The FBI Went to Microsoft, not Trump Organization, for Emails Incriminating Individual-1

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I’m working on a post showing how slow the investigation into Donald Trump and his associates was, contrary to the President’s squeals. That led me to realize something about this August 1 search warrant application for Michael Cohen’s Trump Organization email.

Trump Organization used Microsoft to host their email.

54. On or about July 14,2017, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent a request, pursuant to l8 U.S.C. $ 2703(f), to Microsoft, requesting that Microsoft preserve all content for all email accounts associated with the domain “trumporg.com,” which included the Target Account.

55. On or about July 20,2017 and again on or about July 25,2017,in response to a grand jury subpoena, Microsoft confirmed that the Target Account was an active account associated with the domain trumporg.com. Microsoft also provided records indicating that email accounts associated with the domain “trumporg.com” are being operated on a Microsoft Exchange server. According to publicly available information on Microsoft’s website, Microsoft hosts emails for clients on Microsoft Exchange servers, while allowing customers to use their own domain (as opposed to the publicly available email domains supplied by Microsoft, such as hotmail.com). According to information supplied by Microsoft, the domain trumporg.com continues to operate approximately 150 active email accounts through Microsoft Exchange, meaning that data associated with trumporg.com still exists on Microsoft’s servers.

[snip]

62. On or about June 21, 2017, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent a request, pursuant to 18 U.S.C. $ 2703(f), to Microsoft, requesting that Microsoft preserve all content associated with the Target Account.

That means Microsoft — and not (just) Trump Organization — controlled access to these accounts.

This is something that has long been an unrecognized problem. If the government wants your email and your business or university has Microsoft or Gmail host email for them, the tech giants will get and respond to a law enforcement request, not the entity that might make privilege or First Amendment legal challenges to the subpoena. For example, the government would have gotten Xiaoxiang Xi and Ally Watkins’ Temple University email from Google, not the University, preventing both from making a First Amendment challenge to the warrant.

Microsoft sued over the sheer number of gags on such subpoenas in 2016; few people realized that they were concerned primarily about businesses like Trump Organization, not individual customers. That suit settled on October 24, 2017 after DOJ agreed to provide Microsoft more leeway to notice its customers.

But that agreement would have come too late for Michael Cohen and anyone else at Trump Organization who might have been investigated by DOJ. Since June 21, 2017, Cohen’s emails were preserved, and since July 14, 2017 — just after the June 9 meeting arranged via what appears to be Don Jr’s Trump Organization email became public — all Trump Organization emails have been preserved.

In DOJ’s opposition to Michael Cohen’s efforts to get a restraining order on the materials seized in the April 9, 2018 raid on him, there was a redacted reference suggesting that some materials may have gotten destroyed.

Mueller didn’t subpoena documents from Trump Organization directly until March 2018. So if they discovered documents via email searches direct from Microsoft that were withheld in that March subpoena — such as the emails that Cohen received on Trump Tower Moscow — it might explain this redaction.

This is the kind of thing that Trump might make a big stink about, if he ever figures it out (or if it gets Trump Organization lawyer Alan Garten in trouble for blowing off subpoenas — they were already non-responsive in response to the May HPSCI subpoena). But it’s the kind of thing that businesses and universities everywhere are exposed by.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Mike Flynn Was Renting His Name to the Highest Bidder While Ostensibly Working for Trump

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In this post, I noted that for three initial subjects of the FBI’s investigation into Trump associates’ ties with Russia — Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and George Papadopoulos — the campaign gave similar reasons for firing them as the Mueller Report laid out about their behavior.

The fourth initial subject of the investigation is Mike Flynn. The campaign did not fire Flynn for his ties to Russia; in fact, according to some Flynn associates, Trump directed him to reach out to Russia during the campaign.

Nevertheless, last week, Trump complained that he hadn’t been informed that Flynn was under investigation earlier (presumably asking why he wasn’t given a defensive briefing that discussed the investigation into Flynn specifically).

Of course, as I mentioned, we know how Trump would have responded to a warning because we know how Trump responded to Obama’s warning about Flynn: he blew it off.

Still, that should in no way undermine the investigation into Flynn.

The Russian side of the investigation into Flynn, partly for his trip to Moscow where he sat with Vladimir Putin in December 2015, goes largely unmentioned in the Mueller Report, suggesting it may have become a counterintelligence investigation into Russia instead.

But we can review the Bijan Kian indictment — which is based significantly off Flynn’s cooperation — to see how sleazy Flynn was acting while ostensibly serving as one of Trump’s top advisors on the campaign trail.

After the failed coup attempt against Recep Tayyip Erdogan in July 2016 — around the same time Flynn was leading chants of “Lock her up” at the RNC — Erdogan was trying to persuade the American government to extradite Fethullah Gulen, using the coup as an excuse to crack down on a source of power that challenged his regime. After DOJ determined there was still no basis to extradite Gulen, Kian, Ekim Alptekin, and some high ranking Turkish officials reached out to Flynn’s consulting company. They asked what kind of spin Flynn and Kian could generate “on the short and mid-term,” but warned not to read anyone else in.

On July 30 — three months before the election — Kian and Flynn pitched a 3-month plan, again emphasizing the secrecy of the project. On August 2 — the same day Trump’s campaign manager got together with someone suspected of ties to Russian intelligence to talk about how to win Michigan and carve up Ukraine — Kian nudged Alptekin, again emphasizing the secrecy. On August 8, Alptekin approached the Turkish government.

This was also the period when Flynn started getting involved in an effort to find Hillary’s deleted emails from any possible source, including foreign intelligence services.

On August 11 — as the Turkish government grew closer to a deal and as Trump’s campaign manager started engaging in bigger and bigger lies to hide that he had been an Agent of Ukraine — Kian changed the name of the project, which had been “Truth” to “Project Confidence” and introduced Alptekin’s company, Inovo, as the funder as a cut-out t0 hide that Turkey was behind the plan. From that point forward, both Trump’s soon-t0-be-former campaign manager and one of his top national security advisors were engaged in subterfuge in an attempt to hide their work for foreign countries. In Flynn’s case, he was doing that work even as he campaigned for Trump.

On August 17, while negotiating a deal with the government of Turkey, Flynn accompanied Trump for his first intelligence briefing.

Flynn’s deal with Turkey was confirmed, with a 20% kickback to Alptekin for his company’s role as a cut-out, on August 25 and 26. When Kian put together the contract for the project on September 3, he set the start date two weeks after they really started it to hide that it was the same project for Turkey.

On September 8, Flynn would politicize the intelligence briefings he was attending with Trump while being paid by Turkey, claiming briefers indicated some policy differences with Obama.

“The intelligence we’ve received in the last two briefings were in stark contrast to the policy decisions being made,” Flynn said.

“They would say the intelligence professionals, as they should, they would say those are policy decisions,” Flynn continued. “So Donald Trump, in a very, very sophisticated way, was asking tough questions, and they would back off and say, ‘That is not our job, those are policy decisions at the—in this case the White House is making.’ And we would sit there and go, OK, we understand.”

Flynn, however, caught some controversy himself when NBC News reported on Thursday that Flynn was unruly in one of the briefings. The report stated that Trump’s transition chief, Chris Christie, had to calm Flynn down after he repeatedly interrupted intelligence officers with pointed questions.

On September 9, the first check arrived, $200,000, of which $40,000 went back to Alptekin as a kick-back.

On September 19, Flynn and his partners met with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and Turkish Energy Minister (and Erdogan son-in-law) Berat Albayrak in New York and discussed how to bring about Gulen’s extradition. James Woolsey, attending the meeting as an advisory board member with Flynn’s firm, described the meeting as “a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away.” Woolsey declined his consulting fee after attending the meeting, in part out of legal concern, and let Joe Biden know about it via a mutual friend.

That was a week before the first Presidential debate.

On October 11, two days after the second presidential debate, the second check arrived, $185,000, with another $40,000 kicked back to Alptekin. Two days later, Flynn started reading from talking points scripted by Kian: funding, “Islamists,” and Mullahs.

On October 22, two days after the third debate, Flynn wrote members of the project team, referencing the Turkish officials who were the real customers for the project.

On November 2, days before Americans went to the polls, Flynn’s cut-out demanded more: private investigative work targeting Gulen’s supporters, congressional hearings on his schools. That same day, Kian sent Alptekin an op-ed he had drafted. Kian told Flynn the next day an editor was tightening it up before showing it to Flynn. November 4, Kian sent it to Alptekin, who loved it.

Flynn signed his name to Kian’s work and it was published in The Hill, blaming Gulen for the attempted coup, invoking “professionals in the intelligence community” viewing “the stamp of terror” in Gulen’s ideology, but the language was really written by Kian. The paid op-ed would go on to complain about Gulen’s “vast network of public relations” and his “false façade.”

On November 10, two days after Flynn’s op-ed and Trump’s victory and the day Obama warned Trump against picking Flynn to be his National Security Advisor, the third check came, another $200,000 to do the bidding of Turkey.

Even after the FARA office started nagging Flynn about registering, he stalled for the entire time he was in the White House, even while engaging Turkey and Russia in their joint peace plan for Syria. When he finally submitted his FARA filing on March 7, 2017, he falsely claimed he had written the op-ed as a public figure, not in the service of Turkey.

Trump may not have fired him. But both his wails that he should have been informed Flynn was under investigation (at a briefing Flynn attended) and that this investigation was in any way without predicate belie the sheer audacity with which Flynn sold his name to the highest bidder even while claiming to work for Trump.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

The Logic of Assange’s EDVA Indictment Is Inconsistent with Mueller’s Apparent Logic on Assange’s Declination

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As Emma Best has noted, shortly before GRU targeted John Podesta in a spear-phishing attack, WikiLeaks offered a reward for Hillary’s speech transcripts like the excerpts that were released as part of the John Podesta release.

Hours before Russian hacking operations targeted Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the spring of 2016, WikiLeaks discussed offering a monetary reward for transcripts of her speeches at Goldman Sachs. Soon after, Russian hackers launched a spear phishing campaign that resulted in John Podesta’s email account being compromised. Emails containing excerpts from the speeches were included in the first day of the Podesta email releases. A week later, emails containing the transcripts themselves were released. WikiLeaks heralded these transcripts as their “holy grail.”

The story began on March 9, 2016, when WikiLeaks sent a tweet with a poll asking if they should add Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches to their ”Most Wanted” page for six figure rewards for materials. When the poll completed twenty four hours later, 93% of respondents said that WikiLeaks should offer a reward for the speeches. The Russian hackers at Fancy Bear may have been listening and been inspired by WikiLeaks’ comment. Unpublished targeting data collected by Secureworks shows the hacking campaign began earlier than the Mueller indictment reveals. A week and a half later, after dozens of attempts to penetrate the accounts of Podesta and other Clinton staffers and associates, Fancy Bear sent the phishing email that successfully tricked Podesta into compromising his account and the Goldman Sachs speeches along with it.

Secureworks’ unpublished breakdown of the Russian spear phishing and hacking effort, which AP described last year, shows that the campaign to penetrate the account began hours after WikiLeaks teased the possibility of offering a reward for the information. The tweet first mentioning the potential of a reward for the Goldman Sachs transcripts was sent at 8:16 P.M. Moscow time. At 11:56 AM the next day, less than sixteen hours later, Russian hackers began a campaign that would target “over 300 individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, DCCC, and DNC.“ Podesta’s emails accounts were targeted in the days that followed and successfully compromised a week later, resulting in the exfiltration of nearly 60,000 emails.

Under what I’ve called Theory One of the superseding Julian Assange indictment, WikiLeaks’ publication of a wish list that was subsequently fulfilled would qualify it (or Julian Assange) for a conspiracy charge. Given what we’ve seen of Roger Stone’s actions, it might qualify him for a conspiracy charge as well (though we still don’t know via what means he contacted WikiLeaks).

But this 2.5 page redaction in the Mueller Report appears to explain why they didn’t charge WikiLeaks (and so by association, Stone) in that conspiracy.

