Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  Off in the wings, however, a more serious defense strategy was forming with the pending Senate confirmation of William Barr as Trump’s next attorney general. Barr was no Matthew Whitaker. He was a serious lawyer who had already done a stint as the nation’s top law enforcement officer under George H. W. Bush. Yes, Barr had written an unsolicited letter in June to Rod Rosenstein challenging Mueller’s ability to go after Trump for obstruction of justice. “Mueller should not be permitted to demand that the president submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction,” he said. But he would be fair, the thinking went. He was a solid member of the Washington legal establishment.

  Few predicted just how fierce a partisan warrior he would become.

  After Barr was confirmed by the Senate on February 14, all attention in Washington turned to the coming testimony of Cohen before the House Oversight Committee. Trump had called his former consigliere a “rat” for his willingness to cooperate with Mueller and Congress. Cohen’s testimony at the end of the month was must-watch television: A blindly loyal servant who had done the boss’s bidding and was now paying for it with a three-year prison sentence was out for revenge.

  Cohen had nothing to lose, his credibility already gone. Cohen called Trump a “racist,” a “con man,” and a “cheat” who had directed him to lie to Congress and had been well aware that WikiLeaks planned to publish stolen emails in an effort to hurt the Clinton campaign. He listed numerous examples of Trump’s knowingly inflating the value of various properties to deceive lenders. He painted a picture of a petulant promoter who cared only about pimping his own brand through the presidency. Cohen delivered a lot of smoke, if not yet a gun. Backup, presumably, would come in the Mueller report.

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  Trump’s defenders were determined that Mueller not get the first word. His report couldn’t drop onto an expectant Washington without proper context and advance PR. So, in an extraordinary stroke of political legerdemain, Trump’s new attorney general, Barr, moved to color the public’s view of Mueller’s work well before they could read it themselves.

  On Friday, March 22, Mueller submitted his report to Barr. Two days later, midway through a hazy Sunday afternoon, Barr sent to Congress a four-page letter “to advise you of the principle conclusions reached by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.” The cable news networks went into overdrive. All the news outlets raced to post the letter online immediately. This was the moment the country had been waiting for.

  Barr’s letter listed the size of the FBI team devoted to the investigation, the 2,800 subpoenas issued, the nearly five hundred search warrants executed, the five hundred witnesses interviewed. Then he got to what mattered most to the White House: “The Special Counsel’s investigation,” he wrote, “did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

  Thus, according to Barr: No collusion.

  Yes, there was massive evidence to support the allegation that the Russians had interfered in an unprecedented way in the 2016 election. But they had done so, Barr wanted to make clear, without the involvement of the Trump team.

  On the issue of obstruction, Barr said that Mueller had “ultimately decided not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment.” Instead, Barr said, the special counsel had deferred that matter to him, the attorney general, and Barr had concluded that there was no grounds to criminally charge the president for obstruction, irrespective of any constitutional protections that might accrue to a president.

  And so: No obstruction.

  Clearly attuned to what was coming, Trump began the day with a cheery tweet: “Good Morning, Have A Great Day!” One minute later: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” And then, shortly after Barr’s letter went public, as though they had been in cahoots all along, Trump blasted the tweet he so wanted: “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!”

  Barr’s letter was intended to deflate, to prick the balloon in advance of the report itself. It was intended to get the simple message straight to the public that Mueller hadn’t found all that much, and people could move on with their lives. In that, it largely succeeded.

  At Fusion, the ploy stirred instant suspicions of a whitewash, as it did with most anyone who had followed developments closely. Trump’s obstruction of justice was as plain as day. He had fired Comey to stop the Russia investigation and even admitted as much to Lester Holt on national television. That Mueller had fallen short of gathering evidence to support a single conspiracy charge also seemed astonishing, given the mass of contacts and attempts to egg the Russian efforts along. Then again, conspiracy is notoriously hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and it seemed plausible that Mueller wouldn’t have gambled on pursuing a charge he couldn’t substantiate in court.

  Based on Barr’s letter, Mueller’s inquest at first blush appeared to have been a bust. The press coverage reflected the anticlimax, with many reporters acting as though Barr’s four-page letter was itself a worthy distillation of Mueller’s entire report.

  The chicanery at the heart of Barr’s letter began to sink in over the coming days. Mueller himself wrote to Barr three days later, saying the summary “did not capture the context, nature and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.” Barr had omitted reams of damaging information and context. The clamor for release of the full report increased.

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  When Mueller’s report was finally released to the public on April 18, its 448 redacted pages provided, for the first time, a dense, detailed, blow-by-blow walk through the sordid twists and turns of the 2016 campaign, as well as the many Trump efforts afterwards to block Justice Department efforts to investigate what had happened.

