Trump’s increasingly mercurial behavior characterizes the second year of near-daily controversy in the White House. He floats pardons for both convicted associates and those under investigation; he remains in secretive contact with potential witnesses against him, raising concerns about possible witness tampering; he works both behind the scenes and publicly, on his Twitter feed, to see punished, demoted, fired, or otherwise disgraced any member of the law enforcement or intelligence community investigating him or his aides, allies, and associates; he maneuvers himself into a position to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, or all three, darkly intimating his intention to do so in daily tweets and statements to the media; he uses Twitter as a weapon, alleging wild “deep state” conspiracies against him at the highest levels of his own government; he plays a public relations game with his self-proclaimed, but perpetually elusive, willingness to cooperate with investigators; he issues declarations of innocence that become propaganda in Russia almost instantaneously. “From the United States, we hear there was not any [Russian] meddling in the elections,” says Putin’s right-hand man and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in August 2018, referring to statements made by the president of the United States.1
In all, the state of not only the Trump presidency but the Union itself comes to seem in doubt in 2018, with the path back to normalcy and good order in government for either law enforcement, Congress, or concerned Americans treacherous at best—and perhaps even impassable.
The Facts
IN JULY 2017, CONGRESS BUCKS years of ever-increasing partisan rancor to agree almost unanimously on a single subject: the need to punish the Russian government for its interference in the 2016 presidential elections. The result is CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act), which passes through both houses of Congress with a total vote of 517–5.2 The bill mandates that the White House submit for congressional approval any proposal to terminate or waive Russian sanctions; that current sanctions against Russia be maintained; and that the executive branch identify new targets for sanctions in ten sectors of Russian activity. Trump signs CAATSA in August 2017, yet declares that the bill is “seriously flawed” and “encroaches on the executive branch’s authority to negotiate [with the Kremlin].”3 When the October 2017 deadline for the White House to identify new sanction targets arrives, the White House ignores it; indeed, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, an “old friend” of Putin’s according to Vanity Fair, has shut down the State Department office that oversees sanctions.4 At the very end of November, the White House finally issues a preliminary list of new targets upon whom sanctions will be leveled in January.5
In January 2018, the Trump administration grudgingly meets CAATSA’s six-month deadline for new sanctions to be announced, identifying twenty-one new persons and nine new companies to be sanctioned, but announces that it will go no further, reasoning that “the threat of sanctions [is] already acting as a deterrent” against continued Russian cyberattacks on the United States and that Russia’s defense industry is “already suffering” to a sufficient degree under the existing sanctions.6 While the White House does release, consistent with CAATSA’s reporting requirements, an unclassified list of 114 senior Russian politicians and 96 businesspeople considered Russian “oligarchs,” it does not impose any penalties on them.7
Trump’s hostility to legally mandated sanctions after signing off on a new round is not the only mixed signal coming out of his administration. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s hand-picked CIA director, declares in January that he “fully expects” the Russians to interfere in the midterm elections—even though the administration has soft-pedaled the CAATSA sanctions on the grounds that they cannot deter Russian cyber-aggression any more than current U.S. countermeasures are.8 Less than seventy-two hours later, news breaks that Pompeo has secretly met with the chief officers of Russia’s foreign intelligence agency and internal security agency, both men barred from entering the United States under the sanctions imposed on Russia in 2014.9 Pompeo is said to have followed a “multi-agency legal process” to get the two Russian intelligence officers into the United States.10
Meanwhile, Mueller continues his interrogations of key figures in the Trump-Russia case. In January, he strikes an agreement with former Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon to interview him out of court rather than subpoena him to appear before a grand jury.11 Around the same time, Jeff Sessions becomes the fifteenth member of the Trump administration to be interviewed by Mueller; the attorney general’s voluntary interview lasts “several hours,” according to confirmation by the Justice Department.12 In March, investigators from Mueller’s team question Trump national security adviser Erik Prince and subsequently seize his phones and a computer.13 Media reports note that one of Mueller’s many possible areas of inquiry for Prince is the means by which Prince’s January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles was arranged. While Prince claims it was merely a fortuitous event, other reporting, most notably from the Washington Post, suggests otherwise:
The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. . . . [T]he UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would be likely to require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions. Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump.14
