The White House has not received or been briefed on the Mueller report as of Sunday morning, a senior administration official tells CNN. President Donald Trump and the aides who traveled with him to Palm Beach, Florida, are still in wait-and-see mode like the rest of Washington. Over the weekend, Trump has voiced uncertainty over what Attorney General William Barr will do next, according to the people familiar with his reaction.<doc-sep>ROBERT MUELLER toiled over his report for two years, slightly longer than it took Herman Melville to write Moby Dick. Mr Mueller’s epic may be the most eagerly anticipated work in American literature, but though he passed it to the attorney-general, William Barr, on Friday March 22nd, it is unclear when or in what form it will be published. Both the president and the House of Representatives have called for the full version to be made public, but the attorney-general must weigh whether to redact parts that infringe the privacy of people it mentions or that reveal intelligence. News coverage:Robert Mueller’s report is complete It is not yet clear whether Mr Mueller’s report contains devastating new evidence against the president, whether it adds nothing to the record, or something in-between. Yet the hundreds of pages of indictments that have already been made public provide a tantalising portrait of the scandals surrounding Mr Trump. And Mr Mueller’s indictments are just part of a wider ecosystem of investigations into the president. The overview is this. The Russian government was running an operation designed to “sow discord in the US political system” through social media from 2014 on, and well before Mr Trump ran for office. In the campaign Mr Trump had business dealings with Russia, specifically for a tall tower in Moscow. The Russian government knew about this, just as Mr Trump denied it. At the same time there were contacts between the campaign and people with access to emails that Russian hackers working for military intelligence had stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). On top of this are possible violations of campaign-finance law springing from a scheme to pay a pornographic actress to keep quiet; using charitable funds for uncharitable purposes; allegations of bank and insurance fraud; and, possibly, bending of the tax laws beyond breaking-point. When lumped together, each individual scandal seems less remarkable than it otherwise would—a reminder that Steve Bannon, once Mr Trump’s campaign chief, boasted of flummoxing the opposition by “flood[ing] the zone with shit.” The flood, however, seems not to have been a tactic so much as a characteristic of the world Mr Trump surrounds himself with. The uses of history One way to put his predicament into context is to compare Mr Trump with other presidents under investigation. This shows three things. First that scandals have a life of their own: investigators, Congress and presidents cannot easily control where they end up. Second that scandals often involve corruption among a president’s friends and associates, but that it is extraordinarily hard to pin their crimes on the man in the Oval Office. And last that Mr Trump stands out as the first president caught up in scandals that implicate a foreign power—and a hostile one at that. The first independent prosecutor to look into a president’s affairs was John Henderson, whom Ulysses S. Grant appointed in 1875 to investigate allegations that whiskey distillers and public officials—among them Orville Babcock, Grant’s friend and private secretary—had conspired to cheat the federal government out of tax revenue. Grant was suspected of nothing more than excessive, perhaps even naive, devotion to friends and family (his brother-in-law helped two friends try to corner the gold market, sparking a financial panic). Though Babcock was acquitted and Henderson sacked, the investigation resulted in 110 convictions and recovered millions in taxes. In the 90 or so years between Grant stepping down and Richard Nixon taking office, four other presidents parried with independent prosecutors. James Garfield and Theodore Roosevelt were both investigated over allegations of corruption in the federal Post Office, resulting in hundreds of convictions. In 1923 Calvin Coolidge appointed a pair of special prosecutors, one from each party, to look into allegations that Albert Fall, the interior secretary, had taken kickbacks from oilmen to obtain drilling rights on federal land—notably a spot called Teapot Dome, in Wyoming, which gave the scandal its name. Silent Cal inherited this particular scandal after Warren Harding, elected president with the help of oil money, died in office (Coolidge was his vice-president). Fall was convicted for bribery and became the first cabinet secretary to go to prison. In 1952 Harry Truman forced the resignation of his attorney-general, who fired an independent prosecutor looking into corruption in the Justice Department. But the Teapot Dome scandal was the apex of presidential malfeasance until Watergate, which also occasioned the appointment of two special prosecutors. On October 20th 1973 Nixon’s attorney-general and deputy attorney-general resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to sack Archibald Cox, the first independent prosecutor, after he subpoenaed Nixon’s White House recordings. Sacking Cox began to turn public opinion against Nixon, who, like Mr Trump, viewed the Justice Department as an instrument of his will rather than affording it its customary measure of independence (which has only grown, by virtue of norms and policies, since Watergate). The thing most people know about Watergate is that it was not the