We don’t know what that redaction says, though the unredacted footnote makes it clear that in the case of emails stolen from Hillary, DOJ determined that sharing of stolen property does not constitute a crime.

We do, however, have a sense of how the Attorney General understands this declination, because he used it to exonerate Trump, even in spite of Trump’s active role in pushing Roger Stone to optimize the WikiLeaks releases for the campaign. In one of his explanations for the WikiLeaks declination — one that may more directly allude to Stone’s involvement — Bill Barr said that publication of stolen emails would not be criminal “unless the publisher also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy.”

The Special Counsel also investigated whether any member or affiliate of the Trump campaign encouraged or otherwise played a role in these dissemination efforts.  Under applicable law, publication of these types of materials would not be criminal unless the publisher also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy.  Here too, the Special Counsel’s report did not find that any person associated with the Trump campaign illegally participated in the dissemination of the materials.

In the case of election interference, then, Barr does not consider the publication of documents identified on a wish list that hackers subsequently steal to amount to joining a conspiracy.

But in the case of Chelsea Manning’s leak, his DOJ does.

There’s obviously a distinction: John Podesta’s risotto recipes are not classified, whereas much of the stuff (but not all) Manning leaked was. But the role of a wish list is not functionally different, and Russian officers were charged both for hacking and dissemination.

I’m still working on a post describing how unbelievably stupid the EDVA case is, both for the press and for DOJ’s hopes to lay a precedent.

But at least at a structural level, the prosecution is also inconsistent with the decisions DOJ made about WikiLeaks on the election year operation.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

For Three of the Four Early FBI Subjects Tied to the Trump Campaign, the Campaign Agreed with the Mueller Report Conclusions

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Of the first four people tied to Trump’s campaign who were investigated by the FBI — Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Paul Manafort — the Mueller Report came to remarkably similar conclusions as the campaign did when all three were fired in 2016. As I’ll show in a follow-up post, the FBI’s concerns about the fourth — Mike Flynn — have proven even better founded.

This shows how ridiculous it is for Bill Barr to go after the origins of the investigation. The Trump campaign itself, institutionally, agreed in real time with the conclusion of the investigation.

On August 19, 2016, Trump forced his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, to resign. Sources told the press he was ousted because of his “involvement with Russia” and the fact that “he hadn’t been entirely forthright about his activities overseas.”

In recent days, Manafort had lost the confidence of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and one of his closest advisers, and other members of Trump’s family, according to a source close to the campaign. Kushner had once been a major backer of Manafort and was instrumental in his elevation — and the downfall of Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager.

The family was particularly troubled by reports of Manafort’s involvement with Russia and felt he hadn’t been entirely forthright about his activities overseas, the source said. Family members were also unhappy about changes made to the GOP platform that were seen as beneficial to Russia, which they felt Manafort played a role in, the source added.

On February 13, Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Paul Manafort had lied — both to the FBI and to the grand jury — about his interactions and communications with Konstantin Kilimnik. Among the things Manafort lied about, according to the Mueller Report, was an August 2, 2016 meeting where Manafort told Kilimnik how the campaign planned to win Michigan and two other swing states, Kilimnik pitched Manafort on a plan to carve up Ukraine, and also told ways he could be paid by his Ukrainian and Russian paymasters. Mueller ultimately, “could not reliably determine Manafort’s purpose in sharing internal polling data with Kilimnik during the campaign period” and raised his lies to question whether he spoke to people on the campaign about the plan to carve up Ukraine.

In other words, the Trump family members who ousted Manafort came to precisely the same conclusion Mueller did: Manafort was lying about his suspicious ties to Russia.

On September 24, 2016, the Trump campaign severed all ties with unpaid foreign policy advisor Carter Page. The next day, Hope Hicks sent out an email instructing that, “Page was announced as an informal adviser in March. Since then he has had no role or official contact with the campaign. We have no knowledge of activities past or present and he now officially has been removed from all lists etc.”

It was untrue that the campaign had no knowledge of Page’s activities. After all, on July 9, 2016, he wrote Sam Clovis about his activities in Moscow.

Russian Deputy Prime minister and NES board member Arkady Dvorkovich also spoke before the event. In a private conversation, Dvorkovich expressed strong support for Mr. Trump and a desire to work together toward devising better solutions in response to the vast range of current international problems. Based on feedback from a diverse array of other sources close to the Presidential Administration, it was readily apparent that this sentiment is widely held at all levels of government.5

That said, even after surveilling Page for at least a year, the Mueller investigation likewise only gained limited understanding of Page’s activities. “Page’s activities in Russia–as described in his emails with the Campaign–were not fully explained.” And a redaction explaining why Page wasn’t charged as a foreign agent suggests it had been a close call.

In other words, Mueller came to the same conclusion that the Trump campaign did when they severed all ties with Page.

The Mueller Report is more circumspect about why George Papadopoulos got fired.

Papadopoulos was dismissed from the Trump Campaign in early October 2016, after an interview he gave to the Russian news agency Inter/ax generated adverse publicity.492

492 George Papadopoulos: Sanctions Have Done Little More Than to Turn Russia Towards China, Interfax (Sept. 30, 2016).

But a recent profile reveals that Papadopoulos has been lying about the campaign response to his Interfax column.

The book claims that Trump headquarters informed him of an interview request from Russian news service Interfax and gave him instructions about what to say, complimenting him afterward. In reality, Interfax contacted Papadopoulos directly, and though the campaign okayed the interview, the feedback afterward apparently wasn’t positive. Papadopoulos wrote to campaign official Michael Glassner to ask if he was, as others had told him, “off the campaign because of an interview I gave.”

This is the column that Papadopoulos shared with Joseph Mifsud (though that is not discussed in the report), and then lied about to the FBI.

On or about October 1, 2016, PAPADOPOULOS sent Foreign Contact 1 a private Facebook message with a link to an article from Interfax.com, a Russian news website. This evidence contradicts PAPADOPOULOS’s statement to the Agents when interviewed on or about January 27, 2017, that he had not been “messaging” with Foreign Contact 1 during the campaign while “with  Trump.”

It’s unclear whether the campaign distanced itself from Papadopoulos because of the press coverage of this article or because of what he said (an earlier WaPo report on it reveals how enthusiastic the pre-approval for it was, including the promise that Trump would work with Russia on Syria). If they fired him because he misrepresented the campaign’s friendliness with Russia, then it would support the Mueller Report’s conclusion that there was evidence to investigate but not to charge.

In particular, the Office did not find evidence likely to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Campaign officials such as Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page acted as agents of the Russian government-or at its direction, control, or request-during the relevant time period. 1282

If the campaign fired Papadopoulos because he said things that were inconvenient, it would support the worth of his obstruction charge, which he of course pled guilty to.

Given the seriousness of the lies and omissions and their effect on the FBI’s investigation, the Office charged Papadopoulos with making false statements to the FBI, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001. Information, United States v. George Papadopoulos, No. l:17-cr-182 (D.D.C. Oct. 3, 2017), Doc. 8. On October 7, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to that charge pursuant to a plea agreement.

In either case, the campaign didn’t want to be associated with Papadopoulos’ pro-Russian public comments.

Update, 5/27/19: Papadopoulos actually told HJC/OGR that he never left the campaign.

Mr. Ratcliffe. How did you leave the campaign? First of all, when did you leave the campaign?

Mr. Papadopoulos. I don’t know if I ever really left the campaign. I think I was involved throughout the whole way in different ways. I mean, one — in one manner I’m helping edit the first foreign policy speech and I’m setting up, helping set up this meeting with the Egyptian President, and then I’m kind of just feeding information into the campaign from March until — all through the transition, quite frankly. So I don’t think I really ever left the campaign, if that makes sense.

Mr. Ratcliffe. Okay.

Mr. Papadopoulos. I was considering leaving, but I don’t think I ever submitted some sort of resignation to the campaign that would — that would suggest I would formally abdicate my duties on the campaign.

The Attorney General is carrying out an unprecedented investigation into a counterintelligence investigation targeting the suspected infiltration of a campaign by men working on behalf of Russia. In real time, the campaign acted to distance itself from all three men for precisely that reason.

In other words, Bill Barr is targeting the intelligence agencies for agreeing with the Trump campaign about the suspect ties of three of the initially predicated subjects of the investigation.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Trump Claims He Was Joking When He Gave Russian Hackers a Wish List to Hack Hillary, But His Senior Aides Disagree

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Like a child whose mother catches him saying something improper, Trump claimed — in his responses to Robert Mueller — that he was joking when he asked Russia to find Hillary’s missing 30,000 emails (a claim he repeated on March 2).

d. On July 27, 2016, you stated at a press conference: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

i. Why did you make that request of Russia, as opposed to any other country, entity, or individual?

ii. In advance of making that statement, what discussions, if any, did you have with anyone else about the substance of the statement?

iii. Were you told at any time before or after you made that statement that Russia was attempting to infiltrate or hack computer systems or email accounts of Hillary Clinton or her campaign? If yes, describe who provided this information, when, and what you were told.

Response to Question II, Part (d)

I made the statement quoted in Question II (d) in jest and sarcastically, as was apparent to any objective observer. The context of the statement is evident in the full reading or viewing of the July 27, 2016 press conference, and I refer you to the publicly available transcript and video of that press conference. I do not recall having any discussion about the substance of the statement in advance of the press conference. I do not recall being told during the campaign of any efforts by Russia to infiltrate or hack the computer systems or email accounts of Hillary Clinton or her campaign prior to them becoming the subject of media repo11ing and I have no recollection of any particular conversation in that regard.

Since Trump directed Mueller to a transcript of the press conference, I’ve put excerpts below. They’re a good reminder that at the same press conference where Trump asked Russia to find Hillary’s emails (and in seeming response to which, GRU officers targeted Hillary’s personal office just five hours later), Trump suggested any efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow were years in the past, not ongoing. After the press conference, Michael Cohen asked about that false denial, and Trump “told Cohen that Trump Tower Moscow was not a deal yet and said, ‘Why mention it if it is not a deal?'” He also said they’d consider recognizing Russia’s seizure of Crimea, which makes Konstantin Kilimnik’s travel — to Moscow the next day, then to New York for the August 2 meeting at which he and Paul Manafort discussed carving up Ukraine at the same meeting where they discussed how to win Michigan — all the more striking. Trump’s odd answer to whether his campaign “had any conversations with foreign leaders” to “hit the ground running” may reflect Mike Flynn’s meetings with Sergei Kislyak to do just that. In other words, even on top of that request of the Russians for more hacking, that press conference seems to tie to all the other things Trump was trying to hide when he obstructed Mueller’s investigation.

But it’s also worth looking at the abundant evidence that Trump wasn’t joking about his request that Russians find Hillary’s emails, particularly now that, with the superseding Julian Assange indictment, Trump’s DOJ considers the theft of documents in response to someone wishing they’ll be stolen tantamount to complicity in that theft.

Immediately after Trump asked Russia to find Hillary’s emails, the Mueller Report describes, he started asking Mike Flynn to go find them.

After candidate Trump stated on July 27, 2016, that he hoped Russia would “find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump asked individuals affiliated with his Campaign to find the deleted Clinton emails.264 Michael Flynn-who would later serve as National Security Advisor in the Trump Administration- recalled that Trump made this request repeatedly, and Flynn subsequently contacted multiple people in an effort to obtain the emails.265

Heavily redacted passages also tie the request to Roger Stone to find out what WikiLeaks started around the same time.

Earlier the report quotes Gates describing how “frustrated” Trump was that the emails had not been found.

Gates recalled candidate Trump being generally frustrated that the Clinton emails had not been found. 196

A passage describing Trump’s motive for obstructing justice from Volume II refers back to these passages, describing Trump’s awareness of something about the hack-and-leak even while public reports tied the hacks to Russia, and in turn tying that to Roger Stone’s efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks.

Stone’s indictment describes how, days before that press conference, “a senior Trump Campaign official was directed” (probably a reference to Manafort’s request to Gates) to ask him to find out about upcoming releases, which is what led Stone to start pushing Jerome Corsi to find out what was coming.

