our Criminal Justice System, where he is only looking at one side and not the other. Heroes will come to this, and it won’t be Mueller and his terrible gang of Angry Democrats. Look at their past, and look where they come from. The now $30,000,000 Witch Hunt continues and they’ve got nothing but ruined lives. Where is the Server? Let these terrible people go back to the Clinton Foundation and ‘Justice’ Department.”
On December 7, 2018, Trump vowed to release a counter report to Mueller’s findings and said eighty-seven pages were already written.
Plenty of right-wing political commentators were allies in Trump’s all-out attack on the Justice Department, the FBI, and Mueller. When Mueller announced his first indictments in the Russia investigation in late October 2017, Sebastian Gorka, a former White House official, and Trump’s longtime friend and advisor Roger Stone tweeted attacks on Mueller.
Tweeted Gorka, “I guess that both ex-G-Men have forgotten the ‘I’ in the @FBI motto stands for INTEGRITY.”
He also tweeted, “If this man’s team executes warrants this weekend he should [be] stripped of his authority by @realDonald Trump.”
Stone was more sarcastic. He tweeted, “Breaking: Mueller indicts @ PaulManafort’s maid for tearing labels of sofa cushions.” And “Yeah, I hear Deep State stooge is indicting Manafort’s driver for double parking, u little shithead.”
Not to be outdone, Fox News’s Sean Hannity tweeted, “This has been a HORRIBLE week for Mueller, Special Counsel’s office. THIS IS ALL A DISTRACTION. Monday I’ll have the details. TICK TOCK….!”
Some Republicans in Congress also came to Trump’s defense. Representative Trent Franks called for Mueller to resign, saying Mueller was compromised because of his relationship with James Comey. Frank cited Trump’s argument that Democratic donors funded the Steele dossier, which Republicans say was a phony document that set the Russia investigation in motion, and he cited a discredited report that Hillary Clinton was involved in the sale of uranium to a Russian company.
The attacks on Mueller seemed to have little traction.
But in December 2018 the attacks intensified. The more Mueller imperiled Trump, the more McCarthy-like Trump and his allies became in making unfounded accusations against career government officials, including Mueller. Their objective was to derail the investigation and bury the facts in falsehoods.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said on Fox News, “Mueller is corrupt. The senior FBI is corrupt. The system is corrupt.” House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had been sharply critical of Trump during the 2016 election, did nothing to defend Mueller or the investigation. Many in his GOP caucus were even worse in jumping on the anti-Mueller bandwagon.
And even the underlying accusation itself—collaboration with Russia—could be turned on its head. Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett exclaimed that Mueller was using the FBI “just like the old KGB.”
Fox host Jeanine Pirro piled on, saying, “There is a cleansing needed at the FBI and Department of Justice. It needs to be cleansed of individuals who should not just be fired but need to be taken out in handcuffs.”
Pirro was focusing on a relationship between two FBI agents, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were having an affair and wrote text messages critical of Trump to each other. Strzok was reassigned from the Mueller team almost immediately, but the Republicans cited the texts as proof of bias. Pirro—laughably—would go on to call the FBI “a crime family” under the leadership of James Comey.
No longer were Trump and his Fox News allies and other right-wing commentators just arguing that the Russia probe was fake news and a witch hunt. Now they argued that the FBI probe was prejudiced against Trump because six of the fifteen FBI investigators had given money to Democratic candidates. (Never mind that the people at the top of the probe—Mueller, Rosenstein, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and former FBI director Comey—were all Republicans.) Undermining Mueller’s investigation, they knew, was the key to saving Trump’s presidency.
Three Republicans in the House of Representatives, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Matt Gaetz of Florida, and Devin Nunes of California, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, all screamed for Mueller’s dismissal and even prosecution. Representative Ron DeSantis of Florida, a House Judiciary member, called for the scope and funding of Mueller’s investigation to be severely limited. DeSantis was richly rewarded with Trump’s support during his campaign to become Florida’s next governor.
Nunes, Jordan, and Gaetz had been secretly meeting with a group from the House Intelligence Committee to make the case that heads of the Justice Department and the FBI had mishandled the contents of the Steele dossier. In April 2018 it was revealed that Nunes, head of the House Intelligence Committee, was bringing classified information about the investigation to President Trump in the White House without telling the other members of the committee. Nunes was doing all he could to sabotage or even close down the House investigation. He even went so far as to threaten to issue a report exposing corruption at the FBI.
Other Republicans, however, worried that the attacks on the FBI and Justice Department would foster a distrust of our most important legal institutions.
