The failure to investigate Trump’s personal history with Russia also underscores the limitations Mueller placed on himself and had placed upon him by other actors like Rosenstein. The consequences of not looking into Trump’s dealings with Russia, which go back decades, is the question mark that lingers over his warm approach to the country and its strongman, Vladimir Putin, despite its intervening in the 2016 election, the bounties it reportedly put on the heads of American troops, and other offenses. Some in the FBI saw such an examination as pertinent to national security, but the DOJ under Rosenstein never investigated the matter, even as he reportedly led Andrew McCabe and other FBI officials to believe the special counsel would be taking up the matter. According to an excerpt published Sunday by the Times, Rod Rosenstein, who was then overseeing the probe, directed Mueller in 2017 to investigate only Moscow’s election interference and potential involvement of the Trump campaign in that attack, putting the president’s extensive personal relationship with Russia outside the boundaries of his mandate. the United States that the Department of Justice took clandestine steps to curtail the investigation, even before Trump’s handpicked attorney general, William Barr, stepped in to protect the president. The New York Times’ Michael Schmidt reports in Donald Trump v. Now, another new book is further revealing how Mueller’s investigation was limited-and what the special counsel may have missed, thanks to the narrow purview of his inquiry. Concerned with maintaining an apolitical appearance, and apparently seeking to avoid a confrontation with the president that could further drag out the investigation, Mueller never interviewed the president face-to-face, leaving what Toobin has called a “massive hole” in the middle of the probe-and, despite outlining extensive evidence of wrongdoing, declined to draw conclusions about what he uncovered, all but assuring Trump’s political survival. As Jeffrey Toobin wrote True Crimes and Misdemeanors, his thorough and convincing Russia inquiry post-mortem that hit shelves earlier this month, the qualities that were most celebrated in Mueller-his measure and reserve a strictly by-the-book approach seemingly belonging to another age-ultimately doomed his probe. That, of course, turned out to be woefully naive-and not just because the Republican party was already too far gone, their wagons hitched to a corrupt president they wouldn’t turn on. When the fabled “Mueller Time” arrived, close followers of the Russia probe seemed to assume, a groundswell would finally build against Trump and expel him from the White House. Each day, it seemed, brought with it a damning new revelation about Trump’s ties to Russia, or some new evidence of his brazen efforts to obstruct the special counsel’s investigation-and, with each development, anticipation for Mueller’s report mounted. Owing that money might produce some form of leverage that the people owed the money have over the elected head of state.It can be hard to remember, because it seems so long ago now, but there was a time when much of liberal America invested a great deal of faith in Robert Mueller to rein in-and possibly even end- Donald Trump’s presidency. The concern is that the President owes some chunk of money, or at least his business does, to some people we would prefer he didn't. Consider the economics of the matter right now. That "has been told" is the British newspaper code for "this is from an official source but we're not allowed officially to say so or which one."īut to this idea of Russian loans in 2008. Where it seems that GCHQ did have something to do with it:īritain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told. Do note that this is all entirely different from the allegations about contacts during the election campaign. For we are in that usual fog surrounding intelligence matters of not having a great deal of information. There's a certain weight on that "apparently" there.
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