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

by The Washington Post

Barr’s description of Mueller’s report was favorable to Trump. In addition to finding no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, the attorney general said, Mueller had declined to reach a conclusion on whether the president had obstructed justice.

Some—though not all—of what Mueller revealed had already been publicly known, though the report added layers of both facts and legal analysis.

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 Ru...

This introduction to the Mueller report is based on nearly three years of interviews by Washington Post reporters with the key figures in the saga at the White House, at the Justice Department, in the intelligence community, in the Trump campaign, in Mosc...

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.”

The dossier had been commissioned by Fusion GPS, a Washington opposition research firm, and was fu...

It alleged that the Russians held salacious compromising material about Trump and that the Republican candidate had entered into a consp...

The inquiry also was marred by the texting between two FBI officials working on the case: agent Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, a bureau lawyer. Unbeknownst to many of their colleagues, the two had been having an extramarital affair

and exchanged tens of thousands of text messages sharing their opinions of US political officials and expressing open disdain for Trump.

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.

Sessions happened to be at the White House for a meeting with Trump and others when word came that Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, was appointing a special counsel. Trump was livid. “How could you let this happen, Jeff,” he told Sessions, according to Mueller's report, amid a lengthy diatribe in the Oval Office.

The lawyers who investigated the Iran-Contra scandal and the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair worked under a now-defunct law, commonly known as the independent counsel act, which gave them wide latitude. These independent counsels were picked by a three-judge panel, and they did not answer directly to anyone in the executive branch.

That law was allowed to expire in 1999, after officials who worked under it—including independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr—came to believe it created an unelected, fourth branch of government to enforce the laws against the others. In its place, officials crafted the special counsel regulations, under which Mueller was appointed.

Trump could have ordered Rosenstein to fire Mueller, although doing so would have caused a cascade of resignations at the Justice Department.

Andrew McCabe, Comey’s deputy, had been alarmed when his boss was fired. Wary of the president and Justice Department leaders, he began documenting his interactions with Rosenstein and others, including a meeting where he said Rosenstein had suggested wearing a wire to record the president. After Comey was fired, McCabe immediately authorized the FBI to open an investigation of Trump himself, something the bureau had declined to do for months.

Mueller quickly assembled a team of some of the most experienced lawyers in the country. He took with him from WilmerHale James Quarles, who had been an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and Aaron Zebley, who had been Mueller’s chief of staff at the FBI.

Mueller added Andrew Weissmann, a prosecutor who had been involved in the high-profile Enron cases and was well known among defense lawyers as being aggressive; Zainab Ahmad, whose strong record of prosecuting terrorism cases earned her a glowing profile in The New Yorker; and Andrew Goldstein, a public-corruption specialist who had helped bring charges against prominent state officials in New York.

Mueller also added several appellate specialists,

Trump, meanwhile, had trouble finding and keeping a lawyer to face down Mueller’s dream team. Many of the nation’s most prominent white-collar defense lawyers declined to represent the president of the United States,

Dowd and Cobb drew the line in their strategy of cooperation at allowing Mueller to interview the president.

They did not trust Mueller’s team and feared that their client could not get through an interview session without being accused of perjury.

Mueller’s team pushed forward, serving 2,800 subpoenas, executing nearly 500 search warrants, and questioning around 500 people.

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.

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.

Among Trump’s friends and aides, six men pleaded guilty or were indicted. Mostly, they were charged with lying to Congress and the FBI

William P. Barr:President Trump’s pick to succeed Jeff Sessions as attorney general, William Barr would come to supervise the special counsel probe as it approached its conclusion. Barr was friends with Robert S. Mueller III, both having worked together previously in the Justice Department. But before coming back into government, Barr had raised questions about Mueller’s case and his team—even sending a memo to Justice Department leaders criticizing what he viewed as the special counsel’s “fatally misconceived” theory of how the president might have obstructed justice.

Aras Agalarov met Donald Trump in 2013, when Agalarov paid to sponsor the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Emails released by Donald Trump Jr. show that Agalarov asked his pop star son to get a meeting with members of the Trump campaign for Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016.

