US President Donald Trump sought the removal of US Special Counsel Robert Mueller, discouraged witnesses from cooperating with prosecutors and prodded aides to mislead the public on his behalf, according to a hugely anticipated report from Mueller that details multiple efforts the president made to curtail a Russia probe he feared would cripple his administration.
Trump’s attempts to seize control of the investigation and directions to others on how to influence it, “were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” Mueller wrote in a two-volume, 448-page redacted report.
In one particularly dramatic moment, Mueller reported that Trump was so agitated at the special counsel’s appointment on May 17, 2017, that he slumped back in his chair and said: “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”
With that, Trump set out to save himself.
In June of that year, Trump directed White House Counsel Don McGahn to call US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the probe, and say that Mueller must be ousted because he had conflicts of interest, Mueller wrote.
McGahn refused — deciding that he would sooner resign than trigger a potential crisis akin to the Saturday Night Massacre of firings during the Watergate era.
Two days later, the president made another attempt to alter the course of the investigation, meeting with former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and dictating a message for him to relay to then-US attorney general Jeff Sessions.
The message: Sessions would publicly call the investigation “very unfair” to the president, declare Trump did nothing wrong and say Mueller should limit his probe to “investigating election meddling for future elections.” The message was never delivered.
The report’s bottom line largely tracked the findings revealed in US Attorney General William Barr’s four-page memo released a month ago — no collusion with Russia, but no clear verdict on obstruction — but it added new layers of detail about Trump’s efforts to thwart the investigation.
Looking ahead, both sides were already using the findings to amplify well-rehearsed arguments about Trump’s conduct, with Republicans casting him as a victim of harassment and Democrats depicting the president as stepping far over the line to derail the investigation.
The US Department of Justice released its redacted version of the report about 90 minutes after Barr offered his own final assessment of the findings at a testy news conference.
The release represented a moment of closure nearly two years in the making, but also the starting bell for a new round of partisan warfare.
A defiant Trump pronounced it “a good day” and tweeted an image that read: “Game Over” in a typeface mimicking the Game of Thrones logo.
US House of Representatives Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that it was time to move on from Democrats’ effort to “vilify a political opponent.”
The California lawmaker said the report failed to deliver the “imaginary evidence” incriminating Trump that Democrats had sought.
However, Democrats cried foul over Barr’s pre-emptive news conference and said that the report revealed troubling details about Trump’s conduct in the White House.
In a joint statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote that “one thing is clear: Attorney General Barr presented a conclusion that the president did not obstruct justice while Mueller’s report appears to undercut that finding.”
House Committee on the Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler said that the report “outlines disturbing evidence that President Trump engaged in obstruction of justice and other misconduct.”
He sent a letter to the department requesting that Mueller himself testify before his panel “no later than May 23” and said that he would be issuing a subpoena for the full special counsel report and the underlying materials.
Trump was never questioned in person, but the report’s appendix includes 12 pages of his written responses to queries from Mueller’s team.
Mueller deemed Trump’s written answers — rife with iterations of “I don’t recall” — to be “inadequate.”
He considered issuing a subpoena to force the president to appear in person, but decided against it after weighing the likelihood of a long legal battle.
In his written answers, Trump said that his comment during a 2016 political rally asking Russian hackers to help find e-mails scrubbed from former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private server was made “in jest and sarcastically,” and added that he did not recall being told during the campaign of any Russian effort to infiltrate or hack computer systems.
However, Mueller said that within five hours of Trump’s comment, Russian military intelligence officers were targeting e-mail accounts connected to Clinton’s office.
Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, said that Mueller did not think the president’s obligations to run the executive branch entitled him to absolute immunity from prosecution.
However, to find that the president obstructed justice, Mueller would have needed much clearer evidence that the president acted solely with “corrupt intent,” he said.
“The evidence was sort of muddled,” Blackman said, adding that the president’s actions had multiple motivations.
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