told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he did not inform his father of the meeting, according to Mueller’s report. when he told his father over the phone about the upcoming meeting, Trump Jr. The report does not say whether Trump himself had advance knowledge of the meeting or its connection to Russians. While former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen claimed to have been in the room with Trump Jr. The special counsel determined that even if prosecutors could convince a jury that the Trump Tower meeting constituted criminal activity, “a prosecution would encounter difficulties proving that Campaign officials or individuals connected to the Campaign willfully violated the law,” Mueller wrote in his report. Mueller declined to prosecute Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort for coordinating with a foreign agent - in this case the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya - or committing relevant campaign finance law violations. Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer, has claimed that Trump knew about the meeting in advance and approved of it, which Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman - and a Russian lawyer who promised “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the most conspicuous instance of alleged coordination and collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia involved the June 9, 2016, meeting between three senior Trump campaign advisers - Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner his oldest son Donald Trump Jr. The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer Here are five of those instances and what the redacted Mueller report says - and doesn’t say - about them:ġ. Mueller III uncovered “evidence of numerous links” between Donald Trump campaign officials and individuals with or claiming ties to the Russian government, according to a redacted version of his final report released by the Justice Department on Thursday.īut Mueller declined to charge any of those campaign officials under conspiracy, coordination, or campaign finance laws for their contacts with Russians, because the evidence didn’t reach a prosecutable threshold.Īs the investigation unfolded, Democrats and other Trump critics pointed to multiple instances of those contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russia as evidence of “collusion,” a term that Mueller points out in his report has no legal application, but nevertheless colloquially encompasses the kinds of possible violations he examined. And this time, it will be up to a federal judge and jury to determine if Smith has made his case, with no need to rely on Republicans doing the right thing to see Trump held accountable for thinking himself above the law.Special Counsel Robert S. Smith has been able to go where the evidence led him and, crucially, say exactly what he found. Trump’s attempts to throw up roadblocks in court, so successful when he was president, are crumbling as a private citizen. Thankfully, Smith is free from the constraints Mueller faced. Tellingly, when Trump finally was impeached, one of the charges against him was “obstruction of Congress.” Yet an impeachment trial is a political affair, not a legal one, leaving the Senate GOP to shape its scope and length, making Trump’s acquittal all but guaranteed. Though some brave civil servants still agreed to testify, reams of documents were withheld, and witnesses at the upper reaches of the administration refused to sit for interviews. The White House ordered a total refusal to cooperate with the House’s probe. During the impeachment investigation that began later that year, regarding allegations that Trump attempted to extort Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden, Trump was no more forthcoming with congressional investigators than he was with the Justice Department. They repeated that talking point in the next round of investigations when Trump’s obstruction of any investigation into his behavior was shown to be a pattern, not a fluke.
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