Special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation: How we got here

The Justice Department has dropped its case against former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, erasing his guilty plea in the Mueller probe and ending a years-long saga over his sentencing.

In a court filing Thursday, the Department of Justice said that “based on an extensive review and careful consideration of the circumstances ... continued prosecution of this case would not serve the interests of justice.” The filing was signed by Timothy Shea, who’s currently serving as the US Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team indicted or got guilty pleas from 34 people and three companies during their lengthy investigation.

That group is composed of six former Trump advisers, 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer. Seven of these people (including five of the six former Trump advisers) have pleaded guilty.

It’s often said that Donald Trump’s superpower is his lack of shame. It appears that Attorney General Bill Barr has been bitten by the same politically radioactive spider, at least if his Tuesday interview with NBC is any indication.

The interview with host Pete Williams focused on the Department of Justice’s inspector general report on the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. Barr said a number of questionable things in the interview, including contradicting one of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s core findings: that there was legitimate reason to investigate links between the Trump campaign and Russia. He also tried to spin the Trump team’s contacts with Russia as something that “most campaigns” do.

President Trump’s lawyer argued in a federal court on Wednesday morning that he could not be prosecuted for a crime even if he shot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue.

Attorneys for Trump made the argument during an appeals court case against Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, who is seeking Trump’s tax returns as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

“PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!”

President Donald Trump tweeted these two words just a few minutes after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry in connection with allegations that Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.

Despite high hopes from congressional Democrats that special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony would clarify the conclusions of the Mueller report for the American public, new polls show the hearings changed few minds about the report’s contents and that a partisan split remains on questions of impeachment and presidential wrongdoing.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll found that Mueller’s testimony did little to change voters’ minds on the issue of impeaching Trump. In response to the question, “Did Robert Mueller’s testimony make you more or less likely to support the impeachment of Donald Trump?” 47 percent of Americans said hearing from Mueller made no difference.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has just released the first section of its report on 2016 Russian interference, which found that hackers likely tried to access election systems in all 50 states, confirming widespread fears that America’s election system may not be secure from attack.

For the past two and a half years, the panel led by Chair Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chair Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) has reviewed the intelligence that the Kremlin sought to meddle in the last presidential election, an effort separate from the highly partisan probe in the House that ended in 2018 and found no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Wednesday congressional testimony could have been House Democrats’ big moment on impeachment. It wasn’t.

Despite a suggestion from one of the committee chairs who oversaw Mueller’s double testimony, Jerry Nadler, that drafting up articles of impeachment could be a next step,House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the time is still not right because Democrats have some subpoenas tied up in the courts, awaiting a decision.

House Oversight Committee ranking member Devin Nunes (R-CA) began his opening statement before former special counsel Robert Mueller testified before his committee by acknowledging that collusion occurred during the 2016 election — but not in the way most people think.

“There is collusion in plain sight — collusion between Russia and the Democratic Party,” said Nunes, who worked hand in hand with the White House to push back on the Russia investigation during the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency. “The Democrats colluded with Russian sources to develop the Steele dossier. And Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya colluded with the dossier’s key architect, Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson.”

House Democrats walked into Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony with the intent to craft a compelling and damning public narrative around Russian interference in the 2016 election and President Donald Trump’s possible obstruction of justice into that investigation, with the former special counsel as their star witness.

But there was one major flaw in this strategy: Mueller himself.

Evidently, former special counsel Robert Mueller wanted to say as little as possible in his congressional testimony Wednesday — and he succeeded.

In contrast to past witnesses like former FBI Director James Comey, who have been loquacious and combative, trying to get facts out and debunk misinterpretations or misrepresentations, Mueller was terse and cautious.

Former special counsel Robert Mueller made one thing clear in his marathon testimony before Congress on Wednesday: Russia interfered in the US election, and the threat to American democracy remains in 2020.

“They’re doing it as we sit here,”Mueller said at one point during his appearance before the House Intelligence Committee, “and they expect to do it during the next campaign.”

At 3:29 pm Eastern time on Wednesday, House Oversight Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) gaveled the end of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s hours of testimony. Two minutes later, the Trump campaign pushed out an email blast blatantly lying about what Mueller said.

After characterizing the hearings as “a disaster for Democrats,” the statement, which is attributed to Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale, says, “Robert Mueller confirmed what we already knew: No collusion, no obstruction, and the way President Trump has been treated is unprecedented.”

