“Let’s get it out as quickly as we can,” Barr said. “If we don’t put out the whole thing, we’ll be back in the same boat we’re in.”
At the end of the discussion, Mueller agreed that his team would work on the redactions with the attorney general’s office, and Barr let him know that he was unhappy with how Mueller had communicated with him. “Bob, we’ve known each other for a long time, just pick up the phone and give me a ring,” Barr said. “By the way, here is my cell if you want to call me over the weekend.”
Barr later told Congress that he had declined to release Mueller’s summaries because he believed it was akin to releasing a small piece of the report—that could be analyzed, dramatized, and used as political weaponry—without releasing the rest of the report as context.
“I think—I think—I suspect that they probably wanted more put out,” Barr later told Congress. “But in my view, I was not interested in putting out summaries or trying to summarize, because I think any summary, regardless of who prepares it, not only runs the risk of, you know, being underinclusive or overinclusive, but also, you know, would trigger a lot of discussion and analysis that really should await everything coming out at once.”
Barr told lawmakers that it did not matter what Mueller wanted; Mueller worked for Barr, and it was up to the attorney general to decide what was released.
“It was my baby,” Barr told lawmakers.
My baby. Mueller, the embodiment of by-the-book, rule-of-law independent justice in America for a generation, had been rolled by the attorney general. In the spring of 2017, the president had angrily complained that in Sessions and Rosenstein he had two disloyal men running his own Justice Department.
Finally, he would tell others, he had found someone who was loyal—he had found his Roy Cohn.
★ ★ ★
APRIL 16, 2019
TWO DAYS UNTIL THE RELEASE OF THE MUELLER REPORT
DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL’S CONFERENCE ROOM, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT—Emmet Flood and Trump’s personal lawyers trekked to the Justice Department to read the full Mueller report. For the entire day, they examined all 448 pages that Attorney General Barr planned to release to the public on Thursday of that week. Because executive privilege had been preserved, the president’s lawyers needed to sign off on the information going public.
The lawyers were comforted, a bit, that there were no major surprises. They believed the new incidents were similar to the ones that had already become public. The calculus was both cynical and valid. Throughout the investigation, the president had flagrantly attacked it and there were countless disclosures about how he sought to interfere with it. Because so much of it had been out there, however, it would be hard to shock the public with Mueller’s findings—a numbness that would work to the White House’s advantage.
But the report painted a damaging portrait of a president determined to use his power to protect himself from an investigation into his own conduct and the conduct of those closest to him. The report detailed ten episodes of obstruction. Some of Trump’s lawyers could see how the Democrats were going to be able to easily weaponize the report against the president and build an argument that he should be impeached for obstructing justice.
Flood, in particular, thought the report was an abomination. It had clearly been written as an impeachment referral—something that the rules the special counsel operated under had not called for. Among his litany of complaints with the report, it contained no exculpatory evidence that Flood knew Mueller had obtained in his two years of investigating the president. Flood knew from Burck that McGahn told Mueller’s team that despite everything Trump told him to do, McGahn never believed that Trump actually broke the law.
Legally, Mueller’s team would argue, it made no difference how McGahn felt about whether Trump had broken the law; that was not a determination for him to make. But Flood thought that in what essentially amounted to an obstruction referral, it was deeply unfair to not include McGahn’s opinion. For Flood, it was yet more evidence that Mueller’s team was out to get the president.
After reading the report, Trump’s lawyers conferred and discussed whether McGahn might be willing to put out a statement reiterating what he had told the investigators. Flood said he would call Burck.
“There’s nothing really new,” Flood said to Burck about the report. “But Don is the centerpiece of the report.”
Duh, Burck thought.
“It would be helpful if he put out a statement,” Flood said, adding that if McGahn put a statement out after the report was released, it could potentially calm Trump as the media broadcast the obstruction incidents.
To Burck, Flood’s request made sense. Burck knew that McGahn—and all of his other clients who worked for Trump—wanted to do everything to avoid drawing the president’s ire. An adversarial Trump would only complicate McGahn’s life and haunt his future.
Burck called McGahn, laying out what Flood wanted. McGahn knew how to manage Trump as well as anyone, and a statement that gave even the slightest hint that McGahn was still in Trump’s camp just might keep “Kong” off the Empire State Building.
★ ★ ★
APRIL 18, 2019
THE DAY THE MUELLER REPORT WAS RELEASED
PRESS ROOM, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C.—It would take the Justice Department officials and Mueller’s team four weeks to go through the report and redact it. In that time, a narrative that Trump had essentially been cleared took hold. With the report still cloaked in secrecy, Democrats were powerless to push back on the hardening story line that Trump had done nothing wrong. But Barr was still determined to guide the end of the investigation and enshrine that result. The day the report was released, Barr offered a pre-rebuttal for Trump, holding a press conference at the Justice Department. Some Justice Department officials had warned Barr against using language—like “no collusion”—that could be perceived as defending Trump by echoing his own refrain.