Said Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a moderate Republican, “Most of my Republican colleagues feel as I do that we have confidence in law enforcement. I don’t know why that should change now that we have a Republican administration.” Dent added that law enforcement officials should only be punished for their political opinions if they act on them.
Added Representative Thomas Rooney of Florida, “Those are political cheap shots that sound good on Fox News but in the real world are completely unfair to a guy who has given his life to serving this country.”
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, also a Republican, said, “From his reputation and everything I know about him, I remain convinced that when this is all said and done, Mueller is going to only pursue things that are true, and he will do it in a fair and balanced way.” Rubio advised the president to allow Mueller to complete his investigation.
Hearing some Republicans uphold the rule of law was heartening, but it didn’t slow the criticisms from Trump and his most loyal supporters. In March 2018 Devin Nunes, head of the House Intelligence Committee, announced that the Republicans on the committee had ended the investigation into Russian interference in the election and found no evidence of wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, Nunes continued to attack the Mueller investigation.
“A dangerous new era of alternative reality is advancing,” said a March 14, 2018, op-ed in the New York Times, co-authored by former Republican representative Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island, “and House Republicans are signaling that, like their president, they intend to ignore, bend or assail truth to fight the Mueller investigation (and presumably that of the Senate Intelligence Committee as well, should it reach inconvenient conclusions).”
Trump, like all who spurn democracy in favor of oligarchy, had another extremely powerful ally in his attempts to thwart Robert Mueller and his investigation: Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, with whom President Trump had nightly conversations from his White House bedroom. According to New York Magazine, Trump and Hannity at night would discuss the Mueller “witch hunt.” They also gabbed about media ratings, sports, and Kanye West.
Hannity, even from outside the White House, replaced Steve Bannon as Trump’s most trusted advisor after Bannon left the White House team. The two would discuss next moves whenever Trump was criticized in the newspapers and on CNN and MSNBC. On his Fox News program, Hannity would blast away at the critics and heap congratulatory praise at Trump. More than anything, Hannity repeated Trump’s false claims about Mueller and reverted to the notion that Hillary Clinton should have been indicted for her use of private emails.
Sean Hannity started his career as a shock jock on a college radio station, KCSB in Santa Barbara, California, but was fired after calling gays “disgusting people” who were “brainwashing” the public. Then he moved to Alabama to work at WVNN, and then to Georgia to work for WGST talk radio in Atlanta.
Roger Ailes hired him for Fox News in 1996. In 2011 he gave Trump a platform for his birtherism myth, and they became friends in 2016, when Hannity helped Trump get elected and Trump helped Hannity become a popular face of cable news.
Hannity on December 5, 2017, went on a ten-minute diatribe against Mueller. He said, “Let’s start off with the head of the snake. Mueller’s credibility is in the gutter tonight with these new discoveries; his conflicts of interests, his clear bias, the corruption are on full display. Mueller is frankly a disgrace to the American justice system and has put the country now on the brink of becoming a banana republic.”
He blasted some of the investigators for being Democrats, called out “Mueller’s band of Clinton lovers,” and mentioned “$50,000 in donations to Democrats” from members of Mueller’s team.
For months after Robert Mueller’s appointment in May 2017, little was heard from the special counsel while Trump was filling the airways and newspapers with his tweets deriding Mueller and his investigation. As bad as the leaks had been in the White House, the opposite was true from Mueller’s vaunted team of attorneys. The public—and the White House—had no idea what Mueller and his staff were up to.
Then on July 27, 2017, George Papadopoulos, Trump’s former campaign foreign policy adviser, walked off a Lufthansa flight from Munich at Dulles International Airport where FBI agents met him and placed him under arrest. He was booked into the city detention center in Alexandria, Virginia, the next day.
Papadopoulos was charged with lying to the FBI about his contacts with pro-Russian advocates and with obstruction of justice.
When Papadoupolos, shaken, agreed to plead guilty and cooperate about Russian interference in the 2016 election, Mueller dropped the obstruction charge.
Reports trickled in about who Mueller was calling in to testify before a grand jury: first came Russian American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, who had ties to Russian military counterintelligence and who was in the room when Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with Natalia Veselnitskaya at the all-important June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting.
Other Trump appointees appeared before a grand jury. Paul Manafort’s spokesman Jason Maloni presumably was asked about what Manafort told him about the Trump Tower meeting, and then came Keith Kellogg, who served as acting national security adviser to President Trump following the resignation of Michael Flynn. Kellogg was also an advisor to Trump during the campaign.
Mueller then interviewed former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, former press secretary Sean Spicer, and Trump campaign foreign policy advisory member Sam Clovis. Clovis was asked what he knew about George Papadopoulos talking to the Russians.
