2,000-plus footnotes

What you missed in the Mueller report

POLITICO dived back into the report and its 2,000-plus footnotes to unearth a few details that have not gotten much attention.

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN, KYLE CHENEY and NATASHA BERTRAND

Robert Mueller keeps on giving.

Dozens of overlooked nuggets are buried deep inside the special counsel’s 448-page report that raise yet more intriguing questions about Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and shed new light on charges Mueller considered and dropped, who dished the most on the president, who evaded Mueller's attempts to secure an interview, what happened to the FBI's mysterious counterintelligence investigation and why a Russian Olympic weightlifter ended up on the special counsel's radar.

That’s what happens when two-plus years of investigative work get distilled into a document consumed at the speed of Twitter — and where the sheer volume of news articles about the special counsel’s findings overloaded the most able multitaskers and the fastest speed-readers.

POLITICO dived back into the report and its 2,000-plus footnotes to unearth these details that have not gotten much attention:

Who didn’t get prosecuted

The special counsel made some of his biggest headlines when he brought charges against the likes of Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. But Mueller’s report also showcases his under-the-radar decisions on potential indictments that were never brought.

Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions avoided a perjury prosecution over his Senate confirmation testimony when he memorably told lawmakers that he had no communications with the Russian government during the 2016 campaign. It later came out that he had met with the Russian ambassador to the United States on multiple occasions during the campaign.

Mueller’s team looked at that January 2017 exchange and a pair of follow-up written responses before determining that the election-year meetings that Sessions did have weren’t “sufficient to prove” he gave knowingly false answers to lawmakers. Most notably, Mueller informed Sessions’ lawyers in March 2018 that he was in the clear — eight months before Trump pushed Sessions out of his job.

Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort all escaped prosecution for their role in the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt about Hillary Clinton. Mueller’s report said the office looked into whether the senior campaign leaders should face charges for violating laws banning foreign campaign contributions. But ultimately they opted against pushing for indictments out of concern a conviction wasn’t a sure thing. The special counsel acknowledged lacking evidence to prove any of the three men acted with general knowledge of the crime they’d be committing and said that the promised opposition research wouldn’t necessarily qualify as an illegal donation since it was unclear the information was “a thing of value.”

On the hacking front, Mueller’s team also considered filing charges against an unnamed defendant with trafficking in stolen property, a reveal buried in a footnote. Prosecutors were contemplating bringing the additional charges — they redacted any information about who was being scrutinized — under the Depression-era National Stolen Property Act. Ultimately, however, the special counsel’s office found that hacked emails in electronic form wouldn’t qualify under the law’s almost century-old definition of “goods, wares or merchandise.”

Don Jr. dodges a voluntary Mueller interview

Donald Trump Jr. is quoted extensively in the Mueller report — from his Twitter feed to his text messages and interviews with the Senate Judiciary Committee and Sean Hannity.

But Mueller’s report doesn’t supply any fresh Trump Jr. quotes.

That may be because the special counsel didn’t get a chance to talk directly with Trump Jr. The Mueller report explicitly says the president’s oldest son turned down a request for a voluntary interview. What happened next is left to the imagination: Three lines of redacted text in the same sentence are blacked out for grand jury reasons.

Trump Jr.’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment asking whether his client faced down Mueller in a subpoena fight over the interview.

Annie Donaldson took devastating notes

Annie Donaldson, chief of staff to former White House counsel Don McGahn, appears throughout Mueller’s report in some of its most critical moments, often as the White House aide who took some of the most critical and contemporaneous notes.

Her memos document in vivid detail the chaos inside the West Wing as Trump raged about the Russia investigation.

"Just in the middle of another Russia Fiasco,” McGahn told Donaldson, according to a note she took on March 2, 2017, as Trump pressured Sessions not to recuse from the probe.

Donaldson also memorialized a White House counsel’s office meeting that day in which she described “serious concerns about obstruction” after referencing Sessions. And 10 days later, after FBI Director James Comey confirmed the existence of the Trump-Russia probe, she wrote "POTUS in panic/chaos ... Need binders to put in front of POTUS. All things related to Russia." She later said this commentary was based on discussions with other officials, not an eyewitness account.