Maria Butina: A Russian gun-rights activist, Maria Butina pleaded guilty in December 2018 to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of Russia for cozying up to American conservatives, notably leaders of the National Rifle Association.

Oleg Deripaska: A Russian billionaire who is close to Russian president Vladimir Putin and has struggled to get visas to travel to the United States because of alleged ties to Russian organized crime, Oleg Deripaska employed Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort as an investment consultant for years. At the time Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016, Manafort owed Deripaska money and, through an aide, offered to give Deripaska “private briefings” about the campaign. Manafort and Deripaska have said the briefings never happened.

Sergey Gorkov: The chairman of the Russian state-owned Vnesheconombank, better known as VEB, Sergey Gorkov met during the presidential transition with Jared Kushner,

Sergey Kislyak: The Russian ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2017, Sergey Kislyak sat in the front row during a Donald Trump foreign policy speech in April 2016 and then interacted with several members of Trump’s campaign, including Senator Jeff Sessions, in the months before the election. In December 2016, as Trump prepared to take office, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, called Kislyak and asked that the Russians not respond to new sanctions imposed by President Barack Obama as a response to Russian election interference.

Viktor Netyksho: Viktor Netyksho is the Russian military intelligence officer US officials alleged in court documents was in command of Unit 26165, which is accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The special counsel’s office charged Netyksho, along with eleven other Russian nationals, in July 2018 with executing a hacking conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.

Dmitry Peskov: Press secretary to Russian president Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Peskov is considered one of Putin’s closest advisers. In January 2016, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen emailed Peskov to ask for his help advancing plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen later lied to Congress and said he received no response.

Yevgeniy Prigozhin: A Russian businessman known as “Putin’s chef” because he owned a catering business favored by the Russian president, Yevgeniy Prigozhin was accused by the special counsel’s office of funding the St. Petersburg troll farm called the Internet Research Agency and its elaborate social media campaign to influence Americans prior to the 2016 election. He was charged in February 2018 along with twelve other Russian nationals with conspiring to defraud the United States for the social media plot.

The US intelligence agencies announced in January 2017 that they had assessed that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered a multipronged operation during the 2016 presidential campaign intended to divide Americans, hurt the electoral prospects of Democrat Hillary Clinton, and elect Donald Trump.

Ivan Timofeev: Director of programs at the Moscow-based think tank the Russian International Affairs Council, Ivan Timofeev communicated with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in the spring of 2016 about arranging a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Natalia Veselnitskaya: A Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya has lobbied against the Magnitsky Act, a law passed in 2012 that imposed sanctions against top Russians for human rights abuses. The law has particularly vexed Vladimir Putin, and in retaliation for its passage Russia halted the adoption of Russian children by US families. Donald Trump Jr. agreed to meet with Veselnitskaya in June 2016 after being told she would provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Christopher Steele: A former officer with the British intelligence service 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. The research, which was rejected by Trump, was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

This report is submitted to the Attorney General pursuant to 28 C.F.R. § 600.8(c), which states that, “[a]t the conclusion of the Special Counsel’s work, he . . . shall provide the Attorney General a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions [the Special Counsel] reached.”

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

In late July 2016, soon after WikiLeaks’s first release of stolen documents, a foreign government contacted the FBI about a May 2016 encounter with Trump Campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos had suggested to a representative of that foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. That information prompted the FBI on July 31, 2016, to open an investigation into whether individuals associated with the Trump Campaign were coordinating with the Russian government in its interference activities.

The report describes actions and events that the Special Counsel’s Office found to be supported by the evidence collected in our investigation. In some instances, the report points out the absence of evidence or conflicts in the evidence about a particular fact or event. In other instances, when substantial, credible evidence enabled the Office to reach a conclusion with confidence, the report states that the investigation established that certain actions or events occurred. A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.

we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of “collusion.”

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.

We understood coordination to require an agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.

Volume I describes the factual results of the Special Counsel’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and its interactions with the Trump Campaign.