Mueller Report Executive Summary Vol. II (Clinton Version)

NOTE: This is a version of the Mueller report Executive Summary for Volume II, with references to Trump, his campaign and relevant committees swapped with references to Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and relevant committees. Changes are in blue.

****************************************

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY TO VOLUME II

Our obstruction-of-justice inquiry focused on a series of actions by the President that related to the Russian-interference investigations, including the President's conduct towards the law enforcement officials overseeing the investigations and the witnesses to relevant events.

FACTUAL RESULTS OF THE OBSTRUCTION INVESTIGATION

The key issues and events we examined include the following:

The Campaign's response to reports about Russian support for Clinton. During the 2016 presidential campaign, questions arose about the Russian government's apparent support for candidate Clinton. After WikiLeaks released politically damaging Republican Party emails that were reported to have been hacked by Russia, Clinton publicly expressed skepticism that Russia was responsible for the hacks at the same time that she and other Campaign officials privately sought information [REDACTED: HARM TO ONGOING MATTER] about any further planned WikiLeaks releases. Clinton also denied having any business in or connections to Russia, even though as late as June 2016 Clinton had been pursuing a licensing deal for a skyscraper to be built in Russia called Clinton Tower Moscow. After the election, the President expressed concerns to advisors that reports of Russia's election interference might lead the public to question the legitimacy of her election.

Conduct involving FBI Director Comey and the National Security Advisor. In mid-January 2017, Clinton's incoming National Security Advisor falsely denied to the Vice President, other administration officials, and FBI agents that he had talked to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about Russia's response to U.S. sanctions on Russia for its election interference. On January 27, the day after the President was told that the National Security Advisor had lied to the Vice President and had made similar statements to the FBI, the President invited FBI Director Comey to a private dinner at the White House and told Comey that she needed loyalty. On February 14, the day after the President requested the National Security Advisor's resignation, the President told an outside advisor, "Now that we fired the National Security Advisor, the Russia thing is over." The advisor disagreed and said the investigations would continue.

Later that afternoon, the President cleared the Oval Office to have a one-on-one meeting with Comey. Referring to the FBI's investigation of the National Security Advisor, the President said, "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting the National Security Advisor go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go." Shortly after requesting the National Security Advisor's resignation and speaking privately to Comey, the President sought to have the Deputy National Security Advisor draft an internal letter stating that the President had not directed the National Security Advisor to discuss sanctions with Kislyak. The Deputy National Security Advisor declined because she did not know whether that was true, and a White House Counsel's Office attorney thought that the request would look like a quid pro quo for an ambassadorship she had been offered.

The President's reaction to the continuing Russia investigation. In February 2017, the Attorney General began to assess whether he had to recuse himself from campaign related investigations because of his role in the Clinton Campaign. In early March, the President told the White House Counsel to stop the Attorney General from recusing. And after Attorney General announced his recusal on March 2, the President expressed anger at the decision and told advisors that she should have an Attorney General who would protect her. That weekend, the President took the Attorney General aside at an event and urged him to "unrecuse." Later in March, Comey publicly disclosed at a congressional hearing that the FBI was investigating "the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election," including any links or coordination between the Russian government and the Clinton Campaign. In the following days, the President reached out to the Director of National Intelligence and the leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) to ask them what they could do to publicly dispel the suggestion that the President had any connection to the Russian election-interference effort. The President also twice called Comey directly, notwithstanding guidance from the White House counsel to avoid direct contacts with the Department of Justice. Comey had previously assured the President that the FBI was not investigating her personally, and the President asked Comey to "lift the cloud" of the Russia investigation by saying that publicly.

The President's termination of Comey. On May 3, 2017, Comey testified in a congressional hearing, but declined to answer questions about whether the President was personally under investigation. Within days, the President decided to terminate Comey. The President insisted that the termination letter, which was written for public release, state that Comey had informed the President that he was not under investigation. The day of the firing, the White House maintained that Comey's termination resulted from independent recommendations from the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General that Comey should be discharged for poor performance. But the President had decided to fire Comey before hearing from the Department of Justice. The day after firing Comey, the President told Russian officials that she had "faced great pressure because of Russia," which had been "taken off' by Comey's firing. The next day, the President acknowledged in a television interview that she was going to fire Comey regardless of the Department of Justice's recommendation and that when she "decided to just do it," she was thinking that "this thing with Clinton and Russia is a made-up story." In response to a question about whether she 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."

The appointment of a Special Counsel and efforts to remove him. On May 17, 2017, the Acting Attorney General for the Russia investigation appointed a Special Counsel to conduct the investigation and related matters. The President reacted to news that a Special Counsel had been appointed by telling advisors that it was "the end of her presidency" and demanding that the Attorney General resign. The Attorney General submitted his resignation, but the President ultimately did not accept it. The President told aides that the Special Counsel had conflicts of interest and suggested that the Special Counsel therefore could not serve. The President's advisors told her the asserted conflicts were meritless and had already been considered by the Department of Justice.

On June 14, 2017, the media reported that the Special Counsel's Office was investigating whether the President had obstructed justice. Press reports called this "a major turning point" in the investigation: while Comey had told the President she was not under investigation, following Comey's firing, the President now was under investigation. The President reacted to this news with a series of tweets criticizing the Department of Justice and the Special Counsel's investigation. On June 17, 2017, the President called the White House counsel at home and directed him to call the Acting Attorney General and say that the Special Counsel had conflicts of interest and must be removed. The White House counsel did not carry out the direction, however, deciding that he would resign rather than trigger what he regarded as a potential Saturday Night Massacre.

Efforts to curtail the Special Counsel's investigation. Two days after directing the White House counsel to have the Special Counsel removed, the President made another attempt to affect the course of the Russia investigation. On June 19, 2017, the President met one-on-one in the Oval Office with his former campaign manager, a trusted advisor outside the government, and dictated a message for him to deliver to the Attorney General. The message said that the Attorney General should  publicly announce that, notwithstanding his recusal from the Russia investigation, the investigation was "very unfair" to the President, the President had done nothing wrong, and the Attorney General planned to meet with the Special Counsel and "let [him] move forward with investigating election meddling for future elections." The advisor said he understood what the President wanted  the Attorney General to do.

