The Mueller Report: Presented with Related Materials by The Washington Post

by The Washington Post

Over the next twenty-two months, Mueller, who had led the FBI through the attacks of September 11, 2001, and embodied the bureau’s straight-arrow traditions, quietly and methodically investigated Trump and nearly everyone in his orbit, trying to determine whether any had conspired with the Kremlin to tilt the election, and whether the president himself had tried to obstruct justice. That investigation culminated on March 22, 2019, when Mueller formally concluded his work and submitted a final report to Attorney General William P. Barr.

“This is the end of my presidency,” Trump said, by Mueller’s account, when he learned of the special counsel’s appointment. “I’m fucked.”

“Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump 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 Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” Mueller’s team wrote.

“The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred,” Mueller’s team wrote. “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

In federal court, his team racked up an extraordinary record. His prosecutors charged thirty-four people, including twenty-six Russian nationals. They secured guilty pleas from seven people, including a former national security adviser and the chairman of Trump’s campaign. They reconstructed the day-to-day interactions of Trump’s closest aides and his adult children, exploring dozens of instances of Russian contacts with the Trump campaign. They documented the Russian attack on American democracy in breathtaking detail, even tracing individual keystrokes of Russian military officers in Moscow.

In the summer and fall of 2016, the FBI watched with alarm as the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks released Democratic Party emails that the bureau believed had been stolen by Russian government hackers. There were signs of foreign targeting of state voting systems.

Trump surrounded himself with campaign aides who had long-standing financial ties to Moscow. The candidate echoed Kremlin talking points about NATO and the European Union. Rather than condemning the Russian activity or calling on Russian president Vladimir Putin to stop it, he mocked the threat. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing,” he said at a news conference in July 2016, referring to emails that Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, had purged from a private server, saying they were personal communications and not related to her work while secretary of state.

The investigation was charged from the start. It was highly unusual for the FBI to examine advisers of a leading presidential candidate in the middle of a campaign. Plus, the bureau had to sort out explosive but unverified allegations of Trump-Russia coordination slipped to agents in the summer of 2016 that came to be known as the “Steele Dossier.”

If the FBI had wanted to stop Trump, a leak about the investigation might have done the trick. Instead, the bureau kept its work secret. That stood in contrast to the FBI’s handling of its investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server, which Comey repeatedly addressed publicly in 2016, including in the final days of the campaign.

In February 2018, Mueller’s team indicted thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies, alleging that they had engaged in a complex two-year scheme to interfere in US politics by posing as Americans and planting false news stories and divisive ads on social media. Working from a small office building in St. Petersburg, these trolls allegedly duped real Americans with whom they interacted online, amplifying tense debates about race, gun control, and sexual identity, pushing pro-Trump messages and even getting some Americans to organize and attend rallies they orchestrated. Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin, who the Russian news media has identified as the financial backer of the group, told Russia’s state news agency of the indictment, “The Americans are very impressionable people, and they see what they want to see,” adding, “I am not at all disappointed that I appear in this list. If they want to see the devil—let them.” Then, in July 2018, Mueller’s team indicted twelve Russian military intelligence officers, alleging that they hacked into the email accounts of the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign officials and posed online as an entity called Guccifer 2.0 to publish the material, including by passing it to WikiLeaks and others.

Though it would not be known for some time, Mueller privately complained to Barr about that characterization in a letter, asserting that the attorney general “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.” The missive was remarkable in its own right, and even more so because of the man who signed it. Mueller, rigid in his adherence to the bureaucratic chain of command, had rebuked his boss in writing, increasing the likelihood the disagreement would ultimately become public.

Russia, he said, had engaged in “multiple, systematic” efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, an attack that he said deserved the attention of every American. He carefully explained that his team had felt bound by Justice Department policies that forbid the indictment of a sitting president and that further “principles of fairness” counseled that they should draw no conclusion as to whether the president might have committed a crime if they could not indict him. But he added that “if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Almost

MI6, Christopher Steele was hired by the private US political-intelligence firm Fusion GPS to research Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. From June to December 2016, he submitted a series of reports that came to be known collectively as the “Steele Dossier,” which alleged the Russians held compromising information about Trump and that Trump’s campaign was conspiring with a Russian government effort to win him the election.

Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election principally through two operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign and then released stolen documents. The investigation also identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign. Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump 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 Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law. In connection with that analysis, we addressed the factual question whether members of the Trump Campaign “coordinat[ed]”—a term that appears in the appointment order—with Russian election interference activities. Like collusion, “coordination” does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law. We understood coordination to require an agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference. That requires more than the two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests.

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 Trump and disparaged candidate Clinton. 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.

In March 2016, the GRU began hacking the email accounts of Clinton Campaign volunteers and employees, including campaign chairman John Podesta. In April 2016, the GRU hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The GRU stole hundreds of thousands of documents from the compromised email accounts and networks. Around the time that the DNC 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

WikiLeaks began releasing Podesta’s stolen emails on October 7, 2016, less than one hour after a U.S. media outlet released video considered damaging to candidate Trump.

On January 6, 2017, members of the intelligence community briefed President-Elect Trump 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 Trump’s candidacy and harm Clinton’s. A declassified version of the assessment was publicly released that same day.

Then-FBI Director James Comey later confirmed to Congress the existence of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference that had begun before the election.

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

On May 17, 2017, Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed the Special Counsel and authorized him to conduct the investigation that Comey 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.

while the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges.

the investigation established that several individuals affiliated with the Trump 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 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.

Using fictitious U.S. personas, IRA employees operated social media accounts and group pages designed to attract U.S. audiences. These groups and accounts, which addressed divisive U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists. Over time, these social media accounts became a means to reach large U.S. audiences. IRA employees travelled to the United States in mid-2014 on an intelligence-gathering mission to obtain information and photographs for use in their social media posts.

By early to mid-2016, IRA operations included supporting the Trump Campaign and disparaging candidate Hillary Clinton. The IRA made various expenditures to carry out those activities, including buying political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S. persons and entities. Some IRA employees, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated electronically with individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities, including the staging of political rallies.

In November 2017, a Facebook representative testified that Facebook had identified 470 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 Facebook accounts.6 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.7 A.

“Main idea: Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary [Clintonl and the rest (except Sanders and Trump – we support them).”

Throughout 2016, IRA accounts published an increasing number of materials supporting the Trump Campaign and opposing the Clinton Campaign. For example, on May 31, 2016, the operational account “Matt Skiber” began to privately message dozens of pro-Trump Facebook groups asking them to help plan a “pro-Trump rally near Trump Tower.”55

According to Facebook, the IRA purchased over 3,500 advertisements, and the expenditures totaled approximately $100,000.56

According to Facebook, in total the IRA-controlled accounts made over 80,000 posts before their deactivation in August 2017, and these posts reached at least 29 million U.S persons and “may have reached an estimated 126 million people.”62

In January 2018, Twitter publicly identified 3,814 Twitter accounts associated with the IRA.79 According to Twitter, in the ten weeks before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, these accounts posted approximately 175,993 tweets, “approximately 8.4% of which were election-related.”80 Twitter also announced that it had notified approximately 1.4 million people who Twitter believed may have been in contact with an IRA-controlled account. 81

Posts from the IRA-controlled Twitter account @TEN_GOP were cited or retweeted by multiple Trump Campaign officials and surrogates, including Donald J. Trump Jr.,96 Eric Trump,97 Kellyanne Conway,98 Brad Parscale, 99 and Michael T. Flynn.100 These posts included allegations of voter fraud,101 as well as allegations that Secretary Clinton had mishandled classified information.102

Two military units of the GRU carried out the computer intrusions into the Clinton Campaign, DNC, and DCCC: Military Units 26165 and 74455.110 Military Unit 26165 is a GRU cyber unit dedicated to targeting military, political, governmental, and non-governmental organizations outside of Russia, including in the United States.111 The unit was sub-divided into departments with different specialties. One department, for example, developed specialized malicious software (“malware”), while another department conducted large-scale spearphishing campaigns.”

GRU officers stole tens of thousands of emails from spearphishing victims, including various Clinton Campaign-related communications.

