The 448-page report was a breathtaking catalog of presidential scheming and misconduct. Volume 2 detailed ten events that the special counsel scrutinized for possible obstruction of justice by Trump. It was not just a historical record. It also provided a dense legal analysis of the evidence, the kind of assessment prosecutors would ordinarily make to determine whether to bring criminal charges. Mueller laid bare in granular detail a presidency plagued by paranoia and insecurity, depicting Trump’s inner circle as gripped by fear of the president’s spasms as he frantically pressured his aides to lie to the public and fabricate false records. Some of the episodes had previously been highlighted in news reports, but Mueller’s report was singular for its definitive examination and revelatory details of the events, with the main actors under oath and on the record.
Just as James Quarles had previewed to Barr on March 5, the special counsel decided not to decide whether Trump committed a crime, based on his interpretation of the OLC opinion prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president. Though it did not state so explicitly, the report suggested that Congress should assume the role of prosecutor. “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law,” the report stated.
The report was classic Mueller: brimming with damning facts, but stripped of advocacy or judgment, and devoid of a final conclusion. Many of the deeply investigated moments, retold almost as scenes in a movie, were engrossing. But the analysis of what to make of the president’s conduct was written in overly legalistic prose, complete with double negatives. It was not clear what the facts added up to, nor did it provide a road map for Congress to pursue impeachment proceedings. For instance, the report stated, “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.”
Mueller figured the American people and their elected representatives in Congress would read the report and decide whether and how to act.
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Thanks to Barr’s notification to Congress, the media were on standby for breaking news. Cameras staked out the attorney general outside his home in Virginia and the Justice Department’s Washington headquarters. Barr and Rosenstein set a deadline for themselves of Sunday evening to report back to Congress with Mueller’s principal conclusions, in part because they did not want the financial markets to open on Monday morning with only rumors in the media and the specter of criminal indictment hanging over the president. So they dug in to devour the report, staying up into the wee hours on Saturday morning to read.
On Saturday, March 23, Barr, Rosenstein, and O’Callaghan reconvened at the office to hash out the report. They tried to weigh the evidence in volume 2 and assumed, for the sake of argument, that each of the ten episodes constituted obstruction of justice and first considered each one alone. They found the evidence truly disturbing but felt they couldn’t prove the president had corrupt intent. They asked themselves, could we get a criminal conviction on this evidence and survive an appeal? Their conclusion was unanimous: no.
Their decision made, Barr, Rosenstein, and O’Callaghan had to decide how to announce it to the public. Ordinarily a decision not to prosecute would remain confidential, but this was no ordinary case. The top Justice Department officials considered it an abomination that the Mueller investigation had become so public, but realized that because of the public scrutiny they had to explain in detail what had happened, even though Trump was not being charged with or accused of a crime.
Barr decided to write a second letter to Congress, which would detail the special counsel’s principal conclusions. He and his team scanned the Mueller report looking for sentences that they could quote in the letter that summarized the special counsel’s findings or reflected the bottom line. They found the report to be a garbled mess and struggled to find something worth quoting. At one point, O’Callaghan homed in on this line: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
“If we don’t include that, people are going to criticize us,” O’Callaghan said.
Barr agreed. “You know what, Ed? That’s a good point. Let’s put that in there,” he said.
As they finalized the draft of the letter, O’Callaghan called Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s chief of staff. He told Zebley that Barr would be laying out Mueller’s bottom-line conclusions and asked if he would want to read the draft before it was released. Zebley responded no, telling O’Callaghan that they did not need to see it. Zebley was hoping and assuming that Barr’s letter would quote the summaries the team had spent so much time on. But he didn’t say that to O’Callaghan. Yet again, the Mueller team declined an opportunity to weigh in on how their investigation’s findings would be presented to the public.
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At Mar-a-Lago, Trump awoke early on the morning of Sunday, March 24. He got dressed in his golf shirt and khaki pants and headed out at about nine o’clock to the Trump International Golf Club. He played a round of golf, ate lunch at the clubhouse, and chatted with friends.
Giuliani was in Washington with the rest of Trump’s personal legal team but spoke by phone with the president regularly all weekend. He told The Washington Post’s Robert Costa that Trump was in a “watch and wait” mode of cautious optimism. “However, until you read the report, you don’t know exactly what it entails, so you should keep your powder dry,” Giuliani added.
Trump told friends that weekend, “From everything I hear, it’s good,” but refrained from celebrating prematurely. As Kellyanne Conway remarked to Vice President Pence, “That’s the businessman. That’s somebody in real estate who knows the deal is not the deal until after it’s notarized.”