  In all, it was a devastating indictment of a campaign and a presidency. Had people received the full force of these findings for the first time, Trump’s political career might have ended. As it happened, Mueller in many instances was simply confirming the litany of huge scoops the press had delivered since January 2017. The story was long. It was complicated. It involved a huge cast of characters that was hard to keep straight. It had all played out over several years. It was hard to see all the threads in the Russia picture. Many people were tired of it all. The nation had exhausted its capacity for outrage.

  The more astute observers had warned all along that Mueller’s final report would likely lack the cathartic finale many wanted. Mueller was a cautious man. He stayed within his prescribed lines and stuck religiously to the rules. His report was unlikely to stray beyond findings of fact already memorialized in the many indictments he had handed down. These skeptics were right, to a point. The report was a measured take on events, but it did furnish Congress with more than enough ammunition to pursue impeachment, if it so chose. Its pages very pointedly did not exonerate Trump. They described a leader obsessed with ending a federal investigation that could hurt him, an administration that repeatedly changed its story and told its members to lie, and a campaign that was in repeated contact with Russian officials and lied about it.

  These same outlines held true when Mueller finally went before Congress to testify on July 24, a day long anticipated and duly trumpeted for days in advance by all the cable networks. In all, Mueller failed to impress. He was cautious, hesitant, at times bumbling. He offered no new revelations into what had happened in 2016, or how Trump tried to block his efforts in the years after.

  The Republicans, predictably, brought the script back to two of their favorite bogeymen: Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS. Simpson was mentioned no fewer than thirty-five times before the two House committees. Fusion GPS got fifty-four mentions.

  For Devin Nunes, now merely the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, it was all about Fusion. “Welcome, everyone, to the last gasp of the Russia collusion conspiracy theory
,” he said, kicking off his opening statement, often with phrases taken straight from Sean Hannity’s own spiels on Fox News.

  “There is collusion in plain sight—collusion between Russia and the Democratic Party,” Nunes said. “The Democrats colluded with Russian sources to develop the Steele dossier. And Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya colluded with the dossier’s key architect, Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson.”

  For all that the press had reported over three years, and all that Mueller had laid out in his report—the Russian bot armies; the indictment of multiple Russian actors; the varied efforts by Trump aides to connect with multiple Russian officials; the secret bid in 2016 to get a Trump Tower project under way in Moscow; Trump’s many encouragements of Russian help; his bizarre obsequiousness around Putin; his steady campaign to hinder and obstruct any investigation of these actions—for all of that and more, Nunes wanted to cast the brightest light on Fusion.

  “Fusion GPS, Steele, and other confederates,” Nunes said, “fed these absurdities to naive or partisan reporters and to top officials in numerous government agencies.”

  The Republican construction of the upside-down world was now complete. The Russia investigation was all an elaborate ruse, created first and foremost by a little band of consultants called Fusion GPS.

  The Democrats, determined and detailed in their questioning as the day wore on, did get Mueller to state publicly his most damning findings: That Trump had not, in fact, been exonerated. That Trump had lied repeatedly. That he had sought the aid of WikiLeaks to damage the Clinton campaign. That “it was not a witch hunt.” That the Russians had very blatantly interfered in the election. And that they were preparing to do so again.

  In the end, the Mueller probe sidestepped the question that so unnerved Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele in the summer of 2016: Was the president of the United States under the influence of a foreign adversary?

  As the dust settled on Robert Mueller’s work and his desultory testimony before Congress, several realities became clear.

  First, the main lesson of Watergate wasn’t heeded. Mueller did not—or was not allowed to—follow the money. There is no indication in his report that the investigation looked at Trump’s taxes, his outstanding debts, his curious relationship with Deutsche Bank, or his long history of financing real estate projects with foreign cash of unknown origin—precisely the places where Russian influence efforts were most likely to surface. Over the years, projects from Trump Tower to Trump SoHo to Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, had all taken in millions in cash from Russian buyers. The special counsel’s report did not address the possibility that Trump had used these properties to launder money, or that these deals left him susceptible to Russian manipulation when he ran for president.

  Second, Justice Department policy ensured that the president would not be held accountable, regardless of what Mueller found. The report made clear that, were Trump anyone else, he would have been charged with multiple counts of obstruction of justice. On that, hundreds of former prosecutors agree. But two prior Justice Department opinions held that it was unconstitutional for a sitting president to be criminally charged while in office, and Mueller did not challenge those opinions.*

  Third, Trump’s sweeping efforts to obstruct Mueller’s probe—and the lies that landed several of Trump’s top deputies in jail—ultimately succeeded in preventing investigators from learning what took place between Trump and Russia. Time and again, the special counsel’s report says that prosecutors were not able to answer some of the most pivotal questions. Why did Manafort share polling data from key swing states with Konstantin Kilimnik, a man with ties to Russian intelligence? Who tipped Trump off to the impending leaks from WikiLeaks? Did Roger Stone coordinate the release of hacked DNC emails with Russian intelligence and Julian Assange? Whom did Carter Page meet with in Moscow in June 2016? Did the Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud and Trump’s Russian business associate Sergei Millian work on behalf of Russian intelligence? Why did Jared Kushner try to set up a secret back channel through the Russian ambassador?