One month later, in another private meeting with the advisor on July 19, 2017, the President asked about the status of his message for the Attorney General to limit the Special Counsel investigation to future election interference. The advisor told the President that the message would be delivered soon. Hours after that meeting, the President publicly criticized the Attorney General in an interview with the New York Times, and then issued a series of tweets making it clear that the Attorney General's job was in jeopardy. The advisor did not want to deliver the President's message personally, so he asked a senior White House official to deliver it to the Attorney General.  The senior White House official was uncomfortable with the task and did not follow through. 

Efforts to prevent public disclosure of evidence. In the summer of 2017, the President  learned that media outlets were asking questions about the June 9, 2016 meeting  between senior campaign officials, including Chelsea Clinton, and a Russian lawyer who was  said to be offering damaging information about Donald Trump as "part of Russia and its  government's support for Hillary Clinton." On several occasions, the President directed aides not to  publicly disclose the emails setting up the June 9 meeting, suggesting that the emails would not  leak and that the number of lawyers with access to them should be limited. Before the emails  became public, the President edited a press statement for Chelsea Clinton by deleting a line that  acknowledged that the meeting was with "an individual who [Chelsea] was told might have  information helpful to the campaign" and instead said only that the meeting was about adoptions of Russian children. When the press asked questions about the President's involvement in Chelsea' s statement, the President's personal lawyer repeatedly denied the President had played any  role.

Further efforts to have the Attorney General take control of the investigation. In early summer 2017, the President called the Attorney General at home and again asked him to reverse his recusal  from the Russia investigation. the Attorney General did not reverse his recusal. In October 2017, the President met privately with the Attorney General in the Oval Office and asked him to "take [a] look" at investigating Trump. In December 2017, shortly after the former National Security Advisor pleaded guilty pursuant to a cooperation  agreement, the President met with the Attorney General in the Oval Office and suggested, according to notes taken by a senior advisor, that if the Attorney General unrecused and took back supervision of the Russia  investigation, he would be a "hero." The President told the Attorney General, "I'm not going to do anything  or direct you to do anything. I just want to be treated fairly." In response, the Attorney General volunteered that he had never seen anything "improper" on the campaign and told the President there was a "whole new leadership team" in place. He did not unrecuse.

Efforts to have McGahn deny that the President had ordered him to have the Special  Counsel removed. In early 2018, the press reported that the President had directed the White House counsel to have the Special Counsel removed in June 2017 and that the White House counsel had threatened to resign rather than carry out the order. The President reacted to the news stories by directing White House officials to tell the White House counsel to dispute the story and create a record stating he had not been ordered to have the Special Counsel removed. The White House counsel told those officials that the media reports were accurate in stating that the President had directed him to have the Special Counsel removed.  The President then met with the White House counsel in the Oval Office and again pressured him to deny the  reports. In the same meeting, the President also asked the White House counsel why he had told the Special  Counsel about the President's effort to remove the Special Counsel and why the White House counsel took notes  of his conversations with the President. The White House counsel refused to back away from what he remembered happening and perceived the President to be testing his mettle.

Conduct towards Flynn, Manafort, [REDACTED: HARM TO ONGOING MATTER]. After the former National Security Advisor withdrew from a joint defense  agreement with the President and began cooperating with the government, the President's personal  counsel left a message for the former National Security Advisor's attorneys reminding them of the President's warm feelings  towards the former National Security Advisor, which he said "still remains," and asking for a "heads up" if the former National Security Advisor knew  "information that implicates the President." When the former National Security Advisor's counsel reiterated that the former National Security Advisor could no  longer share information pursuant to a joint defense agreement, the President's personal counsel said he would make sure that the President knew that the former National Security Advisor's actions reflected "hostility" towards the President. During the former campaign manager's prosecution and when the jury in his criminal trial was deliberating, the President praised the former campaign manager in public, said that the former campaign manager was being treated unfairly, and declined to rule out a pardon. After the former campaign manager was convicted, the President called   the former campaign manager "a brave man" for refusing to "break" and said that "flipping" "almost ought to be outlawed." [REDACTED: HARM TO ONGOING MATTER] 

Conduct involving the President's personal attorney. The President's conduct towards her personal attorney changed from praise when he falsely minimized  the President's involvement in the Clinton Tower Moscow project, to castigation when  he became a cooperating witness. From September 2015 to June 2016, the President's personal attorney had pursued the  Clinton Tower Moscow project and had briefed candidate Clinton on the project numerous times, including discussing whether Clinton should travel to Russia to advance the deal. In 2017, the President's personal attorney provided false testimony to Congress about the project, including stating that he had only briefed Clinton on the project three times and never discussed  travel to Russia with her, in an effort to adhere to a "party line" that the President's personal attorney said was developed to  minimize the President's connections to Russia. While preparing for his congressional testimony, the President's personal attorney had extensive discussions with the President's personal counsel, who, according to the President's personal attorney,  said that the President's personal attorney should "stay on message" and not contradict the President. After the FBI searched the President's personal attorney's home and office in April 2018, the President publicly asserted that the President's personal attorney would not  "flip," contacted him directly to tell him to "stay strong," and privately passed messages of support  to him. the President's personal attorney also discussed pardons with the President's personal counsel and believed that if he stayed on message he would be taken care of. But after the President's personal attorney began cooperating with the  government in the summer of 2018, the President publicly criticized him, called him a "rat," and suggested that his family members had committed crimes.

Overarching factual issues. We did not make a traditional prosecution decision about these facts, but the evidence we obtained supports several general statements about the President's conduct.

Several features of the conduct we investigated distinguish it from typical obstruction-of-justice cases. First, the investigation concerned the President, and some of her actions, such as firing the FBI director, involved facially lawful acts within her Article II authority, which raises constitutional issues discussed below. At the same time, the President's position as the head of the Executive Branch provided her with unique and powerful means of influencing official proceedings, subordinate officers, and potential witnesses--all of which is relevant to a potential  obstruction-of-justice analysis. Second, unlike cases in which a subject engages in obstruction of justice to cover up a crime, the evidence we obtained did not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference. Although the obstruction statutes do not require proof of such a crime, the absence of that evidence affects the analysis of the President's intent and requires consideration of other possible motives for his conduct. Third, many of the President's acts directed at witnesses, including discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons, took place in public view. That circumstance is unusual, but no principle of law excludes public acts from the reach of the obstruction laws. If the likely effect of public acts is to influence witnesses or alter their testimony, the harm to the justice system's integrity is the same.

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 her 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 Comey. During that time, the President had been repeatedly told she was not personally under investigation. Soon after the firing of Comey and the appointment of the Special Counsel, however, the President became aware that her 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.