12. After the July 22, 2016 release of stolen DNC emails by Organization 1, a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign. STONE thereafter told the Trump Campaign about potential future releases of damaging material by Organization 1.

13. STONE also corresponded with associates about contacting Organization 1 in order to obtain additional emails damaging to the Clinton Campaign.

a. On or about July 25, 2016, STONE sent an email to Person 1 with the subject line, “Get to [the head of Organization 1].” The body of the message read, “Get to [the head of Organization 1] [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending [Organization 1] emails . . . they deal with Foundation, allegedly.” On or about the same day, Person 1 forwarded STONE’s email to an associate who lived in the United Kingdom and was a supporter of the Trump Campaign.

b. On or about July 31, 2016, STONE emailed Person 1 with the subject line, “Call me MON.” The body of the email read in part that Person 1’s associate in the United Kingdom “should see [the head of Organization 1].”

c. On or about August 2, 2016, Person 1 emailed STONE. Person 1 wrote that he was currently in Europe and planned to return in or around mid-August. Person 1 stated in part, “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.” The phrase “friend in embassy” referred to the head of Organization 1. Person 1 added in the same email, “Time to let more than [the Clinton Campaign chairman] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC. That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke – neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus, setting stage for Foundation debacle.”

Mike Flynn, Rick Gates, and Paul Manafort all testified how serious Trump was about finding these emails. And while Stone would probably lie about the content of his calls with the candidate, there are two witnesses (Michael Cohen and Gates) to Stone’s calls with him on the topic.

This was Trump’s wish list, just the same as WikiLeaks had a wish list that DOJ is now using to charge Julian Assange with Espionage.

If a wish list is enough to get Assange charged with conspiring to steal the documents on the wish list, then DOJ should treat Trump’s wish list for stolen documents with equal gravity.

Update: Harpie makes a good point in comments. The end of Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening” comment is “That’ll be next.” That likely means he has already heard from Roger Stone, who had been told by James Rosen on July 25 that the Clinton Foundation emails would be next.

TRUMP: It’s just a total deflection, this whole thing with Russia. In fact, I saw her campaign manager I don’t know his title, Mook. I saw him on television and they asked him about Russia and the hacking.

By the way, they hacked — they probably have her 33,000 e-mails. I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 e-mails that she lost and deleted because you’d see some beauties there. So let’s see.

But I watched this guy Mook and he talked about we think it was Russia that hacked. Now, first of all was what was said on those that’s so bad but he said I watched it. I think he was live. But he said we think it was Russia that hacked.

[snip]

TRUMP: I’m not going to tell Putin what to do. Why should I tell Putin what to do? He already did something today where he said don’t blame them, essentially, for your incompetence. Let me tell you, it’s not even about Russia or China or whoever it is that’s doing the hacking. It was about the things that were said in those e-mails. They were terrible things, talking about Jewish, talking about race, talking about atheist, trying to pin labels on people — what was said was a disgrace, and it was Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and believe me, as sure as you’re sitting there, Hillary Clinton knew about it. She knew everything.

[snip]

TRUMP: Why do I have to (ph) get involved with Putin? I have nothing to do with Putin. I’ve never spoken to him. I don’t know anything about him other than he will respect me. He doesn’t respect our president. And if it is Russia — which it’s probably not, nobody knows who it is — but if it is Russia, it’s really bad for a different reason, because it shows how little respect they have for our country, when they would hack into a major party and get everything. But it would be interesting to see — I will tell you this — Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next. Yes, sir…

[snip]

TRUMP: No, I have nothing to do with Russia, John (ph). How many times do I have say that? Are you a smart man? I have nothing to with Russia, I have nothing to do with Russia.

And even — for anything. What do I have to do with Russia? You know the closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a number of years ago in Palm Beach, Florida.

Palm Beach is a very expensive place. There was a man who went bankrupt and I bought the house for $40 million and I sold it to a Russian for $100 million including brokerage commissions. So I sold it. So I bought it for 40, I told it for 100 to a Russian. That was a number of years ago. I guess probably I sell condos to Russians, OK?

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)

TRUMP: Of course I can. I told you, other than normal stuff — I buy a house if I sold it to a Russian. I have nothing to do with Russia. I said that Putin has much better leadership qualities than Obama, but who doesn’t know that?

[snip]

TRUMP: No, but they seem to be, if it’s Russians. I have no idea. It’s probably not Russia. Nobody knows if it’s Russia. You know the sad thing is? That with the technology and the genius we have in this country, not in government unfortunately, but with the genius we have in government, we don’t even know who took the Democratic National Committee e-mails. We don’t even know who it is.

I heard this morning, one report said they don’t think it’s Russia, they think it might be China. Another report said it might be just a hacker, some guy with a 200 I.Q. that can’t get up in the morning, OK? Nobody knows. Honestly they have no idea if it’s Russia. Might be Russia. But if it’s any foreign country, it shows how little respect they have for the United States. Yes, ma’am.

[snip]

QUESTION: Do you have any pause (ph) about asking a foreign government — Russia, China, anybody — to interfere, to hack into the system of anybody’s in this country…

TRUMP: That’s up to the President. Let the President talk to them. Look, here’s the problem. Here’s the problem, Katy (ph). Katy, here’s the problem, very simple. He has no respect…

QUESTION: (inaudible) 30,000 e-mails…

TRUMP: Well, they probably have them. I’d like to have them released.

QUESTION: Does that not give you pause?

TRUMP: No, it gives me no pause. If they have them, they have them. We might as well — hey, you know what gives me more pause? That a person in our government, crooked Hillary Clinton — here’s what gives me pause. Be quiet. I know you want to save her. That a person in our government, Katy, would delete or get rid of 33,000 e- mails. That gives me a big problem. After she gets a subpoena! She gets subpoenaed, and she gets rid of 33,000 e-mails? That gives me a problem (ph). Now, if Russia or China or any other country has those e-mails, I mean, to be honest with you, I’d love to see them.

[snip]

QUESTION: Did Don Jr. say back in 2008 that there was Russian money pouring into the top organizations…

TRUMP: We wanted to, yeah, I don’t know what he said. But we wanted…

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: Excuse me, listen. We wanted to; we were doing Miss Universe 4 or 5 years ago in Russia. It was a tremendous success. Very, very successful. And there were developers in Russia that wanted to put a lot of money into developments in Russia. And they wanted us to do it. But it never worked out.

Frankly I didn’t want to do it for a couple of different reasons. But we had a major developer, particular, but numerous developers that wanted to develop property in Moscow and other places. But we decided not to do it.

[snip]

QUESTION: (inaudible) you are the nominee. Has you or your campaign had any conversations with foreign leaders trying to build up a relationship should you win in November, that you don’t have to hit the ground running (inaudible)?

TRUMP: No, I think we — it’s possible we have. But I’m not — I’m only interested in winning. Once I win, I’ll get along great with foreign leaders, but they won’t be taking advantage. I mean, the problem we have with foreign leaders, whether it’s China, Russia, or anybody, they don’t respect our leadership. And certainly in the case of China, they take tremendous economic advantage of us — tremendous, to a point that is hard to believe.

I’ll get along great with the leadership. And we’ll do well.

Yes, ma’am, in the back?

QUESTION: Mr. Trump, (inaudible)

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: No, no. Excuse me. In the back?

QUESTION: I would like to know if you became president, would you recognize (inaudible) Crimea as Russian territory? And also if the U.S. would lift sanctions that are (inaudible)?

TRUMP: We’ll be looking at that. Yeah, we’ll be looking. [my emphasis]

Did Some Republican in Congress Leak Details of the Mueller Report to Roger Stone?

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There’s a passage from a recent Roger Stone filing I’ve been puzzling over. In a motion asking for discovery on selective prosecution — an effort that started out by arguing no one else had been prosecuted for false statements to Congress before that became ridiculous — Stone claims that

Yet, he was ruled out as a conspirator with the Russian state and WikiLeaks before his transcript from HPSCI was transmitted.

This effort parallels an effort to get the whole Mueller Report and this motion asks for all the declination memos on top of that.

Prosecuting Stone because of his arbitrary classification requires discovery, including the declination memos sent to the Attorney General, so that it may be determined who the government thinks lied to Congress or the Special Counsel, but were not prosecuted.

The claim that Stone was ruled out as a co-conspirator with Russia or WikiLeaks is probably true (though not necessarily all that helpful for his case). I’m just trying to figure out how he knows that, if he does. It seems there are four possibilities:

  1. His lawyers, who are fairly careless and who have made false claims in other briefs, are just making this up
  2. He got something in discovery that makes this clear
  3. He’s basing this off Jerome Corsi’s public claims
  4. Someone who has seen an unredacted copy of the Mueller Report (which currently includes the White House and at least 7 of the 8 Republicans who had been given an opportunity to read it before yesterday) told him what those passages of the report say
  5. He learned of this decision in real time, via reporting to the White House and then some channel from the White House

As noted, his lawyers have not been above making shit up, so it’s possible this is what this claim is. But it feels too specific for that.

It’s also possible he got something in discovery to support this claim, except the prosecutors are fighting to provide precisely this kind of information to him in their fight against releasing the Mueller Report.

Such an assertion could be intuited from Jerome Corsi’s crazed rants. Corsi has said that he believes the true source of his/their knowledge that WikiLeaks would release John Podesta’s emails was the cornerstone to Mueller’s “collusion” case (though of course he was assessing conspiracy, as Stone correctly notes here.

It’s certainly possible this is reflected in the less redacted Mueller Report, which would explaining the timing of this claim, which by my reading is new in this filing. Republicans in Congress have tampered with the criminal cases against Trump’s people on at least two occasions (when Richard Burr told the White House who had been targeted, and whoever reached out to Mike Flynn to discourage his cooperation). Given DOJ’s warnings about how sensitive the report is, it would be fairly damning if one of just 5 Republicans who had seen it already ran to Stone to tell him what’s in it. (Those 5 are: Mitch McConnell, Richard Burr, Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, and Doug Collins; it’s not clear whether Devin Nunes has reviewed the report yet.)

I’m most interested whether Stone learned in real time — perhaps last fall — that Mueller had decided not to charge him in a conspiracy with WikiLeaks and Russia. That would be particularly interesting given that Paul Manafort actually told what resembles the truth about the campaign’s outreach, through Stone, to WikiLeaks.

Amy Berman Jackson currently has unredacted parts of the Mueller Report pertaining to Stone, so if this information does come from leaks about the Mueller Report, she may recognize that.

As I said, even if Mueller decided not to charge Stone in a conspiracy because, with the witness tampering charges, he may face the same kind of sentence without some of the evidentiary hurdles, it doesn’t amount to selective prosecution.

But Stone sure seems to have a specific idea of what he’s looking for, even if it only helps his (and Trump’s) political case, not his criminal one.

Update: Corrected the number of Republicans known to have reviewed the report to 5.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Bill Barr’s Bullshit Claim that Trump Obstructed the Investigation Out of Frustration and Anger

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I’ve grown increasingly bothered by the justification William Barr made for Trump’s obstruction of the Russian investigation. Basically, the Attorney General of the United States argued that because the President was “frustrated and angered” about the investigation into the Russian ties he kept lying about, his obstruction was not corrupt.

In assessing the President’s actions discussed in the report, it is important to bear in mind the context.  President Trump faced an unprecedented situation.  As he entered into office, and sought to perform his responsibilities as President, [1] federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office, and the conduct of some of his associates.  At the same time, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the President’s personal culpability.  Yet, as he said from the beginning, [2] there was in fact no collusion.  And as the Special Counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, [3] propelled by his political opponents, and [4] fueled by illegal leaks.  Nonetheless, [5] the White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, [6] directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims.  And at the same time, [7] the President took no act that in fact deprived the Special Counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation. Apart from whether the acts were obstructive, this evidence of non-corrupt motives weighs heavily against any allegation that the President had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.

There are, of course, a slew of errors in this passage, which I address by number.

