by Craig Unger
Beginning in 2017, when Republicans held the White House and both houses of Congress, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, with his lantern jaw and by-the-books G-man demeanor, became the last best hope of the enfeebled Democrats. As such, they had designated him to be their knight in shining armor, riding in on his white steed to save the day.
But that’s not what happened. Since his first term as attorney general under George H. W. Bush, Barr had been out of the limelight for more than twenty-five years, and the intensity of his radical, hard-line positions, the way he had covered up and swept under the rug the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Iran-Contra, Iraqgate, and Inslaw scandals, had largely been forgotten. Few Americans knew or cared about the doctrine of the unitary executive. Mueller had run an airtight investigation without a single leak—this while the Trump administration was leaking like a sieve. As a result, the entire country was on tenterhooks, awaiting the results of Mueller’s two-year investigation.
It began with Barr’s presentation of it on March 24, 2019, which may go down as one of the most artfully deceptive and effective undertakings in the history of spin control. In this masterpiece of disinformation, Barr completely stole Mueller’s thunder, misrepresented it, and presented Trump forces with a victory they used to label the entire Trump-Russia scandal a hoax.
The Mueller Report failed in many respects—but not completely. Its 448 pages contain a number of explosive revelations, especially in terms of obstruction of justice. It disclosed at least ten episodes in which the president appeared to be obstructing justice, including trying to stop the investigation into former national security advisor Michael Flynn; Trump’s reaction to the appointment of Mueller as special prosecutor (“Oh my god. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked”); and the events surrounding the firing of FBI director Comey. There were also Trump’s multiple efforts to fire Mueller as a way of shutting down the probe, principally through White House counsel Don McGahn, who refused—knowing that to do so would provide fodder for impeachment. As the report put it, “The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”13
Even though Mueller had uncovered ample evidence of obstruction of justice, he declined to indict the president and cited a memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which ruled that a sitting president could not be indicted. And if no charges were brought against Trump, the Mueller Report said, asserting that Trump had committed crimes would be unfair because he would have “no such adversarial opportunity for public name-clearing before an impartial adjudicator.”
At the same time, Mueller did not exonerate Trump and wrote that if his team “had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.” They did not.
When it came to a conspiracy to sway the election, Mueller dissected the role WikiLeaks played with Russian military intelligence in releasing the Democrats’ emails that had been hacked.
The report noted “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.” But it added that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
According to a piece by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker, throughout the investigation, Mueller was directed by the Justice Department to confine his probe “to individuals who were reasonably suspected of committing crimes.”14
“I love Ken Starr,” Rosenstein told Mueller, according to people present who spoke with Toobin. “But his investigation was a fishing expedition. Don’t do that. This is a criminal investigation. Do your job, and then shut it down.”
“A fishing expedition.” That was a key Republican talking point. Going after Trump’s ties to Russia was a “fishing expedition.”
And yet, in the beginning, Rosenstein had very different marching orders for Mueller that were spelled out simply on one page of the deputy attorney general’s stationery under the heading “ORDER NO. 3915-2017 APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL TO INVESTIGATE RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE WITH THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND RELATED MATTERS.”
The document was signed by Rosenstein and dated May 17, 2017. It authorized Mueller to serve as special counsel “to conduct the investigation confirmed by then-FBI Director James B. Comey in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 20, 2017.”
The rest of the wording was somewhat vague and unclear, perhaps, but it said Mueller’s mandate was to investigate national security issues—specifically “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of Donald Trump.”15
The mandate goes on to authorize Mueller “to prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation of these matters.” So to some extent, it is a criminal investigation. But that was a by-product of its primary goal: a counterintelligence operation, which, as we know, was buried or never even took place.
As Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, later told the Washington Post, “This all began as an FBI counterintelligence investigation into whether people around then-candidate Trump were acting as witting or unwitting agents of a foreign power. So it began as a counterintelligence investigation, not as a criminal investigation.”16
In other words, the Justice Department was pulling a bait and switch on the American people, and that meant Trump had been successful in shutting down the intelligence probe. In a March 27, 2019, letter to Attorney General Barr, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, and FBI director Christopher Wray, requesting access to Robert Mueller’s “findings, and, underlying evidence, and documents,” both Schiff and Congressman Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, clearly specify that the “Special Counsel’s investigation originated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (‘Bureau’) as a counterintelligence probe.”