Trump’s team had prepared responses to a range of eventualities, with a worst-case scenario that the Mueller report could leak to the public unexpectedly and be so damaging, with surprise evidence, that it triggered an immediate impeachment inquiry in the House. The drafted response was exceedingly hard-hitting, a take-no-prisoners, blood-in-the-water jeremiad against Mueller, the FBI, and their methods.
The president’s personal lawyers gathered again on Sunday at Sekulow’s office, wearing casual work clothes, with both Sekulow and Giuliani in bulky sweaters because it was chilly. A little after 3:15 p.m., Rabbitt alerted Flood in Mar-a-Lago that within the hour Barr would release the key takeaways from the report. He gave Flood the bottom line but read aloud some key conclusory sections from Barr’s letter. Flood and Cipollone then told Trump what to expect, and the president reached out to his personal legal team back in Washington.
That afternoon, Barr made an announcement that would define how the world would interpret Mueller’s findings. Barr submitted a four-page letter to congressional leaders to, as he wrote, “summarize the principal conclusions set out in the Special Counsel’s report.” The document was immediately released online.
At Sekulow’s office, Trump’s lawyers sat in front of open laptops, impatiently waiting for the Barr letter to download. It was taking forever. The letter was already circulating among members of the press, who were texting and calling Trump’s lawyers for reaction. John Santucci of ABC News was on one line asking for comment, and Sekulow, flustered by the slowness of his computer, admitted he hadn’t been able to read a copy yet. “John, will you just send it to me?” he asked the journalist.
Finally, the lawyers read it around the table.
Barr wrote that the investigation found no evidence that any Trump campaign members or associates conspired or coordinated with the Russians to tilt the election—in essence, “no collusion.” On obstruction, he wrote that the special counsel had chosen not to reach a normal prosecutor’s decision on whether Trump had committed a
crime. “The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion—one way or the other—as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction,” Barr wrote. “Instead, for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction.”
Barr explained he therefore concluded the evidence of obstruction was insufficient. “In cataloguing the President’s actions, many of which took place in public view, the report identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct, had a nexus to a pending or contemplated criminal proceeding, and were done with corrupt intent,” Barr wrote.
Barr’s letter included the key line from Mueller’s report that O’Callaghan had suggested adding in good faith that the report “does not exonerate him.” Nonetheless, Barr’s letter laid the groundwork for Trump to declare otherwise.
Barr had served his boss an unmistakable political victory, and a feeling of euphoria swept over Trump and his team. Jane Raskin snapped a picture on her phone that forever captures the moment they read Barr’s summary of the report. Sitting at the conference table side by side, Giuliani grabbed Sekulow by the neck to give him a hug. They looked tired and relieved.
Sekulow talked to Trump by phone. He was elated but also very practical, asking about the team’s media strategy. Of paramount importance to the president was the TV spin wars. “This is great,” Trump said. “How are you all responding? Are you going out?”
Trump wanted every television network to trumpet the news of his victory. Sekulow assured him that they had a detailed media plan. “This is very good news,” Trump replied. “I’ll see you tonight.”
Shortly before 5:00 p.m., Trump arrived by motorcade at Palm Beach International Airport for the two-hour flight home to Washington. He stood under the wing of Air Force One and offered his first reaction to the press corps: “There was no collusion with Russia. There was no obstruction—none whatsoever. And it was a complete and total exoneration.”
That night was a special memory for Trump’s lawyers, who freshened up and assembled around dusk at the Yellow Oval Room in the second-floor residential quarters of the White House to give the president a homecoming. At 7:04 p.m., they watched Marine One land on the South Lawn. Trump stepped off the helicopter, dressed in a suit and red tie, and greeted the assembled press with a hearty wave. “This is a great country,” he said.
Inside the residence, Trump’s defenders felt pride in their work during a tumultuous time when so many were rooting against them. Watching the ebullience of their client strolling across the South Lawn, they felt a swell of relief. Trump walked upstairs and grinned as he saw his lawyers gathered around the room. He had two words for them: “Great job!” Trump, who is not a hugger, heartily shook every hand in the room.
Sarah Sanders joined them for a moment of celebration and posed for a photo with Trump and his legal team, along with Flood and Cipollone, all of them beaming. Sekulow, the conductor and the heart of the operation, offered thanks to his partners. A year earlier, the president’s legal team had endured a devastating stretch after John Dowd quit and the president had no lead lawyer other than Sekulow. The team had to be re-created from scratch, and here they now all stood.
“Thank you to you all,” Sekulow told the group. “This was the best example of a team effort, where everybody brought their ideas to the table. It was a tremendous team effort and I am grateful that our paths have crossed.”
