RocketMan » Sat Mar 23, 2019 1:50 am wrote:THE WALLS ARE INCREASINGLY CLOSING IN ON HIM AND THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
Yaaaas.
"I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it'll save it--save the plan."
Richard Nixon
March 22, 1973
THE WALLS ARE INCREASINGLY CLOSING IN ON HIM AND THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
odd 9 years and no one ever said let it go he will never be held accountable
THE WALLS ARE INCREASINGLY CLOSING IN ON HIM AND THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
where is Paulie waking up this morning? JAIL and he will wake up there every morning for the rest of his life
THE WALLS ARE INCREASINGLY CLOSING IN ON HIM AND THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx94428MYcc
THE WALLS ARE INCREASINGLY CLOSING IN ON HIM AND THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EZFBB-MntE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpG09PenZt8
How Much of Mueller’s Report Will See Daylight?
Only a little? Or a lot?
Timothy L. O'BrienMarch 22, 2019, 7:59 PM CDT
Politics & Policy
By
The special counsel.
Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Timothy L. O’Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. He has been an editor and writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine. His books include “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”
Read more opinion Follow @TimOBrien on Twitter
After an investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election that lasted almost two years, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has filed his final report on the matter to Attorney General William Barr. We now know more than we knew this morning, but it will take days, weeks, months and perhaps years before we learn everything we want to know.
What we can say with assurance is that Mueller and his team — admirable public servants to the end — conducted their probe without leaks, mindful of the law, and with enough resolve to proceed despite unprecedented public and private meddling from President Donald Trump and his cronies in Congress. Mueller also moved along swiftly for an investigation of this scope and gravity (Kenneth Starr, in comparison, spent four years investigating President Bill Clinton).
What we can’t say yet is what firm and final conclusions Mueller has drawn from his exploration of whether Trump and his presidential team colluded with Russia or its proxies during the 2016 election — and whether Trump or anyone else in his orbit obstructed that probe or any investigations preceding or related to it.
We know now that Mueller, in what can only be construed as institutional deference to the presidency, decided not to subpoena or otherwise compel Trump to testify in person and under oath. That may not be a surprise, given that Mueller is an institutionalist to his core. But it also is a glaring and, in my mind, unfortunate lapse in what otherwise appears to have been a thorough and sophisticated investigation. Trump has provided written answers to Mueller’s queries, but compelling the president to answer in person would have given the probe and its report more authority and traction — especially given how aggressively the president chose to interfere with what he relentlessly described as a “witch hunt.”
We also know that Mueller leveled about 200 criminal charges against 34 people and three Russian companies. Within that group, 26 people were Russian nationals and six were once Trump advisers (Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos and Roger Stone, to jog your memory). Trump’s presidential campaign and his transition into the White House were populated by criminals, the facts of which can’t be disputed thanks to Mueller’s investigation. Russians, beyond a doubt, burglarized private computer servers of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign adviser John Podesta in an effort to tilt the 2016 election in Trump’s favor, the facts of which are also indisputable thanks to Mueller’s investigation. Russian interests also used social media to disseminate fake news and support Trump at the direction of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Those facts can’t be disputed, either, thanks to Mueller’s investigation.
Mueller had a broad investigative mandate when he was authorized to launch his probe on May 17, 2017. That envisioned a “full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election” and “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” We can now reasonably conclude that Mueller chose to dive deeply into probing interference in the election, but chose to interpret “any matters” arising from that probe more narrowly (perhaps because of political pressure to keep his focus tight, or simply because he interpreted the legal boundaries that way himself). That appears to have meant that Mueller decided to leave an examination of the Trump Organization and the president’s business dealings and finances to other law enforcement officials (best exemplified, perhaps, by his decision to refer the Cohen prosecution to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan).
In that context, we also know now that Mueller’s team found no reason to indict Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner or other members of the Trump family — including, of course, the president himself — as part of its investigation. That certainly doesn’t mean, however, that the president, his family and his company are out of the woods legally. They’re all being scrutinized by a number of investigators, including federal prosecutors in Manhattan, three state attorneys general and five congressional committees. Parts of those probes could continue for years.
In the near term, Mueller’s report marks the end of the beginning of the Trump investigations. In a letter to senior congressional leaders on Friday evening, Barr said he may be able to inform them of the Mueller report’s “principal conclusions” sometime this weekend. He said he plans to confer with both Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law” and that he is “committed to as much transparency as possible.”