But their requests were never answered. This was no minor detail. That’s because a successful intelligence operation could inflict enormous damage on US national security without necessarily breaking the law.
So if you made millions of dollars from dealing with Russian oligarchs, good for you. Chances are it was perfectly legal. On the other hand, if you were president, it meant you were completely compromised.
“It may not be a crime for a candidate for a president to seek to make money from a hostile foreign power during an election and mislead the country about it,” Schiff said. “But the counterintelligence concerns go beyond mere violation of criminal law. They’re at one time not necessarily a criminal activity and at the same time potentially far more serious than criminal activity, because you have the capacity to warp U.S. policy owing to some form of compromise.”17
It was perfectly legal, for example, for Trump to buy hundreds of television sets from an electronics store in lower Manhattan, as he did some forty years ago. And if the store is owned by a KGB “spotter” agent who is looking for new assets, that may still be legal—but it is grounds for a very serious counterintelligence investigation.
Similarly, it’s perfectly legal to take out full-page ads in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Boston Globe putting forth unconventional foreign policy talking points, even if they happen to have been crafted by the KGB. And it’s legal to sell multimillion-dollar condominiums to Russians through anonymous shell companies, to get $3 billion loans through Deutsche Bank when you’ve filed for bankruptcy multiple times, and to reap billions from partnerships with oligarchs who are in Putin’s pocket. But if Trump is effectively bailed out of bankruptcy by the R
ussians and made a billionaire again, isn’t he somehow compromised by that?
Throughout the probe, however, Mueller was repeatedly steered toward confining his investigation narrowly to the criminal sphere. In addition, he declined to probe Trump’s finances, which might have revealed the extent to which Trump relied on Russia in extricating himself from multiple bankruptcies.
Finally, even when Trump stepped over the line of legality, it was very hard to prove, because one had to prove Trump’s state of mind, one had to prove that he knew he was laundering Russian money, that he knew that the money came from illicit sources, that he knew the talking points in his newspaper ads had come from the KGB, and so forth.
But at Barr’s presentation in March, all that was off the table. No counterintelligence. The Mueller Report had concluded that “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.”
Barr, however, omitted that passage and instead quoted the one in which Mueller said that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Similarly, Barr opined that “the evidence now suggests that the accusations against [Trump] were false.” But that was not what Mueller wrote. Instead, the report said, “The first volume of the report details numerous efforts emanating from Russia to influence the election. This volume includes a discussion of the Trump campaign’s response to this activity as well as our conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy.”
And so it went, one misrepresentation after another. Later, on Just Security, Ryan Goodman published a side-by-side comparison of Barr’s statements with Mueller’s. Barr: “The accusations against [Trump] were false. . . . There was in fact no collusion.” Mueller: “There was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy.”18
Barr: “Special counsel Mueller did not indicate that his purpose was to leave the decision [to indict] to Congress.” Mueller: “The [Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel] opinion says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrongdoing.”
And on it went. Clearly, Barr had lied, and in doing so he had been terribly effective. His words sounded exculpatory, they were widely disseminated, and because Barr did not allow the release of the Mueller Report—and a redacted version of it at that—until nearly a month later, for many Americans it was now official: Trump had done nothing wrong. He was exonerated.
All of which gave Donald Trump and Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber license to tweet and shout that the whole thing had been a hoax. Trump-Russia had been nothing more than “fake news!”
Stunningly, the Senate Intelligence Committee Report put the lie to such misrepresentations by explicating at length the story of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his longtime ties with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence officer; Roger Stone’s communications with WikiLeaks; and the fact that Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who met with Trump campaign officials in June 2016, had much closer ties to Russian intelligence than had been reported. But by then, for millions of Americans, the die had already been cast.
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What had taken place was extraordinary, not just because Robert Mueller fans were so sorely disappointed, but also because William Barr had just begun. In May 2019, President Trump said that he thought Joe Biden and his son Hunter should be investigated and it would be appropriate for him to discuss it with William Barr to get such an investigation under way. Biden, of course, was Trump’s likely rival in the 2020 election. What better way to get the campaign started than to have the attorney general discredit your adversary?
Meanwhile, on May 13, Barr had already begun rewriting history for Trump. When he appeared on Fox News, being interviewed by devoted Trump supporter Laura Ingraham, Barr was especially in his element. “What happened to him [Trump] was one of the greatest travesties in American history,” he said. “Without any basis they started this investigation of his campaign. And even more concerning, actually, is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events . . . to sabotage the presidency.”