  1. Federal Agents and prosecutors weren’t investigating the President until after he had committed several acts of obstruction
  2. The report doesn’t address collusion, it addresses a criminal conspiracy; Roger Stone’s actions, done at the behest of Trump, probably reach any measure for “collusion”
  3. There’s no evidence that the Steele dossier drove the FBI investigation — and certainly not the Mueller investigation that Trump obstructed
  4. The only leak that had a substantial effect on this investigation was the one about Flynn being picked on Sergei Kislyak’s FISA intercept, but it may not have been illegal (if John Brennan authorized the leak, for example, it would have been done with the consent of an original classification authority), and Flynn’s actions would have been included as part of the already-predicated counterintelligence investigation into him in any case
  5. Trump personally refused to cooperate with the investigation; his responses to Mueller’s questions are outright contemptuous
  6. Trump knew several of his aides were lying and encouraged that
  7. Trump was probably involved in withholding key emails about the Moscow Trump Tower project and probably had a role in attempts to withhold Transition emails possessed by GSA

But the thing that has really begun to irk me is the Attorney General’s claim that, “as the Special Counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency,” which is the core of Barr’s excuse for the President’s obstructive acts: the President was frustrated and so it’s cool that he totally undermined rule of law.

Barr is largely wrong about what the report says about the President’s anger and frustration, though, and to the extent he’s not, he’s basically arguing it’s cool for the President to be angry that the system worked as it should.

To show how much he exaggerates that, I reviewed below what the Mueller Report says about the President’s:

  • Frustrations
  • Anger
  • Motivations for obstructing the investigation

There are several categories of references that are on-point to Trump’s feelings about the investigation. In the two most persistent cases, Trump was angry that people engaged in ethical behavior. He was angry and frustrated that Jeff Sessions followed ethics guidelines and recused from the investigation.  He was angry that Comey adhered to DOJ guidelines (both general and specific with respect to this investigation) about confirming or denying targets of an investigation (though the report also describes Trump denying he was angry). So one category of evidence that shows Trump was angry or frustrated — which the Attorney General claims justifies his obstruction — involves Trump reacting emotionally because people did the ethically correct thing.

In one case, he was angry that his administration got caught doing something improper. Trump was angry that Mike Flynn’s totally inappropriate secret efforts to undermine Obama’s policy towards Russia got exposed. He also was angry at Flynn for other reasons, though. Yes, Trump may be right to be angry if this was illegally leaked (something that hasn’t yet been proven), but ultimately he’s pissed that he got caught doing something wrong.

In the sections that deal with Trump’s motives for obstructive acts, the report describes what might be described as frustration about two things. First, that the focus on Russia (both the investigation and the press coverage of it) delegitimized his victory. If Barr thinks this justifies obstruction of justice, it suggests that he thinks Trump is entitled — after having cheered Russia’s hacks of his opponent — not to have it reflect on his own victory. Effectively, the Attorney General seems to think Trump should be able to benefit from help from a foreign adversary — with his encouragement!! — and then have no one mention that, which is an alarming prospect.

The report also describes how Trump was frustrated that he was stymied in foreign policy, most especially in his desire to work with Russia, by the focus on the Russian investigation. This is particularly interesting, as some of the policies Trump was thwarted in pursuing — reversing sanctions on Russia — might have been proof of a quid pro quo (remember, Trump refused to answer all questions about sanctions, even one covering the election period). Given the report’s silence on the most alarming interactions with Trump (such as Putin’s involvement in writing the June 9 statement), there could be more to Trump’s frustrations, which any Attorney General pretending to care about American national security should attend to. In any case, while the Constitution permits the President great leeway to set the country’s foreign policy, it does expect the President will be subject to political pressure on those decisions. That Trump is frustrated that the manner in which he won — plus his encouragement of it and his subsequent lies about it — has constrained his ability to work with Russia is not something that should justify obstruction of justice.

Some of the other descriptions of Trump’s response to the investigation describe him making false claims — denying that Russia did the hack, preferred him, and also denying he had business with Russia. That is, Trump was not denying the allegations in the dossier, but was denying other things that were, in fact, true. That’s also not a basis to obstruct an investigation, that it will expose your lies.

For most of the instances after Trump himself became the subject of the investigation, the Mueller Report concludes Trump was motivated out of a desire to shield his own conduct — that is, pure corrupt obstruction.

In short, even to the extent that the Mueller Report confirms Barr’s claim that Trump was motivated out of frustration, in the most justifiable case (that Trump was prevented from working closely with Russia), Barr is excusing obstruction of justice because Trump got political pressure he deserved for his actions. But in most cases, Trump was frustrated by the ethical actions of others, that he got caught doing something wrong, that winning while cheering the interference of a hostile power aiming to help you undermines your legitimacy. That any lawyer would think such things — which basically amount to a democracy holding someone accountable — would justify obstruction of justice is downright insane.

Nevertheless, that’s where Attorney General Barr has taken us.

Frustration

Four of six references to frustration in the report describe Trump directly.

In the context of reaching out to WikiLeaks, one described Trump’s frustration that Hillary’s deleted emails had not been found.

Gates recalled candidate Trump being generally frustrated that the Clinton emails had not been found.

Chris Christie hypothetically describes Trump as being “frustrated” with the investigation.

The President asked Christie what he meant, and Christie told the President not to talk about the investigation even if he was frustrated at times.222

Trump was frustrated with Comey before his March 20 testimony, which got worse afterwards.

According to McGahn and Donaldson, the President had expressed frustration with Comey before his March 20 testimony, and the testimony made matters worse.318

Trump was frustrated that the Russian investigation made relations with Russia difficult.

The President expressed frustration with the Russia investigation, saying that it made relations with the Russians difficult.348 The President told Rogers “the thing with the Russians [wa]s messing up” his ability to get things done with Russia.349

Anger

The following are the nine of ten references to “angry” and all eleven references to “anger” in the Report involve Trump directly.

A double instance describes Trump being angry — but he was angry that the WaPo had correctly reported that Flynn undermined Obama’s sanctions on Russia. Trump is described another time as being angry that Flynn’s actions were exposed.

On January 12, 2017, a Washington Post columnist reported that Flynn and Kislyak communicated on the day the Obama Administration announced the Russia sanctions. 122 The column questioned whether Flynn had said something to “undercut the U.S. sanctions” and whether Flynn’s communications had violated the letter or spirit of the Logan Act. 123

President-Elect Trump called Priebus after the story was published and expressed anger about it. 124 Priebus recalled that the President-Elect asked, “What the hell is this all about?”125 Priebus called Flynn and told him that the President-Elect was angry about the reporting on Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak. 126 Flynn recalled that he felt a lot of pressure because Priebus had spoken to the “boss” and said Flynn needed to “kill the story.” 127

The President paid careful attention to negative coverage of Flynn and reacted with annoyance and anger when the story broke disclosing that Flynn had discussed sanctions with Kislyak.

Trump was angry with Flynn that his behavior with Sergey Kislyak was causing him trouble again.

The President instructed McGahn to work with Priebus and Bannon to look into the matter further and directed that they not discuss it with any other officials. 154 Priebus recalled that the President was angry with Flynn in light of what Yates had told the White House and said, “not again, this guy, this stuff.” 155

Trump was also angry at Flynn for other things, including his stupid spawn.

Hicks said that the President thought Flynn had bad judgment and was angered by tweets sent by Flynn and his son, and she described Flynn as “being on thin ice” by early February 2017.

The Report describes Trump being angry at Jeff Sessions four times for following DOJ guidelines on recusal.

Hicks recalled that after Sessions recused, the President was angry and scolded Sessions in her presence, but she could not remember exactly when that conversation occurred.

The President became angry and lambasted the Attorney General for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, “How could you let this happen, Jeff?”505

And after Sessions announced his recusal on March 2, the President expressed anger at the decision and told advisors that he should have an Attorney General who would protect him. That weekend, the President took Sessions aside at an event and urged him to “unrecuse.”

The President became very upset and directed his anger at Sessions.393 According to notes written by Hunt, the President said, “This is terrible Jeff. It’s all because you recused.

Trump was also angry at McGahn because Sessions recused.

The President expressed anger at McGahn about the recusal and brought up Roy Cohn, stating that he wished Cohn was his attorney.294

One instance reports Trump denying that he fired Comey because he was angry about the Russian investigation.

The next day, the President acknowledged in a television interview that he was going to fire Comey regardless of the Department of Justice’s recommendation and that when he “decided to just do it,” he was thinking that “this thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.” In response to a question about whether he was angry with Comey about the Russia investigation, the President said, “As far as I’m concerned, I want that thing to be absolutely done properly,” adding that firing Comey “might even lengthen out the investigation.”

But two other references describes Trump being angry that Comey complied with DOJ guidelines and instructions and did not specifically say Trump was not under investigation.

After Comey publicly confirmed the existence of the FBT’s Russia investigation on March 20, 2017, the President was “beside himself’ and expressed anger that Comey did not issue a statement correcting any misperception that the President himself was under investigation.

But during his May 3 testimony, Comey refused to answer questions about whether the President was being investigated. Comey’s refusal angered the President, who criticized Sessions for leaving him isolated and exposed, saying “You left me on an island.

Trump claimed others were angry that Hillary was not being investigated.

On October 29, 2017, the President tweeted that there was “ANGER & UNITY” over a “lack of investigation” of Clinton and “the Comey fix,” and concluded: “DO SOMETHTNG!”756

Trump claimed others were angry because Mike Flynn was prosecuted for lying to the FBI and DOJ.

On December 15, 2017, the President responded to a press inquiry about whether he was considering a pardon for Flynn by saying, “I don’t want to talk about pardons for Michael Flynn yet. We’ll see what happens. Let’s see. I can say this: When you look at what’s gone on with the FBI and with the Justice Department, people are very, very angry.”845

Trump twice accused Mueller’s prosecutors of being angry (and being Democrats).

On July 31, 2018, Manafort’s criminal trial began in the Eastern District of Virginia, generating substantial news coverage.862 The next day, the President tweeted, “This is a terrible situation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further. Bob Mueller is totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to USA!”86

“While the disgusting Fake News is doing everything within their power not to report it that way, at least 3 major players are intimating that the Angry Mueller Gang of Dems is viciously telling witnesses to lie about facts & they will get relief. This is our Joseph McCarthy Era!” @rea!DonaldTrump 11/28/ 18 (8:39 a.m. ET) Tweet.

Motivations

As far as motive, the report has several discussions of Trump’s motives after every act of obstruction it analyzes, but it also suggests that those motives are different before and after he fired Comey and made himself a focus of the investigation.

Although the series of events we investigated involved discrete acts, the overall pattern of the President’s conduct towards the investigations can shed light on the nature of the President’s acts and the inferences that can be drawn about his intent. In particular, the actions we investigated can be divided into two phases, reflecting a possible shift in the President’s motives. The first phase covered the period from the President’s first interactions with Comey through the President’s firing of Come. During that time, the President had been repeatedly told he was not personally under investigation. Soon after the firing of Comey and the appointment of the Special Counsel, however, the President became aware that his own conduct was being investigated in an obstruction-of-justice inquiry. At that point, the President engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation. Judgments about the nature of the President’s motives during each phase would be informed by the totality of the evidence.

The Flynn section includes a passage that describes Trump being angry that Russia’s interference tainted his own victory.

Evidence does establish that the President connected the Flynn investigation to the FBI’s broader Russia investigation and that he believed, as he told Christie, that terminating Flynn would end “the whole Russia thing.” Flynn’s firing occurred at a time when the media and Congress were raising questions about Russia’s interference in the election and whether members of the President’s campaign had colluded with Russia. Multiple witnesses recalled that the President viewed the Russia investigations as a challenge to the legitimacy of his election. The President paid careful attention to negative coverage of Flynn and reacted with annoyance and anger when the story broke disclosing that Flynn had discussed sanctions with Kislyak. Just hours before meeting one-on-one with Corney, the President told Christie that firing Flynn would put an end to the Russia inquiries.

The confirmation of the investigation section includes a lot of language about protecting himself but also concern about the legitimacy of his victory and his ability to work with Russia.