burglary that did for Nixon so much as the cover-up. That is true, but the break-in at the DNC headquarters was hardly trivial. The Trump-Russia scandals also centre on a break-in at DNC headquarters, making Watergate the best reference point when weighing Mr Trump’s scandals. Congress famously asked of Nixon: what did he know? And what did he do to cover it up? For Nixon, the answer to the first was that he did not have advance knowledge of the break-in, but knew about it shortly afterwards, at which point he ought to have called in the police. Then came the cover-up: the use of the CIA to prevent the FBI from investigating; his attempt to present edited versions of his White House tapes as being complete, thereby obstructing justice and holding Congress in contempt. Those tapes also revealed that the president had been keen to set the Internal Revenue Service on his political enemies. Even after all that, only six of the 17 Republican members of the House Judiciary committee were prepared to back a resolution that the president had abused his powers. Yet changes in America’s political culture in the following two decades would make those impeachment votes seem like a golden era of bipartisanship. Two prosecutors also investigated Whitewater, a failed real-estate investment that Bill and Hillary Clinton made in the late 1970s, when he was attorney-general of Arkansas. The first, Robert Fiske junior, lasted just six months before Ken Starr replaced him. Mr Starr’s investigation led to 15 convictions, and sprawled far beyond its original mandate, including into Mr Clinton’s sex life, a turn which ultimately led to his being impeached in the House for lying under oath, and then acquitted in the Senate. Mr Starr, working with the assistance of a young lawyer called Brett Kavanaugh, produced a voluminous report, which the House voted to make public almost immediately. That stands in contrast to the legalistic Watergate equivalent, which was made public only last year, 45 years after its completion. The most striking feature of the investigations into Mr Trump’s campaign is that, unlike the scandals that came before, they involve a hostile foreign power. This matters, and not just because it opens up a question of whether people working to elect the president betrayed their country, either for money or in hope of gaining power or influence. It matters because the founding fathers drew up the impeachment clause with precisely this sort of malfeasance in mind. Impeachment, wrote James Madison, would be appropriate if a president lost his capacity to do the job after being elected, if a president were to take bribes or embezzle money or, worst of all, if he were to “betray his trust to a foreign power”. The Republic is less existentially vulnerable to external enemies now than it was in Madison’s time. But Russia does not aim to conquer democracies, only to degrade them; and had the eagerness of Mr Trump and his retinue to work with a foreign adversary been known before the 2016 election, the result might have been different. Justice Department practice cautions against indicting a sitting president, so the Russia affair poses little legal risk to Mr Trump while he is in office.<doc-sep>Here are the threads Mueller has begun to publicly unravel—and the lingering mysteries that might fall to Congress to solve. Conspiracy To date, Mueller has leveled the conspiracy charges most relevant to the core of his probe—Russia’s election interference—at Russian nationals. In February 2018, his office indicted 13 Russians connected to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a troll farm based in St. Petersburg that flooded the internet with propaganda and divisive political content leading up to the election. Beginning in 2014, Mueller wrote, the defendants “knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other … to defraud the United States” by influencing U.S. political processes in an operation they dubbed “Project Lakhta.” Two of the defendants, Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva, actually traveled to the United States in the summer of 2014 to “gather intelligence” for the project, according to the indictment. The indictment did not make a judgment as to whether the results of the election were impacted, or whether collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia occurred. Months later, and just days before Trump’s bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, Mueller pounced again: He indicted 12 Russian military-intelligence officers, alleging that they had hacked the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and top staffers for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. (The entire contents of the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email inbox, stolen by Russia in March 2016, were dumped by WikiLeaks just minutes after the Access Hollywood tape damaging to Trump was released by The Washington Post.) Read: The House’s latest move could be a big threat to Trump’s presidency Again, though, Mueller stopped short of alleging any kind of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. The closest he came was this sentence: “On or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office” (emphasis mine). By using the words for the first time, Mueller appeared to be emphasizing the fact that the hackers’ activity that day was unique—a significant detail, given another major event that took place on July 27, 2016: Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening,” speech, in which he implored Moscow to find Clinton’s emails. The closest Mueller has publicly come so far to establishing a link between Trump’s