On March 21, 2017, Donaldson similarly recalled that Trump himself said Comey had "made [him] look like a fool." But May 9 was the most devastating of all.

“Is this the beginning of the end?" Donaldson wrote, which Mueller indicated she said “because she was worried that the decision to terminate Comey and the manner in which it was carried out would be the end of the presidency.”

Mueller hampered by missing and deleted messages

The special counsel didn’t mince words in noting his work was stymied in part by missing messages and other communications.

Former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon and his associate Erik Prince, for example, gave conflicting accounts of their discussions about Prince’s post-election trip to the Seychelles, where Prince met with a high-level associate of the Kremlin. Both claimed they inadvertently lost all records of their communication.

A related problem hampered Mueller’s efforts to investigate Manafort because “in some instances, messages were sent using encryption applications.” In addition, Manafort deputy Rick Gates sent internal campaign polling data to a longtime associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, designed for sharing with Ukrainian oligarchs. But those messages were sent by the encrypted service WhatsApp, and “Gates then deleted the communications on a daily basis.”

Sekulow needed an attorney to deal with Mueller

Mueller’s report documented how even the president’s lawyer needed a lawyer — to address false statements made by yet another one of the president’s lawyers.

Here’s what happened.

Michael Cohen, the longtime Trump personal attorney, told Mueller’s prosecutors that he got help from other members of the president’s personal legal team as he prepared congressional testimony downplaying Trump’s interest in and awareness of efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 campaign.

Cohen was ultimately charged with making a false statement to Congress over those September 2017 remarks, and during his cooperation sessions he singled out Trump personal counsel Jay Sekulow as helping edit and review the at-issue testimony.

In the Mueller report, the special counsel explained that Sekulow had a chance to add more details and context to Cohen’s description of how the whole event transpired. But Sekulow, through his own attorney, declined.

There was a second “scope memo”

Republicans attempting to understand the depth of Mueller’s probe had long ago fixated on surfacing a copy of the “scope memo” — an August 2017 document from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that explained the contours of the special counsel’s investigation.

Mueller’s team privately disclosed a version of the memo to the federal judge presiding over Manafort’s criminal trial in Alexandria, Va., last summer, frustrating GOP lawmakers who were thwarted in their own bid to see it.

It wasn’t the only scope memo, however. The Mueller report revealed that Rosenstein delivered an even more detailed version of the memo in October 2017 that cleared the way for investigations into Stone, Cohen, former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates and two other individuals whose names were redacted for “personal privacy.”

What’s more, the memo also authorized Mueller to specifically probe Cohen’s use of an LLC to “receive funds from Russian-backed entities” and separately approved investigations into individuals and entities who were considered in league with his original targets, including Manafort. Lastly, the second scope memo transferred to Mueller the FBI’s ongoing false statement investigation into Sessions.

The Mueller-FBI counterintelligence partnership — revealed

One of the most important mysteries of Mueller’s work is what would become of the significant intelligence findings he uncovered — the details that don’t lead to a criminal prosecution but inform the government about national security threats and whether any Americans became unwitting Kremlin tools.

That question is put to rest early in Mueller’s report when he describes a team of FBI embeds who worked to review his investigation’s results and sent written “summaries of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to FBIHQ and FBI Field Offices.”

The special counsel also offered in at least one footnote a glimpse at what type of information the findings — which have not been released — could contain.

“The Office is aware of reports that other Russian entities” — not just the Kremlin’s social media “trolls” — “engaged in similar active measures operations targeting the United States. Some evidence collected by the Office corroborates those reports, and the Office has shared that evidence with other offices in the Department of Justice and FBI.”

It’s a brief glimpse into the bureau’s work, but it could open vast new chapters of Russia intrigue for Congress, where Democrats have demanded briefings on the classified counterintelligence findings of Mueller’s team and the FBI.