Evidence indicates that the President was angered by both the existence of the Russia investigation and the public reporting that he was under investigation, which he knew was not true based on Comey’s representations. The President complained to advisors that if people thought Russia helped him with the election, it would detract from what he had accomplished.

Other evidence indicates that the President was concerned about the impact of the Russia investigation on his ability to govern. The President complained that the perception that he was under investigation was hurting his ability to conduct foreign relations, particularly with Russia. The President told Coats he “can’t do anything with Russia,” he told Rogers that “the thing with the Russians” was interfering with his ability to conduct foreign affairs, and he told Corney that “he was trying to run the country and the cloud of this Russia business was making that difficult.”

The Comey firing passage does suggest Trump was frustrated he couldn’t work with Russia, but also shows that he had reason to worry an investigation would show he had broken the law, and he worried the investigation would delegitimize his victory.

We also considered why it was important to the President that Comey announce publicly that he was not under investigation. Some evidence indicates that the President believed that the erroneous perception he was under investigation harmed his ability to manage domestic and foreign affairs, particularly in dealings with Russia. The President told Comey that the “cloud” of “this Russia business” was making it difficult to run the country. The President told Sessions and McGahn that foreign leaders had expressed sympathy to him for being under investigation and that the perception he was under investigation was hurting his ability to address foreign relations issues. The President complained to Rogers that “the thing with the Russians [ was] messing up” his ability to get things done with Russia, and told Coats, “I can’t do anything with Russia, there’s things I’d like to do with Russia, with trade, with ISIS, they’re all over me with this.” The President also may have viewed Comey as insubordinate for his failure to make clear in the May 3 testimony that the President was not under investigation.

[snip]

As described in Volume I, the evidence uncovered in the investigation did not establish that the President or those close to him were involved in the charged Russian computer-hacking or active-measure conspiracies, or that the President otherwise had an unlawful relationship with any Russian official. But the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns. Although the President publicly stated during and after the election that he had no connection to Russia, the Trump Organization, through Michael Cohen, was pursuing the proposed Trump Tower Moscow project through June 2016 and candidate Trump was repeatedly briefed on the ro ress of those efforts.498 In addition, some witnesses said that Trump was aware that [redacted] at a time when public reports stated that Russian intelligence officials were behind the hacks, and that Trump privately sought information about future WikiLeaks releases.499 More broadly, multiple witnesses described the President’s preoccupation with press coverage of the Russia investigation and his persistent concern that it raised questions about the legitimacy of his election.500

The report describes his efforts to fire Mueller, efforts to limit the scope of Mueller’s investigation, attacks on Sessions, and attempt to get McGahn to write a false statement denying he tried to fire Mueller as an effort to stop the investigation into himself for obstruction.

Substantial evidence indicates that the President’s attempts to remove the Special Counsel were linked to the Special Counsel’s oversight of investigations that involved the President’s conduct- and, most immediately, to reports that the President was being investigated for potential obstruction of justice.

Substantial evidence indicates that the President’s effort to have Sessions limit the scope of the Special Counsel’s investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President’s and his campaign’s conduct.

There is evidence that at least one purpose of the President’s conduct toward Sessions was to have Sessions assume control over the Russia investigation and supervise it in a way that would restrict its scope.

Substantial evidence indicates that in repeatedly urging McGahn to dispute that he was ordered to have the Special Counsel terminated, the President acted for the purpose of influencing McGahn ‘s account in order to deflect or prevent further scrutiny of the President’s conduct towards the investigation.

The report explains that Trump wrote the June 9 statement in an attempt to avoid public disclosure about the meeting.

The evidence establishes the President’s substantial involvement in the communications strategy related to information about his campaign’s connections to Russia and his desire to minimize public disclosures about those connections.

While the analysis on floating a pardon for Flynn is inconclusive and that on Stone is redacted, the report does say that Trump floated a pardon to Manafort to encourage him not to cooperate and also to influence his jury.

Evidence concerning the President’s conduct towards Manafort indicates that the President intended to encourage Manafort to not cooperate with the government.

And the report concludes that Trump’s efforts to discourage Cohen from cooperating were an attempt to cover up Trump’s own conduct during the campaign.

In analyzing the President’s intent in his actions towards Cohen as a potential witness, there is evidence that could support the inference that the President intended to discourage Cohen from cooperating with the government because Cohen’s information would shed adverse light on the President’s campaign-period conduct and statements.

Update: Fixed mention of Trump Tower meeting when I meant Trump Tower Moscow.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Why Trump Believed He Could Withhold the June 9 Email: Because He Succeeded in Withholding Moscow Trump Tower Ones

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In this post, I showed that I was correct when I wrote, back in January, that the Trump Organization did not turn over all the documents requested in the House Intelligence Committee subpoena to Michael Cohen. Trump Organization withheld — from HPSCI and from Cohen — the email that shows Dmitry Peskov’s office did respond to Cohen’s request for help (as well as emails showing that he kept trying to reach Peskov’s office).

On January 20, 2016, Cohen received an email from Elena Poliakova, Peskov’s personal assistant. Writing from her personal email account, Poliakova stated that she had been trying to reach Cohen and asked that he call her on the personal number that she provided.350 Shortly after receiving Poliakova’s email, Cohen called and spoke to her for 20 minutes.

I also showed that Trump’s sworn response to a Mueller question about all this replicates the lies that Cohen told in his false statement to Congress.

I had few conversations with Mr. Cohen on this subject. As I recall, they were brief, and they were not memorable. I was not enthused about the proposal, and I do not recall any discussion of travel to Russia in connection with it. I do not remember discussing it with anyone else at the Trump Organization, although it is possible. I do not recall being aware at the time of any communications between Mr. Cohen or Felix Sater and any Russian government official regarding the Letter of Intent. In the course of preparing to respond to your questions, I have become aware that Mr. Cohen sent an email regarding the Letter of Intent to “Mr. Peskov” at a general, public email account, which should show there was no meaningful relationship with people in power in Russia. I understand those documents already have been provided to you.

[snip]

With that in mind, consider the substance of that middle paragraph. It repeats the key lies that Cohen pled guilty to in December:

  • Trump and Cohen only have a few (three) conversations about the deal rather than ten or more
  • Trump did not know of any travel plans to Russia
  • Trump didn’t discuss the project with anyone else at Trump Org, including Ivanka and Don Jr
  • Cohen’s attempt to contact Dmitry Peskov in January 2016 was via a public email address and proved unsuccessful

Compare those lies with the three main lies Cohen pled guilty to.

  • The Moscow Project ended in January 201 6 and was not discussed extensively with others in the Company.
  • COHEN never agreed to travel to Russia in connection with the Moscow Project and “never considered” asking Individual 1 to travel for the project.
  • COHEN did not recall any Russian government response or contact about the Moscow Project.

Not knowing (or caring) that his former fixer was already cooperating with Mueller, Trump repeated precisely the same lies Cohen is now in prison for, did so under oath, and refused to fix those responses when given an opportunity to.

All that’s important background for something explained in the Mueller Report: that it was Trump — not Hope Hicks (as Mark Corallo feared) — who planned to withhold the thread of emails setting up the June 9 meeting to hide that Don Jr had accepted dirt from the Russian government. In the weeks before the NYT learned of the emails, Trump repeatedly tried to insulate himself from being shown the emails and said that “just one lawyer should deal with the matter” to prevent them from leaking.

According to Hicks, Kushner said that he wanted to fill the President in on something that had been discovered in the documents he was to provide to the congressional committees involving a meeting with him, Manafort, and Trump Jr.678 Kushner brought a folder of documents to the meeting and tried to show them to the President, but the President stopped Kushner and said he did not want to know about it, shutting the conversation down.679

On June 28, 2017, Hicks viewed the emails at Kushner’s attorney’s office.680 She recalled being shocked by the emails because they looked “really bad.”681 The next day, Hicks spoke privately with the President to mention her concern about the emails, which she understood were soon going to be shared with Congress.682 The President seemed upset because too many people knew about the emails and he told Hicks that just one lawyer should deal with the matter.683 The President indicated that he did not think the emails would leak, but said they would leak if everyone had access to them.684

Later that day, Hicks, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump went together to talk to the President.685 Hicks recalled that Kushner told the President the June 9 meeting was not a big deal and was about Russian adoption, but that emails existed setting up the meeting.686 Hicks said she wanted to get in front of the story and have Trump Jr. release the emails as part of an interview with “softball questions.”687 The President said he did not want to know about it and they should not go to the press.688 Hicks warned the President that the emails were “really bad” and the story would be “massive” when it broke, but the President was insistent that he did not want to talk about it and said he did not want details.689 Hicks recalled that the President asked Kushner when his document production was due. 690 Kushner responded that it would be a couple of weeks and the President said, “then leave it alone.”691 Hicks also recalled that the President said Kushner’s attorney should give the emails to whomever he needed to give them to, but the President did not think they would be leaked to the press.692 Raffel later heard from Hicks that the President had directed the group not to be proactive in disclosing the emails because the President believed they would not leak.693

When the NYT reached out to the White House for the story, Trump uncharacteristically told Hicks not to comment for the story.

On July 7, 2017, while the President was overseas, Hicks and Raffel learned that the New York Times was working on a story about the June 9 meeting.695 The next day, Hicks told the President about the story and he directed her not to comment.696 Hicks thought the President’s reaction was odd because he usually considered not responding to the press to be the ultimate sin.697

Then, when Trump, who was with Hicks, was chewing Mark Corallo out for the counter-statement he released, Hicks, “channel[ed] the President” by saying that the email would never get out.

The next day, July 9, 2017, Hicks and the President called Corallo together and the President criticized Corallo for the statement he had released.721 Corallo told the President the statement had been authorized and further observed that Trump Jr. ‘s statement was inaccurate and that a document existed that would contradict it.722 Corallo said that he purposely used the term “document” to refer to the emails setting up the June 9 meeting because he did not know what the President knew about the emails.723 Corallo recalled that when he referred to the “document” on the call with the President, Hicks responded that only a few people had access to it and said “it will never get out.”724 Corallo took contemporaneous notes of the call that say: “Also mention existence of doc. Hope says ‘ only a few people have it. It will never get out.”‘725 Hicks later told investigators that she had no memory of making that comment and had always believed the emails would eventually be leaked, but she might have been channeling the President on the phone call because it was clear to her throughout her conversations with the President that he did not think the emails would leak.726

In the period when the Joint Defense Agreement was trying to respond to Congressional requests for documents on Trump’s ties to Russia, the President’s response was to argue that “just one lawyer should deal with the matter” to ensure that the emails did not get out.

That lawyer is Alan Garten.

We know that because in Cohen’s March 6 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, he described that Alan Garten and Alan Futerfas were in charge of document collection for the Trump Organization.

THE CHAIRMAN: A number of those emails were never turned over to our committee in the document production. Do you know who was responsible for the document production and who would have withheld those documents from this committee?

MR. COHEN: Alan Futerfas and Alan Garten.

More specifically, Cohen’s February 28 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, he described a meeting he had with Garten on document production. He was telling the story to explain that at the meeting, Garten told Cohen enough for him to figure out that Trump was the one who drafted the false statement on the June 9 meeting.

THE CHAIRMAN: You mentioned a meeting also with Alan Garten?

MR. COHEN: Yes, sir.

THE CHAIRMAN: And can you tell us who that is?

MR. COHEN: Alan Garten is now general counsel at The Trump Organization, And prior to that, he was assistant general counsel.

THE CHAIRMAN: You referenced that in the context of this also raised your suspicion of collusion. What in particular were you referring to?

MR. COHEN: My conversation with Alan Garten was in regard to, I believe, this committee’s subpoena where they wanted all of my contacts from the Trump Org server. And in order to limit the amount, because there were about 10,000, he brought to me a stack of pages and wanted me to go through each one of those email addresses to the best of my ability to mark off which ones were family, which ones were friends, which ones related to Trump Org business, which ones were just solicitations, Google alerts, et cetera. We started to engage in conversation, because at the time the news cycle was all over the allegation that the conversation going back and forth was about adoption. And I said, well, what’s going on? Tell me what happened. So he told me that he was with Don Jr. and that they were communicating back and forth with Air Force One. And he goes, you know how it gets, back and forth and back and forth. He goes, it was such a process. That was the conversation with Alan Garten.

