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.