There’s the rub. The actions of the most transparently unethical and lawless president of the modern era are being formally memorialized by law enforcement in a report and through a process that has been largely opaque. We don’t know what we don’t know, and Barr is about to take the first crack at deciding what we should know. He and Congress may be poised for an epic showdown over transparency and the full contours of Robert Mueller’s magnum opus.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... t-you-know
Very Quick Thoughts on the End of the Mueller Investigation
Attorney General William Barr now has the Mueller Report, and the world looks a heck of a lot like it did yesterday, when Barr did not have the Mueller Report. At least, it appears to. The major difference is that the mystery before us has slightly changed form. Before today, we asked what Mueller was going to do, what indictments he was going to bring, and what allegations he was going to make. Today, we ask a subtly different question: What is it that he has written? What allegations has he made? And why has he decided not to make those allegations in the form of additional cases?
We don’t, at this stage, know anything about what information the Mueller Report contains. We don’t know what form the document takes. We don’t even know how many pages comprise it. We don’t know when we will learn what Mueller has found. Speculating about these questions is not useful. A huge amount depends here on how Mueller imagines his role—and on how Barr imagines his.
But there are certain things we do know: We know, for example, that Mueller was able to finish his investigation on his own terms. We know this because Barr said so in his letter to Congress Friday evening. The special counsel regulations, writes Barr, “require that I provide [Congress] with ‘a description and explanation of incidents (if any) in which the Attorney General’” countermanded an investigative step of the special counsel. “There were no such instances during the Special Counsel’s investigation.” This is reassuring. From it, we can at least tentatively conclude that the Mueller report—whatever is in it—reflects Mueller’s best assessment of the evidence, following his having taken every investigative step he felt necessary and appropriate to reach that assessment.
We also know that Mueller is not going to indict more people. Though what precisely this means is unclear, it means at a minimum that we should not expect the major collusion indictment that ties together the earlier Russian hacking allegations and social media indictment with conduct by figures in the Trump campaign. It also means that whatever Mueller found on the obstruction prong of the investigation, it’s not resulting in criminal charges either.
The president should wait before popping the champagne corks over this and tweeting in triumph. Yes, in the best-case scenario for the president, Mueller is not proceeding further because he lacks the evidence to do so. But even this possibility contains multitudes: everything from what the president calls “NO COLLUSION!” to evidence that falls just short of adequate to prove criminal conduct to a reasonable jury beyond a reasonable doubt—evidence that could still prove devastating if the conduct at issue becomes public.
There are other possibilities as well. It’s possible, for example, that Mueller is not proceeding against certain defendants other than the president because he has referred them to other prosecutorial offices; some of these referrals are already public, and it’s reasonable to expect there may be other referrals too. In this iteration, what is ending here is not the investigation, merely the portion of the investigation Mueller chose to retain for himself. It’s possible also that Mueller is finished because he has determined that while the evidence would support a prosecution of the president, he is bound by the Justice Department’s long-standing position that the president is not amenable to criminal process. On the obstruction front, he may well have concluded that, while the president acted to obstruct the investigation, he cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the president’s obstructive acts were not exercises of Trump’s Article II powers. It’s also possible that Mueller has strong prudential reasons for not proceeding with otherwise viable cases.
My gut instinct is that it is some combination of these factors that explains the end of the probe. Without knowing the reasons the investigation is finished, it is impossible to know how to assess its end—and nobody should try.
Finally, we also know other one big thing: There is a report—some kind of, as Barr describes it, quoting the relevant regulation, “‘confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions’ he has reached.” About this document we admittedly know little. Barr said in his letter that he is reviewing the document and “may be in a position to advise [Congress] of the Special Counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.” How capacious this initial accounting will be is known only to Barr himself. But Barr has also promised to make as much of Mueller’s findings public as he can consistent with the law—a promise he reiterated in his letter Friday evening. So it’s reasonable to expect, though not to be complacent in the expectation, that over time, the underlying factual findings and legal analysis will emerge.
All of which, as I say, shifts the conversation from what Mueller will do to what he has written in explaining what he has done—and what he has not done. Vindication for the president will take place only when we learn that the facts contained in the report exculpate him. The end of the Mueller probe could well prove tomorrow to be merely the creation of a factual record for the next act of this drama.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... t-you-know
Subpoenas, sentencings and Stone: What will become of the special counsel’s unfinished business?
The conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election concluded Friday with the news that a final report had been delivered to the attorney general. The probe’s formal end, however, leaves questions about several ongoing legal proceedings, including the prosecution of Roger Stone, a former adviser to President Donald Trump.
In addition to Stone’s prosecution, the office’s legal loose ends include two sentencings and two grand jury subpoena appeals. Yet the government’s plans to carry those matters forward are unclear.