But as Barr addressed the country from the lectern, it took just a few minutes for him to repeat the exact phrase that Trump wanted to hear.
“The Special Counsel found no evidence that any Americans—including anyone associated with the Trump campaign—conspired or coordinated with the Russian government or the IRA [Internet Research Agency] in carrying out this illegal scheme,” Barr said. “Put another way, the special counsel found no collusion by any Americans in the IRA’s illegal activity.”
Barr—who was flanked by Rosenstein and the top department official who oversaw Mueller on a day-to-day basis, Ed O’Callaghan—mentioned some form of “no collusion” five times in his twenty-two-minute-long remarks.
Shortly after 11:00 a.m. on Thursday, April 18, the Justice Department released the report. Mueller’s report—hundreds of pages of detailed investigative findings about Trump and his associates—was, on its face, one of the most damning documents ever written about a sitting president.
Particularly in the second volume—the 182-page section laying out more than a dozen incidents in which Trump appeared to be close to or at the point of obstructing justice.
Barr had said that most of what was included in the obstruction section of the report was already publicly reported or something Trump had done in public. But the report contained stark new examples. Despite failing to learn from McGahn about how Trump wanted to prosecute Clinton and Comey, the report contained a similar incident. Trump, according to the report, held Sessions’s job over his head at the same time he pressured him to investigate Clinton and Comey: “According to Sessions, the President asked him to reverse his recusal so that Sessions could direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Hillary Clinton, and the ‘gist’ of the conversation was that the President wanted Sessions to unrecuse from ‘all of it,’ including the Special Counsel’s Russia investigation. Sessions listened but did not respond, and he did not reverse hi
s recusal or order an investigation of Clinton.”
The report also detailed the time that Trump had instructed his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to meet with Sessions and get him to publicly announce his unrecusal. If Sessions refused, the report stated, Trump wanted Lewandowski to tell Sessions that he was fired. Sessions never gave in to that request, which rankled Trump endlessly. Trump had fired Sessions the morning after the midterm elections in 2018.
In tortured fashion, the report declined to say whether any of these incidents actually amounted to a violation of the law, leaving it to legal experts to play prosecutor. Out of the incidents, the experts said, at least four were clear-cut examples of Trump breaking the law. They were all tied to Trump’s efforts to contain the Mueller investigation. They included the new incident involving Lewandowski. But, of greatest significance to our reporting, they also included the attempt to fire Mueller and the attempt to force McGahn to go back on what he had told Mueller about the firing attempt after we broke our story.
There were so many instances of obstruction documented in the report that they crowded each other out, preventing one salient example from rising to the country’s consciousness. It is a great irony that, as with so much else with the way that Trump operates, a cascading chaos dulls the senses, sows confusion, and has the effect of protecting him. One or two instances of a president obstructing justice is relatively easy to understand. Ten instances of a president obstructing justice is overwhelming and disorienting. In the weeks that followed, obstruction failed to catch on.
It would take me a year to put together the pieces of what I believe is one of the most important parts of the report: what it did not contain. Back in May 2017, the FBI had opened a two-pronged investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice and whether he was a Russian agent. When Mueller took over the investigation, the acting FBI director, McCabe, had briefed him on this. Over nearly two hundred pages, Mueller’s team took on the question of whether Trump had obstructed justice. But nowhere in the unredacted version of the report was there a thorough examination of Trump’s ties to Russia. The report did examine whether members of the campaign broke the law for conspiring with the Russians and found no evidence of a criminal offense. But the report said nothing about whether Trump posed a threat to national security or whether his long-standing ties to Russia were problematic.
In reporting for this book, I spoke to several people involved in the Mueller investigation. They told me that investigators never undertook a significant examination of Trump’s personal and business ties to Russia. For instance, they said, investigators knew of financial documents that might show Trump’s ties to Russia, but they never pursued them. Further, in intense negotiations with Trump’s lawyers in seeking an interview with the president, Mueller’s team showed little interest in questioning Trump beyond issues related to the election. And when Mueller’s team ultimately sent Trump questions for him to respond to in writing, they never asked anything other than questions about what occurred during the campaign.
Mueller would later tell Congress that his investigators had not closely examined Trump’s finances, but his disclosures received little attention. In his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Mueller engaged in an exchange with Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois that captures what can only be described as a profound failure to present the full picture of Trump’s ties to Russia.
“You described your report as ‘detailing a criminal investigation,’ correct?” asked Krishnamoorthi.
“Yes,” Mueller answered.
“Director, since it was outside the purview of your investigation, your report did not reach counterintelligence conclusions regarding the subject matter of your report?” Krishnamoorthi asked.
“That’s true,” Mueller said.
“For instance, since it was outside your purview, your report did not reach counterintelligence conclusions regarding any Trump administration officials who might potentially be vulnerable to compromise of blackmail by Russia, correct?” Krishnamoorthi asked.