STATUTORY AND CONSTITUTIONAL DEFENSES

The President's counsel raised statutory and constitutional defenses to a possible obstruction-of-justice analysis of the conduct we investigated. We concluded that none of those legal defenses provided a basis for declining to investigate the facts.

Statutory defenses. Consistent with precedent and the Department of Justice's general approach to interpreting obstruction statutes, we concluded that several statutes could apply here. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 1503, 1505, 1512(b)(3), 1512(c)(2). Section 1512(c)(2) is an omnibus obstruction-of-justice provision that covers a range of obstructive acts directed at pending or contemplated official proceedings. No principle of statutory construction justifies narrowing the provision to cover only conduct that impairs the integrity or availability of evidence. Sections 1503 and 1505 also offer broad protection against obstructive acts directed at pending grand jury, judicial, administrative, and congressional proceedings, and they are supplemented by a provision in Section 1512(6) aimed specifically at conduct intended to prevent or hinder the communication to law enforcement of information related to a federal crime.

Constitutional defenses. As for constitutional defenses arising from the President's status as the head of the Executive Branch, we recognized that the Department of Justice and the courts have not definitively resolved these issues. We therefore examined those issues through the framework established by Supreme Court precedent governing separation-of-powers issues. The Department of Justice and the President's personal counsel have recognized that the President is subject to statutes that prohibit obstruction of justice by bribing a witness or suborning perjury because that conduct does not implicate his constitutional authority. With respect to whether the  President can be found to have obstructed justice by exercising his powers under Article II of the Constitution, we concluded that Congress has authority to prohibit a President's corrupt use of his or her authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice.

Under applicable Supreme Court precedent, the Constitution does not categorically and permanently immunize a President for obstructing justice through the use of his or her Article II powers.  The separation-of-powers doctrine authorizes Congress to protect official proceedings, including those of courts and grand juries, from corrupt, obstructive acts regard less of their source. We also concluded that any inroad on presidential authority that would occur from prohibiting corrupt acts does not undermine the President's ability to fulfill his or her constitutional mission. The term "corruptly" sets a demanding standard. It requires a concrete showing that a person acted with an intent to obtain an improper advantage for themselves or someone else, inconsistent with official duty and the rights of others. A preclusion of "corrupt" official action does not diminish the President's ability to exercise Article II powers. For example, the proper supervision of criminal law does not demand freedom for the President to act with a corrupt intention of shielding himself from criminal punishment, avoiding financial liability, or preventing personal embarrassment. To the contrary,  a statute that prohibits official action undertaken for such corrupt purposes furthers, rather than hinders, the impartial and evenhanded administration of the law. It also aligns with the President's constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws. Finally, we concluded that in the rare case in which a criminal investigation of the President's conduct is justified, inquiries to determine whether the President acted for a corrupt motive should not impermissibly chill his performance of his constitutionally assigned duties. The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President's corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.

 CONCLUSION

Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President's conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President's actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice,  we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate her.

Mueller Report Executive Summary Vol. I (Clinton Version)

NOTE: This is a version of the Mueller report Executive Summary for Volume I, with references to Trump, his campaign and relevant committees swapped with references to Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and relevant committees. Changes are in blue.

****************************************

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY TO VOLUME I 

RUSSIAN SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN

The Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out the earliest Russian interference operations identified by the investigation--a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States. The IRA was based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and received funding from Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin and companies he controlled. Prigozhin is widely reported to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, [REDACTED: HARM TO ONGOING MATTER]

In mid-2014, the IRA sent employees to the United States on an intelligence-gathering mission with instructions [REDACTED: HARM TO ONGOING MATTER]

The IRA later used social media accounts and interest groups to sow discord in the U.S. political system through what it termed "information warfare." The campaign evolved from a generalized program designed in 2014 and 2015 to undermine the U.S. electoral system, to a targeted operation that by early 2016 favored candidate Clinton and disparaged candidate Trump. The IRA' s operation also included the purchase of political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S. persons and entities, as well as the staging of political rallies inside the United States. To organize those rallies, IRA employees posed as U.S. grassroots entities and persons and made contact with Clinton supporters and Clinton Campaign officials in the United States. The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons conspired or coordinated with the IRA. Section II of this report details the Office's investigation of the Russian social media campaign.

RUSSIAN HACKING OPERATIONS

At the same time that the IRA operation began to focus ·on supporting candidate Clinton in early 2016, the Russian government employed a second form of interference: cyber intrusions (hacking) and releases of hacked materials damaging to the Trump Campaign. The Russian intelligence service known as the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Army (GRU) carried out these operations.

In March 2016, the GRU began hacking the email accounts of Trump Campaign volunteers and employees, including Trump's campaign chairman. In April 2016, the GRU hacked into the computer networks of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and the Republican National Committee (RNC). The GRU stole hundreds of thousands of documents from the compromised email accounts and networks. Around the time that the RNC announced in mid-June 2016 the Russian government's role in hacking its network, the GRU began disseminating stolen materials through the fictitious online personas "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0." The GRU later released additional materials through the organization WikiLeaks.

The presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton ("Clinton Campaign" or "Campaign") showed interest in WikiLeaks's releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Trump. Beginning in June 2016, [REDACTED: HARM TO ONGOING MATTER] forecast to senior Campaign officials that WikiLeaks would release information damaging to candidate Trump. WikiLeaks's first release came in July 2016. Around the same time, candidate Clinton announced that she hoped Russia would recover emails described as missing from a private server used by Trump (she later said that she was speaking sarcastically).
[REDACTED: HARM TO ONGOING MATTER]
WikiLeaks began releasing Trump's campaign manager's stolen emails on October 7, 2016, less than one hour after a U.S. media outlet released video considered damaging to candidate Clinton. Section III of this Report details the Office's investigation into the Russian hacking operations, as well as other efforts by Clinton Campaign supporters to obtain Trump-related emails.

RUSSIAN CONTACTS WITH THE CAMPAIGN

The social media campaign and the GRU hacking operations coincided with a series of contacts between Clinton Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government. The Office investigated whether those contacts reflected or resulted in the Campaign conspiring or coordinating with Russia in its election-interference activities. Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Clinton presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Clinton Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

The Russian contacts consisted of business connections, offers of assistance to the Campaign, invitations for candidate Clinton and Putin to meet in person, invitations for Campaign officials and representatives of the Russian government to meet, and policy positions seeking improved U.S.-Russian relations. Section IV of this Report details the contacts between Russia and the Clinton Campaign during the campaign and transition periods, the most salient of which are summarized below in chronological order.