THE CHAIRMAN: And tell me what raised your suspicion about that conversation.

MR. COHEN: lt was about how to describe the meeting, the Trump Tower meeting, as to whether it was about obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton or it was about adoption. And what he expressed to me is that, you know, Mr. Trump drafted the first round, and it came to Don and him, and then they sent it back, and back and forth.

THE CHAIRMAN: So what he described to you was Mr. Trump’s participation in the creation of a false statement about what took place in that meeting?

MR. COHEN: Yes, that’s how he described it. Well, that’s how I understood it.

But the point of the meeting was to begin the document response process from Trump Organization that resulted in the most damning emails — emails that would prove false the story Cohen and the Trump family lawyers planned to tell about the Trump Tower Moscow deal — being withheld.

In the March 6 one, Adam Schiff got Cohen to repeat that the reason he and Garten were having this conversation in the first place is because Garten was pulling documents to reply to Congressional requests.

Q Well, let me ask it a different way. What was the purpose of him showing you your contacts and other documents?

A The Trump Organization received a subpoena in order to turn over documents, and since I had no documents, everything being in their custody and control, they wanted the contacts to be limited to, I suspect, non-business-related, you know, removal, family removal emails that are not pertaining to the investigation.

Q So the purpose of the meeting was to discuss a document production that The Trump Organization needed to provide?

A Correct.

Q And was it to provide to this committee?

A I don’t know which committee, but I suspect it was all the committees.

Q All right. And do you recall that the false statement that Don Jr. issued about the Trump Tower meeting that was discussed on Air Force One, do you recall that happened in approximately June of 2017?

A I believe so.

Garten was with Don Jr in person as they worked back and forth with Hope Hicks and Donald Trump on Air Force One to draft the June 9 meeting that Trump wanted to lie about by making sure the email didn’t leak.

There were no lawyers on Air Force One. This is the conversation that, in his appearances before Congress, Don Jr successfully avoided discussing because he was with his lawyer. But no privilege should have attached to that conversation because Garten did not represent Trump personally (Trump was supposed to be walled off from Trump Organization matters), much less Hope Hicks.

In June 2017, when Donald Trump was trying to sustain a false story about the June 9 meeting by suggesting that if just one lawyer dealt with the matter, the email disproving that story would not be “leaked,” Alan Garten was ensuring that the email disproving Michael Cohen’s false story did not get turned over to Congress.

That’s why Trump thought he’d get away with the lie. Because he almost got away with it on the Trump Tower Moscow story.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Michael Cohen’s HPSCI Testimony Proves Trump Lied in his Answers to Mueller

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Yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee released transcripts of Michael Cohen’s February 28 and March 6 testimony before the committee. Together they’re utterly damning for a bunch of reasons:

  • GOPers (with former US Attorney John Ratcliffe incompetently replacing Trey Gowdy as their designated “adult”) thought they could prove that Cohen hadn’t been offered a pardon, but proved the opposite; on top of looking like blithering idiots, it basically put them in the position of laying out proof of — then shrugging away — crime after Trump crime
  • As I anticipated at the time, Cohen makes clear that any Joint Defense Agreement involving him lasted only so long as Trump believed Cohen could hurt him
  • On top of providing details about the editing of his false statement, Cohen lays out how in conversations before the first draft, Jay Sekulow got him to shorten the timeframe of the Moscow Trump Tower deal
  • Cohen confirmed that — as I laid out in January — there was a gap in the documents shared with HPSCI necessary to sustain the false story

Perhaps most surprising, though, Cohen’s testimony establishes that Trump lied to Robert Mueller in his sworn answers.

Trump’s responses on Trump Tower questions were the least responsive of his many non-responsive answers

Far too little attention has been focused on Trump’s downright contemptuous responses to Mueller’s questions, many of which conflict with the testimony of numerous loyal Trump people. Worst of all were Trump’s response to seven questions on the Trump Tower deal.

a. In October 2015, a “Letter of Intent,” a copy of which is attached as Exhibit B, was signed for a proposed Trump Organization project in Moscow (the “Trump Moscow project”).

i. When were you first informed of discussions about the Trump Moscow project? By whom? What were you told about the project?

ii. Did you sign the letter of intent?

b. In a statement provided to Congress, attached as Exhibit C, Michael Cohen stated: “To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Trump was never in contact with anyone about this proposal other than me on three occasions, including signing a non-binding letter of intent in 2015.” Describe all discussions you had with Mr. Cohen, or anyone else associated with the Trump Organization, about the Trump Moscow project, including who you spoke with, when, and the substance of the discussion(s).

c. Did you learn of any communications between Michael Cohen or Felix Sater and any Russian government officials, including officials in the office of Dmitry Peskov, regarding the Trump Moscow project? If so, identify who provided this info1mation to you, when, and the substance of what you learned.

d. Did you have any discussions between June 2015 and June 2016 regarding a potential trip to Russia by you and/or Michael Cohen for reasons related to the Trump Moscow project? If yes, describe who you spoke with, when, and the substance of the discussion(s).

e. Did you at any time direct or suggest that discussions about the Trump Moscow project should cease, or were you informed at any time that the project had been abandoned? If yes, describe who you spoke with, when, the substance of the discussion(s), and why that decision was made.

f. Did you have any discussions regarding what information would be provided publicly or in response to investigative inquiries about potential or actual investments or business deals the Trump Organization had in Russia, including the Trump Moscow project? If yes, describe who you spoke with, when, and the substance of the discussion(s).

g. Aside from the Trump Moscow project, did you or the Trump Organization have any other prospective or actual business interests, investments, or arrangements with Russia or any Russian interest or Russian individual during the campaign? If yes, describe the business interests, investments, or arrangements.

In response, Trump wrote three paragraphs.

Response to Question III, Parts (a) through (g)

Sometime in 2015, Michael Cohen suggested to me the possibility of a Trump Organization project in Moscow. As I recall, Mr. Cohen described this as a proposed project of a general type we have done in the past in a variety of locations. I signed the non-binding Letter of Intent attached to your questions as Exhibit B which required no equity or expenditure on our end and was consistent with our ongoing efforts to expand into significant markets around the world.

I had few conversations with Mr. Cohen on this subject. As I recall, they were brief, and they were not memorable. I was not enthused about the proposal, and I do not recall any discussion of travel to Russia in connection with it. I do not remember discussing it with anyone else at the Trump Organization, although it is possible. I do not recall being aware at the time of any communications between Mr. Cohen or Felix Sater and any Russian government official regarding the Letter of Intent. In the course of preparing to respond to your questions, I have become aware that Mr. Cohen sent an email regarding the Letter of Intent to “Mr. Peskov” at a general, public email account, which should show there was no meaningful relationship with people in power in Russia. I understand those documents already have been provided to you.

I vaguely remember press inquiries and media reporting during the campaign about whether the Trump Organization had business dealings in Russia. I may have spoken with campaign staff or Trump Organization employees regarding responses to requests for information, but I have no current recollection of any particular conversation, with whom I may have spoken, when, or the substance of any conversation. As I recall, neither I nor the Trump Organization had any projects or proposed projects in Russia during the campaign other than the Letter of Intent.

The first paragraph is factually accurate. The last paragraph is correct (as far as we know) with respect to having no other proposed projects, but is utterly non-responsive to a question about the response to investigative questions (including these ones) regarding the project, in part because Trump only agreed to answer questions pertaining to the campaign period.

The middle paragraph, however, is inconsistent with the documentary record, but consistent with the false statement that Cohen is now sitting in prison for.

After Cohen pled guilty, Mueller offered Trump a chance to correct his testimony, but he refused

Because I get into why that is, consider that, in the wake of Cohen’s plea, Trump admitted to remembering that the deal may have gone through the end of the campaign (the LOI was only withdrawn after the election) and Rudy ran his mouth admitting that the project went through November. In response, Mueller asked follow-up questions.

In light of the President’s public statements following Cohen’s guilty plea that he “decided not to do the project,” this Office again sought information from the President about whether he participated in any discussions about the project being abandoned or no longer pursued, including when he “decided not to do the project,” who he spoke to about that decision, and what motivated the decision. 1057 The Office also again asked for the timing of the President’s discussions with Cohen about Trump Tower Moscow and asked him to specify “what period of the campaign” he was involved in discussions concerning the project. 1058 In response, the President’s personal counsel declined to provide additional information from the President and stated that “the President has fully answered the questions at issue.” 1059

1057 1/23/19 Letter, Special Counsel’s Office to President’s Personal Counsel.

1058 1/23/ 19 Letter, Special Counsel’s Office to President’s Personal Counsel.

1059 2/6/ l 9 Letter, President’s Personal Counsel to Special Counsel’s Office.

On this matter, then, Trump made comments to the public after submitting his responses to Mueller that made it clear his claims to not recall these matters were false. When Mueller gave him the opportunity to fix his testimony, he refused.

Part of Trump’s response exactly replicates the lies Cohen told, in a statement prepared with the input of Jay Sekulow, to Congress

With that in mind, consider the substance of that middle paragraph. It repeats the key lies that Cohen pled guilty to in December:

  • Trump and Cohen only have a few (three) conversations about the deal rather than ten or more
  • Trump did not know of any travel plans to Russia
  • Trump didn’t discuss the project with anyone else at Trump Org, including Ivanka and Don Jr
  • Cohen’s attempt to contact Dmitry Peskov in January 2016 was via a public email address and proved unsuccessful

Compare those lies with the three main lies Cohen pled guilty to.

  • The Moscow Project ended in January 201 6 and was not discussed extensively with others in the Company.
  • COHEN never agreed to travel to Russia in connection with the Moscow Project and “never considered” asking Individual 1 to travel for the project.
  • COHEN did not recall any Russian government response or contact about the Moscow Project.

Not knowing (or caring) that his former fixer was already cooperating with Mueller, Trump repeated precisely the same lies Cohen is now in prison for, did so under oath, and refused to fix those responses when given an opportunity to.

Cohen’s testimony, however, makes these lies even more damning.

The Trump Organization withheld the documents that would have made it clear Cohen was lying from the Committees

Again, as I noted back in January, there is no way that the lies Cohen told SSCI and HPSCI would have been sustainable if the committees had gotten all the documents they asked for. Specifically, three emails referenced in Cohen’s statement of the offense could not have been turned over to the committees without them figuring out he was lying.

On or about January 14, 2016 , COHEN emailed Russian Official 1’s office asking for assistance in connection with the Moscow Project.

On or about January 16, 2016, COHEN emailed Russian Official 1’s office again , said he was trying to reach another high- level Russian official, and asked for someone who spoke English to contact him.

On or about January 20, 2016, COHEN received an email from the personal assistant to Russian Official 1 (“Assistant 1”) , stating that she had been trying to reach COHEN and requesting that he call her using a Moscow-based phone number she provided.

Cohen’s story (and the one Trump submitted as his sworn testimony) is that he tried emailing Dmitry Peskov’s office just once, and that via a public email address. But as Mueller describes it — citing three emails from Cohen and one response from Peskov’s assistant Elena Poliakova — he wrote one email in which he fat-fingered the address for Peskov’s email, one to the general press line, and a second to Peskov’s email. In response, Poliakova wrote back, stating, “I can’t get through to both your phones. Pls, call me.”