campaign and the Russian hackers is through Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant whom Mueller charged in January with obstruction of justice, making false statements to Congress, and witness tampering. In a court filing last month, Mueller linked Stone directly to one of the Russian military-intelligence (GRU) officers, writing that the search warrants his team conducted against the GRU revealed that Guccifer 2.0, a fictitious online persona created by the Russians, “interacted directly with Stone concerning other stolen materials posted separately online.” Stone has said he had “a short and innocuous Direct Message Exchange with Guccifer 2.0” in August 2016, in which Guccifer offered to “help” him. The January indictment of Stone also offered the clearest link yet between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, and suggested that the campaign might have known about additional stolen emails before they were released.<doc-sep>
Robert Mueller has completed his Trump-Russia investigation without prosecuting additional associates of the president, and has reported his findings to William Barr, the US attorney general. Barr said in a letter to senior members of Congress on Friday afternoon he had received a report from Mueller, the special counsel, and expected to be able to inform them of its main conclusions “as soon as this weekend”. The attorney general said he would consult Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, to determine what information from the report could be released to the public . “I remain committed to as much transparency as possible,” Barr wrote, adding that he was constrained by law and justice department rules. Senior Democrats and Republicans called for Barr release the report in full. Justice department officials told reporters Mueller had not recommended any further indictments based on his findings, ending intense speculation that more members of Trump’s circle would be prosecuted. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leaders in Congress, urged the attorney general not to give Trump a “sneak preview” of Mueller’s findings or to allow the White House to interfere in decisions on what information to release. 02:19 Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris react to completion of Trump-Russia inquiry – video The White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said Trump had not been briefed on the report. She said: “The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course.” Mueller’s move brought to an end a sprawling criminal and counterintelligence inquiry that has dominated the first two years of Trump’s presidency, prompting furious attacks from Trump and his allies. The investigation led to the criminal convictions of Trump’s campaign chairman, deputy chairman, personal attorney and two policy advisers. The president’s longtime friend and adviser Roger Stone was also indicted. Mueller’s team secured criminal indictments of others, including more than two dozen Russians accused of involvement in Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election, which US intelligence agencies concluded was aimed at helping Trump win. Feverish anticipation of the “Mueller report” had grown for months. Critics of Trump hoped for a full public account of any links between his presidential campaign team and the Russian operation, while allies of the president claimed the report would prove there had been “no collusion”. Profile Who is Robert Mueller? Show Background Robert S Mueller III, 74, is a former FBI director who was appointed by George W Bush and held over by Barack Obama beyond his 10-year term. The term extension required special congressional action which the Senate approved 100-0. Previously, Mueller held two different US attorney posts and was an assistant attorney general in the George HW Bush administration. Special counsel Mueller was appointed special counsel in May 2017, eight days after Trump fired FBI director James Comey. A special counsel is a prosecutor appointed in extraordinary circumstances or in cases of conflicts of interest within the justice department. In this case, there was a need for someone to investigate the Russian matter who was not appointed by or beholden to Trump. Mueller’s team of 17 lawyers operates independently of, but (ideally) in cooperation with, Congress, which has three committees conducting investigations in parallel to Mueller. Mueller is expected to submit a report to Congress and may bring criminal charges separately. Mueller has a sizeable budget and an open-ended term. He is specifically authorized to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” plus any matters that “may arise directly from the investigation”. He has the power to prosecute federal crimes. Can he be replaced? In theory, William Barr, the new attorney general, could fire Mueller. Barr, who once criticised Mueller's case as “fatally misconceived”, was asked during his confirmation hearing if he would fire the special counsel without good cause and replied: "I would not carry out that instruction." Although, if Trump wanted to fire Mueller, and Barr was unwilling, Trump could replace Barr. Trump's view Trump has said Mueller “is very, very good friends with [James] Comey, which is very bothersome” but also said “Robert Mueller is an honorable man.” Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP Was this helpful? Thank you for your feedback. It was not clear on Friday how much detail Mueller’s report contained. He was required by law to tell Barr only why his team of investigators decided to prosecute those people who were charged – and declined to pursue others.