How the Robert Mueller Fandom Was Disappointed
Notes on "Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation," by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, and Andrew Goldstein
In Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s introduction to this book, he writes that it completes the historical record. So it does, it’s brief and fairly good. In the early days of President Trump’s first term, all the political consultants who thought themselves extremely deft and extremely powerful, so much so that they were going to remove the president, basically deceived the public about it.
When the investigation was set up, there were four teams. Two of them seem like they were successful, two of them it seems reasonable to say were failures. There were teams looking into Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort, then one for Russian active measures, and a fourth to look into any obstruction issues.
Paul Manafort was genuinely corrupt. The only thing I have any concerns about with that piece is the addition of Andrew Weissmann to the team. He seems to have been working on his own, both prior to, and in violation of federal rules, to get Manafort. The authors write that he was already working on Manfort material “almost as a hobby,” and then toward the end he is passing material to the Southern District of New York until the special counsel team tells him to knock it off because it’s not allowed. It got Weissmann a plum post on MSNBC, though.
A few of the active measures prosecutions, like the one of the Internet Research Agency—closely connected to the deceased Yevgeny Prigozhin—vindicate that piece as well. The obstruction piece was a disastrous flop, and there was a Supreme Court case earlier this year confirming a president’s substantial immunity for official acts. The imprudence of opening this investigation and doing it in this way—the authors admit the authority of the special counsel’s office ultimately derives from the president—with the ostensible goal of subjecting a sitting president to the rule of law, has resulted in court precedents that expand executive power.
All parties to these events recognize the difficult constitutional issues they raise. And there was a real effort to do a Nixon on Trump—get him on obstruction—which this time didn’t work. The evidence for the obstruction in this case was considerably more flimsy than it was for Nixon.
We’ll get to that, but there’s an irresolvable tension in an investigation like this in which indisputably lawful acts within the president’s authority can be construed as obstruction. It reminds me of that joke about whether God can microwave a burrito so hot even he can’t eat it: can a president be subpoenaed in an investigation that ultimately derives from his own authority? Special Counsel Mueller, according to this book, wanted to subpoena the president, but was opposed by Rod Rosenstein and ultimately overruled by the Department of Justice. The question here is if the president’s unwillingness to grant an interview can be construed as obstruction, why not the DOJ itself, or Rosenstein, in their unwillingness to grant a subpoena? The recursiveness of where authority lies here is a problem.
On the merits, the things that are taken as obstructive by the special counsel’s office as obstructive seem pretty thin, even from the evidence given in this book. There are basically two main things: the request from Trump to Comey that they go easy on Flynn, and his request to Don McGahn to refute press accounts.
In the case of the former, the one indictment having anything to do with Flynn was thrown out of court in 2023. The Flynn investigation was brought over to the special counsel’s office from the preceding Crossfire Hurricane investigation, for which Peter Strzok was the lead investigator. The pretexts for investigating Flynn at all were pretty flimsy, there was the conversation with the Russian ambassador (an incoming national security advisor having conversations with an ambassador should not be regarded as alarming in and of itself), and the femme fatale piece from Crossfire Hurricane informant Stefan Halper—I’ve interviewed the woman, Svetlana Lokhova—turned out to be the jealous paranoia of a fat guy. At the time all this was all over the news, and the public was being whipped up into a frenzy about it.
The second ostensibly obstructive act was Trump asking White House Counsel Don McGahn to refute stories in the press. The timelines and details here are very important. On June 17, 2017, Trump instructs McGahn to fire Mueller, and McGahn refuses. On January 25, 2018, a story runs in the New York Times with bylines from Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman claiming that McGahn threatened to quit rather than do so. The following day the Post runs a story saying McGahn had not told the president anything to that effect. You have to wonder given Haberman’s issues whether this is an attempt to force the hand of the White House.
The authors here make great hay out of this, as basically Trump ordering the Saturday Night Massacre. The problem is his guys didn’t carry it out, but it worked out just fine. McGahn made it until October of that year, but this put him in a very awkward position. The fact is the reporting from Haberman and Schmidt was not true, and is it unreasonable of the president to ask the White House Counsel to refute an inaccurate press account? McGahn just played it cool, and refused to refute them. If you think about the psychology of a guy like Trump, what probably concerns him most is the appearance that he backed down in the face of a threat, which wasn’t made. Setting aside the constitutional issues, at this point we’re not even talking about a successful act of obstruction of justice but what is called an endeavor to obstruct justice, if that’s what it is at all. These are both extremely thin threads to have a major fight like this about. The authors drily note at one point, “some tension between keeping the DOJ informed and also maintaining our independence from the executive branch.”