Before the dramatic news Friday, the special counsel’s high-powered appellate team appeared to be on the verge, after a long struggle, of winning a series of appeals filed by two recalcitrant witnesses fighting subpoenas to appear before his grand jury. If those victories had been secured, Mueller would have the right to seek documents and testimony from Andrew Miller, an associate of Stone’s, and a mysterious company about which little is known, other than it is owned by a foreign government and has an office in the United States.
The mysterious company, while zealously guarding its identity from public disclosure, had fought Mueller from the district court all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which was poised to decide whether to hear the case on Friday. Miller had also repeatedly dragged his case from the district court to the federal court of appeals in Washington, D.C., and back, losing every time. As of late Friday night, the Supreme Court still had not issued its decision on whether to hear the mystery company’s appeal.
Roger Stone, an associate of President Trump's, leaves the U.S. District Court, after a court status conference on his seven charges in Washington. (Photo: Cliff Owen/AP)
Now, with the investigation officially over, it appears that both Miller and the mystery company may have been handed a new argument: The request for their documents and testimony is moot — with the special counsel’s investigation concluded, additional fact-finding can no longer be needed for the probe.
That may not, however, be the end of the matter. Mueller’s grand jury in Washington, D.C., the legally independent body that issued the subpoenas, had its term extended in January for up to six months, just before its initial 18-month term was set to expire. Another part of the Justice Department, such as the department’s foreign influence unit or the prosecutors who take over Stone’s case, could seek to step in and begin working with the grand jury to obtain the witnesses’ testimony.
In addition, two former federal prosecutors agreed that the Justice Department would likely be loath to see recalcitrant witnesses come away with such an easy victory.
“I think some other unit within the Justice Department will likely see it through, either [the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C.] or maybe DOJ national security,” said Harry Sandick, a former prosecutor with the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office. “It would set a bad precedent for Mueller to let witnesses defeat a subpoena through delay.”
“I think that somebody will carry on the litigation because the grand jury is still in session until June,” said Elizabeth de la Vega, a former organized crime prosecutor, agreeing.
This courtroom sketch depicts Rick Gates, right, testifying last year during questioning in the bank fraud and tax evasion trial of Paul Manafort. (Dana Verkouteren via AP)
Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, declined to comment on what would happen next with the contested subpoenas.
Mueller’s investigators had also executed search warrants at Roger Stone’s residences in Florida and New York when they arrested him in late January, seizing computers and phones, among other things. In court filings in Stone’s case, prosecutors disclosed that they had seized 9 terabytes from the electronic devices they found — an enormous volume of stored data roughly equivalent to 29 hours of ultra-high-resolution video. It seems unlikely that the investigators would have been able to screen and review so much material in the less than two months since the search.
The special counsel’s office is also closing with prosecutions still pending at various stages of completion. These include defendants who are waiting only to be sentenced at the completion of their cooperation, such as retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, and Rick Gates. Defendant Stone is in the pretrial stages of his prosecution, and a large number of foreign defendants have been indicted but not arrested and brought before a court. It is unlikely they ever will be.
The prosecution of Stone on charges of lying in Congressional testimony and intimidating other witnesses will go forward even though the investigation that gave rise to the charges has come to a close. Stone will be prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., whose prosecutors have been attached to the case since its initiation, Carr confirmed by email Friday evening.
Prosecutions that may spring to life in the future, for example, if the Russian defendants associated with the Internet Research Agency were ever arrested, would be handled by other Justice Department offices associated with those cases. Whether any former special counsel attorneys will continue to participate remains to be determined, Carr wrote.
The Department of Justice in Washington, Friday. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
The prosecutions of Gates, Trump’s deputy campaign manager, and Flynn, however, do not have any Justice Department components other than special counsel’s office involved.
Gates’s sentencing has been serially postponed, most recently on March 15, because Gates “continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations,” according to a status update filed with the court. It’s not clear how many of those investigations remain ongoing after Friday’s announcements; the next update is due in May. Gates’s sentencing, when it happens, will be handled by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., according to Carr.
Flynn’s sentencing was delayed late last year after the federal judge expressed his extreme distaste with Flynn’s conduct and offered him the chance to complete his cooperation before being sentenced, an offer the retired general decided to accept. The next status update in Flynn’s case is due in June.
The two special counsel attorneys assigned to Flynn’s case, Brandon Van Grack and Zainab Ahmad, had left the special counsel’s office even before the conclusion of its investigation on Friday. Asked which Justice Department office would be taking over Flynn’s case to handle the sentencing, Carr replied: “To be determined.”
https://news.yahoo.com/stone-what-will- ... 16626.html
Mueller’s Final Move
If the news that Mueller finished his report with no conspiracy indictments left you confused, don’t feel bad. Tea was left scratchin’ his chin whiskers most of the early evenin’, too. That is until he took a few breaths and applied a little horse-sense to the puzzle. Then things started started fallin’ into place.
