Tag: Mueller investigation

Supreme Court to hear dispute over Democrats’ access to Mueller materials

The Hill logoThe Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to take up the dispute over House Democrats’ access to redacted grand jury materials from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

The court is expected to hear the case in its next term, which begins in October, meaning any newly redacted material would likely not be made public until after the November elections.

The decision to grant the appeal means at least four of the court’s nine justices agreed to hear the dispute, with a decision due by the end of the court’s term in June 2021. Continue reading.

The DOJ is hiding a key memo explaining why Trump wasn’t prosecuted for obstructing justice

AlterNet logoWhen former Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his final report for the Russia investigation, he declined to deliver a judgment on whether President Donald Trump should be prosecuted for obstructing justice. Attorney General Bill Barr decided to usurp this responsibility, declaring that the facts didn’t warrant bringing such a charge — but he never explained why.

And according to Conor Shaw and Anne Weismann of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Justice Department has now “confirmed the existence of a memo laying out its rationale for not bringing charges against President Trump” but “refuses to make its reasoning public.”

“The Mueller Report catalogued numerous instances in which President Trump may have obstructed the Russia investigation, including by asking associates to curtail it or to fire the special counsel,” Shaw and Weismann explain. “The memo obtained by CREW explains the legal reasoning behind Attorney General Barr’s suspect claim that ‘the evidence developed during the special counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense.’ The memorandum is also presumably the supposed vindication of President Trump’s claim, after Barr’s announcement, that there was ‘No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION.’” Continue reading.

Justice Dept: Mueller prepared no reports to Congress

A request for records akin to Watergate “road map” comes up dry.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors never drafted a report to Congress about alleged misconduct by President Donald Trump, Justice Department lawyers indicated in a court filing Friday.

DOJ attorneys said they were unable to locate any records in Mueller’s files that were responsive to a Freedom of Information Act request seeking reports and compilations “prepared for the eventual consideration of one or more members of Congress, whether or not such records were actually transmitted to any party outside of the Special Counsel’s Office.”

The FOIA request, submitted in November 2018 by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, invoked a grand jury’s submission to the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 of a so-called “road map”to evidence in the Watergate scandal. The point-by-point guide received a spate of fresh publicity in the fall of 2018 after a judge ordered disclosure of portions of the nearly half-century-old compendium. Continue reading.

Rick Gates was offered cash to stonewall Mueller probe: prosecutors

AlterNet logoProsecutors recommended no prison time for former Trump deputy campaign chief Rick Gates after he resisted pressure and even a cash offer to stonewall investigators and provided “extraordinary assistance” in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Prosecutors said in a court filing that they will not oppose Gates’ request to be sentenced to probation after he pleaded guilty in 2018 to conspiracy, lying to federal investigators and other charges.

Gates cooperated with Mueller’s team after the plea and testified at the trials of former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, who were both convicted of numerous charges, as well as attorney Greg Craig, who was acquitted. Prosecutors said this week that Gates is still assisting with “a number of different ongoing matters.”

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Highlights from the newly released FBI Mueller investigation notes

Washington (CNN) — The Justice Department, responding to a lawsuit by CNN and BuzzFeed, released 295 pages of witness memoranda and notes from FBI interviews that were part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference, including contacts with Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The witnesses include: former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, former Trump 2016 campaign aide Rick Gates, former White House chief of staff John Kelly, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former White House communications director Hope Hicks and former campaign aide Corey Lewandowski.

This is the second release of interview notes from Mueller’s special counsel investigation sparked by lawsuits from CNN and BuzzFeed.

Continue reading here.

House is investigating whether Trump lied to Mueller, its general counsel told a federal appeals court

Washington Post logoHouse investigators are examining whether President Trump lied to former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the House general counsel told a federal appeals court Monday in Washington.

The statement came during arguments over Congress’s demand for the urgent release of secret grand jury evidence from Mueller’s probe of Russia’s 2016 election interference, with House lawyers detailing fresh concerns about Trump’s truthfulness that could become part of the impeachment inquiry.