2015. Some of the earliest contacts were made in connection with a Clinton real-estate project in Russia known as Clinton Tower Moscow. Candidate Clinton signed a Letter of Intent for Clinton Tower Moscow by November 2015, and in January 2016 a Clinton representative emailed and spoke about the project with the office of Russian government press secretary Dmitry Peskov. Clinton pursued the project through at least June 2016, including by considering travel to Russia.

Spring 2016. A Clinton campaign foreign policy advisor made early contact with Joseph Mifsud, a London-based professor who had connections to Russia and traveled to Moscow in April 2016. Immediately upon his return to London from that trip, Mifsud told the advisor that the Russian government had "dirt" on Donald Trump in the form of thousands of emails. One week later, in the first week of May 2016, the advisor suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Clinton Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Trump. Throughout that period of time and for several months thereafter, the advisor worked with Mifsud and two Russian nationals to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government. No meeting took place.

Summer 2016. Russian outreach to the Clinton Campaign continued into the summer of 2016, as candidate Clinton was becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for President. On June 9, 2016, for example, a Russian lawyer met with senior Clinton Campaign officials, including Chelsea Clinton and Clinton's campaign manager, to deliver what the email proposing the meeting had described as "official documents and information that would incriminate Donald." The materials were offered to Chelsea Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Hillary Clinton." The written communications setting up the meeting showed that the Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist candidate Clinton's electoral prospects, but the Russian lawyer's presentation did not provide such information.

Days after the June 9 meeting, on June 14, 2016, a cybersecurity firm and the RNC announced that Russian government hackers had infiltrated the RNC and obtained access to opposition research on candidate Clinton, among other documents.

In July 2016, a Clinton campaign foreign policy advisor traveled in his personal capacity to Moscow and gave the keynote address at the New Economic School. He had lived and worked in Russia between 2003 and 2007. After returning to the United States, he became acquainted with at least two Russian intelligence officers, one of whom was later charged in 2015 with conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of Russia. His July 2016 trip to Moscow and his advocacy for pro-Russian foreign policy drew media attention. The Campaign then distanced itself from him and, by late September 2016, removed him from the Campaign.

July 2016 was also the month WikiLeaks first released emails stolen by the GRU from the RNC. On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks posted thousands of internal RNC documents revealing information about the Trump Campaign. Within days, there was public reporting that U.S. intelligence agencies had "high confidence" that the Russian government was.behind the theft of emails and documents from the RNC. And within a week of the release, a foreign government informed the FBI about its May 2016 interaction with the Clinton foreign policy advisor and his statement that the Russian government could assist the Clinton Campaign. On July 31, 2016, based on the foreign government reporting, the FBI opened an investigation into potential coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Clinton Campaign.

Separately, on August 2, 2016, Clinton's campaign chairman met in New York City with his long-time business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence. Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that the campaign manager acknowledged to the Special Counsel's Office was a "backdoor" way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine; both men believed the plan would require candidate Clinton's assent to succeed (were she to be elected President). They also discussed the status of the Clinton Campaign and Podesta's strategy for winning Republican votes in Midwestern states. Months before that meeting, Podesta had caused internal polling data to be shared with Kilimnik, and the sharing continued for some period of time after their August meeting.

Fall 2016. On October 7, 2016, the media released video of candidate Clinton which was considered damaging to her candidacy. Less than an hour later, WikiLeaks made its second release: thousands of Trump's campaign manager's emails that had been stolen by the GRU in late March 2016. The FBI and other U.S. government institutions were at the time continuing their investigation of suspected Russian government efforts to interfere in the presidential election. That same day, October 7, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint public statement "that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations." Those "thefts" and the "disclosures" of the hacked materials through online platforms such as WikiLeaks, the statement continued, "are intended to interfere with the US election process."

Post-2016 Election. Immediately after the November 8 election, Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new administration. The most senior levels of the Russian government encouraged these efforts. The Russian Embassy made contact hours after the election to congratulate the President-Elect and to arrange a call with President Putin. Several Russian businessmen picked up the effort from there.

Kirill Dmitriev, the chief executive officer of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, was among the Russians who tried to make contact with the incoming administration. In early December, a business associate steered Dmitriev to a supporter of the Trump Campaign and an associate of a senior Clinton advisor. Dmitriev and the supporter later met face-to-face in January 2017 in the Seychelles and discussed U.S.-Russia relations. During the same period, another business associate introduced Dmitriev to a friend of Clinton's son-in-law who had not served on the Campaign or the Transition Team. Dmitriev and this friend collaborated on a short written reconciliation plan for the United States and Russia, which Dmitriev implied had been cleared through Putin. The friend gave that proposal to Clinton's son-in-law before the inauguration, and the son-in-law later gave copies to a senior Clinton advisor and the incoming Secretary of State.

On December 29, 2016, then-President Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for having interfered in the election. The incoming National Security Advisor called Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and asked Russia not to escalate the situation in response to the sanctions. The following day, Putin announced that Russia would not take retaliatory measures in response to the sanctions at that time. Hours later, President-Elect Clinton tweeted, "Great move on delay (by V. Putin)." The next day, on December 31, 2016, Kislyak called the incoming National Security Advisor and told him the request had been received at the highest levels and Russia had chosen not to retaliate as a result of his request.

* * *

On January 6, 2017, members of the intelligence community briefed President-Elect Clinton on a joint assessment-drafted and coordinated among the Central Intelligence Agency, FBI, and National Security Agency-that concluded with high confidence that Russia had intervened in the election through a variety of means to assist Clinton's candidacy and harm Trump's. A declassified version of the assessment was publicly released that same day.

Between mid-January 2017 and early February 2017, three congressional committees-the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), and the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC)-announced that they would conduct inquiries, or had already been conducting inquiries, into Russian interference in the election. Then-FBI Director James Corney later confirmed to Congress the existence of the FBI's investigation into Russian interference that had begun before the election. On March 20, 2017, in open-session testimony before HPSCI, Corney stated:

I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Clinton campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts .... As with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.

The investigation continued under then-Director Corney for the next seven weeks until May 9, 2017, when President Clinton fired Comey as FBI Director-an action which is analyzed in Volume II of the report.

