![]() According to his book, Trump offered John Kelly, then his Homeland Security secretary and later his chief of staff, the FBI director job the day after he sacked Comey-but under one condition: “If he became FBI director, Trump told him, Kelly needed to be loyal to him, and only him,” Schmidt wrote, according to Axios. The special counsel did seem to press harder in some areas than others while he did not get into Trump’s own potential associations with the Kremlin, Mueller, through then-White House counsel Don McGahn, frequently sought information about the president’s private conversations as they related to firing investigators like McCabe and James Comey and his desire to prosecute the two FBI officials and Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent.īut, Schmidt reported, even the obstruction portion of Mueller’s inquiry missed some damning details. The failure to investigate Trump’s personal history with Russia also underscores the limitations Mueller placed on himself and had placed upon him by other actors like Rosenstein. The consequences of not looking into Trump’s dealings with Russia, which go back decades, is the question mark that lingers over his warm approach to the country and its strongman, Vladimir Putin, despite its intervening in the 2016 election, the bounties it reportedly put on the heads of American troops, and other offenses. Some in the FBI saw such an examination as pertinent to national security, but the DOJ under Rosenstein never investigated the matter, even as he reportedly led Andrew McCabe and other FBI officials to believe the special counsel would be taking up the matter. According to an excerpt published Sunday by the Times, Rod Rosenstein, who was then overseeing the probe, directed Mueller in 2017 to investigate only Moscow’s election interference and potential involvement of the Trump campaign in that attack, putting the president’s extensive personal relationship with Russia outside the boundaries of his mandate. ![]() the United States that the Department of Justice took clandestine steps to curtail the investigation, even before Trump’s handpicked attorney general, William Barr, stepped in to protect the president. The New York Times’ Michael Schmidt reports in Donald Trump v. Now, another new book is further revealing how Mueller’s investigation was limited-and what the special counsel may have missed, thanks to the narrow purview of his inquiry. Concerned with maintaining an apolitical appearance, and apparently seeking to avoid a confrontation with the president that could further drag out the investigation, Mueller never interviewed the president face-to-face, leaving what Toobin has called a “massive hole” in the middle of the probe-and, despite outlining extensive evidence of wrongdoing, declined to draw conclusions about what he uncovered, all but assuring Trump’s political survival. ![]() As Jeffrey Toobin wrote True Crimes and Misdemeanors, his thorough and convincing Russia inquiry post-mortem that hit shelves earlier this month, the qualities that were most celebrated in Mueller-his measure and reserve a strictly by-the-book approach seemingly belonging to another age-ultimately doomed his probe. That, of course, turned out to be woefully naive-and not just because the Republican party was already too far gone, their wagons hitched to a corrupt president they wouldn’t turn on. When the fabled “Mueller Time” arrived, close followers of the Russia probe seemed to assume, a groundswell would finally build against Trump and expel him from the White House. ![]() Each day, it seemed, brought with it a damning new revelation about Trump’s ties to Russia, or some new evidence of his brazen efforts to obstruct the special counsel’s investigation-and, with each development, anticipation for Mueller’s report mounted. It can be hard to remember, because it seems so long ago now, but there was a time when much of liberal America invested a great deal of faith in Robert Mueller to rein in-and possibly even end- Donald Trump’s presidency. ![]()
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