The hearing followed Friday’s conviction of longtime Trump friend Roger Stone for lying to Congress. Testimony and evidence at his trial appeared to cast doubt on Trump’s written answers to Mueller’s questions, specifically about whether the president was aware of his campaign’s attempts to learn about the release of hacked Democratic emails by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

View the complete November 18 article by Ann E. Marimow, Spencer S. Hsu and Rachael Bade on The Washington Post website here.

Roger Stone’s lies caused inaccurate House Russia report, Mueller team says

Defense says the longtime Trump confidant had no ‘motive’ to lie

Lawyers delivered closing arguments Wednesday in the trial of Roger Stone, a longtime Republican political operative and confidant of President Donald Trump accused of lying to Congress about his interactions with the president’s 2016 campaign and his connections to WikiLeaks.

Stone pleaded not guilty in January to a seven-count indictment of lying to investigators, obstruction of justice and witness tampering. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. The jury is expected to begin deliberations Thursday.

Stone and his lawyers have questioned prosecutors’ motives for pursuing the case against him, accusing them of trying to exact political retribution against Stone for his association with Trump.

View the complete November 13 article by Griffin Connolly on The Roll Call website here.

Internal Mueller documents show Trump campaign chief pushed unproven theory Ukraine hacked Democrats

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, suggested as early as the summer of 2016 that Ukrainians might have been responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee during the presidential campaign rather than Russians, a key witness told federal investigators last year.

Newly released documents show that Manafort’s protege, deputy campaign manager Rick Gates, told the FBI of Manafort’s theory during interviews conducted as part of former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Gates told the FBI that Manafort had shared his theory of Ukrainian culpability with him and other campaign aides before the election.

The new information shows how early people in Trump’s orbit were pushing the unsubstantiated theory about Ukraine’s role. And it illustrates a link between Mueller’s investigation, which concluded in March, and the current House impeachment investigation of Trump. The president had pushed Ukrainians to open a probe into whether their country interfered in the election — an assertion his allies have made in an effort to discredit Mueller’s findings about Russia’s role.

View the complete November 2 article by Rosalind S. Helderman and Spencer S. Hsu on The Washington Post website here.

Maria Butina, Russian Woman Who Admitted Being Kremlin ‘Secret Agent,’ Released From Prison

TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — A Russian gun rights activist who admitted being a secret agent for the Kremlin and trying to infiltrate conservative U.S. political groups while Donald Trump rose to power was released from federal prison on Friday, officials said.

Maria Butina left a low-security facility in Tallahassee, Florida and was placed in the custody of federal immigration authorities. She is expected to be immediately deported to Russia now that she has finished her 18-month sentence.

Butina pleaded guilty last December to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent. She admitted that she worked with a former Russian lawmaker to leverage contacts in the National Rifle Association to pursue back channels to American conservatives during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.

View the October 25 article by Eric Tucker and Bobby Calvan from the Associated Press on the Time website here.

Trump Jr. and McGahn didn’t testify before Mueller grand jury during Russia probe — and a federal judge wants to know why

AlterNet logoDuring the Russia investigation, former special counsel Robert Mueller sought testimony from a long list of people. But according to a court filing on Sunday, two people who Mueller did not force to testify before a grand jury were Donald Trump Jr. and former White House Counsel Don McGahn. And U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wants to know why.

The court filing on Sunday, according to The Week, was in response to a ruling Howell made on Thursday — when Howell asserted that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) was withholding too much information from the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York. The House Judiciary Committee, The Week’s Peter Weber reports, has been “wrangling” with DOJ over the evidence that Mueller obtained during his lengthy investigation.

On Thursday, Howell wrote that it was unclear why Mueller didn’t force Trump Jr. or McGahn to testify. “The special counsel’s reasons remain unknown,” Howell explained. “The reason is not that the individuals were insignificant to the investigation. To the contrary, both of the non-testifying individuals named in paragraph four figured in key events examined in the Mueller Report. Assessment of these choices by the special counsel is a matter for others.”

View the complete October 22 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.