On May 17, 2017, the Acting Attorney General appointed the Special Counsel and authorized him to conduct the investigation that Corney had confirmed in his congressional testimony, as well as matters arising directly from the investigation, and any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a), which generally covers efforts to interfere with or obstruct the investigation.

President Clinton reacted negatively to the Special Counsel's appointment. She told advisors that it was the end of her presidency, sought to have the Attorney General unrecuse from the Russia investigation and to have the Special Counsel removed, and engaged in efforts to curtail the Special Counsel's investigation and prevent the disclosure of evidence to it, including through public and private contacts with potential witnesses. Those and related actions are described and analyzed in Volume II of the report.

* * *

THE SPECIAL COUNSEL'S CHARGING DECISIONS

In reaching the charging decisions described in Volume 1 of the report, the Office determined whether the conduct it found amounted to a violation of federal criminal law chargeable under the Principles of Federal Prosecution. See Justice Manual § 9-27.000 et seq. (2018). The standard set forth in the Justice Manual is whether the conduct constitutes a crime; if so, whether admissible evidence would probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction; and whether prosecution would serve a substantial federal interest that could not be adequately served by prosecution elsewhere or through non-criminal alternatives. See Justice Manual § 9-27 .220.

Section V of the report provides detailed explanations of the Office's charging decisions, which contain three main components.

First, the Office determined that Russia's two principal interference operations in the 2016 U.S. presidential election-the social media campaign and the hacking-and-dumping operations violated U.S. criminal law. Many of the individuals and entities involved in the social media campaign have been charged with participating in a conspiracy to defraud the United States by undermining through deceptive acts the work of federal agencies charged with regulating foreign influence in U.S. elections, as well as related counts of identity theft. See United States v. Internet Research Agency, et al., No. 18-cr-32 (D.D.C.). Separately, Russian intelligence officers who carried out the hacking into Republican Party computers and the personal email accounts of individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign conspired to violate, among other federal laws, the federal computer-intrusion statute, and the have been so charged. See United States v. Netyksho, et al., No. 18-cr-215 D.D.C.). [REDACTED: HARM TO ONGOING MATTER] [REDACTED: PERSONAL PRIVACY]

Second, while the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Clinton Campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges. Among other things, the evidence was not sufficient to charge any Campaign official as an unregistered agent of the Russian government or other Russian principal. And our evidence about the June 9, 2016 meeting and WikiLeaks's releases of hacked materials was not sufficient to charge a criminal campaign-finance violation. Further, the evidence was not sufficient to charge that any member of the Clinton Campaign conspired with representatives of the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election.

Third, the investigation established that several individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign lied to the Office, and to Congress, about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals and related matters. Those lies materially impaired the investigation of Russian election interference. The Office charged some of those lies as violations of the federal false statements statute. The Former National Security Advisor pleaded guilty to lying about his interactions with Russian Ambassador Kislyak during the transition period. A foreign policy advisor during the campaign period, pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about, inter alia, the nature and timing of his interactions with Joseph Mifsud, the professor who told him that the Russians had dirt on candidate Trump in the form of thousands of emails. A former Clinton attorney pleaded guilty to making false statements to Congress about the Clinton Moscow project. [REDACTED: HARM TO ONGOING MATTER] Clinton's campaign manager lied to the Office and the grand jury concerning his interactions and communications with Konstantin Kilimnik about Clinton Campaign polling data and a peace plan for Ukraine.

* * *

The Office investigated several other events that have been publicly reported to involve potential Russia-related contacts. For example, the investigation established that interactions between Russian Ambassador Kislyak and Clinton Campaign officials both at the candidate's April 2016 foreign policy speech in Washington, D.C., and during the week of the Democratic National Convention were brief, public, and non-substantive. And the investigation did not establish that one Campaign official's efforts to dilute a portion of the Democratic Party platform on providing assistance to Ukraine were undertaken at the behest of candidate Clinton or Russia. The investigation also did not establish that a meeting between Kislyak and the Attorney General in September 2016 included any more than a passing mention of the presidential
campaign.

The investigation did not always yield admissible information or testimony, or a complete picture of the activities undertaken by subjects of the investigation. Some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination and were not, in the Office's judgment, appropriate candidates for grants of immunity. The Office limited its pursuit of other witnesses and information-such as information known to attorneys or individuals claiming to be members of the media-in light of internal Department of Justice policies. See, e.g., Justice Manual§§ 9-13.400, 13.410. Some of the information obtained via court process, moreover, was presumptively covered by legal privilege and was screened from investigators by a filter (or "taint") team. Even when individuals testified or agreed to be interviewed, they sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete, leading to some of the false-statements charges described above. And the Office faced practical limits on its ability to access relevant evidence as well-numerous witnesses and subjects lived abroad, and documents were held outside the United States.

Further, the Office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated-including some associated with the Clinton Campaign---deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records. In such cases, the Office was not able to corroborate witness statements through comparison to contemporaneous communications or fully question witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with other known facts.

Accordingly, while this report embodies factual and legal determinations that the Office believes to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible, given these identified gaps, the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.

Harris Podcast on the Mueller Report

I would encourage anyone who either has or hasn't read the full Mueller report, but especially those who haven't, to listen to the latest episode of Sam Harris's podcast, with guest Bejamin Wittes.

It's probably about as close to an objective overview of the findings as you're going to get, even though both Harris and Wittes are no fans of Trump. At the end of the podcast, Harris asks Wittes what he would say to any Trump supporters who believe their discussion (and the whole investigation itself) is just some partisan hit job, intent on overturning an election due to sour grapes.

I liked Wittes's answer, though it's not entirely original: Read the executive summaries for both volumes of the Mueller report, substituting "Trump" for "Clinton" or "Biden" or the Democratic politician of your choosing. Then ask yourself the following questions:

• Would you think an investigation into these activities was warranted?
• Would you find this behavior acceptable in a Presidential campaign and a President?
• Would you support impeachment for the Democrat if the facts were the same?

It's a fine idea, the exercise of looking at an issue from the opposite angle, in order to try to correct for some of your biases. But I kind of doubt anyone will actually do it. So, I thought I would mock up a version of the executive summaries myself, right here on this blog.

The next couple of blog posts will do just that.

Here is the Clinton Version of the Mueller Report's Executive Summary of Volume I

Here is the Clinton Version of the Mueller Report's Executive Summary of Volume II

The Mueller Report: Cohen and Prague

I want to preface this post by saying I hate conspiracy theories. My whole life, I've tried to immunize myself from cognitive biases that lead people to see patterns where they don't exist and believe things for which they have no firm rational foundation.