  Mueller never found out. And on several of these fronts, it is not clear how hard he tried.

  It slowly became clear in the summer of 2019 that Mueller never investigated whether the Kremlin had turned President Trump or members of his administration into agents of Russian interests, witting or unwitting. Was Russia using economic or other leverage to manipulate Trump? Did that explain Trump’s bizarre coddling of Putin and his reluctance to impose sanctions or say a harsh word about Russia’s illegal seizure of the Crimea, its use of chemical weapons in England, and its attempts to hack the U.S. election system?

  That central question—whether Russia had Trump under its thumb—was the focus of a secretive counterintelligence investigation that, according to Mueller, was hived off from his duties early on. Its findings—if any—remain buried deep in the bowels of the FBI’s spy-hunting unit, where they will likely remain. Some of those inquires quietly continue, Mueller told Congress in his June 2019 testimony. Given the sensitive nature of such investigations, the results are rarely disclosed, meaning the American people may never know what comes of them.

  None of this is to suggest that Robert Mueller failed at his job. His team probed diligently within the Justice Department’s narrow guidelines, leading to criminal indictments of thirty-four individuals, including six members of Trump’s inner circle as well as a dozen Russian intelligence agents behind the hack of Democrats and thirteen individuals and three companies tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which ran propaganda efforts on social media. He finished his work in less than two years, avoiding the errors of past independent counsels like Kenneth Starr, who became a semi-permanent presidential inquisitor. As important, Mueller’s team conducted itself with dignity and discipline amid the political maelstrom whipped up by Trump and his Republican allies, giving the nation a symbolic bulwark against those norm-destroying forces.

  But Mueller’s cramped mandate and his determination to wrap up expeditiously meant that key questions about Trump’s relationship with Russia would have to be answered by Congress, other federal or state prosecutors, and the courts. Unfortunately, none appeared particularly suited to the task.

  When Democrats retook the House of Representatives in 2018, they used its investigative authority to renew the inquiries Republicans spent two years blocking. But the Trump administration only intensified its campaign of open obstruction—ignoring subpoenas, citing legal privileges that don’t exist, and refusing to produce documents even when ordered by the courts. The tactics worked, and congressional inquiries got bogged down in legal squabbling as the 2020 elections loomed. Democrats were bitterly divided by the demands of their base to hold Trump accountable in an impeachment proceeding, with many of the party’s leaders wary of the reality that, post-Mueller, Russia had become a tricky political issue. Trump’s Russia entanglements were hardly mentioned in the early rounds of the 2020 Democratic primary debates.

  The federal courts proved to be the last bastion of the reality-based world, with federal judges unflinching in their handling of the criminal cases spinning out of the Mueller investigation. But while the Russia probe tangled the Trump administration for two years, White House officials quietly managed to remake the courts. By the summer of 2019, nearly one in four federal appeals court judges were Trump appointees. The impact of their lifetime appointments may hamstring future efforts to hold Trump accountable.

  Ultimately, the job of finding answers to those questions Mueller left dangling fell to the fourth estate, private citizens, and researchers like those at Fusion GPS.

  So just what did happen in the run-up to the election?

  For Simpson and Fritsch, the extraordinary events of 2016 triggered early alarms because of the overlap between those events and their work as journalists in the 2000s, investigating the emerging nexus between post-Soviet kleptocracy and American politics. Wh
at at first seemed a colorful vein of reporting on the globalization of lobbying and corruption gradually became a far more troubling inquiry into how a rogue state—Russia—seemed to be attempting to infiltrate and subvert the American political system.

  The story begins not with Trump but with Vladimir Putin, who for more than a decade aggressively pursued ways to covertly influence and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and numerous other Western democracies he blamed for stripping Russia of its rightful role as a superpower. After the Cold War, Moscow’s goal became one less focused on stealing state secrets than on cultivating support abroad for its political priorities, especially recognition of its territorial claims over parts of the former Soviet Union.

  Before Trump, Putin’s biggest “get” in this sense was former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. After losing to Angela Merkel in 2005, Schröder became an ardent Putin supporter while earning riches sitting on the boards of companies led by Russian state energy giant Gazprom. Asked in 2004 if he thought Putin was a “flawless democrat,” Schröder said, “I am convinced he is.”

  Like Schröder, Trump was more of a target of opportunity than a Manchurian candidate who was somehow brainwashed by Putin. He’s simply the latest and most powerful politician to look past the crimes of an autocrat when there’s possible money on the table. Trump’s long infatuation with making deals in the former Soviet Union, combined with his craven desire for an economic comeback after years of bankruptcy, made him the most susceptible among a number of American political figures from both parties whom the Russians targeted for cultivation over many years.