Before we get into the details, let’s first examine Bob Mueller’s very nature, because that is the key to makin’ sense of this 11th hour chess move.
First ask yourself four words you’d use to describe Mr. Mueller. Tea thinks a fair consensus would be “smart,” “proper,” “expedient” and “frugal.” Mueller hates spendin’ money. He’s known to regularly bring his lunch in a brown paper bag. He’s proper; he always follows the book and, most importantly, he’s smart. Here lie the clues we need to get a glimpse into his likely end-game strategy.
Now let’s examine why his office brought no conspiracy charges.
Workin’ backwards, bringin’ conspiracy charges wouldn’t be “frugal.” If Mueller took on the task of prosecutin’ Don Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort for the now-famous Trump Tower meetin’, it would require extendin’ his charter for at least two more years, for such a case would be fought all the way to the Supreme Court and back. This would greatly extend the cost of his mission and add fuel to fire for his critics.
The Special Counsel is designed more as an investigative collaboration, rather than a prosecutorial one. So the idea of recreatin’ an entire team to do the work done everyday by any of our federal districts wouldn’t be “expedient.”
“Proper” plays a vital role. Since Mueller plays by the book, his primary directive would be for a case to be tried where the venue is “proper.” Ask yourself the simple question, “Where did the bulk of the alleged Trump-Russia conspiracy take place?” and you have your answer: “New York City.” It would be silly for Mueller to prosecute Trump, Kush and the rest of Team Treason in D.C. when the crime took place in New York, right?
Simply put, this is “smart!” If Mueller prosecuted Diaper Donnie, Trump could pull the plug on Mueller’s charter and we’d litigate it in the courts until doomsday just to get the case back on track. But placin’ the venue in the purview of the Sovereign District of New York is a stroke of genius, safely away from Trump’s pryin’ baby hands. It’s frugal because SDNY is budgeted for just such actions. It’s expedient because SDNY is fully staffed and ready to roll. The venue is proper and, dang it, it’s just plain smart.
So… don’t be surprised if Monday mornin’ or one day real soon the SDNY drops the hammer on Little Donnie, Kush, Manafort, et, al. This would be the perfect setup for Individual-1 to be revealed in Mueller’s report as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Trump-Russia conspiracy.
Oh! One more thing. News broke tonight that the SDNY replaced the lead attorney on the Michael Cohen case with Audrey Strauss, famous for his defeat of Roy Cohn, lawyer for the Gambino crime family and Trump family attorney till his death. What’s the chances the SDNY decided to bring in the one attorney that beat Trump’s lucky charm, Roy Cohn? Tea Pain’s Grandpa Virgil always said, “Don’t believe in coincidences, Tea Pain, cause they take a heap of plannin’!”
https://www.teapaintrain.com/post/mueller-s-final-move
NY AG James
17 AGs have joined our call to urge US Attorney General William Barr to release the Mueller report to the public.
Our joint statement:
45 years apart
Battle Looms Over Executive Privilege as Congress Seeks Access to Mueller Files
March 22, 2019
Attorney General William P. Barr has said he wants to be as transparent as possible but also that he will act consistently with the Justice Department’s regulations for special counsels.Doug Mills/The New York Times
Attorney General William P. Barr has said he wants to be as transparent as possible but also that he will act consistently with the Justice Department’s regulations for special counsels.Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The makings of an epic constitutional battle over the executive branch’s power to keep information secret from Congress started to take shape on Friday, as Attorney General William P. Barr began to weigh how much to disclose about the findings of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
As Mr. Barr officially informed Congress that Mr. Mueller had handed in his long-awaited report about the Trump-Russia investigation to the Justice Department, Democrats on Capitol Hill immediately reiterated their demands to see the entire document — and more.
Democrats have made clear they are also determined to gain access to the Mueller team’s supporting evidence and other investigative files, virtually guaranteeing a fight.
“Now that Special Counsel Mueller has submitted his report to the attorney general, it is imperative for Mr. Barr to make the full report public and provide its underlying documentation and findings to Congress,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, said in a joint statement.
In a letter to Congress on Friday, Mr. Barr said he might release Mr. Mueller’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend. He is expected to take a longer time to review the broader report for information that is classified, subject to grand-jury secrecy rules or relevant to any open investigation before deciding what to show to Congress.
Mr. Barr also plans to consult with the White House about any confidential internal information, including private conversations of the president, that is potentially subject to executive privilege. Decisions about what to make public will be even more complicated.