There are many things I despise about the Donald Trump era, but one of the biggest ones is actually the way it makes me feel like a conspiracy theorist. I've tried to be as informed as possible about what's going on because I feel like this is a pivotal time in history, and I want to absorb and remember as many details as possible. And there are a ton of details. The effect is that I end up sounding like Carrie in Homeland ranting at a pegboard full of criss-crossing yarn.

All I can do is continue to guard against my biases and try to look at things as clearly and objectively as possible.

Anyway...

The Steele Dossier says that Michael Cohen secretly met with three Kremlin officials in August 2016 in Prague. Now some things in the dossier have been confirmed. Many things haven't. But it's been public for a long time. I can understand Mueller and the FBI not wanting to lean on its reliability, but from what I understand, Steele isn't an amateur, and you'd probably want to follow up on the allegations in the dossier, at the very least to rule them out.

When the dossier first came out, Cohen tweeted a picture of the cover of his passport and said he'd never been to Prague. That's a super-convincing way of knocking the story down. That's like trying to convince someone you don't have any five dollar bills by tweeting a pic of the outside of your wallet. In other words: It proves nothing. It's dumb. And it's suspicious.

He then showed the inside of the passport to Buzzfeed. There was no stamp for the Czech Republic, but there was one for Italy in July of 2016.

The Italian trip is the most intriguing, because it places Cohen in what’s known as the Schengen Area: a group of 26 European countries, including the Czech Republic, that allows visitors to travel freely among them without getting any additional passport stamps.
...
Cohen, 50, said he understands the scrutiny this will bring. He said credit card receipts would prove he stayed in Capri, an island off the Italian coast, but he declined to make those receipts available. Cohen was with family and friends, he said, including the musician and actor Steve Van Zandt. Van Zandt did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Well, Van Zandt later did make a comment on Twitter:

So Cohen made it sound like he was spending significant time with Van Zandt in Italy, and he wasn't. Again, it's a small, stupid lie, but it's weird. It raises suspicion.

Then there were a couple of reports from McClatchy, generally a well-regarded news source. One was from April 2018, and cited two sources saying that Mueller had evidence that Cohen had entered the Czech Republic via Germany in late August or early September 2016. A second report from McClatchy in December of 2018 cited four sources saying that Meuller had data from cell phone pings placing Cohen in Prague in "late summer 2016".

Now the spokeperson for the Special Counsel's office didn't do a lot of speaking during the investigation. But they did speak up to knock down a story from Buzzfeed reporting that Trump had instructed Cohen to lie to Congress.

If the Cohen stories were so preposterous and unfounded, why didn't the SC office knock them down as well? Maybe they didn't feel it was worth their time. Maybe they had better things to do. But the allegations of Cohen in Prague are so impactful and damning, they certainly seem like they need to be addressed, don't they? We're talking about the President's personal lawyer being accused of meeting with Kremlin agents. If it did happen, that's pretty conclusive evidence of a conspiracy directly implicating Trump, right? If it didn't happen, we need to know that, don't we?

Okay, so what does the Mueller Report say about all this? Certainly it clears it right up, right?

In early May 2017, Cohen received requests from Congress to provide testimony and documents in connection with congressional investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. At that time, Cohen understood Congress's interest in him to be focused on the allegations in the Steele reporting concerning a meeting Cohen allegedly had with Russian officials in Prague during the campaign. Cohen had never traveled to Prague and was not concerned about those allegations, which he believed were provably false.

Okay, then. Cohen had never traveled to Prague. So the FBI dug around in his bank and phone records and verified that, right? They interviewed Van Zandt and others, right? Well, we don't know. Because this is all Mueller says.

Oh wait, there's a footnote for this sentence. Surely that will provide some justification for simply stating he wasn't in Prague. Oh, it's just a citation for an interview with Cohen.

So basically, they asked him if he'd been to Prague. He said no. End of story.

No. No, no, no, no, no.

You gotta show your work here, man. I read the Mueller report as if I were a juror. And dammit, there should be some evidentiary standards. There should be some freaking evidence, you know.

You can't just say a thing and make it true. You have to back it up. And this is a report. A final report. I'm not going to infer a lot of investigative work that isn't described. That's not how this works. We've had two damn years of smoke and fragments. I just want the facts.

And in this case, they seem incredibly easy to come by. We already know that the Feds looked into Cohen's finances. We know they got a warrant on him and raided him. So surely they checked that information to rule out that he met with Kremlin officials in the summer of 2016, right? RIGHT???

If you took those steps, why not say it? There was a media report specifically noting that Mueller had checked Cohen's cell phone data during that time period. Why not, for God's sake, say in the report that the FBI did in fact look at those records, and Cohen was in New York the whole time? Or California? Or an Arby's in Minnesota?

That's what makes this so stupid. If the Steele dossier is wrong, and the McClatchy stories are wrong, it seems relatively simple to knock this false little story down. When Mueller doesn't do that, when according to the plain text of the report, he relies solely on Michael Cohen's word, what the hell are we supposed to think?

You know who else has those records? Michael Cohen. Supposedly he has said that he would sit down, any time, with reporters, and share all the records that would clearly show he didn't go near Prague in the summer of 2016. But remember what happened when he sat down with Buzzfeed:

He said credit card receipts would prove he stayed in Capri, an island off the Italian coast, but he declined to make those receipts available. 

He has reported to prison now, but as far as I know, he never sat down with any reporters to share receipts or phone records. Why not?

Now Derek, you might say. If he showed you those, you'd just want more. Your conspiratorial little brain would just work overtime to keep this story alive.

No. No it wouldn't. If Cohen sat down with a respectable reporter and shared records covering the time period in question, that'd do it for me. Or better yet, Mueller could have squashed this with a single line in the report, something like:

Investigative efforts into Michael Cohen's personal records established his whereabouts during this time frame, strongly indicating he did not travel to Prague in the late summer of 2016.

Boom. That would have done it. Just say you did something other than just ask him.

Apparently a lot of other people are satisfied. The Washington Post cites this very example as a lesson for the media to chew on for it's substandard reporting of the investigation.

McClatchy reported that Mueller had evidence about Cohen-Prague; in a document disclosing his findings, Mueller cited no such evidence. 

