The Russia probe 2019 –

See also: The Russia probe 2017-18
Robert Mueller III, Special Counsel
The 45th President of the U.S. Chapter III

Russiagate Was Not a Hoax
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirmed what the Mueller report could not.
(The Atlantic) Rereading the Mueller report more than a year after its publication is an exercise in disappointment. One gets the feeling that Robert Mueller didn’t press his inquiry to its end. Instead of settling the questions that haunt the 2016 campaign, he left them dangling, publishing a stilted document riddled with insinuation and lacunae. He rushed his work, closing up shop before finishing his assignment.
While Mueller received all the hype, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence kept its head down. Yesterday, having avoided cable speculation almost entirely, the SSCI released the fifth and final volume of a report on Russia’s attempt to sway the last election in Donald Trump’s favor. It finally delivered what Mueller either could not or would not: a comprehensive presentation of the evidence in the matter of “collusion.” The report confirms that Russiagate is no hoax. Whether or not the Trump campaign illegally coordinated with the Kremlin, Trump has no grounds for proclaiming vindication, much less that he’s the victim of a witch hunt.
Credit largely goes to Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the SSCI, who shrewdly orchestrated the proceedings. Cultivating a close relationship with the SSCI’s Republican chair, Richard Burr, he worked to keep the investigation deliberately low-key. (The committee did the bulk of its work behind closed doors, without leaks.) As a result, the committee on the whole miraculously avoided the politicization that tainted the broader debate over Russian interference. Each of its findings won bipartisan approval prior to publication. Instead of rushing forward, the committee left the incendiary question of collusion for last.
Trump Phone Calls Add to Lingering Questions About Russian Interference
A Senate committee went further than the Mueller report on key points about Russia’s election sabotage operations and the Trump campaign.
(NYT) Over all, the Senate report was a bipartisan endorsement of the finding that Russia tried to intervene in 2016 on behalf of Mr. Trump’s election and that the campaign welcomed the assistance. It also hinted that Mr. Manafort may have known about the Russian efforts to hack Democratic emails and dump them into the public sphere, as it did through WikiLeaks.

2019

18 April
Jonathan Chait: Trump Beat the Rap, but Mueller Uncovered a Historic Scandal
(New York) Perhaps the most haunting passage in the special counsel’s report on Russian election interference is a fragment of a sentence, most of which is hidden behind black redaction lines. Some figure, whose name is hidden, writes to Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian regime crony, “Putin has won.”
The Mueller report is the story of a crime that succeeded and a cover-up that quite possibly did too.
Trump has repeatedly claimed, and his attorney general has repeated, that the Mueller report proved (as William Barr put it Thursday morning) “there was in fact no collusion.” Mueller’s report shows this claim of exoneration is at best highly misleading and at worst outright false.

24 March
What to Make of Bill Barr’s Letter
By Mikhaila Fogel, Quinta Jurecic, Susan Hennessey, Matthew Kahn, Benjamin Wittes
(Lawfare) Leave it to President Trump to describe as “Total EXONERATION” a document that specifically quotes Special Counsel Robert Mueller as saying that one of his principal findings “does not exonerate” the president.
The brief letter sent by Attorney General William Barr to congressional leaders on Sunday afternoon summarizing Mueller’s findings is a complicated document. In key respects, it contains very good news for President Trump about a scandal that has dogged his presidency since before he even took office. The determination of just how good the news is—whether it amounts to the exoneration Trump claims on these points or whether we’re dealing with conduct just shy of prosecutable—will have to await the text of Mueller’s report itself. But for those who quite reasonably demanded a serious investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and of cooperation and coordination with it on the part of the Trump campaign, it has to be significant that Mueller, after the better part of two years of investigating, has not found that anyone associated with the Trump campaign knowingly conspired with Russia’s efforts.
In other respects, however, Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report is ominous for the president. While Mueller did not find that Trump obstructed his investigation, he also made a point of not reaching the opposite conclusion: that Trump didn’t obstruct the investigation. Indeed, he appears to have created a substantial record of the president’s troubling interactions with law enforcement for adjudication in noncriminal proceedings—which is to say in congressional hearings that are surely the next step.
What makes the document more complicated still is the fact that it offers only a skeletal description of Mueller’s report. It only purports to convey Mueller’s top-line findings and does not include any of the evidence or legal analysis that underlies those findings. It doesn’t tell any of the stories that the Mueller report will tell. It only distills and announces two high-altitude legal conclusions from those stories. Assuming that Barr is characterizing Mueller’s findings reasonably, that leaves a whole raft of questions unanswered about what those stories will be—and what their impact will be.