The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has conducted an extensive investigation into Russian efforts to sway the outcome of the 2016 presidential race. Here is the story of how it all started.Doug Mills/The New York Times
The House voted unanimously this month for a nonbinding resolution demanding that lawmakers be permitted to read the entire report and that the public be allowed to see as much as the law allows — even though the Justice Department’s special counsel regulations, written by the Clinton administration after Ken Starr’s investigation into the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals, do not call for that. They also do not prohibit it.
Asked about the report in recent days, President Trump said he wanted Mr. Barr to “let people see it.”
Regardless of how much of the report is eventually disclosed, Democrats are also pushing for information and material Mr. Mueller gathered but did not put in the report. Such files could include documents and records of interviews with witnesses, as well as any internal memos the Mueller team wrote analyzing negative information about people whom it ultimately decided against indicting.
The Justice Department traditionally opposes turning over such files — especially if they contain information relevant to investigations that remain open. Mr. Mueller has handed off many cases his office developed to regular Justice Department prosecutors for continued pursuit, and there remains a permanently open counterintelligence investigation into Russia.
“We’re definitely on a collision course for a major fight at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue over both the Mueller report, testimony related to it and the underlying case files,” said Andrew Wright, who specialized in executive privilege matters as a White House lawyer in the Obama administration and was a congressional oversight staff member.
Such a fight would play out politically — with accusations by Democrats of a cover-up and by Republicans of legislative overreach — and legally. Democrats would begin with a House subpoena to Mr. Barr, followed by a vote to hold him in contempt over whatever he does not turn over.
The House would then file a lawsuit to enforce its subpoena, asking a court to order Mr. Barr to comply with it. That would require the judge to decide whether Mr. Barr had a lawful basis to disregard the subpoena, including whether any invocation of executive privilege by Mr. Trump was legitimate.
Mueller Has Delivered His Report. Here’s What We Already Know.
More than two years of criminal indictments and steady revelations about Trump campaign contacts with Russians reveal the scope of the special counsel investigation.
Anticipating a lengthy fight, Democrats have already moved to gain access another way to some of the information Mr. Mueller gathered: by asking his witnesses who provided materials to him to give them copies of the same records. Swiftly recreating as much of Mr. Mueller’s files as possible was a key strategy behind letters the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, sent to 81 people and organizations this month asking for records.
The committee so far has received tens of thousands of pages, but the most sensitive information gathered is available only from Mr. Mueller, leaving plenty to fight over.
The top Democrats on six House committees issued a joint statement on Friday night calling on the Justice Department not only to release to the public “the entire report,” but also to give their panels “the underlying evidence uncovered during the course of the special counsel’s investigation” upon request.
One potential obstacle will be information that is classified, like material that could reveal a secret source of intelligence about the Russian government. The executive branch traditionally limits highly sensitive information to the intelligence committees or even just the top “Gang of Eight” congressional leaders.
Another potential hurdle will be information that Mr. Mueller used a grand jury to gather, such as records and testimony he obtained by subpoena. Federal rules of criminal procedure generally bar disclosure of such materials to outsiders — a limit that, on its face, makes no exception for Congress.
Still, a judge could issue an order permitting grand jury information to be shared with Congress, as happened in 1974 during the Watergate scandal. A key question would be whether the Trump administration consents to such a request — as the Nixon administration did — or fights it.
Notably, for the part of the investigation that focused on whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice, Mr. Mueller’s team gathered information from witnesses through voluntary F.B.I. interviews that are not shielded by grand-jury secrecy rules, according to lawyers familiar with the matter.
A Special Episode of ‘The Daily’: Robert Mueller Submits His Report
The Mueller report has been sent to the attorney general. Here’s a look at what this means and what comes next.
A more sweeping obstacle will be any information that Mr. Trump seeks to shield by invoking executive privilege — the power to keep secret information whose disclosure could inhibit the executive branch’s ability to carry out its constitutional functions, like chilling the candor of internal deliberations.
There are two categories of information that may be protected by executive privilege: communications involving the president — which would most likely apply only to events after Mr. Trump was sworn in — and internal agency deliberations, including investigative files covering the campaign and transition.
But the scope and limits of executive privilege are murky. Courts have held that Congress also has a right to gain access to information it needs to carry out its own constitutional functions of conducting oversight and enacting legislation.
Because these rival imperatives overlap, courts have encouraged presidents and lawmakers to resolve disputes by negotiating compromises to accommodate both branches’ needs, like letting lawmakers read certain documents but not take copies of them. As a result, few disputes have resulted in definitive judicial rulings that could serve as guideposts if both sides dig in over the Mueller files.
In recent years, the line the Justice Department has tried to hold has eroded because Republicans repeatedly demanded and gained access to internal law-enforcement information generated during the Obama era, including going to court to obtain department emails about how to respond to congressional inquiries about the gun trafficking investigation called Fast and Furious.