One of the other indictments from the active measures part of the special counsel’s office was the one from July 2018 against 12 GRU officers, which will probably never go to trial and the Concord companies piece has been dismissed. This is the one that pertains to the spearphishing of the DNC—attribution provided by Crowdstrike—and it happened when Jeff Sessions was still attorney general, though Rod Rosenstein handled the announcement. This is ascribed to Mueller’s habit of avoiding press conferences. The DOJ press release says, “there is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity or knew they were communicating with Russian intelligence officers.” This group was allegedly releasing the materials through “DCLeaks” and “Guccifer 2.0,” the latter described in quotes here as Romanian.
This is where we get to the really conspicuous omission in this book. Roger Stone was found guilty and then pardoned over his role here, the last in the barrel, and he was in touch with Randy Credico and Wikileaks.
James Bamford’s work connects the dots here. If all Stone was guilty of is obstruction, and the GRU indictment has no allegation that any American was a knowing correspondent of Russian intelligence officers, he probably was talking to the Israelis, as Bamford has written in The Nation:
According to the FBI warrant, the same day that Stone communicated with the Israeli agent, he began Googling some very strange terms, including “guccifer” and “dcleaks.”
This was Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone making connections to the Trump team on behalf of the Israelis, pertaining to a Russian leak. According to Bamford’s reporting, the Israelis had the skinny on the GRU operation because of their own signals intelligence, but there’s of course the possibility of coordination between the Israelis and the Russians as well.
The way this information interacts with the Steele Dossier is very interesting. The authors of this book claim “We would not chase any unfounded leads in the infamous Steele dossier,” and that they possessed independent evidence of Russian involvement in the hack-and-leak operation prior to the Steele dossier being published. But the effect on the public, where the Steele dossier had a huge impact, was to use this Paul Singer-funded research to establish that we already know this is all about Russia, ignore the Israeli angles.
There’s a way in which doing this through Wikileaks tends to suit the foreign policy goals of the neocons. The point would be to dirty up Assange and Wikileaks by making him anathema to the left, which it did, and then allow him to be burned by the Republican administration. That seems to have been the plan for Mike Pompeo and Ric Grenell, who had a plan to kill him. That’s one reason I helped a bit with Assange. Pompeo is a real crook, and his tongue is so far up Bibi’s butthole he can taste the shawarma. None of these people could be expected to tell the truth that Guccifer 2.0’s phone was registered in Israel. There’s a little more on how the special counsel did the attribution here which is a little dubious given the sophisticated SIGINT capabilities of the Israelis:
By matching material we knew had been stolen by the GRU to some of the documents Guccifer 2.0 released that day, we concluded that Guccifer 2.0 was, in fact, the GRU—not some nonexistent Romanian hacker.
Probably worth checking this one.
The thing is here, Trump is denying this whole time that it was a Russian hack-and-leak, very publicly. In reference to Putin, Trump said, “He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
What if Trump knew that Stone was in touch with Israeli intelligence officers? This is precisely what the special counsel wanted to ask Trump about in the interview that never happened: “Roger Stone’s apparent foreknowledge of WikiLeaks’ impending dumps of Democratic data stolen by Russian military intelligence.” This is also what Stone lied to Congress about. So it looks like Stone is protecting the Israeli role in all this.
Mike Pompeo only crops up here a few times. There are two details that suggest a certain amount of evasiveness. He claimed not to have remembered Trump asking him to stay behind after a daily briefing on March 22, 2017, along with Dan Coats. He was also the only intelligence chief to be interviewed with personal counsel present.