The Mueller Probe Was an Unmitigated Success
The scandal is how much corruption it exposed—and how much turns out to have been perfectly legal.
By Franklin Foer
(The Atlantic) The Mueller investigation has been an unmitigated success in exposing political corruption. In the case of Paul Manafort, the corruption was criminal. In the case of Trump, the corruption doesn’t seem to have transgressed any laws. As Michael Kinsley famously quipped, “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal.” Lying to the electorate, adjusting foreign policy for the sake of personal lucre, and undermining an investigation seem to me pretty sound impeachable offenses—they might also happen to be technically legal.
Through his investigation, Mueller has also provided a plausible answer to the question that first bothered me. Trump’s motive for praising Putin appears to have been, in large part, commercial. With his relentless pursuit of Trump Tower Moscow, the Republican nominee for president had active commercial interests in Russia that he failed to disclose to the American people. In fact, he explicitly and shamelessly lied about them. As Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen implied in his congressional testimony, Trump ran his campaign as something of an infomercial, hoping to convince the Russians that he was a good partner. To enrich himself, Trump promised to realign American foreign policy.
… Along with Trump’s stalwart defenders, many left-wing critics of hawkish foreign policy have been quick to tout Attorney General William Barr’s letter as exoneration. Matt Taibbi has compared the coverage of the Russia scandal to the media’s gullible reporting about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The accusation is that the media are prone to parrot whatever self-serving conspiracy the national-security state has to offer. But Mueller has apparently endorsed the fundamental underlying case emanating from the intelligence community: The Russians were actively working to secure Trump’s victory. What makes their interference so horrifying is that it involved the theft of information and the active manipulation of public perceptions. All of that is arguably far worse than Watergate. David Frum: The Question the Mueller Report Has Not Answered — Why?

Masha Gessen: After the Mueller Report, the Dream of a Sudden, Magic Resolution to the Trump Tragedy Is Dead
(The New Yorker) The Russian-collusion story dangled the carrot of discovering that Trump was entirely foreign to U.S. politics, a puppet of a hostile power. It also held the appeal of a secret answer to our catastrophe, one that would make the unimaginable suddenly explicable.
The truth about Trump has been in plain view all along. The President has waged an attack on political institutions, the law, and culture, and has succeeded to an astonishing extent. We are no longer surprised, for example, that more than a month passes between White House press briefings, or that the President and his spokespeople lie openly and routinely. The assumption that the Administration should at least act as though it were accountable to the public has vanished, and we barely took notice.
The Internet age creates the illusion that it is possible for the media to pursue an unlimited number of stories, as though we could follow the Mueller investigation and everything else, too. But, while the Web might be boundless, human attention is not.

Trump Might Not Be Guilty, But Neither Is the Press
As the president trumpets his ‘exoneration,’ let’s not forget that Mueller gave reporters plenty of malfeasance worth reporting on.
(Politico) The president is not a crook.
That’s the six-word précis of Attorney General William P. Barr’s four-page summary of the still- to-be-paginated report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III of his 674-day investigation into Russian government efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
… In defense of the coverage, let’s remember that charges of collusion didn’t arise in a vacuum. Thanks to Mueller, we now know about the steady and suspicious dalliances with Russians during the campaign by the easily compromised, ethically challenged, political amateurs inside Trumpworld—George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. (and Michael Flynn after the campaign). Recall how many documented lies Mueller has caught the president’s men telling. Recall again the relationship between Manafort and his business associate Konstantin V. Kilimnik, believed by Mueller to be allied with Russian intelligence. The Russians weren’t just SoulCycling in their many encounters with the president’s men; they were peddling dirt or an agenda distinctly favorable to the Kremlin. Just because Mueller’s report concluded that the president didn’t commit a crime doesn’t mean there was nothing going on. We still don’t know why Trump was so eager to end FBI Director James Comey’s investigation of Russian influence, and so willing to take two years of political punishment for firing him. All of these questions—and more—will now be taken up by the various House committees.