Republican lawmakers also obtained information about the Hillary Clinton email server investigation, including a record of her F.B.I. interview and — with Mr. Trump’s help — information about the early stages of the Trump-Russia investigation, including an intelligence wiretap order targeting Carter Page, a former adviser to the Trump campaign with links to Russia.
“A constitutional conflict is very likely in this circumstance,” said Mark J. Rozell, author of the book “Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy and Accountability.”
“I don’t see the House backing down from its request to get access to the full record, and the president is certainly not going to allow that to happen to the extent that he can stop it,” he added. “This may need a judicial resolution.”
Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/p ... eller.html
What Mueller Leaves Behind
The attorney general says he may be able to advise Congress of the special counsel’s principal conclusions as early as this weekend.
Natasha Bertrand is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers national security and the intelligence community.
Mar 22, 2019
Alex Wong / Getty
After one year, 10 months, and six days, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has submitted his final report to the attorney general, signaling the end of his investigation into a potential conspiracy between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.
Mueller’s pace has been breakneck, legal experts tell me—especially for a complicated criminal investigation that involves foreign nationals and the Kremlin, an adversarial government. The next-shortest special-counsel inquiry was the three-and-a-half-year investigation of the Plame affair, under President George W. Bush; the longest looked into the Iran-Contra scandal, under President Ronald Reagan, which lasted nearly seven years. Still, former FBI agents have expressed surprise that Mueller ended his probe without ever personally interviewing its central target: Donald Trump.
The content of the special counsel’s report is still unknown—Mueller delivered it to Attorney General William Barr on Friday, and now it’s up to Barr to write his own summary of the findings, which will then go to Congress.
Read: Americans don’t need the Mueller report to judge Trump
While aspects of the central pieces of Mueller’s investigation—conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and kompromat, the Russians’ practice of collecting damaging information about public figures to blackmail them with—have been revealed publicly through indictments and press-friendly witnesses, the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, and Mueller’s own legacy, still hang in the balance. Did Trump’s campaign knowingly work with Russia to undermine Hillary Clinton and win the election? And how much was Mueller actually able to uncover?
Here are the threads Mueller has begun to publicly unravel—and the lingering mysteries that might fall to Congress to solve.
Conspiracy
To date, Mueller has leveled the conspiracy charges most relevant to the core of his probe—Russia’s election interference—at Russian nationals. In February 2018, his office indicted 13 Russians connected to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a troll farm based in St. Petersburg that flooded the internet with propaganda and divisive political content leading up to the election. Beginning in 2014, Mueller wrote, the defendants “knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other … to defraud the United States” by influencing U.S. political processes in an operation they dubbed “Project Lakhta.” Two of the defendants, Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva, actually traveled to the United States in the summer of 2014 to “gather intelligence” for the project, according to the indictment. The indictment did not make a judgment as to whether the results of the election were impacted, or whether collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia occurred.
Months later, and just days before Trump’s bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, Mueller pounced again: He indicted 12 Russian military-intelligence officers, alleging that they had hacked the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and top staffers for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. (The entire contents of the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email inbox, stolen by Russia in March 2016, were dumped by WikiLeaks just minutes after the Access Hollywood tape damaging to Trump was released by The Washington Post.)
Read: The House’s latest move could be a big threat to Trump’s presidency
Again, though, Mueller stopped short of alleging any kind of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. The closest he came was this sentence: “On or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office” (emphasis mine). By using the words for the first time, Mueller appeared to be emphasizing the fact that the hackers’ activity that day was unique—a significant detail, given another major event that took place on July 27, 2016: Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening,” speech, in which he implored Moscow to find Clinton’s emails.
The closest Mueller has publicly come so far to establishing a link between Trump’s campaign and the Russian hackers is through Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant whom Mueller charged in January with obstruction of justice, making false statements to Congress, and witness tampering. In a court filing last month, Mueller linked Stone directly to one of the Russian military-intelligence (GRU) officers, writing that the search warrants his team conducted against the GRU revealed that Guccifer 2.0, a fictitious online persona created by the Russians, “interacted directly with Stone concerning other stolen materials posted separately online.” Stone has said he had “a short and innocuous Direct Message Exchange with Guccifer 2.0” in August 2016, in which Guccifer offered to “help” him. The January indictment of Stone also offered the clearest link yet between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, and suggested that the campaign might have known about additional stolen emails before they were released.
Many questions are still unanswered. One of them is whether Stone and the Trump campaign coordinated WikiLeaks’ release of the stolen Podesta emails to distract from the Access Hollywood tape, which showed Trump making vulgar comments about women. The emails were dumped just minutes after the tape was released on October 7, 2016, and the Stone indictment reveals a tantalizing new detail: Shortly after the Podesta emails were released, a Trump-campaign associate texted Stone “Well done.”
