ANOTHER VIEW--WHAT THE MUELLER INVESTIGATION ACCOMPLISHED

My Comment:  I still want to see the Trump syndicate locked up!  We'll see what the report discovers and if it will be open for the people to see what 2 years and millions of bucks later has uncovered!

MUCH HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED

By Matt Zapotosky and Rosalind S. Helderman WASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON — He pulled back the curtain on a sophisticated Kremlin hacking operation — identifying by name the 12 Russian military officers who he said sought to sway a US election.

He exposed a Russian online influence campaign, bringing criminal charges against the 13 members of a Russian troll farm accused of trying to manipulate US voters and sow division through fake social media personae.

And he revealed how those closest to President Trump defrauded banks, cheated on their taxes, and, time and time again, lied to deflect inquiries into their ties with Russia.

After 22 months of meticulous investigation, charges against 34 people — including six former Trump aides or confidants — and countless hours of all-consuming news coverage, Special Counsel Robert Mueller Friday submitted the long-anticipated report on his findings to Attorney General William Barr.

Barr said in a letter to lawmakers that he may be able to inform Congress of Mueller’s ‘‘principal conclusions’’ as early as this weekend.

But through legal documents and court hearings, Mueller has already revealed rich details about the Russian attack on the US democracy in 2016 — and his investigation has triggered unpredictable ripple effects.

The special counsel indirectly helped expose hush money that Trump’s lawyer paid an adult-film actress, shed new light on secret foreign-backed lobbying efforts, and helped force a reckoning at major technology companies over how social media can be used to divide and inflame.

Mueller’s investigation also severed the bonds between Trump and some of his most loyal confidants, brought down a national security adviser, and spawned spinoff criminal probes that appear likely to live on, even after the special counsel’s office disbands.

“He’s almost like a venture capital incubator who has spun out multiple lines of business,’’ said David Kris, a former Justice Department national security division chief and founder of the consulting firm Culper Partners. ‘‘He’s shown us an awful lot, and yet I think there’s an awful lot more to come.’’

From the start of his investigation, Mueller and his team followed a consistent pattern. They would toil in silence for months, and then — often on a Friday — they would reveal indictments packed with more detail than needed to substantiate the charges.

Mueller struck first at the heart of Trump’s campaign, charging its former chairman, Paul Manafort, and deputy campaign chairman, Rick Gates, with crimes related to their work for a pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine.

The infractions Mueller alleged were not related to possible coordination with Russia, a fact that Trump and his allies were quick to seize on. But the October 2017 indictment sent a message: Mueller was alleging that the president’s campaign had been led by people who had engaged in serious criminal wrongdoing.

Mueller also revealed that another campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, had secretly pleaded guilty earlier that month to lying to the FBI about his contacts with foreigners claiming to have high-level Russian connections.

He was one of at least 14 Trump associates who had contact with Russian nationals during the campaign and transition.

Papadopoulos’s plea agreement described his extensive efforts to try to arrange a meeting between Russians and the Trump campaign. And he said that in April 2016, a London-based professor claiming to have Russian connections confided that he had ‘‘dirt’’ on Hillary Clinton, including ‘‘thousands of e-mails.’’

That same month, Mueller would later allege, Russian hackers had accessed the networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee.

The plea deal previewed what Mueller would show over and over: Those surrounding the president sought to hide or downplay their dealings with Russia.

One of the persistent mysteries has been why.

In December 2017, former national security adviser Michael Flynn admitted that he lied to the FBI about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. Flynn had claimed the two did not discuss Obama-era sanctions directed at the Kremlin, when in fact they had.

Nearly a year later, Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen similarly pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his efforts to pursue a possible Trump Tower project in Moscow.

When longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone was indicted in January, accused of making false statements and obstruction, he became the sixth Trump aide ensnared by Mueller’s investigation.

Earlier this month, Manafort was sentenced to a total of 7½ years in prison for conspiracy and fraud. Cohen is set to start serving a three-year prison sentence in May.

‘‘These aren’t bit players; these are people who were part of the heart and soul of the Trump operation,’’ said Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University.

One of Mueller’s core assignments from the start was to dissect exactly how Russia sought to influence the 2016 presidential campaign.

Four months before Mueller was appointed, the US intelligence community laid out in a terse 14-page report how it said Russia — on the order of President Vladimir Putin — had waged an online campaign to help Trump win the election.

The special counsel added to that 66 richly detailed pages of his own, outlining in two indictments the specifics of the cyberoperations.

In the first, which accused 13 Russians of waging a social media influence effort that ran afoul of US law, Mueller revealed he had access to the group’s internal communications, including an e-mail from September 2017 in which one of those charged wrote to a family member: ‘‘The FBI busted our work (not a joke).’’

Mueller also described how the group worked offline, visiting states to gather intelligence on US politics and enlisting unwitting Americans to hold rallies in support of Trump, providing the clearest window yet into Russia’s covert efforts.

In the second, which charged a group of Russian military officers with hacking Democrats’ e-mails and laundering them through fake online personae so they could be posted online, Mueller identified by name those he asserted were responsible for the attack. The indictment expanded considerably on the intelligence community’s assessment.

Notably, the indictments did not accuse any Americans of conspiring with Russia, one of the main questions the special counsel was asked to examine.

Mueller’s impact has gone far beyond the work of his own prosecutors.

His revelations have fueled calls for greater government oversight of Facebook, Twitter, and Google, following years in which the tech industry grew into one of the nation’s wealthiest and most important economic sectors while facing little regulatory scrutiny.

Mueller has also referred additional investigations to at least three US attorney’s offices.

One of those cases, a handoff to prosecutors in Manhattan, led to a guilty plea from Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney, for tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations that he told a judge were directed by Trump.

That case ruptured a key personal relationship for the president, spilling into public view embarrassing details about Trump’s efforts to pay off the adult-film actress known as Stormy Daniels and allowing prosecutors to pry into Trump’s personal business.

The Cohen case appears to have been the spark for yet another investigation, this one related to Trump’s inaugural festivities. Prosecutors in Manhattan issued a wide-ranging subpoena in February to Trump’s presidential inaugural committee seeking records related to its fund-raising and spending.

Meanwhile, this summer in Virginia, prosecutors will try a former business partner of Flynn, the former national security adviser, on charges that he acted as an illegal agent of Turkey. The case underscores how the Mueller probe shined new light on a lucrative and largely unseen American lobbying industry financed by foreign interests.