Having already asserted that Trump had been wrongfully accused, Barr now raised the question of whether federal agents had abused their authority in their investigation. “I think spying did occur,” he told a Senate panel. “The question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”
To that end, Barr assigned the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut, John Durham, the task of discovering if there was a conspiracy among those investigating Trump to harm his political prospects.19 In addition, Trump granted Barr an enormous range of new powers including “full and complete authority” to declassify government secrets about the Russia investigation. Trump had labeled the probe a “political witch hunt,” and now Barr was doing his bidding to write that into the history books.
Equally disturbing, by granting Barr new powers, Trump was entering dangerous territory. “Stripping the intelligence leaders of their ability to control information about sources and methods, and handing that power to political actors, could cause human agents to question whether their identity will be protected,” Jeremy Bash, a former CIA chief of staff during the Obama administration, told the Washington Post.20
In June, Barr widened the scope of his investigation. He began interviewing high-level CIA officers. He took on a bigger and bigger role in erasing the damage from the Trump-Russia probe and in fabricating a new history in which Trump was the victim of rogue liberals in the FBI who had conjured up a phony scandal to smear Trump in the fake news media. Trump’s tweets were endless, calling it a “witch hunt,” a “hoax,” and “fake news.”
When necessary, Barr came to the rescue of Trump aides such as Paul Manafort, making sure the former Trump campaign manager did not suffer the indignity of being sent to the notoriously harsh and violent New York prison complex on Rikers Island. Manafort, who deposited $75 million in offshore accounts he got from carrying water for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, had been sentenced to a seven-and-a-half-year sentence for tax and bank fraud. (In May 2020, Manafort was released to home confinement in view of concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic.)
Meanwhile, Barr continued his campaign to negate any evidence there had been compromising ties between Trump and Russia, to characterize the investigators in the FBI as highly partisan rogue liberals who were using their positions as political weapons, to discredit the media that had printed the stories as fake news—to find, create, and, if necessary, invent a new narrative, a new reality in which Trump was a martyr, a victim of a “deep state” that was filled with liberals out to get him.
To that end, on October 1, 2019, as impeachment hearings heated up, bringing forth more and more damning information against Trump, Barr took off for London to meet with British intelligence in hopes of finding anything that would discredit reports showing that Russia had interfered on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 presidential election. As one British official told the UK’s Independent, Barr’s wish list “is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services.”21
In rapid succession, there was the impeachment of Trump; followed by a phony Senate acquittal in which there were no witnesses; a raging pandemic that the administration had neither the competence nor the will nor the desire nor the common sense to control; and a powerful mass movement for racial justice, which the administration insistently opposed. News cycles could be measured in nanoseconds. Historic events—impeachment!—quickly
faded from memory, buried in mountains of earth-shattering news.
On the afternoon of Monday, June 1, 2020, at 6:04 p.m., the White House communications office sent out an alert to reporters that President Trump would hold a news briefing eleven minutes hence in the Rose Garden.
Spontaneous, out-of-the-blue press conferences were unusual under Trump, but now he needed to speak to the nation. Six days earlier, on May 25, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old black man, had been killed by a white police officer who coolly kept one hand in his pocket as he forced his knee down on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. At the time, Floyd was handcuffed, on the ground, and pleading for his life, and his casual but brutal murder was captured on video for all the world to see, instantly igniting hundreds of massive, largely peaceful demonstrations in all fifty states and in other cities all over the world. All because Floyd was suspected of passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill.
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The murder of George Floyd and the demonstrations that followed happened at a time when the Trump administration was already coming apart at the seams.
With more than four hundred Trump officials having resigned or been dismissed by this time, the administration was a revolving door, and such episodes were too numerous to keep track of. Top cabinet posts—including the secretaries of the Departments of Defense, State, Health and Human Services, Energy, and Homeland Security—were at various times filled by “acting” secretaries whose status did not require that they be approved by the Senate, thereby obviating congressional oversight.
After William Barr had become Donald Trump’s attorney general, he immediately became a one-man wrecking ball in service to allowing Trump to fully enjoy the vast scope of powers afforded by Barr’s expansive views of the unitary executive.