Russia conspiracy

Mueller finds no Trump-Russia conspiracy

Attorney General William Barr says the special counsel did not take a clear position on whether the president obstructed justice.

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN and JOSH GERSTEIN

Robert Mueller’s nearly two-year-long Russia probe concluded without finding adequate evidence to show that officials with Donald Trump’s presidential 2016 campaign aided Russian attempts to interfere with the election.

“The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” the special counsel wrote in his findings, which Attorney General William Barr released on Sunday in four-page summary form.

Mueller’s long-awaited findings also do not take a clear position on whether Trump obstructed justice, a gray-area conclusion that leaves the door wide open for an already-heated debate in Congress over whether Democrats should even consider impeachment proceedings against the president.

“For each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leave unresolved what the special counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction,” Barr wrote in a letter to the key House and Senate committees.

“The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,’” Barr added.

However, in an apparent departure from the four corners of Mueller’s report, Barr says he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

Notwithstanding that nuance and Mueller’s decision not to assess whether the president committed obstruction, Trump was unreserved in declaring victory Sunday.

The decision by Barr and Rosenstein to publicly put a Trump-vindicating gloss on Mueller’s report was quickly capitalized on by the White House, which drew no distinction between Mueller’s findings and those of Barr and Rosenstein.

“The Special Counsel did not find any collusion and did not find any obstruction,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “AG Barr and DAG Rosenstein further determined there was no obstruction. The findings of the Department of Justice are a total and complete exoneration of the President of the United States.”

That point is certain to unleash a firestorm of criticism from Democratic lawmakers and other Trump critics who appear eager to enter a protracted legal fight to lift the curtain further on the special counsel’s investigation.

Nonetheless, Mueller’s conclusions on Russian meddling as summarized by Barr represent a big victory for Trump, whose White House over the last two years has been consumed by questions about whether it had won the last presidential election with help from a foreign power.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump publicly called on Russia to try to find missing emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. However, Mueller’s report apparently excluded that sort of exhortation, limiting its definition of coordination to a “tacit or express” agreement between the campaign and the Russian government.

Barr’s summary of the special counsel's investigation describes a probe launched in May 2017 that leaned on more than 2,800 subpoenas, the execution of nearly 500 search warrants, 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence and interviews with about 500 witnesses. But apart from the already-known indictments against a series of Trump officials, including his former campaign chairman, personal lawyer and national security adviser, Barr said there were no further indictments from Mueller to be made public and that there were no charges under seal.

Trump, his lawyers and other aides have projected an air of calm while they waited for the Mueller findings, which they got word of officially at 3 p.m. Sunday, when Barr’s chief of staff, Brian Rabbitt, called Emmet Flood, the top White House attorney handling Russia matters, and gave him a summary of the letter going to Capitol Hill.

“That’s the extent of the contact between us and the White House on the report thus far,” a Justice Department official told reporters.

The attorney general and Rosenstein did not consult or coordinate with Mueller about the letter released Friday, a Justice Department official said.

Asked whether there was any disagreement between Barr and Rosenstein over the conclusions made public Sunday, the official said: “The deputy attorney general and attorney general have worked hand-in-hand on this.”

With Democrats on alert for any sign of White House influence over the process, Justice officials insisted they were being careful to observe appropriate protocols.

Barr and Rosenstein said their conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice was not based on longstanding Justice Department policy that sitting presidents cannot be indicted.

However, the top Justice Department officials and Trump appointees said their assessment was influenced by Mueller’s finding that the evidence did not establish that Trump actually committed a crime relating to Russia’s election interference. If he didn’t, he probably wasn’t mounting a cover-up, Barr and Rosenstein said.

“While not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction,” Barr wrote.

Barr’s summary does not address myriad subplots that have long lingered over the Mueller inquiry, including everything from the so-called Steele dossier — a collection of raw intelligence memos compiled by a former British spy that described a years-long Russian plot to cultivate Trump and propel him to the White House — to the now infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 involving a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and several top Trump campaign officials.

That meeting, originally offered on the premise that the Russian government could provide “dirt” on Clinton, has long been seen as an example of the Trump campaign’s eagerness to benefit politically from stolen Democratic emails.

But Barr’s summary does give a nod to the two previously-unveiled Mueller indictments that dig in on the Kremlin’s election meddling effort, the first against an alleged “troll farm” housed in Russia’s Internet Research Agency that filled social media platforms during the 2016 campaign with posts slamming Clinton and backing Trump, and the second involving charges against 12 Russian intelligence officers with the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.

Despite those cases, Barr nonetheless noted that Mueller “did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

A Justice Department official said Sunday that the process of preparing a fuller version of the Mueller investigation for public release was already underway, but refused to predict how long it would take. Officials have also declined to say how long Mueller’s submission to the Justice Department was, beyond describing it as “comprehensive.”

Sunday’s summary hardly resolves all of the questions looming over the president, his White House and the Justice Department. Indeed, another big question Barr still faces is just how much information to make public from Mueller’s investigation on topics where the special counsel didn’t move to file an indictment. With a few exceptions, Justice Department policy has historically been to not air people’s dirty laundry if an investigation didn’t lead to charges.