Trump was well aware that there was more to come that would not be so flattering, when some larger portion of the report would be released. But he was glad to have this phase behind him. He felt in the clear. He had won. The president offered his thanks, repeatedly saying, “Great job.” The team knew that was the highest praise. “You’re in good shape when he says, ‘Great job.’ You’re not so good when he says, ‘Let’s see,’” one team member joked.
The celebration ended with Trump’s gentle good night.
“All right, kids. Thanks,” he said.
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What Barr included in his summary of principal conclusions, what he left out, and how he framed the special counsel’s findings were the first and only words the public received that month about the probe’s long-awaited conclusion. Inside the bunker of Mueller’s lawyers, Barr’s letter stung. Members of the special counsel team would later describe Mueller’s reaction: He looked as if he’d been slapped.
Some team members were livid at what they considered Barr’s calculated and selective word choices that sidestepped the unpleasant evidence the team had uncovered about Trump himself and his campaign’s encouragement of the Russians. The team had made groundbreaking discoveries about Russian bots and intelligence officers rushing to hack Clinton’s personal emails hours after Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening” remarks, yet that work was reduced to less than a sentence in Barr’s letter. Even the portion of the dependent clause in that sentence that Barr chose to make public put Trump in the most flattering light.
Quoting from the report, Barr wrote that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” He left out the thirty-nine preceding words from that passage, which confirmed the very facts Trump hated to acknowledge and refused to hear: “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
The authors of volume 2, who struggled to reveal every detail of Trump’s moves to shut down or curtail the criminal investigation, practically had steam coming out of their ears. Barr’s letter appeared to the uninformed reader to say the opposite of what they painstakingly laid out in their report. For example, Barr wrote that none of Trump’s actions, “in our judgment,” were done with corrupt intent. Actually, the report’s authors had detailed four episodes in which they identified substantial evidence of Trump’s intent to thwart the probe.
What had once been Trump’s defiant mantra of “No collusion! No obstruction!” instantly became a rallying cry for his reelection, lines he and his surrogates repeated on every media platform. Never mind what the Mueller team actually had found. Trump was winning the spin war.
Mueller had himself to blame for the misrepresentation of his work, in that he was a by-the-books creature of bureaucratic norms miscast for the Trump era, a period of profound polarization, fraying institutions, and news delivered like an IV to the public in fits and spurts.
“We’re the Twitter society,” said Frank Figliuzzi, a former Mueller colleague at the FBI. “We’re the digital streaming society. We’re the scan-the-headlines-to-get-some-news society. That’s not Mueller. That’s not a four-hundred-page report. Somebody’s got to show their face on a TV screen and scream and yell. What many of us have asked is, in the age of Trump, as steadfast as Mueller’s been to the principles of democracy that got us here, has Mueller served us well with this style? The answer is no.”
On the morning of March 25, less than twenty-four hours after Barr sent his summary letter, Zebley contacted O’Callaghan. He asked that the Justice Department release the executive summaries from each volume of Mueller’s report. O’Callaghan was noncommittal and said he, Barr, and Rosenstein would think about it. O’Callaghan asked Zebley to mark up the summaries for all necessary redactions of sensitive grand jury material and send them back.
Later that day, Zebley called O’Callaghan with a complaint. He said there was “public confusion” in the media reporting about Barr’s letter. When O’Callaghan briefed Barr on the call, the attorney general was taken aback and a bit peeved. As Barr saw it, he had written the letter to be intentionally brief and includ
e only Mueller’s baseline conclusions, and as an act of good faith he quoted Mueller’s language about not being able to “exonerate” the president. What’s more, Barr told his team, they had given Mueller and his deputies an opportunity to review a draft of the letter and Zebley declined. How could Zebley now be upset about it?
On March 27, Mueller signed a letter to Barr from the special counsel’s office objecting strongly to the attorney general’s handling of the principal conclusions: “The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and its conclusions. We communicated that concern to the Department on the morning of March 25. There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”
The letter said that the introductions and executive summaries of the report “accurately summarize this Office’s work and conclusions,” and included those redacted documents as attachments. “Release at this time would alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen and would answer congressional and public questions about the nature and outcome of our investigation.”
Barr’s office did not receive the letter until March 28. When they first read it, the attorney general and his team thought, “Holy shit! What is this? Give us a break.” To them, it was an uncharacteristically passive-aggressive move by Mueller. On April 30, the eve of Barr’s Senate testimony, the correspondence was reported by Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky of The Washington Post. At his hearing the next day, Barr characterized the letter’s tone as “snitty” and speculated that it was written by one of Mueller’s underlings.
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