None of this made much of an impression on the public, but then on October 30, 2017, Mueller’s team brought a twelve-count indictment against Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates. Both were charged with being unregistered agents of the government of Ukraine. They were accused of generating tens of millions of dollars in income and hiding the money from US authorities.
According to the indictment, Manafort and Gates “laundered the money through scores of United States and foreign corporations, partnerships, and bank accounts.” They did all of this to avoid detection of their violations of, among other laws, the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA). Congress enacted FARA to require anyone working as an agent of a foreign government to register with the Department of Justice (in 1938, Germany, Japan, Italy, and the USSR topped the list of countries trying to influence the United States government, and the USSR and the former Soviet republics have been trying to infiltrate the US government in just about all of the eighty years since FARA was enacted).
In furtherance of the scheme, said the indictment, Manafort and Gates funneled millions of dollars in payments to foreign companies and bank accounts in foreign countries, all the while hiding the existence of these foreign companies and banks. They reported none of this money on their income tax forms.
As lobbyists on behalf of a foreign government, they were required to report their work and fees under FARA. Instead, they hid that information. When the Department of Justice asked them about it, they lied.
Said the indictment, “Manafort also used these offshore accounts to purchase multimillion-dollar properties in the United States. Manafort then borrowed millions of dollars in loans using these properties as collateral, thereby obtaining cash in the United States without reporting and paying taxes on the income. In order to increase the amount of money he could access in the United States, Manafort defrauded the institutions that loaned money on these properties so that they would lend him more money at more favorable rates than he would otherwise be able to obtain.”
More than $75 million flowed through the offshore accounts. Manafort laundered more than $18 million, which he used to buy property, goods, and services in the United States, income that he concealed from the United States Treasury, the Department of Justice, and others. Gates transferred more than $3 million from the offshore accounts to other accounts he controlled.
Anyone who read the indictment would have been overwhelmed by Manafort and Gates’s incredible lawlessness. The question, of course, was why Trump chose Manafort to be his campaign chairman and Gates to be Manafort’s right-hand man. The man who would soon become president of the United States could not keep an unregistered foreign agent out of the top job in his own political campaign—or perhaps Trump knew and didn’t care.
On the day Papadopoulos’s name surfaced again, it was reported that he had signed a statement admitting he had lied to the FBI.
More interviews followed. In early November 2017, Jared Kushner was asked about the role of Michael Flynn. Stephen Miller, a Trump advisor, was interviewed, as was Don McGahn. Then on December 1, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor (who only lasted in that job for a few weeks in early 2017 before he was forced to resign), pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, part of a coordinated effort by Trump and his appointees to form foreign policy even before taking office and while Obama was still president.
Flynn agreed to cooperate with the investigation in exchange for leniency for his son, who had some exposure to charges on related matters, and a lighter sentence for himself. Flynn agreed to testify about Trump’s efforts to get the FBI to shut down the Flynn investigation.
If Trump had promised to lift the Obama administration’s US sanctions against Russia in exchange for Russian help in winning the 2016 election, Flynn would very likely have been involved. He was certainly a key witness. An express quid pro quo agreement between Trump and the Russians on such a deal probably would have been bribery even if Trump did not hold public office at the time the deal was made.
But there also could have been a “wink-wink, nod-nod” that fell short of proverbial criminal bribery. Mueller would have to find out. Discovering what had happened—whether or not Trump associates’ actions with the Russians were criminal—was an important point of Mueller’s investigation. It should be kept in mind that the suspected quid pro quo in this instance was highly unusual in that it did not involve a deal between a US political candidate and US nationals—for example a domestic bank, healthcare company, or fossil fuel company contributing PAC money to a politician—but a foreign government that since the 1917 Russian Revolution had been committed to undermining, and even overthrowing, the US government.
Any express or implied quid pro quo with the Russians, or any dependency between the Russians and a US candidate, much less a US president, was a cause for enormous concern for US national security. Allowing the Mueller investigation to proceed—and witnesses such as Flynn to testify fully and truthfully—should have been an utmost priority for any loyal American. If Trump had been innocent, and at all rational, completing the Mueller investigation without interference on his part would have been his priority as well.
Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, was interviewed in December 2017 about Trump’s conversations with Russians and the doings of Paul Manafort, with whom she also worked. Mueller in mid-January 2018 then interviewed Attorney General Jeff Sessions as Mueller began to focus on Trump’s behavior in office, whether the president was attempting to obstruct justice by firing FBI Director James Comey, as well as possible ties to the Russians. As head of the Trump campaign’s foreign policy team, Sessions had met with Russians. That was why Sessions had recused himself from the investigation.