Former special counsel Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony on Wednesday was a farce and a tragedy.

Mueller testified before both the House Judiciary Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence, saying very little of substance beyond what was already contained in the text of his report. He responded to questions with monosyllables or requests for clarification. According to a count by NBC, Mueller “deflected or declined to answer questions 198 times” during the two three-hour hearings.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress is over — and it wasn’t the parade of fireworks and explosive new information some had hoped it would be.

Instead, it was mostly Mueller providing a lot of repetitive, one-word answers, Democrats trying to methodically lay out a case for impeachment, Republicans trying to deliver viral moments with a lot of yelling, and a whole lot of talk about how big of a threat Russia really was — and still is.

Former special counsel Robert Mueller just answered one of the biggest lingering questions of his investigation: Why didn’t he interview President Donald Trump?

During Wednesday’s House Intelligence Committee hearing, Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY) asked Mueller if the reason he didn’t ultimately push to sit down with Trump was because he “flinched” — in other words, that he backed down in the face of Trump’s onslaught of criticism of the investigation.

For most of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony on Wednesday, he refused to offer any opinion or speculation beyond the bounds of his report — except for one remarkable moment when he offered his most direct critique of President Donald Trump yet.

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) asked Mueller to opine on a series of public statements Trump made during the 2016 presidential campaign praising WikiLeaks after the site dropped troves of private emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign by Russian actors.

Former special counsel Robert Mueller became animated in his otherwise taciturn testimony before Congress on Wednesday, in order todefend the integrity of his team and directly challenge Republican allegations of political bias in his investigation.

Telling the House Judiciary Committee he made hiring decisions based on “the capability of the individual to do the job” and do it “seriously and with integrity,” Mueller actually interjected and elaborated in response to a question — one of the few times he did so.

During his congressional testimony on Wednesday, former special counsel Robert Mueller noted that part of his decision to refrain from considering an indictment of President Donald Trump was attributed to a long-standing Justice Department policy: According to the agency’s Office of Legal Counsel, a sitting president cannot be charged with a federal crime.

“We, at the outset, determined that, when it came to the president’s culpability, we needed to go forward only after taking into account the OLC opinion that indicated that a sitting president cannot be indicted,” he said.

Special counsel Robert Mueller didn’t charge President Donald Trump with obstruction of justice during the Russia investigation, but he didn’t exonerate the president, either.

The reason for that, according to Mueller, is that he believes a Justice Department opinion bars him from charging a sitting president with a federal crime.

During Robert Mueller’s testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) asked Mueller if he could indict the president on obstruction charges.

The former special counsel’s answer was simple: “Yes.”

Former special counsel Robert Mueller testified on Wednesday that his investigation was not hindered or curtailed, reassuring anyone worried that he wasn’t able to fully carry out the inquiry.

Mueller made this assertion in response to questioning from Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. Collins, in a series of rapid-fire questions, asked the special counsel whether “your investigation [was] curtailed or stopped or hindered?”

In just five minutes, House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) prompted special counsel Robert Mueller to knock down President Donald Trump’s main talking points about “no obstruction.”

Nadler, as the panel’s chair, got to ask the long-anticipated hearing’s first questions. He used the opportunity both to set the tone for Wednesday morning and to get Mueller to refute the president’s repeated claim that he didn’t obstruct justice during Mueller’s investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Former special counsel Robert Mueller opened his hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday by noting it was unusual that he was testifying at all — and trying to head off lawmakers from asking questions he won’t be able to answer.

“It is unusual for a prosecutor to testify about a criminal investigation, and given my role as a prosecutor, there are reasons why my testimony will necessarily be limited,” he said.

Robert Mueller is unlikely to say much that’s genuinely new in his Wednesday testimony before Congress. He and his team already assembled a report on their investigation and its conclusions that’s more than 400 pages long, and if he had more to say on the subject, he would have written a longer report.

The most likely outcome is that the former special counsel will simply go over ground that’s already well understood to careful readers of his report. And it’s possible on those grounds to dismiss the whole affair of his testimony as mere political theater. But that would be a mistake. There’s a reason plays are performed, after all, even though you hardly need to go through the fuss of casting actors and designing sets to understand the plot of Hamlet.