In his November 2017 testimony before Congress, Prince had grudgingly admitted to being told of a single meeting involving Steve Bannon and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, but according to the Post there were multiple such “discussions.” They also involved Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner, and the crown prince decided to assist the Trump transition team in setting up a back channel to Putin only after “[meeting] twice with Putin in 2016 . . . and urg[ing] the Russian leader to work more closely with the Emirates and Saudi Arabia—an effort to isolate Iran.”15
In April, Special Counsel Mueller asks Dana Boente, the FBI’s general counsel, to testify before the Trump-Russia grand jury. The request is significant because Boente is one of Comey’s corroborating witnesses, fellow FBI officials to whom Comey related his conversations with Trump shortly after they were completed and who kept their own contemporaneous notes. While Trump has successfully cast doubt on Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe (another Comey confidant), in the minds of many Republicans in Washington, Boente remains undiscussed and untouched by Trump and his allies thus far. Boente’s testimony also underscores that Mueller is considering obstruction of justice charges in the Trump-Russia affair—if brought against Trump, an impeachable offense—and not merely Trump-Russia collusion, which would in the first instance be charged as aiding and abetting or conspiracy.16
In June, Mueller’s team questions Ukrainian politician Andrii V. Artemenko for “several hours” before a grand jury. Artemenko will later say that most of the questions were focused on Michael Cohen, confirming that Mueller retains significant interest in Trump’s personal attorney and fixer on the Russia collusion question, even as federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Cohen for white-collar financial crimes.17 This interest is confirmed when it is revealed that Mueller’s agents have also detained and questioned Viktor Vekselberg, the Russian oligarch who paid Cohen hundreds of thousands of dollars in alleged consulting fees, at a New York airport.18
In August, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York grant immunity to Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. While the grant is a “limited” one that is allegedly focused on the ongoing investigation of Michael Cohen, the deal with Weisselberg raises the specter of Mueller sometime soon piercing the T
rump Organization’s corporate veil to get information on Trump’s own financial dealings and tax returns.19 According to CNN, Weisselberg is “so much more than [the Trump Organization CFO]. Hired first by Trump’s father, Weisselberg has been the money man in Trump’s orbit for decades. And, he didn’t just handle finances for the Trump Organization but also for Trump’s personal accounts.”20 According to Bloomberg, “Nobody knows the Trump Organization like Allen Weisselberg.”21 The Atlantic, writing on the grant of immunity to Weisselberg, concluded that “New York prosecutors may pose a bigger threat to Trump than Mueller.”22 Mueller’s relationship with New York prosecutors is procedurally a two-way street, however; just as Mueller can, in August, refer three individuals for prosecution by the Southern District of New York for failing to register as foreign lobbyists, the Southern District is presumed to be willing to share with Mueller any information from its own investigations.23 Slate will even speculate that Mueller’s intention in “spread[ing] [his] work around” to other prosecutors is to hedge his bets against his own eventual firing, making the investigation of Trump’s business dealings impossible to derail even if Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, and Mueller himself are all fired by the president.
In late February, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence interviews Hope Hicks in a closed session. Hicks reportedly refuses to answer any questions about events post-inauguration—while admitting she may have lied for Trump on occasion, although she insists none of the lies were “substantive.”24 The next day, she announces that she will be resigning her position at the White House.25 Within twelve days, the committee has ended its investigation. It will later issue a report—endorsed only by its Republican members—concluding that there was no collusion whatsoever between the Trump campaign and Russia.26
In March, federal agents detain self-described Trump adviser Ted Malloch—also a known associate of Roger Stone’s—and seize his cell phone. Their subsequent questioning of him focuses on Stone, WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Nigel Farage, and Malloch’s repeated contacts with both Stone and the Trump campaign in 2016.27
Throughout 2018, Mueller proceeds expeditiously with his work, periodically issuing indictments that rock America’s political ecosystem before returning to the necessary secrecy and opacity of his ongoing investigation. While some of the major advancements in Mueller’s federal criminal probe are attributable to charges brought by Mueller and his D.C. team, others are the result of Mueller’s referrals to federal prosecutors elsewhere. Into this latter category falls one particularly critical set of Trump-related convictions: eight convictions for Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, for offenses including tax fraud, bank fraud, causing an unlawful corporate contribution, and making an excessive campaign contribution.28 While there is no direct link between these convictions and the Trump-Russia case, other than them comprising additional evidence that Trump is easily blackmailed—a perpetual concern if Putin holds kompromat on him—they do directly implicate Trump in a crime for the first time since he has taken office.