Silence once again fell on the investigation until February 16, 2018, when Mueller indicted thirteen Russian nationals and three organizations linked to the Internet Research Agency, known in Russia as the Kremlin’s troll factory. These were the Russians who conducted the information warfare on Hillary Clinton for the benefit of Donald Trump. According to Mueller, the disinformation campaign began in 2014 and continued through the election. The goal was “to sow discord in the United States political system.” The Russians posted derogatory information about a number of candidates and bought ads and communicated with “unwitting” people tied to the Trump campaign and others.
The indictment included a February 2016 memo to the staff of the Internet Research Agency telling them to post political content on US social media sites and “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except [Bernie] Sanders and Trump—we support them).” Twelve of those indicted worked for the Internet Research Agency. One of those charged was Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch who controlled Concord Catering, a group that funded the Internet Research Agency. The indictment said the company spent more than $1.25 million a month during the election year. Some defendants traveled to the United States to gather intelligence.
On that day Richard Pinedo, an unknown figure, pleaded guilty to identity fraud for selling stolen bank account numbers to Russians involved in election interference. He transferred, possessed, and used strangers’ identities so that the Russians could have PayPal accounts under fake names. He faces up to fifteen years in prison and a $250,000 fine. He agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation.
On February 20, 2018, Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about working with Rick Gates and an individual identified as “Person A.” On February 22, Mueller filed thirty-two additional charges against Manafort and Gates, accusing them of money laundering and bank fraud. A day later, Gates cut a deal with Mueller.
The next day a federal grand jury indicted Manafort, alleging he had “secretly retained a group of former senior European politicians to take positions favorable to the Ukraine, including lobbying in the United States.”
Everyone wondered, What was that all about?
On April 3, 2018, the mysterious Alex van der Zwaan was sentenced to thirty days in jail and $20,000 in fines for lying to FBI investigators. Van der Zwaan was the first person indicted by Mueller to go to jail.
Then, on April 9, 2018, Mueller made headlines when the FBI raided the hotel room and office of Trump’s personal advisor and “fixer,” Michael Cohen. A month later Mueller brought new charges against Manafort and also charged Konstantin Kilimnik, a former aide to Manafort with suspected ties to Russian intelligence. Manafort and Kilimnik were both charged with conspiracy and obstruction of justice for attempting to get others to lie in their testimony. Mueller also charged Manafort with conspiracy to launder money, acting as an unregistered foreign agent, and lying to authorities.
The next broadside of indictments was filed on July 13, 2018, when Mueller indicted twelve Russian military intelligence officers for hacking and releasing the Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign.
A month later, on August 21, Manafort was found guilty in a Virginia courtroom of eight counts of fraud. That same day Michael Cohen—in a separate case brought by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York—pleaded guilty in a Manhattan courtroom to eight counts of tax fraud and campaign finance violations. Some of these charges arose out of Cohen’s payment on behalf of an unindicted co-conspirator, “Individual 1,” of $130,000 in hush money to Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence about her affair with Donald Trump. Individual 1 is no doubt Donald Trump himself.
On September 7, Papadopoulos was sentenced to fourteen days in prison for lying to the FBI. On November 29, Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about what he knew about the proposal for a Trump Tower deal in Moscow.
On December 12, 2018, Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison on charges relating to campaign finance violations, tax evasion, and lying to Congress.
To the public this didn’t sound like much, but Mueller was slowly putting the large jigsaw puzzle together, and when combined with Trump’s actions to strengthen Russia and to weaken America, it was becoming clearer and clearer that if Trump wasn’t in Putin’s pocket, either voluntarily or because of blackmail, then Trump certainly had enough of a bromance with Putin to do his bidding. Why did Trump change the Republican Party’s platform on Ukraine to benefit Putin? How was it that Trump derided NATO and treated the English and German leaders terribly while praising Putin for his leadership?
Why and how indeed.
Whether or not an express quid pro quo with the Russians could be proven, there was strong circumstantial evidence of a close relationship between Trump and Russia—a dependency at minimum. For years we have grown accustomed to hearing that so and so is “the oil companies’ man in the Senate,” or “the bankers’ man in the House,” even if bribery indictments are almost never handed down. Now we confront the extremely dangerous situation that the Russians could have their man in the White House.
Trump could see that Mueller slowly but surely was closing in. Trump knew that conclusions from the investigation would be rich fodder for his impeachment and possible removal from office. With the aid of his White House legal team, Trump rolled out a couple more tricks to hinder the investigation and prevent the issuance of Mueller’s final report.