Barr said in his letter Sunday that his review of Mueller’s report before a more comprehensive forthcoming release would have to take into account the ancillary investigations spawned by Mueller’s investigation.

“I … must identify any information that could impact other ongoing matters, including those that the Special Counsel has referred to other offices,” the attorney general wrote.

Barr’s letter Sunday also warns about the process of making more information public that will be limited by the presence of information Mueller obtained through grand juries. Such testimony and evidence are traditionally kept secret by law, although there are some exceptions to that rule.

“Based on my discussions with the Special Counsel and my initial review, it is apparent that the report contains material that is or could be subject to grand jury secrecy requirements,” Barr wrote, adding that at least some of it “by law cannot be made public.”

While grand jury secrecy does limit the Justice Department’s discretion to release some information, judges sometimes approve such releases, including a disclosure to the House Judiciary Committee as it was preparing articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon over Watergate.

Democrats in today’s Congress — including Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the current head of the powerful House Judiciary Committee — continued to demand access to Mueller’s full report and the underlying evidence, warning that the legislative branch’s constitutional oversight abilities could be impaired if the Justice Department didn’t release incriminating materials about the president.

“It’s equivalent to a cover-up,” Nadler, a New York Democrat, said on “Fox News Sunday” prior to the release of Barr’s summary.

Turning to Twitter after the attorney general sent the summary to Congress, Nadler detailed plans for his next step.

“In light of the very concerning discrepancies and final decision making at the Justice Department following the Special Counsel report, where Mueller did not exonerate the President, we will be calling Attorney General Barr in to testify before @HouseJudiciary in the near future,” he wrote.

Mueller’s investigation, now finished, isn’t the only game in town for Trump. Federal prosecutors in New York are examining the president’s inauguration and campaign spending. States have active inquiries into Trump’s real estate projects and personal finances. The summary document that Barr released Sunday left lawmakers with little in the way of a roadmap as they do their own homework on the question of impeachment.

For the special counsel, impeachment was never something directly on his agenda. It’s an absence that is actually by design and stems from Ken Starr’s five-year tenure investigating President Bill Clinton on a range of controversial matters, including the Democrat’s extramarital affair with a White House intern.

Lawmakers exhausted by Starr’s efforts, which culminated in an unsuccessful and bitterly partisan impeachment effort on Capitol Hill, allowed the post-Watergate law to lapse that authorized those kinds of wide-ranging probe. In its place, the Clinton Justice Department wrote new rules governing future executive branch investigations but dropped the requirement that Starr faced to report any potential impeachable offenses to Congress.

Mueller’s investigators have been working under those same Clinton-era rules and faced no explicit mandate to tell Congress about any possible Trump crimes they found. Essentially, for all the work the special counsel just did to examine the president for possible obstruction of justice, experts say the onus is on lawmakers to decide whether they want to build their own record to try and remove Trump.

“If the House wants to consider impeachment, it needs to do its own work,” Starr wrote in an Atlantic op-ed published Friday.

“It would be odd in the extreme to ask, in effect, the executive branch to become a tool of the legislative branch in a death-struggle with the only individual identified in the Constitution as the possessor and wielder of executive power: the president,” Starr added. “That was the old way, under the old statute. Congress did away with that approach, and wisely so.”

Faced with such limits, House Democrats are struggling with their own next steps.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she wouldn’t allow impeachment proceedings to begin unless one or more true smoking guns emerged that rose to the level of the Constitution’s loosely defined “high crimes and misdemeanors” requirement. She also wants to see significant numbers of Republicans show an interest in backing such an effort; otherwise, the California Democrat said, an attempt to remove Trump is “just not worth it.”

Meanwhile, her Democratic committee leaders have started building a record in case impeachment is a necessary option.

Nadler is working through the thousands of pages of documents from Trump aides and associates that arrived after an initial batch of 81 letters went out earlier this month that seek to duplicate the record Mueller has. Nadler and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), have also said they’ll try to subpoena the bulk of Mueller’s investigative work.

Both Democrats have also said they are ready to call Mueller up to Capitol Hill to deliver both private and public testimony, though people who know the soon-to-be-former special counsel are skeptical he’d divert from a script approved by the Justice Department and divulge details beyond what’s been released to Congress.

While lawmakers may lack in seeing specific mentions of Trump in a Mueller report, that doesn’t mean the president can slip completely under the radar. In New York, prosecutors who secured a guilty plea from Michael Cohen said that Trump directed his longtime personal lawyer to make payments to two women to keep them silent about alleged extramarital affairs.

“You can call someone ‘Individual 1’ all you want,” said James Trusty, a former federal prosecutor and friend of Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. “You don’t have to be a Navajo code talker to decipher who that is.”

While Trump’s hostility toward Mueller’s investigation has been unmistakable, he has sent mixed messages about the report. Weeks ago, the president said he looked forward to seeing it. He also gave House Republicans a green light to join what would end up being a 420-0 vote for the report’s release.

However, in remarks and an interview last week, the president suggested that the special counsel should have never been in position to prepare it.

“Now, somebody is going to write a report who never got a vote,” Trump complained to reporters Wednesday.