Also unknown: the whereabouts of a Russia-linked professor from Malta who told the Trump-campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in April 2016—before the Russian hacks were made public—that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton in the “form of thousands of emails,” according to a criminal information filed by Mueller against Papadopoulos in October 2017. It is still not clear how the professor, Joseph Mifsud, seemed to know in advance that Russia sought to compromise Clinton’s candidacy, and he has virtually disappeared since his name was made public in 2017.
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And what about the internal campaign polling data that Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort gave to the suspected Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik in August 2016? One of the top prosecutors on Mueller’s team, Andrew Weissmann, said in a closed-door hearing last month that this episode goes “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.” But it has yet to be resolved in either court filings or hearings in Manafort’s case—he was sentenced last week to serve about seven years in prison for tax and bank fraud and failing to register as a foreign agent for Ukraine.
The extent to which Manafort was using his high-level campaign role to curry favor with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska is also still unclear, as is the purpose of a meeting that another Russian oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, had with Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen before the inauguration. A meeting that Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016, in which Kushner proposed setting up a secret back-channel line of communication to Moscow using the Russian embassy, has also never been fully explained. Nor has Kushner’s meeting around the same time with Sergey Gorkov, the CEO of the Russian state-owned Vnesheconombank and a close friend of Putin’s. The meeting came as Kushner was trying to find investors for a Fifth Avenue office building in Manhattan. (Reuters reported in 2017 that the FBI was examining whether Gorkov suggested to Kushner that Russian banks could finance Trump associates’ business ventures if U.S. sanctions on Russia were lifted or relaxed.) The Kremlin and the White House have provided conflicting explanations for why Kushner met privately with Gorkov in the first place.
A 2017 meeting in the Seychelles involving the informal Trump-campaign adviser Erik Prince and another Russian banker also remains a mystery, as does a proposed peace plan for Ukraine that Cohen delivered to the White House in January 2017, which would involve lifting sanctions on Russia. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s motivations for lying to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak about sanctions—a felony to which he pleaded guilty in December 2017—are similarly unclear. (Flynn has been cooperating with Mueller for more than a year.) Just days after Trump took office, though, his administration looked into lifting the sanctions that former President Barack Obama had imposed on Russia over its meddling in the 2016 election, raising questions about whether some kind of quid pro quo had occurred.
And one of the biggest lingering mysteries of all: Why did a computer server for Alfa Bank, a private Russian bank led by oligarchs with close ties to Putin, convey a disproportionate interest in reaching a server used by the Trump Organization during the campaign? The server activity has been investigated in-depth by journalists and the FBI. But a conclusion has never been reached.
Obstruction of Justice
Much has been reported about the special counsel’s interest in whether Trump obstructed justice—a felony—when he asked former FBI Director James Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn in February 2017; fired Comey in May 2017; and, in July 2017, drafted a misleading statement about a meeting his campaign had with Russians at the height of the election. But Mueller has revealed virtually nothing about that line of inquiry in court filings, perhaps out of sensitivity to the Justice Department policy that forbids the indictment of a sitting president. Whether he addresses it in his final report is an open question.
Read: The fan-fictioning of Robert Mueller
Even so, we already know a lot about what Mueller has been interested in. According to The New York Times, Mueller has been examining how far Trump went to keep Flynn in his orbit and safe from prosecution after the White House learned that the FBI was examining Flynn’s phone calls with Kislyak during the transition period. Mueller has also been investigating Trump’s decision to fire Comey a few months after asking him, unsuccessfully, for both his loyalty and to let Flynn “go.” Mueller is also reportedly interested in why Trump was so angry with then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia probe, and wants to know more about Trump’s attempts to fire him after he was appointed—attempts that were reportedly thwarted by the president’s staff.
Despite Trump’s claim that Comey was fired because of how he handled the Clinton-email probe, Trump reportedly told Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that firing Comey, whom he described as a “nut job,” had eased the pressure of the ongoing Russia investigation. “I just fired the head of the FBI,” Trump told the Russians, according to a document summarizing the meeting that was read to the Times. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
After Comey’s firing, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into the president himself—an unprecedented move—to determine whether he was acting as a secret Russian agent. The obstruction inquiry was folded into that broader counterintelligence probe, according to the acting FBI director at the time, Andrew McCabe. Mueller took over the entire Russia investigation, including the counterintelligence probe into the president, days later. The question the FBI was trying to answer—whether Trump was acting at Russia’s behest rather than in U.S. interests—remains an open one.
