More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
embodied the bureau’s straight-arrow traditions, quietly and methodically investigated Trump and nearly everyone in his orbit,
required to notify the attorney general of significant steps he planned to take, not unlike any of the ninety-three US attorneys nationwide, and the attorney general was allowed to veto his decisions.
At a meeting shortly after Mueller’s appointment, McCabe and Rosenstein each suggested that the other should recuse himself from any involvement with the case. Neither did.
he derided Sessions privately as “Mr. Magoo,” an elderly cartoon character popular in the 1960s and iconic for not acknowledging his poor eyesight, and Rosenstein as “Mr. Peepers,” a bespectacled high school teacher from a 1950s sitcom. After word of the insults leaked, Trump denied using the nicknames.
Trump had nothing but praise for Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman, whose lawyers quietly assured Trump’s team that he was not providing damaging information about the president, even after he pleaded guilty to crimes including tax fraud and began cooperating with Mueller.
“Democrats who have been running around for the last two years making outlandish claims about the President and his family ought to apologize to the American people for misleading them and the press about this smear campaign,” said Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the Republican whip. “This report…delivered a death blow to their baseless conspiracy theories.”
Papadopoulos said in his plea that he was told by a London-based professor that month that the Russians held damaging information about Democrat Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Papadopoulos then spent months unsuccessfully trying to arrange meetings between Trump or his campaign aides with top Russian officials,
When former Trump national security adviser Michael T. Flynn admitted lying about his own dealings with a Russian diplomat, Flynn said the interactions were done in consultation with senior Trump transition officials, including Kushner. In particular, Kushner directed Flynn to talk with the Russian ambassador about a UN resolution on Israel,
Flynn admitted as part of a plea agreement that he spoke with McFarland at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort before talking to the diplomat so they could “discuss what, if anything, to communicate to the Russian ambassador about the US sanctions.” Flynn told FBI agents he did not discuss sanctions with the ambassador, though he would later admit that was a lie.
McGahn, who had also served as legal adviser to Trump’s campaign,
Flood steered clear of public attention but advised the White House to limit cooperation with the probe and researched ways to assert executive privilege to potentially prevent Mueller’s report from being shared with Congress, The Washington Post has reported.
Sergey Gorkov met during the presidential transition with Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law. The White House and the bank offered conflicting descriptions of the meeting, with the bank saying it was to discuss business strategy and the White House insisting it was unrelated to business, but instead was one of many diplomatic encounters Kushner had before Trump was sworn in as president.
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.
Ivan Timofeev communicated with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in the spring of 2016 about arranging a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
John Brennan’s agency made critical assessments on the motive of the Russian election-influence operation, including that one of its goals was to help Donald Trump get elected president. Brennan was among the intelligence-community leaders to brief Trump on the Russian plot in January 2017.
Clapper wrote that he had “no doubt” that Russia swung the election to Trump.
At Agalarov’s request, Goldstone emailed Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and asked if he would meet with a Russian lawyer who, Goldstone said, had information to share about Democrat Hillary Clinton.
He also acknowledged in his plea that he worked with a foreigner, who The Washington Post has identified as Paul Manafort’s longtime aide Konstantin Kilimnik, to route an illegal foreign donation from a Ukrainian politician to Donald Trump’s inaugural committee.
A California man who pleaded guilty in October 2018 to identity theft for a scheme in which he sold bank account numbers online. Prosecutors said Russian nationals used the numbers to open PayPal accounts and fund a social media campaign to influence the American electorate.
Investigators have explored whether the gathering was part of an effort to establish a back channel between the Kremlin and the incoming administration,
Sater told Cohen that the ultimately unsuccessful building project could boost Trump’s electoral chances and improve his relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The research, which was rejected by Trump, was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
W. Samuel Patten, a political consultant, pleaded guilty to failing to register as a foreign lobbyist and admitted in an agreement with prosecutors that he steered $50,000 from a Ukrainian politician to Donald Trump’s inaugural committee.
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 Special Counsel’s investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election principally through two operations.
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.
A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.
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. We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States.
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.”
