I finally read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election.” Mueller manages to make even the most startling revelations impressively dull, carefully avoiding any grammatical sound bites. If a tree falls in the forest and Mueller is there to describe it, does it make a snoring sound?
And yet, Mueller’s blandness makes the included Trump quotes stand out in a sputtering neon glow. Like when Trump first heard a special counsel had been appointed, he is reported to have exclaimed: “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m [expletive].” Mueller let’s Trump’s expletives shine and in that twilight gleaming we see too much.
Mueller breaks the report into two volumes. The first is focused on what the Russians did to us. They did interfere. Trump and his team had multiple Russian contacts, knew about Russian efforts, and did not mind. But Mueller concludes that he could not prove that Trump or his team conspired with the Russians. Possibly because of successful obstruction, Mueller could not find the necessary evidence to prove collaboration — just two trains heading for the same station on parallel tracks.
The second volume of the report focuses on the question of whether Trump obstructed Mueller’s investigation. Now that Mueller has spoken, we know he: A. believed he would not be able to indict the President because of Justice Department policy; B. that if he couldn’t indict, then the President would not have a chance to go to trial to clear his name; and C. that accusing the president when he could not clear his name in court would violate the spirit of the presumption of innocence. But Mueller couldn’t lie, either. He couldn’t say the president did not break the law.
Few know that by online-translating Mueller’s words into multiple foreign languages and then back into English, you can distill his true meaning: “The Russians are about to steal your children and probably any pets you love so you might want to care that your president is doing everything he can to prevent any response because he’s afraid it will reflect on the size of his crowd. I can’t touch him, but — like, Hello Congress, I’m talking to you — the Constitution says you can do stuff. I can’t say out loud that the president tampered with witnesses and grand juries and that any other human in this country would already be facing 20 years, but if I blink anytime today, consider it said.”
Mueller seems especially buffaloed that Trump did his interfering in public. He can only stammer out that we don’t need to take his word for it because “many of the President’s acts directed at witnesses, including discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons, occurred in public view.”
For instance, when Michael Cohen was still lying for Trump about business in Russia or payments to hush up Trump’s tawdry betrayals of his wife, our president tweeted that he had always “liked and respected” Cohen, his fixer. Once Cohen began cooperating with investigators, however, Trump publicly called his former attorney a “rat” and began threatening his family, suggesting that “Cohen’s family members had committed crimes.” (Courts frown on, say, drug lords tweeting to witnesses, “I know where your family lives.”)
As Mueller writes, “[T]he President used inducements in the form of positive messages in an effort to get Cohen not to cooperate, and then turned to attacks and intimidation to deter the provision of information or undermine Cohen’s credibility once Cohen began cooperating.”
Similarly, Trump sought to control Paul Manafort, apparently successfully, by dangling the possibility of a pardon. In the process, Trump implied that the FBI and Mueller’s team were asking people to commit perjury, tweeting that “[m]ost people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble….” and that Manafort had “refused to ‘break’ and ‘make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’’”
Mueller’s investigation was primarily about Russians seeking to divide and weaken America. In obstructing the Mueller probe, which Trump appears to have done successfully, Trump has impeded investigation of what Russia is still doing to us.
Mueller notes that the crime of obstruction of justice hinges on corrupt intent, not an underlying crime. Even for a president, Mueller notes, acting with the “corrupt intention of shielding himself from criminal punishment” is illegal, but so too are actions aimed at “avoiding financial liability, or preventing personal embarrassment.”
Mueller concludes that “the protection of the criminal justice system from corrupt acts by any person — including the President — accords with the fundamental principle of our government that ‘[n]o [person] in this country is so high that he is above the law.’” Does that need translation?
David Gilbert Keith lives in Deerfield.