The GRU carried out the anonymous release through two fictitious online personas that it created—DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0—and later through the organization WikiLeaks.

GRU officers operated a Facebook page under the DCLeaks moniker, which they primarily used to promote releases of materials.141 The Facebook page was administered through a small number of preexisting GRU-controlled Facebook accounts.142

On July 27, 2016, Unit 26165 targeted email accounts connected to candidate Clinton’s personal office [# # # # #]. Earlier that day, candidate Trump made public statements that included the following: “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.”

Within approximately five hours of Trump’s statement, GRU officers targeted for the first time Clinton’s personal office. After candidate Trump’s remarks, Unit 26165 created and sent malicious links targeting 15 email accounts at the domain [# # # # #] including an email account belonging to Clinton aide [# # # # #] The investigation did not find evidence of earlier GRU attempts to compromise accounts hosted on this domain. It is unclear how the GRU was able to identify these email accounts, which were not public.184

June 2016, the GRU compromised the computer network of the Illinois State Board of Elections by exploiting a vulnerability in the SBOE’s website. The GRU then gained access to a database containing information on millions of registered Illinois voters,189 and extracted data related to thousands of U.S. voters before the malicious activity was identified.190

On October 7, 2016, four days after the Assange press conference [+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +], the 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.239 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.

Between approximately October 13, 2015 and November 2, 2015, the Trump Organization (through its subsidiary Trump Acquisition, LLC) and I.C. Expert completed a letter of intent (LOI) for a Trump Moscow property. The LOI, signed by Trump for the Trump Organization and Rozov on behalf of I.C. Expert, was “intended to facilitate further discussions” in order to “attempt to enter into a mutually acceptable agreement” related to the Trump-branded project in Moscow.

in an email from Robert Goldstone, at the request of his then-client Emin Agalarov, the son of Russian real-estate developer Aras Agalarov. Goldstone relayed to Trump Jr. that the “Crown prosecutor of Russia . . . offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. immediately responded that “if it’s what you say I love it,” and arranged the meeting through a series of emails and telephone calls. Trump Jr. invited campaign chairman Paul Manafort and senior advisor Jared Kushner to attend the meeting, and both attended.

Trump Campaign officials met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the week of the Republican National Convention. The evidence indicates that those interactions were brief and non-substantive. During platform committee meetings immediately before the Convention, J.D. Gordon, a senior Campaign advisor on policy and national security, diluted a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform expressing support for providing “lethal” assistance to Ukraine in response to Russian aggression. Gordon requested that platform committee personnel revise the proposed amendment to state that only “appropriate” assistance be provided to Ukraine.

The Campaign team discussed toning down language from the 2012 platform that identified Russia as the country’s number one threat, given the candidate’s belief that there needed to be better U.S. relations with Russia.789

The Office was not, however, able to gain access to all of Manafort’s electronic communications (in some instances, messages were sent using encryption applications). And while Manafort denied that he spoke to members of the Trump Campaign or the new Administration about the peace plan, he lied to the Office and the grand jury about the peace plan and his meetings with Kilimnik, and his unreliability on this subject was among the reasons that the district judge found that he breached his cooperation agreement.842

The Office could not reliably determine Manafort’s purpose in sharing internal polling data with Kilimnik during the campaign period. Manafort [~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~] did not see a downside to sharing campaign information, and told Gates that his role in the Campaign would be “good for business” and potentially a way to be made whole for work he previously completed in the Ukraine. As to Deripaska, Manafort claimed that by sharing campaign information with him, Deripaska might see value in their relationship and resolve a “disagreement”—a reference to one or more outstanding lawsuits. Because of questions about Manafort’s credibility and our limited ability to gather evidence on what happened to the polling data after it was sent to Kilimnik, the Office could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it.

we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has issued an opinion finding that “the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions” in violation of “the constitutional separation of powers.”1 Given the role of the Special Counsel as an attorney

while the OLC opinion concludes that a sitting President may not be prosecuted, it recognizes that a criminal investigation during the President’s term is permissible.3 The OLC opinion also recognizes that a President does not have immunity after he leaves office.