Right. Hey, he didn't cite any evidence, other than Cohen's testimony. Cohen is not the most trustworthy witness. Presumably you would cross-check it with other people's testimony, right? And in those cases where you could get hold of corroborating physical evidence, you'd do that, too, right? I'm not an investigator or in law enforcement or a lawyer, but this just seems like common sense.

This makes me mad. When the Mueller report came out, I wanted some definitive answers. I was hoping that Mueller would verify or discount most or all of the Steele dossier, for the sake of the truth and of the reputations of the people involved, and for the country.

Instead, we get the kind of justification that wouldn't pass muster in a 5th-grade book report, much less the final word on the most important investigation in our country's history.

Call me a conspiracy nut if you must, but for me, the question of Cohen's whereabouts in the summer of 2016 are still an open question, and Mueller, as he did in many other areas, dropped the damn ball in clearing this up.

The Mueller Report: What the Russians Did

If you've ever watched a Republican asked about the extent of the Russian interference in the 2016 election, you've probably heard them say some variants of the following:

• Sure, but they've been doing this for decades.
• Sure, but it was only a couple of Facebook ads. (Jared Kushner himself said this.)
• Sure, but no votes were changed and it didn't affect the outcome of the election.

I'm not sure why Republicans would want to minimize an attack on our democratic infrastructure. Oh wait, I actually do. They're afraid of angering Donald Trump.

One could possibly go the other way, and exaggerate the extent of the meddling. I don't know, why don't we see what the Mueller report says?

The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.

Hm. It doesn't say "unprecedented", but it doesn't sugarcoat or downplay it either. You could go too far in the other direction and exaggerate the impact. There's a lot we still don't know. A 9/11-style commission would actually be helpful here, because the tech companies have not told us the whole story, and the government has not legally compelled them to (more on that in a second).

Here are a few things that we do know:

• "First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton." (Vol. 1, p.1)
• "Two military units of the GRU carried out the computer intrusions into the Clinton Campaign, DNC, and DCCC: Military Units 26165 and 74455."  (Vol. 1, p.36)
• "[T]he Washington Post published an Access Hollywood video that captured comments by candidate Trump some years earlier and that was expected to adversely affect the Campaign. Less than an hour after the video's publication, WikiLeaks released the first set of emails stolen by the GRU from the account of Clinton Campaign chairman John Podesta." (Vol. 1, p.58)

Think about those three facts for a second. The Russians intervened, and the candidate they showed a strong preference for won. Two full GRU units worked full-time to interfere with our election. If the US had devoted two units of the FBI to work full time to get a foreign leader elected, should the people of that country just brush it off as routine? And in what was likely one of the most impactful aspects of the Russian influence campaign, through a cutout they released emails within an hour of the pussy-grabbing tape hitting the news. The exact influence that had is probably impossible to quantify with any precision. But to deny that it affected the news cycle and dampened the political harm to Trump while simultaneously harming Clinton...well, that's just a ridiculous assertion. So the next time someone tells you the Russians may have interfered but it didn't affect the outcome, please remind them of this.

Now, back to the tech companies...

"By the end of the 2016 U.S. election, the IRA had the ability to reach millions of U.S. persons through their social media accounts. Multiple IRA-controlled Facebook groups and Instagram accounts had hundreds of thousands of U.S. participants. IRA-controlled Twitter accounts separately had tens of thousands of followers, including multiple U.S. political figures who retweeted IRA-created content. In November 2017, a Facebook representative testified that Facebook had identified IRA-controlled Facebook accounts that collectively made 80,000 posts between January 2015 and August 2017. Facebook estimated the IRA reached as many as 126 million persons through its Face book accounts. In January 2018, Twitter announced that it had identified 3,814 IRA-controlled Twitter accounts and notified approximately 1.4 million people Twitter believed may have been in contact with an IRA-controlled account." (Vol. 1, p.14-15)

That may or may not sound bad, probably depending on your political persuasion. But here's the part that really stuck out to me while reading this: "a Facebook representative testified".

Wait, what?

Robert Mueller and the FBI seemed to rely primarily on the testimony of paid spokespeople for the tech companies in determining the scope of Russian influence on their platforms. Are you kidding me?

Here's a story where Zuckerberg said that "there may be" subpoenas that Mueller's team sent to the company or its employees. But based on the Mueller report, there is no mention of a subpoena to any tech company. The only sources cited for any of these figures come, as far as I can tell, exclusively from the companies themselves.

Forgive me for not trusting these companies to be completely forthright. What exactly is their incentive to do so? To have their platforms exploited in such a way cannot look good for them, and can only have a possible negative effect to their bottom line. But is this just paranoia? Do we have any concrete reason to believe they're not revealing the full extent of the problem?

Hey, turns out we do. The Senate Intelligence Committee commissioned two reports to analyze the extent of the Russian influence campaign. Here's one. Here's the other.

What do they each have to say about the data and cooperation they received from the tech companies?

From the first report, The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency:

None of the platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and Alphabet) appears to have turned over
complete sets of related data to SSCI. Some of what was turned over was in PDF form; other data sets contained extensive duplicates. Each lacked core components that would have provided a fuller and more actionable picture. For example:

• The platforms didn’t include methodology for identifying the accounts; we are assuming the provenance and attribution is sound for the purposes of this analysis.
• They didn’t include anonymized user comments, eliminating a key path to gauge impact.
• They didn’t include any conversion pathway data to elucidate how individuals came to follow the accounts, eliminating another key path to gauge impact.
• There was minimal metadata.
• One data set did not include any user engagement data at all.

Regrettably, it appears that the platforms may have misrepresented or evaded in some of their statements to Congress; one platform claimed that no specific groups were targeted (this is only true if speaking strictly of ads), while another dissembled about whether or not the Internet Research Agency created content to discourage voting (it did). It is unclear whether these answers were the result of faulty or lacking analysis, or a more deliberate evasion.

Here's what the other report, The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018:

Facebook provided the US Senate with information on the organic post data of 81 Facebook pages, and the data on Facebook ads bought by 76 accounts. Twitter’s data contribution covered activity in multiple languages, but Facebook’s data contribution focuses on activity only in English. Facebook chose not to disclose data from IRA Profiles or Groups and only shared organic post data from a small number of Pages with the Committee. Google chose to supply the Senate committee with data in a non-machine-readable format. The evidence that the IRA had bought ads on Google was provided as images of ad text and in PDF format whose pages displayed copies of information previously organized in spreadsheets. This means that Google could have provided the useable ad text and spreadsheets—in a standard machinereadable file format, such as CSV or JSON, that would be useful to data scientists—but chose to turn them into images and PDFs as if the material would all be printed out on paper. 