The mystery endures over what Carter Page was doing in Moscow

Carter Page — an American energy consultant whose Russia ties have aroused the FBI’s suspicions since at least 2013 — emailed the Trump campaign in January 2016 boasting that he could arrange a “direct meeting in Moscow” between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He criticized U.S. sanctions on Russia and touted high-level Kremlin contacts.

Less than two months later, the campaign tapped him as a foreign policy adviser.

What prompted Page’s initial outreach to the campaign hasn’t been completely explained. And after 22 months, Mueller’s team conceded in its report it still can’t “fully” answer what Page was doing in Moscow in July 2016, a few months after he joined the Trump campaign. The special counsel’s office said it had trouble getting additional evidence or testimony about Page’s trip. But the investigators also said they could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Page had been acting as a foreign agent.

Mueller’s report acknowledges that some things about Page don’t add up. For example, he ostensibly traveled to Moscow in July 2016 to give the commencement address at Moscow’s new Economic School, even though the event typically featured high-profile speakers like Barack Obama. Putin’s top spokesman Dmitry Peskov was notified of Page’s visit, but decided not to meet with him privately.

Page initially denied having any significant meetings during his visit. But he acknowledged to Mueller that he met with Andrey Baranov, a former Gazprom employee who had become the head of investor relations at Russia’s biggest energy company, Rosneft. Page told Mueller “the possibility of a sale of a stake in Rosneft” may have been mentioned “in passing.”

Cohen mistakes Putin operative for Olympic weightlifter

Shortly after Cohen signed a letter of intent to pursue the Moscow real estate deal, Ivanka Trump received an email from a woman named Lana Erchova offering up her husband Dmitry Klokov’s services as someone who could be helpful to her father.

Ivanka Trump forwarded the email to Cohen, who believed incorrectly that Klokov was a former Russian Olympic weightlifter with the same name.

In fact, Klokov was the director of a large Russian electricity transmission company who’d previously been employed as an aide to Russia’s energy minister. Emails exchanged between Cohen and Klokov indicate that they were trying to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin — referred to by Klokov as “our person of interest” — as early as December 2015.

Mueller could not establish that Cohen told the campaign about his conversations with Klokov or that anyone connected with him at a later date. Cohen told Mueller that he let it go because he was already working on the Trump Tower Moscow project with Felix Sater, a Russia-born developer who claimed to have Kremlin connections of his own.

But on July 27, 2018, something else strange happened. Lana Erchova, Klokov’s then-ex wife, sent an “unsolicited email” to Mueller’s office claiming that Klokov had asked her to reach out to Ivanka Trump “on behalf of the Russian officials” who wanted to offer Trump “land in Crimea among other things and [an] unofficial meeting with Putin." Mueller’s office reached out to ask for more detail but never received a reply.

A little more is learned about the mysterious overseas professor

One of the most tantalizing — and still unresolved — subplots of the Russia investigation is the role a shadowy foreign professor played in the Kremlin’s election interference.

Joseph Mifsud, described by Mueller as “a Maltese national who worked as a professor at the London Academy of Diplomacy in London,” was the first to tell the Trump campaign that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. His disclosure came in April 2016, well before the hack on the Democratic National Committee was made public.

George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign adviser who met with Mifsud and learned of the “dirt,” described Mifsud as “a good friend” in emails to the campaign about their meetings. Since being arrested and later imprisoned for lying to the FBI about his communications with Mifsud, however, Papadopoulos has insisted that the professor is a Western intelligence asset who was setting him up.

But Mueller outlines in the report, for the first time, the “various Russian contacts” Mifsud maintained while living in London — which included a “one-time employee” of the Internet Research Agency, the company employing the Russia online trolls that Mueller charged in connection with the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign.

Portions of this section are redacted, but Mueller indicates another Mifsud connection to “an employee of the Russian Ministry of Defense,” which had “overlapping contacts with a group of Russian military-controlled Facebook accounts” that were used to promote the Russians’ release of hacked Democratic emails.