President Trump directed campaign affiliates to find Hillary Clinton's personal emails, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report says.
Trump, who in July 2016 publicly called on Russia to find deleted emails from his Democratic opponent, "repeatedly" requested his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, do so. The report says that Flynn "contacted multiple people in an effort to obtain the emails."
These people included Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen and Republican donor Peter Smith. Smith made claims that he was in contact with Russian hackers about the emails "and that his efforts were coordinated with the Trump campaign."
But while Mueller's report says that Smith was in contact with Flynn and Trump adviser Sam Clovis, the investigation didn't find that Trump's campaign initiated or directed his efforts. It also says the investigation didn't establish that Smith actually was in contact with Russia hackers or that he or the Trump campaign obtained the emails.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders acknowledged a claim she once made about former FBI Director James Comey was completely false, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report says.
Mueller's report details President Trump's firing of Comey in 2017, noting that Sanders spoke in a press briefing and insisted that the FBI had lost confidence in Comey. This, she said, was based on hearing as much from "countless members of the FBI."
But the Mueller report says that "the evidence does not support those claims" and that Trump, in fact, specifically told Comey that "the people of the FBI really like [him]." Sanders "acknowledged to investigations that her comments were not founded on anything," although she claimed this was a "slip of the tongue." She also claimed that when she repeated in a separate interview that the FBI had lost confidence in Comey, she did so "in the heat of the moment."
The report notes that Trump praised Sanders' performance in the 2017 press conference and did not correct her false claim. Brendan Morrow
A significant part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, made public in redacted form on Thursday, involved looking into if President Trump tried to obstruct justice. While Mueller was unable to reach a conclusion on that front, he did detail in great length an episode in which Trump tried to get him fired.
On June 17, 2017, Trump apparently called his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn, and ordered him to fire Mueller over a supposed conflict of interest. "You gotta do this," McGahn recalled Trump saying, with the president directing him to call Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to do the deed.
McGahn was "perturbed by the call" and "did not intend to act on the request," Mueller wrote, noting that McGahn and Trump's other advisers had thought the conflicts alleged by Trump were "silly" and "not real." Trump apparently called McGahn a second time, asking "have you done it?" and demanding "call me back when you do it." Mueller wrote that "to end the conversation with the president, McGahn left the president with the impression that McGahn would call Rosenstein" although in actuality "he just wanted to get off the phone."
Because McGahn refused to follow Trump's order, he decided to resign and began preparations, which involved, apparently, telling then-Chief-of-Staff Reince Priebus that the president had asked him to "do crazy sh-t." Priebus and Stephen Bannon urged McGahn not to quit and to just ignore the president.
When Trump and McGahn next saw each other, Mueller writes, "the president did not ask McGahn whether he had followed through with calling Rosenstein." Read the full section of the report below, via The Toronto Star's Daniel Dale. Jeva Lange
Here's Mueller's description of what he says were Trump's attempts to get him fired. pic.twitter.com/PrboWok1Rg
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) April 18, 2019
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team was never actually looking for evidence of "collusion" but rather conspiracy, his redacted report says.
Mueller's report states that the investigation set out to find whether members of President Trump's campaign conspired with Russia in its election interference and did not establish that they did so. But while Trump has chalked this up to Mueller finding "no collusion," Mueller's report notes that collusion is "not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the U.S. code" and is not a term in federal criminal law.
Therefore, the investigation was always working with the criminal definition of conspiracy "as defined in federal law, not the commonly discussed term 'collusion.'" Mueller was specifically looking for coordination, i.e. "an agreement — tacit or express — between the Trump campaign and the Russian government on election interference," which would require both parties to act in a way that was "informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests," per The Washington Post.
Ultimately, while the investigation doesn't establish that Trump's campaign illegally conspired with Russia, it says the campaign expected to benefit from Russia's election interference. Brendan Morrow