“Those decisions probably were made in the FBI,” Mueller said.
“But not in your report, correct?” asked Krishnamoorthi.
“Not in our report. We avert to the counterintelligence goals of our investigation which were secondary to any criminal wrongdoing that we could find,” Mueller said.
“Let’s talk about one administration official in particular, namely President Donald Trump. Other than Trump Tower Moscow, your report does not address or detail the president’s financial ties or dealings with Russia, correct?” Krishnamoorthi said.
“Correct,” Mueller said.
“Similarly, since it was outside your purview your report does not address the question of whether Russian oligarchs engaged in money laundering through any of the president’s businesses, correct?” Krishnamoorthi asked.
“Correct,” Mueller said.
“And, of course, your office did not obtain the president’s tax returns, which could otherwise show foreign financial sources, correct?” asked Krishnamoorthi.
“I’m not going to speak to that,” Mueller said.
“In July 2017, the president said his personal finances were off limits, or outside the purview of your investigation and he drew a ‘red line,’ around his personal finances,” Krishnamoorthi asked, referring to our 2017 interview with Trump in the Oval Office. “Were the president’s personal finances outside the purview of your investigation?”
“I’m not going to get into that,” Mueller said.
While Mueller had addressed the question of what his team had or had not investigated, he didn’t explain himself. If the American public or official Washington had expected the Mueller investigation to answer questions of the president’s loyalties that only a counterintelligence investigation could answer, it would not. In reporting for this book, I discovered why. During the struggle between McCabe and Rosenstein in May 2017, it appeared as if McCabe had come out on top, as Rosenstein had appointed Mueller to pick up where McCabe and the FBI had left off on their obstruction and counterintelligence investigations of Trump. But in handing off the investigation from McCabe to Mueller, Rosenstein had suspended the counterintelligence investigation into Trump. He believed that the decision by McCabe and the top counterintelligence investigators at the FBI to open the inquiry into whether Trump was a Russian agent in the first place had been precipitous and premature. Without informing McCabe, Rosenstein told Mueller that his investigation should concentrate on whether crimes were committed, and it should not be a fishing expedition into whether Trump was a Russian agent. If Mueller’s prosecutors wanted to expand their investigation, they could come back to Rosenstein and ask for the authority to do so. But in the meantime, they were to concentrate on whether the Russians had broken the law in their election meddling, and whether any Americans had broken the law in connection with those activities.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had foreclosed any deeper inquiry before the investigation even began.
* * *
—
A month before the report was released, Burck had begun representing the New England Patriots owner, Robert Kraft, after he was accused of soliciting sex at a massage parlor in Florida. Burck was now working around the clock to persuade a judge in Florida to keep video of the alleged incident secret. But as soon as Mueller’s report was released, Burck, who was working from his study at home, dropped everything and began reading. While it was true that McGahn was the centerpiece, there were many others—ranging from characters like Lewandowski to Sessions—who implicated the president in obstructive behavior, showing that Trump had done far more than try to use McGahn to control the investigation. Along with all the damaging details about Trump, there was a small surprise: an anecdote that showed Trump bad-mouthing McGahn. The report said that as Trump sought to pressure McGahn to recant that he had tol
d him to fire Mueller, Trump told Porter that McGahn was a leaker and a “lying bastard.”
Two years of desperately trying to keep the presidency within the bounds of the law, and that’s the thanks he gets. When McGahn heard what Trump had said, he no longer wanted to put out a statement. And Burck agreed that putting out such a statement on the occasion of a report awash in obstruction would look weird. And after being called a liar? No way.
That afternoon, Flood called Burck to find out when they would be putting out the statement. Burck said it was not the right time and explained their rationale.
“What would the purpose be?” Burck said.
Flood grew very agitated—more agitated than Burck had heard him in the dozen years they had known each other and worked closely together. The president, Flood said, was raging. And then Burck heard a refrain he had so many times in the previous two years.
“The president’s going to fire me,” Flood said.
Burck thought it sounded like an empty threat from Trump. And so what if he fired Flood? Flood would just return to private practice, where he worked for a great firm and made a nice living. He would not be putting out that statement.
In the days that followed, Flood did not call Burck back.
That Friday night, I checked in with Rudy Giuliani, who had been in constant contact with Trump and was preparing to go on Fox News. Giuliani told me he would call back when he finished his interview. After the interview, he called and I asked him about McGahn. Giuliani said that McGahn had made inaccurate statements to the special counsel.
“It can’t be taken at face value,” Giuliani told me. “It could be the product of an inaccurate recollection or could be the product of something else,” he said, intimating that McGahn had lied.
Giuliani denied that Trump ever asked McGahn to have Mueller fired. The former mayor said that he wanted the chance to cross-examine McGahn on the witness stand.
I sent Giuliani’s remarks to Burck and asked him for a response. Minutes later, Burck fired back at Giuliani.
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 41