On January 11, 2016, Cohen emailed the office of Dmitry Peskov, the Russian government’s press secretary, indicating that he desired contact with Sergei Ivanov, Putin’s chief of staff. Cohen erroneously used the email address “[email protected]” instead of “Pr [email protected] .ru,” so the email apparently did not go through.346 On January 14, 2016, Cohen emailed a different address ([email protected]) with the following message:

Dear Mr. Peskov, Over the past few months, I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower-Moscow project in Moscow City. Without getting into lengthy specifics, the communication between our two sides has stalled. As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you; contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon.347

Two days later, Cohen sent an email to [email protected], repeating his request to speak with Sergei Ivanov.348 Cohen testified to Congress, and initially told the Office, that he did not recall receiving a response to this email inquiry and that he decided to terminate any further work on the Trump Moscow project as of January 2016. Cohen later admitted that these statements were false. In fact, Cohen had received (and recalled receiving) a response to his inquiry, and he continued to work on and update candidate Trump on the project through as late as June 2016.349

On January 20, 2016, Cohen received an email from Elena Poliakova, Peskov’s personal assistant. Writing from her personal email account, Poliakova stated that she had been trying to reach Cohen and asked that he call her on the personal number that she provided.350 Shortly after receiving Poliakova’s email, Cohen called and spoke to her for 20 minutes.351

346 1/11/16 Email, Cohen to [email protected] (9: 12 a.m.).

347 1/14/16 Email, Cohen to [email protected] (9:21 a.m.).

348 1/16/16 Email, Cohen to [email protected] (10:28 a.m.).

349 Cohen Information ,i,i 4, 7. Cohen’s interactions with President Trump and the President’s lawyers when preparing his congressional testimony are discussed further in Volume II. See Vol. II, Section 11.K.3, infra.

350 1/20/1 6 Email, Poliakova to Cohen (5 :57 a.m.) (“Mr. Cohen[,] I can’t get through to both your phones. Pis, call me.”).

351 Telephone records show a 20-minute call on January 20, 2016 between Cohen and the number Poliakova provided in her email. Call Records of Michael Cohen After the call, Cohen saved Poliakova’s contact information in his Trump Organization Outlook contact list. 1/20/16 Cohen Microsoft Outlook Entry (6:22 a.m.).

The Poliakova email, by itself, would prove all the claims that Cohen got no response to be false.

As Cohen explained it, since he was no longer at Trump Organization anymore, he had to rely on Trump Org lawyers (probably Alan Garten) to comply with discovery requests. That probably means Garten is responsible for withholding the emails — particularly the Poliakova one — not just from Congress, but from Cohen.

Q Now, in your February 28th interview before this committee you mentioned that Alan Futerfas and Alan Garten, the two lawyers who were tied to The Trump Organization, were responsible for the document production that you produced to the committee in response to this committee’s May of 2017 subpoena. ls that accurate?

A That’s accurate.

[snip]

Q Do you have any information about why The Trump Organization would have withheld from this committee production of the January 141h, 2016, email from you to Peskov’s office?

A I do not.

Q Same question as to the January 161h, 2016, email from you to Peskov’s office regarding Sergei lvanov?

A I also do not.

Q Same question with regards to the January 20th,2016, email from Elena Poliyakova (ph)?

A I do not

THE CHAIRMAN: Mr. Cohen, what Mr. Mitchell is asking about is you’ve testified that the members of the joint defense agreement were aware that the written testimony that you were going to give to this committee was false. Documents that would have contradicted that timeline, namely, the three that Mr. Mitchell just referenced, were not produced to this committee. ls there any insight you can shed as to who might have been involved in withholding documentary evidence that would have contradicted your written false testimony?

MR. COHEN: Again, it would be other members of the joint defense team, but specifically at The Trump Organization level.

For reasons I’ll return to, Cohen was one of the only Trump people who got subpoenaed and therefore whose document compliance would be legally binding. But that means that Trump Org failed to comply with a subpoena issued not by Adam Schiff, but by Devin Nunes.

Cohen didn’t talk about these emails with Joint Defense Agreement lawyers, but he talked about the Poliakova one (and the follow-up call) with Trump

All that’s damning enough, especially since Trump claimed to Mueller that the documents turned over to his office would match his story (this is not the only sworn response where Trump falsely claimed the documentary record matches his testimony).

All the more so, though, because Trump is the one person that Cohen spoke to at Trump Org about receiving this Poliakova email (in addition to Felix Sater, who wrote the next day to say Putin’s office had contacted him, seemingly in response).

Indeed, immediately after his call with Poliakova, Cohen talked to Trump about how well versed she was on issues that mattered for their deal.

Q At what time did you speak to anyone at The Trump Organization about this email?

A About this specific email? I did not

Q Never?

A No. Well, actually, I apologize, that’s not true, I spoke to Mr. Trump about it.

Q When was that?

A That was after I had spoken to Ms. Poliyakova (ph).

[snip]

THE CHAIRMAN: And did I hear you to say that you spoke to Mr. Trump about your conversation with Mr. Peskov’s office?

MR. COHEN: Yes, with Ms. Poliyakova (ph).

THE CHAIRMAN: And was the conversation you had with Mr. Trump about that conversation with Ms. Poliyakova (ph) in person or by phone?

MR. COHEN: lt was in person.

THE CHAIRMAN: And how soon after your conversation with her on the phone did that take place?

MR. COHEN: Right afterwards.

THE CHAIRMAN: Can you tell us about the conversation you had with Ms Poliyakova (ph)?

MR. COHEN: I just found that she was very professional and her questions regarding the project were insightful. As an assistant, I was impressed, and I just made mention to him that I had spoken to an assistant for Peskov, and I was, again, incredibly impressed with her line of questioning regarding the project. And I made mention how nice it would be to have an assistant who asked such pertinent questions.

[snip]

THE CHAIRMAN: And by the detailed nature of her questions, you could tell that they knew a great deal about the project?

MR. COHEN: Yes.

THE CHAIRMAN: And what kind of questions did she have for you about the project?

MR. COHEN: The areas that obviously we would want to be building in. I don’t want to try to recollect the specific questions, but there were just very profess — they were very professional, talking about like the size of the project, the scope, length of time, where the construction crews were going to come from. I mean, it was a pretty insightful conversation.

Even if you buy that Trump forgot this conversation and the other seven he claims to have forgotten about a deal he very much wanted, you still need to explain why his responses, which allegedly account for the documentary evidence, nevertheless repeat the story that Cohen told based on a documentary record that Trump lawyers ensured was incomplete.

Given the great lengths Trump went to to not answer any of Mueller’s questions, it would take some doing for him to tell a demonstrable lie.

But he did just that with regards to the Trump Tower meeting — and refused to fix his testimony after he made it clear, publicly, that he had lied.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

The Mueller Report Redactions and the Claims about “Collusion”

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On Volume II page 121 of the Mueller Report, a partial transcript of the call Trump’s lawyer (WaPo says this is John Dowd) placed to Mike Flynn’s lawyer on November 22, 2017 appears, along with even more damning details about a follow-up call from the following day.

In late November 2017, Flynn began to cooperate with this Office. On November 22, 2017, Flynn withdrew from a joint defense agreement he had with the President.833 Flynn’s counsel told the President’s personal counsel and counsel for the White House that Flynn could no longer have confidential communications with the White House or the President.834 Later that night, the President’s personal counsel left a voicemail for Flynn’s counsel that said:

I understand your situation, but let me see if I can’t state it in starker terms. . . . [I]t wouldn’t surprise me if you’ve gone on to make a deal with … the government. … [I]f . .. there’s information that implicates the President, then we’ve got a national security issue, . . . so, you know, . . . we need some kind of heads up. Um, just for the sake of protecting all our interests ifwe can …. [R]emember what we’ve always said about the ‘ President and his feelings toward Flynn and, that still remains …. 835

On November 23, 2017, Flynn’s attorneys returned the call from the President’s personal counsel to acknowledge receipt of the voicemail.836 Flynn ‘s attorneys reiterated that they were no longer in a position to share information under any sort of privilege.837 According to Flynn’s attorneys, the President’s personal counsel was indignant and vocal in his disagreement.838 The President’s personal counsel said that he interpreted what they said to him as a reflection of Flynn’s hostility towards the President and that he planned to inform his client of that interpretation.839 Flynn’s attorneys understood that statement to be an attempt to make them reconsider their position because the President’s personal counsel believed that Flynn would be disturbed to know that such a message would be conveyed to the President.840

This is, of course, the call referenced in Flynn’s less redacted cooperation addendum released last week. A whole slew of reporters who have claimed to have read the Mueller Report over the last month claimed that this passage had been redacted in the report, which is something that Quinta Jurecic and I had a bit of a laugh about on Chris Hayes’ show Friday night.

In fact, there’s likely to be very little of great interest submitted when the government complies with Judge Emmet Sullivan’s order to submit an unclassified version of the Flynn passages of the report by May 31.

The revelation in Flynn’s cooperation addendum that he provided information on close-hold discussions about WikiLeaks means some of those conversations may be unsealed in that production. But aside from that, this redaction on Volume I page 183 — footnoting a discussion of the consideration of whether Flynn was a foreign agent and probably discussing an ongoing counterintelligence investigation into Russians, not Flynn — is the one of the only Flynn-related passages that might be of any interest that is not otherwise grand jury material.

With just a few notable exceptions, the redactions aren’t that nefarious.

Using Grand Jury redactions to protect the President from political pressure

I’ve noted two exceptions to that. One is the way DOJ used grand jury redactions to hide the details of how both Donald Trumps refused to testify (even while Jr continues to be willing to testify before congressional committees that don’t have all the evidence against him).

There are two redactions hiding details of what happened when Jr was subpoenaed.

Volume I page 117 on the June 9 meeting:

Volume II page 105 on President Trump’s involvement in writing the June 9 statement.

And there are two redactions hiding the discussion of subpoenaing Trump.

Volume II page 12 introducing the obstruction of justice analysis.

Appendix C introducing Trump’s non-responsive answers.

These redactions are all ones that Congress should ask more about. If Don Jr told Mueller he would invoke the Fifth, we deserve to know that (particularly given his willingness to appear with less informed committees). More importantly, the role of Trump’s refusal to answer questions (as well as any concerns he had about Don Jr’s jeopardy) are necessary parts to any discussion of obstruction of justice.

Plus, the President of the United States should not be able to hide his unwillingness to cooperate with an investigation into his own wrong-doing by claiming it’s grand jury material.

The use of “Personal Privacy” to hide central players

In his description of the four types of redactions in the report, Bill Barr described the fourth — “personal privacy” — as relating to “peripheral third parties.”

As I explained in my letter of April 18, 2019, the redactions in the public report fall into four categories: (1) grand-jury information, the disclosure of which is prohibited by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e); (2) investigative techniques, which reflect material identified by the intelligence and law enforcement communities as potentially compromising sensitive sources, methods, or techniques, as well as information that could harm ongoing intelligence or law enforcement activities; (3) information that, if released, could harm ongoing law enforcement matters, including charged cases where court rules and orders bar public disclosure by the parties of case information; and (4) information that would unduly infringe upon the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties, which includes deliberation about decisions not to recommend prosecution of such parties.

Some of the PP redactions do pertain to genuinely peripheral players.

For example, sometimes they hide the random people with whom Russian trolls communicated.

In others, they hide the names of other victims of GRU hacking (including Colin Powell, who is not a private person but is peripheral to this discussion).

In other places, they hide the names of genuinely unrelated people or businesses.

But as I have noted, Mueller treated this category as a declinations decision, not a privacy one.

I previously sent you a letter dated March 25, 2019, that enclosed the introduction and executive summary for each volume of the Special Counsel’s report marked with redactions to remove any information that potentially could be protected by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e); that concerned declination decisions; or that related to a charged case. [my emphasis]

Among the people Barr claims are “peripheral” players who have been investigated but not charged are Don Jr in the second redaction in this passage:

Carter Page on page 183.

And KT McFarland and several other key players on page 199.

Don’t get me wrong: I think these redactions are absolutely proper. The description of them, however, is not. Barr is pretending these people are “peripheral” to avoid having to admit, “in addition to Trump’s Campaign Manager, Deputy Campaign Manager, Personal Lawyer, Life-Long Rat-Fucker, National Security Advisor, and Foreign Policy Advisor who have either pled guilty to, been found by a judge to have, or been indicted for lying in an official proceeding, Mueller seriously considered charging at least three other Trump associates with lying.”

