DOJ official reportedly secretly stopped FBI, Mueller from examining Trump's financial ties to Russia

The FBI was sufficiently worried about President Trump's decades-long personal and financial ties to Russia that, in the days after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, the bureau reportedly launched a counterintelligence investigation of the president. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein quickly "curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere," The New York Times reports, citing former Justice Department and FBI officials.

The acting FBI director at the time, Andrew McCabe, had approved the counterintelligence investigation, reportedly believing Trump would quickly fire him too. And when Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel, "it was the most enormous exhale of my life," McCabe told New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt. Rosenstein left "the FBI with the impression that the special counsel would take on the investigation into the president as part of his broader duties," the Times reports. But privately, Rosenstein instructed Mueller "to conduct only a criminal investigation into whether anyone broke the law in connection with Russia's 2016 election interference," and then "shut it down," the Times continued.

"We opened this case in May 2017 because we had information that indicated a national security threat might exist, specifically a counterintelligence threat involving the president and Russia," McCabe told the Times. "I expected that issue and issues related to it would be fully examined by the special counsel team. If a decision was made not to investigate those issues, I am surprised and disappointed. I was not aware of that." Rosenstein, now retired, declined to comment.

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While Mueller never looked into Trump's personal ties to Russia, the Senate Intelligence Committee did to a limited extent. It detailed the extensive links between Trump's campaign and Moscow, including Russian intelligence, and numerous unsubstantiated reports of "Trump's potentially compromising encounters with women in Moscow in 1996 and 2013" in a recent bipartisan report, the Times notes. "But the senators acknowledged they lacked access to the full picture, particularly any insight into Mr. Trump's finances." Read more at The New York Times.