15 March
Mueller Ready to Pounce on Trumpworld Concessions to Moscow
New court filings by Mueller’s office could answer a central question of the Russia investigation: What did the Kremlin hope to get from its political machinations? (18 December 2018)

The House voted 420 to 0 to release the Mueller report. So why is Lindsey Graham blocking the bill?
By Aaron Blake
(WaPost) … politically speaking, there are many reasons Graham should want to vote for this, and now.
Voting in favor of disclosure now would put GOP senators on the record on this topic at a time when it’s not a very difficult decision. They could help inoculate themselves from this whole situation by simply saying they would like to see what Mueller found, and then let Barr make his decisions (which may or may not actually be influenced by these votes). That puts the onus on Barr to be the Bad Guy, rather than them. ‘We already voted for disclosure!’ they could say.
Graham’s demand for a special counsel to look into alleged Justice Department wrongdoing is clearly a politically motivated one. There is already a U.S. attorney looking into these things, but Graham wants to make the argument that Democrats aren’t curious about potential wrongdoing within the top levels of U.S. law enforcement.
But Graham is also someone who has seen merit in getting out ahead of potentially damaging situations involving Mueller. At one point he was a leading advocate for a bill to protect Mueller from being fired by Trump. (Since becoming Judiciary Committee chairman and having the power to actually move such a bill, Graham has backed off and said there’s no need.)

28 February
Michael Cohen’s Stunning Testimony About Trump
New claims from the president’s former fixer help fill in essential gaps in the Russia investigation.
(The Atlantic) Cohen’s testimony, at less than 4,000 words, doesn’t change the fundamental picture so much as fill in essential gaps. Cohen will say that Trump was informed of conversations with WikiLeaks about releasing emails related to Hillary Clinton—something the president has denied. Cohen will present a copy of a check reimbursing him for hush money, dated August 2017. While Cohen has already implicated Trump in a violation of campaign-finance law in court pleadings, that check places the crime during Trump’s presidency. Cohen will allege that he lied to Congress at Trump’s direction, though by his own account the direction was implicit. Finally, Cohen will claim that Trump was aware of a meeting at Trump Tower between campaign officials, including his son and son-in-law, and Russians in June 2016.
Why 1 simple lie by Michael Cohen could invalidate his entire testimony
Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
…the key to the believability of Cohen as liar-turned-truth-teller is that he actually, you know, told the truth in his testimony on Wednesday. Which brings me to the news that Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Mark Meadows (R-North Carolina) referred Cohen to the Justice Department Thursday for possible prosecution for perjury during his testimony. While the referral from Jordan and Meadows argues that Cohen didn’t tell the truth on a number of fronts, the most worrisome charge for Cohen is that his assertion that he never wanted to work in the White House seems to be false.
Jordan, in his questioning of Cohen, sought to make that case — arguing that Cohen’s decision to plead guilty and turn on Trump was due to the fact that “you wanted to work in the White House. ”
… Cohen’s claim that he never wanted to work in the White House was immediately greeted with mockery by Trump allies and family.  … If the feds have texts from Cohen that make clear he wanted a job in the White House, that’s big trouble for him. … Cohen had a credibility problem going into Wednesday’s hearing. If it can be proven he lied in that hearing, his credibility is ruined forever.
Jonathan Chait: Michael Cohen’s Testimony Is the First Hearing in President Trump’s Impeachment
Robert Mueller’s indictments have outlined a conspiracy connecting Russian intelligence to the hackers who stole Democratic emails, the hackers to WikiLeaks, and WikiLeaks to Stone. Cohen is now connecting Trump to Stone.
Trump’s inner circle has obviously been aware of this. Asked in December if Stone ever gave Trump a heads-up on what WikiLeaks had obtained, his lawyer [Giuliani] equivocated.
If this can be proved, it would also likely expose Trump to direct perjury charges. In his written answers to Mueller, Trump reportedly denied having been informed in advance about emails obtained by Wikileaks. And this explains why Mueller settled for allowing Trump to answer written questions rather than demanding a live interview. He knew he could commit Trump to supplying false answers that would expose him to perjury charges.
Ex-lawyer Cohen assails Trump but gives no direct evidence of collusion
(Reuters) – Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen assailed the president’s character in a tense congressional hearing on Wednesday, calling him a “conman” who knew in advance about the release of stolen emails aimed at hurting his 2016 election Democratic rival. But Cohen, the Republican president’s onetime “fixer,” said he had no direct evidence that Trump colluded with Moscow to bolster his White House campaign, a key line of inquiry in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation which has dogged Trump during his two years in office.