At his in-court allocution, Cohen unambiguously identifies Trump (using a euphemistic appellation required by Department of Justice protocols) as the man who directed him to commit a number of his crimes.29 Because the prevailing wisdom in the Department of Justice and the legal community more broadly is that a sitting president cannot be indicted—or, if indicted, cannot be tried in a criminal court—Cohen’s accusation does not lead to immediate legal jeopardy for Trump.30 But it adds evidence of criminality to any future impeachment proceedings and, perhaps as important, puts Cohen at the mercy of Special Counsel Mueller. Cohen’s plea deal in Manhattan all but ensures he will spend at least four or five years in prison. But cooperation with Mueller could potentially shorten that sentence, or any sentence Mueller might seek on collusion-related conspiracy charges down the line—though at the time of Cohen’s plea all parties agree no such deal yet exists.31
Cohen faces additional legal liability for his clandestine negotiations with Russian nationals during the campaign; for ferrying a policy proposal by a foreign power to the White House, which would violate the Logan Act; and for possibly selling access to Trump prior to Trump’s inauguration. He was also paid $400,000 by Ukrainian nationals to set up a back channel between Trump and Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko in June 2017, according to the BBC. The timing of the payment is significant, because shortly afterward, the Ukrainian government halted its domestic criminal investigations of Paul Manafort.32
Another case Mueller hands off to other prosecutors that likewise could, in time, become significant to the Trump-Russia investigation is Maria Butina’s indictment in the District of Columbia in July for conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and failing to register as a foreign agent.33 While the very fact of Butina’s arrest (and the continued freedom of her boyfriend, Paul Erickson) suggests that Erickson may be a cooperating witness in the case against her, her youth, vulnerability as a Russian national caught in a nation not her own, and apparently substantial knowledge of Russian intelligence activities and capabilities within the United States suggest she, too, could be susceptible to a cooperation agreement.34 Certainly, the information Mueller appends to her indictments suggests that she has substantial knowledge to offer Mueller on the subject of illicit Russian activities from the same period of time the Trump-Russia investigation is focused upon: 2012 to 2016.35
Of course, Mueller also remains busy in 2018, continuing his prosecution of Trump associates while adding to his prosecutorial brief new charges against Russian nationals directly involved in Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. In February, he indicts thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian organizations on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and six counts of aggravated identity theft.36 Because the special counsel uses what is called a “speaking indictment”—an indictment that not only lays out charges but discusses in some detail the inculpatory facts undergirding them—his indictment of participants in Russia’s Internet Research Agency gives Americans their first look at the Russian propaganda operation from the inside. What Americans learn is that Russia’s election influence and interference campaign began in May 2014, approximately six months after Trump returned from his November 2013 Miss Universe Moscow trip. Putin’s anger over the American response to his 2014 annexation of Crimea is more likely to have prompted his initiation of such a complex, hostile, and geopolitically dangerous operation in May 2014 than Trump’s still-incipient presidential campaign, but it is nevertheless clear—given Trump’s December 2013 conversations with New York politicians and Trump aide Sam Nunberg’s observations of when Trump decided to run for president—that for those in the know, particularly those in personal or business partnerships with Trump, his plans for 2016 were evident in late 2013. Mueller’s indictment of the Internet Research Agency and a number of its participants also establishes that several Russian nationals traveled to the United States to conduct reconnaissance before the operation began, raising the possibility that they were in contact with American political operatives during their travels.37 As NPR notes, Mueller’s indictment does confirm that Trump campaign workers corresponded with “Russian influence-mongers . . . [who] even paid some Americans to show up for protests they organized,” but “none of the Americans knew they were dealing with Russian operatives,” despite their actions offering “important help” to the Russian operation.38 Russian interactions with unwitting Republican political operatives even aided the Russians in determining which states to target their activities toward for maximum impact during the 2016 election cycle.39
While both Mueller and his Russian defendants are aware the case will never be prosecuted—the DOJ and FBI have no expectation the Kremlin will extradite the men and women charged—the indictment does have the unanticipated side effect of briefly forcing Trump to acknowledge Russian malfeasance. On February 16, 2018, Trump tweets, “Russia started
their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong—no collusion!”40 Trump’s erroneous statement of when information about his anticipated 2016 presidential run became common knowledge in select political and corporate circles aside, his reference to an “anti-US campaign” by Russia will be one of the only times he ever recognizes Russian criminality during the 2016 election as a certainty rather than one possible scenario among many.
In July 2018, Mueller charges twelve spies from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, as key culprits behind the Russian hacking operation that attacked America’s electoral infrastructure in 2015 and 2016. The GRU—the same Russian outfit with which Michael Flynn was unusually enamored in 2013 and 2014—is accused by Mueller, per Vox, of “hacking the computer networks of members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Committee . . . [and] coordinat[ing] to release damaging information to sway the election under the names ‘DCLeaks’ and ‘Guccifer 2.0.’ ”41 The former of these two entities, a website, had its first full day of operation on June 9, 2016, the very day the Kremlin promised to give the Trump campaign materials damaging to Clinton, while the latter, a persona, was in contact with Trump adviser Roger Stone on more than one occasion. Mueller’s indictment is silent on whether the actions of these GRU spies affected the outcome of the 2016 election, and indeed it takes the same non-position on that question that Mueller’s February indictments did. But in mid-July, Trump will nevertheless tweet that the special counsel’s investigation is intended as merely a “Democrat excuse for losing the ’16 Election.”42 In all, Mueller’s July indictment charges eleven Russians with conspiracy to commit computer crimes, eight counts of aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money, while two defendants are charged with a separate count of conspiracy to commit computer crimes.43
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