The role of Rod Rosenstein in this book probably needs scrutiny. After Sessions recused himself he had oversight over all of this. He also worked for NSO Group after leaving the administration. He is described on May 12, 2017 as being rattled. On may 13 and 14, a weekend, Rosenstein calls Mueller with AG Sessions on the line (Sessions had recused himself from any oversight of Russia-related investigations). Nothing happens that Monday. Mueller attends a meeting at the White House on Tuesday with Mike Pence, Sessions, Rosenstein and “several White House staffers,” and the authors say the “unspoken result of the White House meeting for Rosenstein: he was now ready to appoint Bob as special counsel.”
That afternoon, a story from Michael Schmidt drops in the New York Times about Trump’s request to Comey to go easy on Flynn, and within hours Jason Chaffetz of the House Oversight Committee demands Comey’s memos. The following day Mueller is appointed.
What happens in the ensuing weeks has the quality of a well-oiled machine, and I suspect a lot of this has to do with factional fights among various flavors of pro-Israel types. It’s not that Flynn doesn’t have problems. He co-authored a book with Michael Ledeen, the man substantially behind the yellowcake forgery that bolstered the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq War. Flynn was also way too close to Palantir. But the effect of all this suspicion was to make it easier to move traditional neocons into the role of national security advisor: first H.R. McMaster and then John Bolton, both closely aligned with the Israel lobby, and then the Mormon Robert O’Brien. There are two factions of right-wing Zionists here, one the more traditional neocons, and then the even more extreme faction with which the Ledeens are aligned, who against my better judgment I’ve toyed with calling “Orange Jews.” The Ledeens, if you recall, were also trying to honeypot McMaster.
Saturday, May 20, 2017, as the special counsel’s office is just getting set up, an unnamed FBI special agent calls Zebley asking to subpoena the White House. The preservation order has already been issued, and this is getting extremely froggy. Zebley says no. Much later Mueller will bring up the possibility of subpoenaing the president, but the fact that there are already investigators trying to do so just shows some of the conflicts here between the professional and political sides of the executive branch.
On Monday, the Post publishes a story with the headline, “Trump asked intelligence chiefs to push back against FBI collusion probe after Comey revealed its existence.” The authors here describe this as having a “Nixonian hue,” but this is in the midst of a campaign in which headline after headline was thrown out there about the assessments of nameless members of the “intelligence community” offering their opinions about one thing or another. This sends the gumshoes of the special counsel’s office off to interview DNI Coats and Admiral Rogers, looking for obstruction based on evidence published that morning in the Post. This is a rather far cry from professional police work. It is Paul Singer’s senator, Richard Burr, who shortly thereafter demands to let staffers see Comey’s memos. Would be interesting to know which staffers.
One of the other Post stories, from June 14, 2017, with Adam Entous on the byline, also seems deeply flawed, and the authors suggest they have no idea who these officials supposedly are. The tricky thing here is, given the Israeli spyware issue, whether that might have been happening here. Three days later Trump demands McGahn fire Mueller. As a guy with long ties to organized crime, he knows a setup when he sees one.
The parts here having to do with Rob Goldstone, a British Jew working in PR close to the Russians, also is approaching Don Jr. about dirt on the Clintons. This looks like another thing a lot like Lev Parnas a few years later, an attempt to dirty them up.
There are a few new details on the interactions between George Papadopoulos and Joseph Mifsud, looked into as part of the active measures pillar of the investigation, which suggest the pardon in Papadopoulos’s case was warranted, despite his involvement with the neocon Hudson Institute.
There are a few details that bear on Bill Barr. He appears at a remarkably opportune time, before being appointed attorney general, to say that the obstruction statute didn’t apply in the way the special counsel’s office might be meaning to apply it. “[H]is memo was remarkably timely,” the authors write. It’s also Barr who overrules the sentencing guidelines in Stone’s case, which the authors note is very unusual. So Barr is extending lenient treatment to a guy who’s protecting the Israeli role in all this. In some of the final chapters the authors note that they have a lot of Stone’s electronic communications.
Most of the final few chapters is devoted to the constitutional pissing match between Barr and the special counsel’s office. The investigators are understandably upset to have been mischaracterized, but the Supreme Court has vindicated Barr’s position, which is not to say Barr’s involvement is not somewhat shady. They are especially proud of their work with the hack-and-dump case, but that’s the one where the biggest details are still missing in their account here. Unfortunately the details missing tend in the same direction most professionals in Washington have a hard time acknowledging.