And then there’s the infamous Trump Tower meeting with the Russians at the height of the election—and the misleading statement that followed. In July 2017, as Trump and his aides were flying back to the U.S. from a whirlwind trip to Poland and Germany, The New York Times published what seemed like a smoking gun: Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner had attended a meeting at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Clinton. When news of the meeting broke, Trump—who has insisted that he did not know about the meeting until it was reported in the Times—helped write a statement for his son that omitted any reference to compromising information about Clinton; it said the meeting was instead about Russia’s adoption policy, a topic the president had discussed the day before with Putin at the G20 Summit. Mueller has made that misleading statement a focus of his investigation, according to questions drafted by the president’s lawyers based on their conversations with Mueller’s team.
Kompromat
The House Intelligence Committee, led by Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, is now fixated on investigating one overarching question: Is the president currently compromised by Russia? Mueller has not publicly drawn any conclusions about how Trump’s business dealings or personal behavior might have made him vulnerable to blackmail before—and perhaps even during—his time in office. But in charges filed last year against Cohen, Mueller provided the public with evidence, for the first time, that could show that Trump was compromised by Russia while Putin was waging a direct attack on the 2016 election.
Read: Roger Stone’s secret messages with WikiLeaks
Cohen admitted in federal court in New York in November that he lied to Congress about how often he and Trump had spoken about building a Trump Tower in Moscow in 2016, and acknowledged that he had tried to organize a trip for Trump to Russia in 2016 to scope out the potential project after Trump clinched the Republican nomination. He lied both to minimize Trump’s link to the Moscow project and to limit “the ongoing Russia investigations,” according to Mueller’s team. Cohen, who sat for more than 70 hours of interviews with Mueller’s team last year after deciding to cooperate, also contacted the Kremlin “asking for assistance in connection with the Moscow Project” in January 2016, according to Mueller. Cohen was sentenced in December to serve three years in prison for tax and bank-fraud crimes and making false statements to Congress.
Trump had insisted both during and after the election that he had no business ties to Russia, and his alleged double-dealing could have allowed Russia to use the project—which Trump had been pursuing for decades— as leverage, intelligence experts told me. The project might also contextualize Trump’s consistent and inexplicable praise for Putin along the campaign trail. “This shows motive: Trump’s desire to pursue a major deal in Russia,” Jens David Ohlin, the vice dean of Cornell Law School, told me at the time. “It finally gives Mueller some direct evidence that Trump’s associates continued to pursue business opportunities in Russia during the campaign, which would explain why Trump was, and continues to be, so deferential to Russia in general and Putin in particular. The motive was financial.”
A dossier written by the former British spy Christopher Steele in 2016, which outlined the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia during the election, raised another possibility: that Trump engaged in lewd behavior during a trip to Moscow in 2013, which was recorded and is now being held over his head. According to the dossier, the Kremlin tried to exploit “Trump's personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable 'kompromat' (compromising material) on him.” Cohen told lawmakers last month that he had “no reason to believe” such a recording exists, and Trump has denied doing anything obscene while in Russia. His longtime bodyguard Keith Schiller reportedly told the House Intelligence Committee in a closed-door interview in 2017 that someone in Russia offered to send five prostitutes to Trump's Moscow hotel room in 2013, but that Schiller declined the offer on Trump’s behalf.
Mueller’s report is expected to address only criminal activity, so he might not be able to explain whether Trump has been compromised. But the president’s deference to Putin has largely continued throughout his time in office. In July 2018, for example, when the pair met for a bilateral summit in Helsinki, Trump stunned the world when he sided with Putin over the U.S. intelligence community on questions about Russia’s hacking of the 2016 election and other bad behavior. “He tells me he didn’t do it,” Trump said of Putin, referring to the election interference. “I will tell you this, I don’t know why he would do it,” Trump said. The president has also been very secretive about his private conversations with Putin, to the point where he reportedly took his interpreter’s notes from a meeting he had with Putin in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017 and tore them up. Trump also wouldn’t allow any of his aides into his private meeting with Putin in Helsinki.
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Trump’s bank of choice for decades, Deutsche Bank, is another area where Democrats say Mueller should be looking to find evidence that Trump might be compromised—the German bank was involved in a massive Russian money-laundering scandal and has loaned to Trump when no one else would. The House Intelligence and Financial Services Committees have already begun talks with the bank, which said in a statement that it plans to assist the lawmakers “in their official oversight functions.”
“If the special counsel hasn’t subpoenaed Deutsche Bank, he can’t be doing much of a money-laundering investigation,” Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, said last month. “So, that’s what concerns me—that that red line has been enforced, whether by the deputy attorney general or by some other party at the Justice Department. But that leaves the country exposed.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... mp/585526/