The expansive redactions pertaining to WikiLeaks and Roger Stone

So aside from the grand jury redactions hiding how Trump Sr and Jr dodged testifying and the way Barr describes the declinations redactions, I think the redactions are generally pretty judicious. I’m less certain, though, about the redactions pertaining to Roger Stone, the bulk of which appear in Volume I pages 51 to 59, 188 to 191, 196 to 197. and Volume II, pages 17 to 18 and 128 to 130.

There are two reasons to redact this information: most importantly, to comply with the gag order imposed by Amy Berman Jackson that prohibits lawyers on either side from making statements that “pose a substantial likelihood of material prejudice” to Stone’s case, or to hide information from Stone that he doesn’t otherwise know.

Except that we know he has already gotten the latter category of information in discovery. In a filing opposing Stone’s bid to get an unredacted copy of the Mueller Report, prosecutors noted that “disclosable information that may have been redacted from the public version of the Special Counsel’s report to the Attorney General is already being provided to the defendant in discovery.”

And it seems highly likely that some of the information in these redacted passages is stuff that would only prejudice Stone’s case by raising the import of it to Trump.

Consider, for starters, that (unless I’m mistaken) not a word from Stone’s indictment appears in this Report. For example, the descriptions of how Stone asked Jerome Corsi to ask Ted Malloch to find out what WikiLeaks had coming and a follow-up email reflecting knowledge that John Podesta would be targeted must be reflected on pages 55 and 56.

On or about July 25, 2016, STONE sent an email to Person 1 with the subject line, “Get to [the head of Organization 1].” The body of the message read, “Get to [the head of Organization 1] [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending [Organization 1] emails . . . they deal with Foundation, allegedly.” On or about the same day, Person 1 forwarded STONE’s email to an associate who lived in the United Kingdom and was a supporter of the Trump Campaign.

On or about July 31, 2016, STONE emailed Person 1 with the subject line, “Call me MON.” The body of the email read in part that Person 1’s associate in the United Kingdom “should see [the head of Organization 1].”

On or about August 2, 2016, Person 1 emailed STONE. Person 1 wrote that he was currently in Europe and planned to return in or around mid-August. Person 1 stated in part, “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.” The phrase “friend in embassy” referred to the head of Organization 1. Person 1 added in the same email, “Time to let more than [the Clinton Campaign chairman] to be exposed as in bed wenemy if they are not ready to drop HRC. That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke – neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus, setting stage for Foundation debacle.”

Page 56 actually includes new proof that Stone and Corsi had confirmed that Podesta’s emails were coming. Malloch describes Corsi telling him about Podesta’s emails, not vice versa.

Malloch stated to investigators that beginnin in or about Au ust 2016, he and Corsi had multiple Face Time discussions about WikiLeaks [redacted] had made a connection to Assange and that the hacked emails of John Podesta would be released prior to Election Day and would be helpful to the Trump Campaign. In one conversation in or around August or September 2016, Corsi told Malloch that the release of the Podesta emails was coming, after which “we” were going to be in the driver’s seat.221

Likewise, the indictment makes it clear that Stone was talking to the campaign about WikiLeaks releases.

ROGER JASON STONE, JR. was a political consultant who worked for decades in U.S. politics and on U.S. political campaigns. STONE was an official on the U.S. presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump (“Trump Campaign”) until in or around August 2015, and maintained regular contact with and publicly supported the Trump Campaign through the 2016 election.

During the summer of 2016, STONE spoke to senior Trump Campaign officials about Organization 1 and information it might have had that would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign. STONE was contacted by senior Trump Campaign officials to inquire about future releases by Organization 1.

[snip]

By in or around June and July 2016, STONE informed senior Trump Campaign officials that he had information indicating Organization 1 had documents whose release would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign. The head of Organization 1 was located at all relevant times at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, United Kingdom.

After the July 22, 2016 release of stolen DNC emails by Organization 1, a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign. STONE thereafter told the Trump Campaign about potential future releases of damaging material by Organization 1.

We see outlines of precisely who those references are to in the report.

Most notably, after describing Trump’s enthusiasm after Stone told Trump while Michael Cohen was listening on the speaker phone that the DNC emails would drop in a few days just before they did (which Cohen described in his testimony to Oversight), these two paragraphs, appear to to describe Manafort and Trump’s enthusiasm after the DNC release, with Manafort telling both Stone directly and Gates that he wanted to be kept informed via Stone of what was coming. And having gotten some indication of what was coming, the campaign started making plans to optimize those releases. It appears that Gates, like Cohen before him, witnessed a Stone-Trump call where the rat-fucker told the candidate what was coming.

These pages also have more background about how important all this was to Trump, who was frustrated that Hillary’s deleted emails hadn’t been found (something also told, in Flynn’s voice, in the Peter Smith section).

The references to Stone in these passages may well be appropriately redacted. But the descriptions of conversations between Trump and Manafort or Gates should not impact Stone’s defense — unless you want to argue that Trump’s personal involvement in Stone’s rat-fucking might change the deliberations for a jury. They don’t serve to hide Stone’s actions. They hide Trump’s enthusiasm for using materials stolen by Russia to win.

This affects the “collusion” discussion

All of this has particular import given the basis on which Attorney General Bill Barr tried to exonerate the President for obstruction. In Barr’s 4-page summary of the report, Barr emphasized that Trump did not conspire or coordinate with the Russian government, even going so far as to suggest that no Trump associate “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government on these efforts,” efforts which in context include, “publicly disseminat[ing hacked] materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks.”

As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

[snip]

In assessing potential conspiracy charges, the Special Counsel also considered whether members of the Trump campaign “coordinated” with Russian election interference activities. The Special Counsel defined “coordinated” as an “agreement–tacit or express–between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.”

[snip]

The second element involved the Russian government’s efforts to conduct computer hacking operations designed to gather and disseminate information to influence the election. The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks. Based on these activities, the Special Counsel brought criminal charges against a number of Russian military officers for conspiring to hack into computers in the United States for purposes of influencing the election. But as noted above, the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.

Of course, that leaves off coordinating with WikiLeaks because WikiLeaks is not the Russian government, even while in context it would be included.

Similarly, in Barr’s “no collusion” press conference, he again emphasized that Trump’s people were not involved in the hacking. Then he made a remarkable rhetorical move [I’ve numbered the key sentences].

But again, the Special Counsel’s report did not find any evidence that members of the Trump campaign or anyone associated with the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its hacking operations.  In other words, there was no evidence of Trump campaign “collusion” with the Russian government’s hacking.

The Special Counsel’s investigation also examined Russian efforts to publish stolen emails and documents on the internet.  The Special Counsel found that, after the GRU disseminated some of the stolen materials through its own controlled entities, DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, the GRU transferred some of the stolen materials to Wikileaks for publication.  Wikileaks then made a series of document dumps.  [1] The Special Counsel also investigated whether any member or affiliate of the Trump campaign encouraged or otherwise played a role in these dissemination efforts.  [2] Under applicable law, publication of these types of materials would not be criminal unless the publisher also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy.  [3] Here too, the Special Counsel’s report did not find that any person associated with the Trump campaign illegally participated in the dissemination of the materials.

Given what we know to be in the report, those three sentences look like this:

  1. Mueller asked, did any Trump affiliate encourage or otherwise play a role in WikiLeaks’ dissemination?
  2. By the way, if a Trump affiliate had played a role in the dissemination it wouldn’t be illegal unless the Trump affiliate had also helped Russia do the hacking.
  3. After finding that a Trump affiliate had played a role in the dissemination, Mueller then determined that that role was not illegal.

Again, “collusion” is not a legal term. It describes coordination — legal or not — in sordid activities. What these three sentences would say, if Barr had been honest, is that Mueller did find coordination, but because Stone (via yet unidentified means) coordinated with WikiLeaks, not Russia itself, Mueller didn’t find that the coordination was illegal.

Note that even Bill Barr, who’s a pretty shameless hack, still qualified the “no collusion” judgment on which he presents his obstruction analysis as pertaining to Russia.

After finding no underlying collusion with Russia, the Special Counsel’s report goes on to consider whether certain actions of the President could amount to obstruction of the Special Counsel’s investigation.  As I addressed in my March 24th letter, the Special Counsel did not make a traditional prosecutorial judgment regarding this allegation.  Instead, the report recounts ten episodes involving the President and discusses potential legal theories for connecting these actions to elements of an obstruction offense.

After carefully reviewing the facts and legal theories outlined in the report, and in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other Department lawyers, the Deputy Attorney General and I concluded that the evidence developed by the Special Counsel is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.

Barr bases his obstruction analysis on “collusion,” not conspiracy. But his 1-2-3 gimmick above lays out that non-criminal “collusion” did happen, only that it happened with WikiLeaks.

For his part, Mueller points to those same passages that get redacted in the first discussion in his background discussion for the obstruction volume.

Importantly, the redaction in this footnote makes it clear that the campaign was relying on what they were learning from Stone to plan their communication strategy for upcoming releases.

Remember, in his charging decisions on campaign finance, Mueller didn’t actually say no crime had been committed. He said the evidence was not sufficient to obtain and sustain a criminal conviction.

The Office similarly determined that the contacts between Campaign officials and Russia-linked individuals either did not involve the commission of a federal crime or, in the case of campaign-finance offenses, that our evidence was not sufficient to obtain and sustain a criminal conviction.

There are multiple places where the report makes it clear that, in addition to the June 9 meeting, the campaign finance crimes reviewed included the WikiLeaks releases, including the Table of Contents.

Indeed, the paragraph describing why Trump may have wanted to fire Jim Comey focuses closely on the campaign’s response to the WikiLeaks releases.

In addition, the President had a motive to put the FBI’s Russia investigation behind him. The evidence does not establish that the termination of Comey was designed to cover up a conspiracy between the Trump Campaign and Russia: As described in Volume I, the evidence uncovered in the investigation did not establish that the President or those close to him were involved in the charged Russian computer-hacking or active-measure conspiracies, or that the President otherwise had an unlawful relationship with any Russian official. But the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns. Although the President publicly stated during and after the election that he had no connection to Russia, the Trump Organization, through Michael Cohen, was pursuing the proposed Trump Tower Moscow project through June 2016 and candidate Trump was repeatedly briefed on the progress of those efforts.498 In addition, some witnesses said that Trump was aware that [redacted] at a time when public reports stated that Russian intelligence officials were behind the hacks, and that Trump privately sought information about future WikiLeaks releases.499 More broadly, multiple witnesses described the President’s preoccupation with press coverage of the Russia investigation and his persistent concern that it raised questions about the legitimacy of his election.500 [my emphasis]

And a more general discussion of Trump’s motives later in the obstruction discussion raises it — and the possibility that it would be judged to be criminal — explicitly.

In this investigation, the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference. But the evidence does point to a range of other possible personal motives animating the President’s conduct. These include concerns that continued investigation would call into question the legitimacy of his election and potential uncertainty about whether certain events–such as advance notice of WikiLeaks’s release of hacked information or the June 9, 2016 meeting between senior campaign officials and Russians–could be seen as criminal activity by the President, his campaign, or his family. [my emphasis]

The most damning revelations about the President’s own actions during the campaign in this report pertain to his exploitation of the WikiLeaks releases. They go directly to the question of criminal liability (which Mueller says he couldn’t charge for evidentiary reasons, not because he didn’t think it was a crime), and if you want to talk “collusion” as opposed to “conspiracy” — as the President does — it goes to “collusion.”

And in the guise of protecting Roger Stone’s right to a fair trial — and possibly with an eye towards preserving the President’s ability to pardon Stone before a trial reveals even more of these details — DOJ used a heavy hand on the redactions pertaining to Trump’s own personal involvement in exploiting the benefit his campaign received from WikiLeaks releasing emails that Russia stole from Hillary. These details are the bulk of what DOJ is hiding by offering just a small number of members of Congress to review the less-redacted version of the report.

Perhaps Mueller agreed with all these redactions; it’s a question I hope he gets asked when he finally testifies. But the redactions serve to hide what was clearly a close call on prosecution and one of the most damning explanations for Trump’s obstruction, an explanation that involved his own actions on the campaign.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

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