Tag: Mueller investigation

Trump asked Boris Johnson to help discredit the Mueller inquiry by revealing British intelligence on his links to Russia

Donald Trump called Prime Minister Boris Johnson earlier this year and asked him for access to British intelligence which may discredit the Mueller inquiry into the president’s alleged links to Russia.

The Times of London reports that the president called Johnson on July 26 and asked him to provide the US Attorney General William Barr with evidence that may undermine the investigation.

Several days later Barr attended a meeting of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance in London where he repeated the president’s suspicions about UK intelligence agencies, the paper reports.

View the complete October 2 article by Adam Bienkov on The Business Insider website here.

Trump Pressed Australian Leader to Help Barr Investigate Mueller Inquiry’s Origins

New York Times logoThe discussion was another instance of the president using American diplomacy for potential personal gain.

WASHINGTON — President Trump pushed the Australian prime minister during a recent telephone call to help Attorney General William P. Barr gather information for a Justice Department inquiry that Mr. Trump hopes will discredit the Mueller investigation, according to two American officials with knowledge of the call.

The White House curbed access to a transcript of the call — which the president made at Mr. Barr’s request — to a small group of aides, one of the officials said. The restriction was unusual and similar to the handling of a July call with the Ukrainian president that is at the heart of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

Like that call, Mr. Trump’s discussion with Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia shows the president using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal political interests.

View the complete September 30 article by Mark Mazzetti and Katie Benner on The New York Times website here.

White House blocks key Mueller witness from answering more than 200 questions from House investigators

Washington Post logoAnnHouse Democrats’ hopes of making Annie Donaldson, the former chief of staff to ex-White House counsel Donald McGahn, a star witness in their investigations of President Trump were dashed as White House lawyers blocked her from answering more than 200 questions about potential obstruction of justice by the president.

Donaldson affirmed the accuracy of colorful and striking notes she made while working in the White House — notes that former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III cited 65 times in his report that described 10 episodes that raised concerns about possible obstruction.

But Trump administration lawyers barred her from elaborating on her thinking at the time she captured several exchanges between Trump and her boss — including one note in which she scribbled concern that Trump’s firing of James B. Comey as FBI director would trigger the end of his presidency.

View the complete July 8 article by Rachael Bade, Rosalind S. Helderman and Carol D. Leonnig on The Washington Post website here.

‘The enigma of the entire Mueller probe’: Focus on origins of Russian investigation puts spotlight on Maltese professor

Washington Post logoShortly after Joseph Mifsud’s efforts to help connect a Trump adviser with the Kremlin were detailed in court filings, an Italian reporter found him at a university in Rome, where he was serving as a visiting professor.

“I never got any money from the Russians: my conscience is clear,” Mifsud told La Repubblica. “I am not a secret agent.”

Then Mifsud disappeared.

View the complete June 30 article by Rosalind S. Helderman, Shane Harris and Ellen Nakashima on The Washington Post website here.

Report: Mueller Team Had Enough Evidence To Charge Trump

The Mueller team collected enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice — and Trump would most likely be under indictment right now if he were not a sitting president, according to a Friday report by Murray Waas in the New York Review of Books.

Prosecutors working for Mueller said that, if not for current Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president, they would have advocated that Trump should face federal criminal charges for pressuring former FBI Director James Comey to drop the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Waas spoke to two Justice Department officials who confirmed they were told this information personally by two prosecutors on Mueller’s team. A third person present for the conversation confirmed that it occurred.

View the compete April 27 article by Dan Desai Martin on the National Memo website here.

‘I can land the plane’: How Rosenstein tried to mollify Trump, protect Mueller and save his job

Rod J. Rosenstein, again, was in danger of losing his job. The New York Times had just reported that — in the heated days after James B. Comey was fired as FBI director — the deputy attorney general had suggested wearing a wire to surreptitiously record President Trump. Now Trump, traveling in New York, was on the phone, eager for an explanation.

Rosenstein — who, by one account, had gotten teary-eyed just before the call in a meeting with Trump’s chief of staff — sought to defuse the volatile situation and assure the president he was on his team, according to people familiar with matter. He criticized the Times report, published in late September, and blamed it on former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, whose recollections formed its basis. Then he talked about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and told the president he would make sure Trump was treated fairly, people familiar with the conversation said.

“I give the investigation credibility,” Rosenstein said, according to an administration official with knowledge of what was said during the call. “I can land the plane.”

View the complete April 26 article by Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett on The Washington Post website here.

Trump: Russia investigations an attempted ‘coup’

President Donald Trump on Thursday called the FBI probe into his 2016 campaign and subsequent investigations into Russian election meddling “an attempted overthrow” of his administration.

“This was a coup,” Trump told host Sean Hannity on Fox News’ “Hannity” in his first interview since the Mueller report’s release. “This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government.”

Trump insisted that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election had gone “hog wild to find something about the administration which obviously wasn’t there.”

View the complete April 26 article by Bianca Quilantan on the Politico website here.

Live updates: Mueller rejects argument that Trump is shielded from obstruction laws

Attorney General William P. Barr on April 18 discussed the release of the redacted report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s investigation. (Photo: Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)

President Trump, upon first learning of the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, cursed and declared, “this is the end of my presidency,” according to the redacted 400-page report by Mueller released Thursday by the Justice Department.

The detailed document depicts a Trump campaign that expected to “benefit electorally” from information stolen and released by Russia and a president who subsequently engaged in several alarming actions, including seeking the ouster of former officials and ordering a memo that would clear his name.

The release of the report followed a news conference at which Attorney General William P. Barr exonerated Trump, saying neither he nor his campaign colluded with Russia and that none of Trump’s actions rose to the level of obstruction of justice, despite Mueller leaving that question unanswered in his report.

View the complete April 18 article by The Washington Post website on their website here.

A Mueller mystery: How Trump dodged a special counsel interview — and a subpoena fight

President Trump walks to Marine One to leave the White House on Jan. 14, 2019. Credit: Jabin Botsford, The Washington Post

It was March 2018, nearly 10 months into his Russia investigation, when special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, a man of few words, raised the stakes dramatically in a meeting with President Trump’s lawyers: If the president did not sit down voluntarily for an interview, he could face a subpoena.

In the months that followed, Mueller never explicitly threatened to issue a subpoena as his office pursued a presidential interview, a sit-down for which the special counsel was pushing as late as December.

But with that prospect hanging over them, Trump’s legal advisers conducted a quiet, multipronged pressure campaign to avert such an action and keep the president from coming face-to-face with federal investigators — fearful he would perjure himself.

View the complete March 28 article by Philip Rucker, Carol D. Leonnig, Josh Dawsey and Matt Zapotosky on The Washington Post website here.

Russia responds to Mueller report: Moscow wins, Putin is stronger than Trump and US is a ‘pain in the a – -’

“A mountain has given birth to a mouse. The ‘Russian affair’ falls to pieces before our eyes.”

So pronounced the Russian news site Gazeta.ru, as word of the completed Mueller report swept around the world.

Thus far, official Russian response to the Mueller findings has been scornful. Leaders are taking the conclusions of U.S. Attorney General Robert Barr – that the report shows no collusion between the Kremlin and U.S. President Donald Trump – as a chance to dismiss all claims of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

View the complete March 26 article by Cynthia Hooper, Associate Professor of History, College of the Holy Cross, on the Conversation website here.