This should dispense with the idea that the tech companies are acting in good faith and are being transparent with regard to the extent of the problem. An easy solution to finding the truth would have been for the Senate Intelligence Committee or the FBI to subpoena these companies. As far as I can tell, this did not happen. If I'm misinformed about this, please let me know in the comments. If none of them actually were subpoenaed, even though they were obviously giving Congress badly-formatted and incomplete data, why? I mean, it's only the integrity of our elections and our national security, right?

Another interesting note before I wrap this up. Both of the independent reports spend a lot of time pointing out that specific minority groups were targeted by the Russians. The most aggressively-targeted group appears to have been African-Americans. The goal was to inflame racial animosity and suppress the black vote. According to the Pew Research Center:

The black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6% in 2016 after reaching a record-high 66.6% in 2012. The 7-percentage-point decline from the previous presidential election is the largest on record for blacks. (It’s also the largest percentage-point decline among any racial or ethnic group since white voter turnout dropped from 70.2% in 1992 to 60.7% in 1996.) 

Again, we're dealing with a complex system with a lot of variables, and assigning causality is very difficult. One could easily point to the presence of Obama on the ballot as a motivating factor in 2012, but this drop is still suggestive and worth noting. Except that the Mueller report didn't note it at all. Their team didn't appear to do much analysis of the interference campaign at all, and it certainly didn't highlight many of the points that independent researchers have.

Well, you might contend that wasn't their job. But how is the American public supposed to understand the problem if the investigators aren't either fully investigating or telling us the whole story? And how is the country supposed to defend from future attacks if it doesn't fully understand the problem?

I understood this to be one of the primary goals of the Mueller investigation, and it seems to me that on that score, it is wholly inadequate. Until we get whistleblowers from inside the tech companies or subpoenas from either Congress or the DoJ, we will not have even a relatively complete picture of what happened. That is, unless you trust that Facebook, Twitter, and Google have been as honest and open as possible. LOL.

The Mueller Report

So I just finished reading the Mueller report. The whole thing. And it actually wasn't that bad. There are a lot of redundancies. For example, the report will describe a series of events, then in an analysis of those events, it often simply restates the events. There are a lot of footnotes, many of which can simply be glossed over or ignored. The redactions make some sections easily skippable. In some cases, entire pages are redacted. Some of the pages of legal rulings can be skimmed over. And there are multiple appendices. So the 450-page length shouldn't really scare anyone off. It's far smaller than that in terms of actual content.

This first post is going to give an overview of my general thoughts and impressions of the report. Then I'll likely follow up with a deep dive into some specific points and sections.

All in all, despite its length, to me the report seems...incomplete. In many ways, it feels like a preliminary report. Despite two years of investigation, there is very little new that we learned from the report. Some of those new facts are significant, but for the most part the report is just filling in very small details and adding very little to what we already knew from press reports.

This is hugely disappointing. Not because I wanted a particular outcome, which I did. But because it feels like so many threads were cut short. In many, many parts of the report, I would get to the end of a section, and the report would go onto the next section. And I would be expecting a continuation of the facts. There would be nothing. Like I said, I'll cite specific examples in upcoming posts. But this was a disturbing trend.

There were key witnesses that simply weren't interviewed. For example, the two key members of the Trump Tower Meeting, Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya, neither were interviewed by the Special Counsel. Some experts think Don Jr. either took the fifth or threatened to. What is an investigator's recourse when a witness won't assist them? Presumably they look for other evidence. Maybe they try to get a warrant. We have no idea what investigative steps, if any, Mueller took in response to Don Jr. refusing to testify. If we're going off simply what we have in the report, which is meant to be a final report, it seems as if they asked him to testify, he refused, and that was the end of that. If it were that easy to blow off Mueller, why did anyone ever sit down to answer any questions at all?

This was another trend, the lack of description about what investigative steps were taken to either verify or rule out events. Discussing a review of bank records or cell phone tower information shouldn't reveal sensitive sources and methods. We should assume this is the kind of thing the FBI is doing.

The report states very early on that members of the Trump campaign used communication methods to encrypt or delete what they were saying to each other. So I expected to read a lot more discussions of methods that didn't rely on interviews or emails or texts. Yet if you read the report, there's very, very little of that sort of thing. In fact, the bulk of the report reads like a summary of press clippings and interviews. Very often, the only justification for a particular set of facts is an interview with a witness. Now I'm sure they have skilled interviewers, but cross-examination only gets you so far.

What we've been dealing with for two years is smoke, spin, and innuendo. Finally, I hoped to get some facts. There are very few of those that we didn't already know, and many cases where it seemed like those facts should have been relatively easy to discover. So my general impression is that the investigation was not as aggressive or as comprehensive as it should have been. It seems to have pulled up short in many instances. Another possibility is that it was cut short. Mueller turned in his report within about six weeks of Barr becoming Attorney General. Maybe that's not a coincidence.

There are fourteen other investigations in other jurisdictions that Mueller referred. Let's hope those are allowed to proceed without political interference. There is also the main question that I, and I'm sure many other Americans, primarily wanted answered. And that is: Is our President compromised by a foreign power? There were conflicting reports about whether or not the counterintelligence investigation into Trump was being overseen by Mueller. The report seems to indicate that it wasn't, though he shared information with that investigation. So what happened to that investigation? Is it ongoing? If not, what were the results. We need to know. Because the Mueller report is maddeningly, frustratingly incomplete. It doesn't answer the most important questions we need to know, and it leaves threads dangling all over the place.

Did Trump Break the Law By Deleting His Tweet?

This morning at 7:30am, Donald Trump tweeted this:

Notice the incorrect spelling of "councel". 

About an hour and a half later, the original tweet was deleted, and the same tweet was sent back out, this time with the word "counsel" spelled correctly:

This isn't the first time this has happened. But is he actually breaking the law every time he does this?

Every word the President utters is meant to be preserved for the historical record, by law:

Both the Freedom of Information Act and Presidential Records Act require the commander in chief to painstakingly preserve all records of federal government actions and communications. 

Of all the things Trump has done and is accused of, this is obviously one of the most benign. Still, it would be kind of funny, if and when Trump is ever indicted, for a few charges of violating the FOIA and PRA were tacked on.